Chapter 712: Blood debt
“…”
Dan Zhu stood among the ruins, her already half-mutated face submerged in the dim light, making her look like a ghost. She narrowed her eyes, scrutinizing the Prophet standing alone not far away, whose expression was excessively calm.
She suddenly smiled.
“What a ‘no need’.”
“What, aren’t you going to bargain with me, to seek a little way out for your little companions?”
“After all, once you kill me, your goal is achieved,” the Tarot Master said impassively. “The others no longer have a direct conflict of interest with you, so naturally, there’s no need for you to continue fighting.”
“True.”
Vines climbed up behind Dan Zhu, their sharp, beak-like tips slowly wrapping around her wrist, being carelessly played with and caressed by her slender fingers.
“However, if they still relentlessly pester me… I can’t guarantee what will happen next.”
“Then would you let them go because of my request now?” Su Cheng looked at her and suddenly asked.
A piercing question.
Hearing this, Dan Zhu giggled.
She laughed breathlessly for a good while before giving her answer, “Of course not.”
Su Cheng just quietly watched her laugh, his expression not changing in the slightest, as if he had long anticipated her answer.
“Alright,”
Dan Zhu used her fingertips to wipe away the tears of laughter from the corners of her eyes. She raised her head, seeming to have finally lost interest in this conversation, and the smile on her face faded.
“Enough with the time-wasting idle chatter.”
“If we drag this on any longer, your painstaking efforts will be wasted.”
She enunciated her words very lightly, like a soft whisper, the rising inflection at the end still carrying a hint of a smile, lightly brushing past. “Isn’t that right?”
However, the moment her voice fell, the vines lurking beneath the ruins, which had unknowingly been circling Su Cheng’s feet, suddenly broke through the ground. Their blade-like tips drilled into his body, lifting him into the air!
Crack.
Bones let out a sound of being overwhelmed.
Nourished by the Prophet’s flesh and blood, they grew at an almost frantic, extremely rapid speed!
In just the blink of an eye, they had already taken root and sprouted in his body, biting through skin, breaking bones, and finally growing out from the Prophet’s fingertips, shoulders, chest, and abdomen. The sharp floral branches were dyed a bloody red.
“…”
Under extreme pain, a human couldn’t even make a sound.
They avoided the fatal areas, merely tightly entangling him from the inside out, from his bones to his internal organs, forcing him to be completely immobile.
The vines and the Prophet’s body had merged into one.
Small flowers quietly bloomed one by one, each emitting a sticky, rusty smell.
Dan Zhu stood aside, a flower blooming in one of her empty eye sockets, as vividly bright as blood. She watched Su Cheng’s pale, twisted face in pain with great interest.
“So, you really didn’t leave any backup plan.”
She raised an eyebrow, looking somewhat surprised.
Dan Zhu was strong, and absolutely not stupid.
A person who had hidden in the shadows for so long, remaining unseen no matter how she searched, suddenly and without warning decided to stop fleeing and appear alone before her at such a critical moment—no matter how you thought about it, it was fishy.
This was simply poisonous bait delivered to her door.
How could Dan Zhu eat it so unguardedly?
But to her surprise, the expected situation didn’t happen.
No traps, no ambush.
No backup plans, no props, no resistance.
He just surrendered without a fight, offering his neck to the slaughter.
“…Sigh, fine then.” The unexpected look on Dan Zhu’s face dissipated. She shrugged and carelessly withdrew her gaze.
“Since you really don’t have any backup plans, let’s end it here.”
“Don’t worry, I act quickly,” she stroked her flowing, cloud-like long hair and said. “After all, unlike many people here, I don’t really have a habit of torturing people.”
At this point, she wasn’t prepared to delve into the reason for his sudden, inexplicable suicide—regardless, killing the Tarot Master and making herself the sole captain candidate was still the first priority on her list.
She raised her eyes again, her gaze lightly sweeping over his riddled body, a terrifying smile flashing across her lips:
“But then again, to the current you, maybe I’m even doing you a small favor.”
