Chapter 301

Chapter 301: Boarding the Ghost Ship

A ship had “risen” from the sea in a shocking way and now stood in front of Vanna and Nina.

The waves on the surface had not yet calmed. Layers of turbulent water spread outward with the rusted ship as their center. Seawater kept pouring down from its corroded smokestack and deck structures, making loud, harsh sounds. The ship rocked slightly between the waves. Slanting sunlight fell across its deck, spreading a strange, unreal color over it.

Nina stared with her mouth open. After a few seconds she finally reacted and began shouting. “Ah! A ship! A ship! A ship suddenly popped up!”

Then she suddenly turned to Vanna, speaking so fast her words almost ran together. “I am going to tell Uncle Duncan!”

Before her words even finished, the girl had already turned and rushed across the deck like a gust of wind, running toward the stern.

Vanna still stared hard at the strange ship that had suddenly risen from the sea. She studied its old, decayed marks and every detail on its hull.

She noticed a line of large letters on one side of the bow. The letters were badly covered by rust and grime, so they were very hard to read, but she still managed to sound them out.

“The Obsidian.”

The noise from this mysterious ship suddenly appearing on the sea was great. Of course Nina and Vanna were not the only ones who noticed it. In just a short time, the others who had been resting in their cabins came out and gathered on deck.

Morris, Shirley, Dog, and Alice all came in surprise to the bow, looking out at the strange ship in the distance and guessing where it had come from. Very soon, Duncan also followed Nina out onto the bow deck.

“Mr. Duncan,” Vanna said at once when she saw him, “there are no signs of living people on that ship. It might be a… ghost ship.”

Her expression looked a little strange when she said the words “ghost ship”.

“One of our own,” Duncan replied casually, then lifted his head to study the ghost ship that looked only about half the size of the Vanished. The first thing he noticed was the smokestack structure on its upper levels. “Looks like a steamship… can you guess its rough age and origin?”

“There is no need to guess,” Morris said from nearby. The old scholar gazed toward the distant sea with a complicated look in his eyes. “I saw its name. The Obsidian. A fast steam cutter, sunk six years ago off the coast of Frostholm.”

“Huh?” Shirley, who had been craning her neck, looked at the old gentleman in surprise. “Old gentleman, you know that ship?”

“Brown Scott had his accident on that ship,” Morris said, his voice a bit low. “But how… how did it suddenly appear here? And in this way…”

Alice listened to the others talking. She looked up at the Obsidian in the distance, then turned her head back to look at Morris and Duncan. After thinking hard for a bit, she finally asked, “Captain, is this normal? Will a sunken ship just float back up out of the sea?”

“Of course this is not normal,” Duncan gave the silly girl a look. “This is called a ghost ship. And I suspect it is not just a ghost ship.”

As he spoke, Goathead’s voice suddenly sounded in his mind. “Captain, should we fire two shots to test it? The cannons say that from this angle and distance they feel a bit hungry and cannot help wanting to throw a few shells over…”

“Tell them to hold it!” Duncan cut Goathead off without hesitation. He thought for a moment, then turned to the people beside him. “We have to go over there and see what is going on.”

“We are going… onto that ghost ship?” Shirley shrank her neck at once. “Is that not a bit reckless? I am not scared of other things, I am just afraid that ship will suddenly sink again. It popped up out of nowhere, after all…”

“AI will bring us back,” Duncan said, giving the young lady a calm look. “Of course, if you do not want to go, you can stay here. I am not forcing you.”

Shirley opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Dog broke the silence first. “We will go, we will go! Serving the captain is our duty! We would be happy to!”

Shirley froze, then began complaining silently to her partner. [Dog, can you please have some principles…]

[How is seeing the situation clearly and taking part in group activities not a principle?] Dog answered with confidence in the mental link. [The big boss is leading the team, so we do not have to worry about safety. Of course we should do our best to show what we can do…]

[What I mean is, can you leave the chance to hug the big thigh to me next time? You grab it every time…]

Dog thought for a while. […Shirley, can you please have some principles?]

