Chapter 558 – Cursed Objects

Mo Lan ignored the opening the ghost ship had revealed and headed deeper into the dining hall.

There was another doorway there, and from the staircase slanting downward beyond it, it appeared to be the entrance to the lower hold.

The ghost ship sensed her intentions and frantically shifted its walls of flesh and blood to block the entrance to the lower hold.

A large orb of light materialized in Mo Lan’s hand. “Move aside!”

The ghost ship: “…”

The walls of flesh reluctantly parted, revealing the doorway behind them.

Only when she approached did Mo Lan discover that the stairs were composed entirely of vertebrae. Each step produced a teeth-grating creak.

The passageway was extremely narrow. The walls pressed against Mo Lan’s light shield, and where the shield scorched the wall’s surface, dark reddish-black blood oozed down.

Mo Lan kept her eyes fixed straight ahead as she descended the vertebrae staircase into the lower hold.

Before her stretched another corridor, lined with many doors on both sides.

The ghost ship had dropped all pretense now — not a shred of the “wallpaper décor” of a normal vessel remained. Everything had transformed into writhing flesh and blood.

The black iron doors had turned a dark crimson like raw flesh, and locks made of intertwined sinew and tissue wound around the bone door handles.

Mo Lan did happen to have a key — the “ticket” found through the treasure map — but with so many locks down here, she had no idea which one it opened.

Fortunately, blasting doors open with magic was quite convenient.

A hole was blasted clean through the door panel.

Peering through the hole at the room inside, she could see several single beds, a set of table and chairs, and several cabinets. It appeared to be a crew rest quarters.

Everything was preserved far too well — it looked almost as if the ship were still in normal operation.

Mo Lan sensed something was off and examined the room with Curse Revelation.

Good heavens. Beds that would plunge anyone who lay on them into eternal slumber. A table and chairs that would cause a catastrophic drop in sanity upon sitting. Cabinet doors that would blind anyone who opened them… The entire cabin was riddled with traces of curses.

Moreover, these were all trigger-condition curses. Compared to curses without trigger conditions that took effect immediately as direct attacks, this type of curse could often bypass both physical and magical defenses to take effect.

In other words, even though Mo Lan currently had all manner of defensive magic layered upon her and the ghost ship couldn’t breach her defenses, as long as a curse’s trigger condition was met, she would still be affected.

Of course, that was only if she hadn’t detected these curses beforehand.

Furthermore, a Curse Witch was naturally immune to curses at or below the strength corresponding to her own Curse Magic level.

The curses here were only at Peak level, and Mo Lan’s Curse Magic was also at Peak level — curses at Peak-level strength or below had no effect on her.

Everything in this cabin was completely harmless to her.

Still, she found these items quite fascinating. Nowhere else could one find cursed object materials of such high intensity and such seamless, natural formation.

They could be used to craft cursed object cards, or for research into Curse Magic.

Mo Lan cast a single Void Blade, slicing the beds, table, chairs, cabinets, and even the floor sections they were fixed to clean off the ground. Then she used the Levitation Spell to float them up and fed them all to the Book of Cards, keeping only a few duplicate cursed objects for herself, which she stored in a dedicated Spatial Card.

Only after emptying the entire cabin did she move on to the next door.

The rooms near the stairway entrance were all rest quarters, and the cursed objects inside were largely similar. Mo Lan turned nothing away, clearing each room completely before moving to the next.

Past two washrooms, she reached the cargo holds.

The cursed objects inside opened Mo Lan’s eyes to entirely new possibilities.

In the food hold: flour that made anyone who ate it grow increasingly hungry, chili peppers that caused continuous blood loss, sugar cubes that induced uncontrollable vomiting…

In the linens hold: bed sheets that wrapped tighter and tighter while continuously absorbing the body’s moisture until the person was mummified into a dried husk, towels that scraped off a layer of skin with every wipe…

In the tool hold: cutlery that compelled its holder to eat without stopping, wrenches that filled their wielder with a manic urge to bash people over the head…

Mo Lan couldn’t resist taking photos as souvenirs. One of these days she’d have to regale her friends with the tale — unfamiliar objects really should not be touched, because what if they turned out to be cursed?

When she blasted open one particular hold door and saw a room full of wine — including familiar dark green glass bottles among them — Mo Lan went back to compare the key against the blasted-open door lock.

“Click.” It actually opened.

So the key had been for the wine cellar all along.