Almost the moment her voice fell, the vine wrapped around her pinky finger shot out, making a sharp sound of tearing through the air!
The Tarot Master seemed to sense something. He struggled to raise his head, but just this slight movement made the vines embedded deep in his body sink even deeper. The tips pierced his skin, shedding more scarlet blood that dripped and gathered into a small lake by his feet.
Yet, he acted as if he didn’t feel it, slowly raising his head bit by bit, as if still seeking, waiting for, and clinging to something—
And deep within his already unfocused pupils, reflected the rapidly enlarging red Grim Reaper.
“Pfft.”
A muffled sound of flesh and blood being crushed.
The vine plunged into his throat, piercing cleanly through from front to back.
“…”
Su Cheng’s head dropped abruptly, and his limbs, hoisted high in the air, went limp.
Death is just like this.
The spiritual light of life dissipated from his pupils, his heartbeat stopped bit by bit, his breathing vanished, and his body temperature gradually cooled.
Then, everything returned to zero.
The Prophet slept in mid-air, his pale face resting on the vines dyed red by his own blood. The pained expression and shadows had retreated from his face. With his eyes closed, he looked very young.
The blood-stained vines retracted bit by bit, rewrapping around Dan Zhu’s wrist, leaving clear, distinct bloodstains on her pale skin.
During this process, her expression didn’t change from beginning to end.
It was as if she had merely kicked aside a pebble on the road, or crushed a flying insect in the air.
As life dissipated from Su Cheng’s body, Dan Zhu felt an unprecedented, strange sensation rising bit by bit from beneath her feet, gradually filling her entire body—originally, her control over the cruise ship was already like commanding her own arm, but now, this feeling was expanding, diffusing, and strengthening at an incomprehensible speed…
Her field of vision seemed to heighten instantly, and the obstacles originally blocking her eyes became transparent.
She looked down at the cruise ship as if looking down at her own body.
The walls of the cruise ship became her skin; the complex, winding corridors became her blood vessels.
Her thoughts, her consciousness, her body, were all merging with this ship bit by bit.
Every change happening here, every activity taking place, couldn’t escape her eyes.
Dan Zhu could see Hugo personally killing his last teammate; she saw the figures traveling deep within the walls suddenly stop and change direction—although this didn’t happen right before her eyes, it was as if she witnessed it personally, detailed, clear, and lifelike.
How interesting. Dan Zhu raised her hand with great novelty, her slender pale fingers opening and closing. Even though it was still a very familiar limb, from this brand-new perspective, it seemed somewhat unfamiliar.
Power surged in her veins, letting out a surging roar.
She slowly took a deep breath, closed her eyes, feeling unprecedentedly beautiful, healthy, and powerful—
Suddenly, a strange feeling struck her head-on.
Dan Zhu froze involuntarily. She frowned, taking about two or three seconds to finally recall that this sudden feeling was called “pain.”
Yes, pain.
Even though there were no wounds on her skin, her body seemed to have suffered some unspeakable damage, slowly collapsing and disintegrating from the inside out.
Even when she was still a anchor, this feeling was very unfamiliar. And right now, for it to actually appear deep within this brand-new and powerful body made it seem even more abrupt and discordant—
Dan Zhu jerked her head up, looking into the air, her expression dark and terrifying. She opened her mouth and questioned sharply, “What the hell is going on…?”
A cold, emotionless mechanical voice came beside her ear:
“Ms. Dan Zhu, congratulations on defeating your opponent and becoming the honorable and sole captain of the Lucky Cruise Ship.”
Previously, even though Dan Zhu had seized enough captain’s authority, she was still only a captain candidate. But now, with the death of her competitor, Dan Zhu had become the final and sole victor.
“From the moment you become the captain of the Lucky Cruise Ship, the cruise ship becomes an extension of your body. Its strength is equivalent to your strength, but its damage is also equivalent to your damage…”
Muscles tearing, blood vessels collapsing, bones wailing.
Just like this ship.
Destroyed, restructured, ruined.
In battle after battle, round after round, it was already riddled with holes and torn to pieces.
And in this process, she herself had even played a massive role and contributed greatly.