Duncan did not care what Shirley and Dog were talking about while they stood there in a daze. He knew that when these two “people” went quiet, they must be whispering in the mental link again. Instead, he looked up at the others. “Are you coming along?”

“I am going!” Nina raised her hand first. She even looked a bit excited. “It is a ghost ship. I only heard about them in stories before. I have never seen one with my own eyes.”

“The Vanished is also a ghost ship,” Duncan had to remind the young lady, then looked at the others. “What about you?”

“There might be clues on that ship about what Brown did before his accident,” Morris nodded. “I will go with you.”

“I will go too,” Vanna said. “A ghost ship phenomenon is very likely connected to heretics or evil corruption. I have some experience with that.”

“I am not sure,” Alice said after thinking for a bit. She looked at Duncan. “But I want to stay with the captain.”

“Then we will all go. Treat it as seeing more of the world,” Duncan said casually. He waved toward the mast not far away, calling down the pigeon that had been sunning itself with closed eyes high above. “AI, take us over to that ghost ship.”

A ball of ghost-green flame suddenly rose from the Vanished. A moment later, a huge skeletal bird soared into the air and flew toward the Obsidian, which rocked gently on the waves in the distance.

The deck of the Vanished grew quiet.

The quiet lasted for a short while. Then the small boat hanging near the side of the Vanished began to creak sadly and sway.

It was a shuttle boat, normally used to quickly move people between two ships when they were close together on the sea.

Two coiled ropes lying along the edge of the deck began to rustle as they moved. They slid like snakes over to the shuttle boat and lifted their ends to pat its hull.

Goathead, who had stayed behind in the captain’s cabin, of course sensed what was happening near the deck. It sighed softly and spoke to the old fellows it had worked with for a century. “Maybe you little boats should practice paddling around in the sea yourselves…”

The shuttle boat creaked even louder…

On the other side, AI did not land on the Obsidian right away. Under Duncan’s command, she circled several times in the air over the ghost ship. Only after she roughly confirmed that there were no moving targets anywhere on the ship did she land on a section of deck that looked clean and stable.

ghostly green flame burst into the air, and Duncan’s group stepped out of the fire.

A strong, dirty smell rushed into all their noses at once. It was the fishy stench of seawater, mixed with some other rotten odor that was hard to name.

Nina was the first to wrinkle her nose after stepping onto the deck. “Ugh… it smells awful up here…”

“Not every ghost ship is as clean and tidy as the Vanished, and not every one has unlimited fries,” Duncan said to Nina with a smile. “If this ship really is the Obsidian from back then, it has been soaking in the Deep Sea for six years.”

As he spoke, he looked around at this steamship that gave off an eerie feeling from every corner.

Rust, broken edges, mottled stains. It might once have been a pretty and advanced mechanical cutter, but now it was only a heap of dead steel and wood.

The strangest thing, though, was that as a ship that had just risen from the sea, there was no seawater to be seen here.

The deck was dry.

Even in many of the dents on the deck, those places that should easily hold pools of water, everything was dry.

Vanna had clearly noticed this too. She squatted and rubbed the ground with her fingers, frowning.

She still remembered the scene when this ship came up out of the sea. A huge amount of water had poured off the Obsidian, like endless waterfalls washing over every corner of the ship. Judging by common sense, there should not be a single dry place on this ship.

“Vanna,” Morris said, turning around after he had quickly checked the area around them. “Do you feel any trace of heretics or evil corruption?”

“…No,” Vanna said, slowly shaking her head with a frown. From the moment she had stepped onto the deck she had been watching for this, always feeling for any wave of supernatural power. “There is not the slightest supernatural aura. But that only makes it stranger. The dry deck is clearly not normal, and behind any abnormal phenomenon there should be some supernatural power at work.”

“Then it might be an supernatural power beyond what you can sense,” Duncan said casually, then started walking forward. “Anyway, if something really is hiding on this ship, as long as we look around enough, it will show itself.”

Nina quickly ran a few steps to catch up with her Uncle Duncan. “What if something really jumps out?”

Duncan stopped and turned back with a smile. “Then we try talking sense first…”