Dan Zhu’s pupils shrank. She seemed to realize something and abruptly turned her head to look at Su Cheng’s corpse not far away.
Wait, could it be…
However, whether the other party did it intentionally or not, death is like a snuffed-out lamp; all reasons no longer concerned her—what she needed to focus on most right now was how to deal with the current crisis.
Dan Zhu closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and gathered her messy thoughts. Her voice was strained, as if squeezed from between her teeth:
“Tell me, how… to… solve this now…!”
“The cruise ship’s level of damage is too high and cannot be repaired from the outside. Please proceed to the captain’s cabin for manual operation.”
No wonder the priority of killing the Tarot Master was so high—as a candidate, Dan Zhu naturally urgently wanted to eliminate her only competitor, but why was Nightmare so urgent? By now, the answer was self-evident.
It extracted materials to restructure a new “Cruise Ship instance” instead of repairing the original instance and dropping the anchors in, not because it didn’t want to.
But because it couldn’t.
The cruise ship was Nightmare’s true heartland, and it had lost control over this place for far too long. That was why it so urgently needed this protracted battle for the captaincy to come to an end. Only when the captain’s seat was no longer vacant could the cruise ship be restored to its entirety, and true repairs begin.
“The nearest direction to the captain’s cabin is…”
Nightmare’s words were cut off before it could finish.
The wall in front of her let out a bizarre squirming sound and slowly opened before her.
A passage built of flesh and blood immediately appeared before her eyes. The stairs extended upwards step by step, and further ahead was a pitch-black darkness where one couldn’t see their own fingers.
Dan Zhu didn’t choose the direction Nightmare guided her to, but instead, as the captain, simply and brutally fabricated a new path directly into the wall.
“Warning, this is not a regular route, please…”
“I know.”
Dan Zhu pressed her knuckles hard against her temples, veins popping out on her pale, marble-like forehead. She raised an eye made bizarre by mutation, her tone very light but carrying a chill.
“Shut. Up.”
Of course, she knew this wasn’t a regular route to the captain’s cabin.
“Are you telling me that in this state of bodily collapse, you want me to follow your so-called ‘regular route’ step by step, spending at least ten-plus minutes to get to the captain’s cabin?” Dan Zhu smiled instead of getting angry.
“…” Clearly, the other party also understood the unreasonableness of this request.
It finally quieted down by her ear.
Thus, the woman, her hands stained with blood, stepped over the corpse. As the sole survivor and victor of this bloody slaughter, she walked into the passage deep within the wall without looking back, stepping toward her own throne.
The walls squirmed and closed, swallowing that slender figure.
Then, the ruins returned to a dead silence once again.
In this corner of the abandoned world, overwhelming, endless fresh blood dyed everything red.
The Prophet hung his head, leaning against the thorns.
Like he was asleep.
*
“…”
Chen Cheng furrowed his brows tightly, looking down at the tarot card in his hand.
Unlike the deck transformed by Su Cheng’s talent, the one in his hand right now was just an ordinary, poorly made paper replica. The card was full of creases, shockingly looking as if it had been tightly gripped by someone in unimaginable pain. On the tarot card, the pattern made of chaotic lines was soaked in bright red blood. Even though it was very rough, it inexplicably presented a bit of the madness similar to the original.
Not to mention they didn’t understand it, even if they really had someone proficient in tarot look at it, they would probably be at their wits’ end.
The others stood aside, discussing more practical issues.
“…So, other than that inexplicable tarot card, did the Prophet leave any other information?”
“No.”
Wen Ya came over and looked down at the tarot card in Chen Cheng’s hand.
Suddenly, she froze slightly.
“Wait, I remember this card.”
Hearing this, everyone stopped their discussion and turned to look in her direction in unison.
Wen Ya carefully scanned the bizarre patterns on the card again and nodded with absolute certainty.
“…There’s no mistake, it’s this one.”
Earlier, when they were in the passage, Su Cheng had shown her this card and told her its meaning.
—”The Lovers.”
“Ah?” Orange Candy frowned deeply. “What does that mean?”
They looked at each other in dismay.
“Can we tell where Dan Zhu went from this?” The second question was thrown out.
“…”
This time, silence answered her again.
Wen Ya also shook her head—the reason she could recognize which card this was was only that Su Cheng had shown it to her; it didn’t mean she understood the meaning behind it.
That meant what they held right now was just a tarot card with ambiguous content and multiple possible interpretations, and among everyone present, no one had similar talents or knowledge.
“Ahhh—” Orange Candy looked ferocious, going crazy. “Couldn’t he have left an instruction manual with detailed steps written out!!!”
“If no one can understand this thing, didn’t this guy die in vain???”
Just before she was about to go mad with anger, suddenly, a voice came to her ear:
“Although it has nothing to do with what you’re studying right now, but…”
Everyone turned their heads to look in the direction the voice came from.
—It was actually No. 8, who hadn’t said a word all this time.
Since just now, he had been thoughtfully gazing in a certain direction, only now withdrawing his gaze to look at everyone.
“I might know something that could help you.”
“…Speak,” Hugo stared at him intently and said.
“In that direction,” No. 8 pointed in a direction not far away, his tone very certain, “—an extra passage has appeared.”
“You might not know this, but on this ship, as long as a passage has been ‘used’, even if the ship’s body is damaged, it will only twist and shift, but won’t disappear.”
As a dealer, No. 8 knew these staff passages deep within the walls like the back of his hand—whether they were passable, impassable, blocked, or deformed.
And he was certain…
This passage didn’t exist a few minutes ago.
*
Under No. 8’s lead, everyone walked into this passage that “shouldn’t exist.”
The walls closed behind them, and the last of the light bit off and disappeared with it.
Unlike the other passages they had walked through, the air here wasn’t stuffy, but rather filled with a strong, suffocating smell of blood.
Mixed within it was a faint, rotten, bizarre floral scent. Even if they covered their mouths and noses, it would still drill through their fingers with an extremely strong penetrating power, seeping into their nasal cavities, settling on their tongues, bringing a nauseatingly sweet and sticky taste.
“How much longer do we have to walk?”
Orange Candy’s tone was unsteady.
“I’m not sure either,” No. 8 replied—he knew as little about this brand-new passage as anyone else—he paused and continued, “But, if I infer from my experience, it shouldn’t be too long.”
This newly born passage was too straight, even steep and treacherous.
It completely abandoned the rules he was familiar with from the previous staff passages, making way for efficiency in all aspects.
Traveling through a passage where absolute efficiency was the highest priority, it wouldn’t take too long from start to finish.
However, even though No. 8 already had a vague concept of this in his mind, its shortness still exceeded his imagination.
He stopped abruptly, uncontrollably carrying a bit of surprise in his voice:
“We’re here.”
On the left was a long, red corridor.
On the right was a bottomless abyss.
“…………I remember this place.” Chen Cheng frowned tightly, looking around, and said.
Although it looked torn to pieces and bizarrely twisted here, it still evoked a similar image in his memory—the ground, walls, and ceiling were all as scarlet as if they had drunk their fill of blood, and staircases like long snakes stretched across the abyss.
This was the necessary path to the captain’s cabin.
However, unlike when he came last time, everything here seemed to have suffered some kind of devastating destruction.
The ground was slanted, the walls broken.
Those tiny pipes that made up the walls were broken and twisted, continuously pouring out red liquid that accumulated into red pools of blood on the ground, one after another. Looking from afar, it seemed there were faintly cold shadows moving inside them, sometimes gathering, sometimes scattering, sometimes hiding, sometimes appearing.
“Don’t touch those red liquids,” Wen Ya warned with a grave expression. “They are the source of the vicious ghosts.”
Everyone cautiously bypassed the pools of blood that seemed alive and continued forward.
“…”
No. 8 looked around, his gaze falling on one of the walls. “The new path is here, follow me.”
Just like that, under his lead, the group moved forward all the way.
The originally extremely long and winding, maze-like corridor became very simple and easy to walk with these straight, highly purposeful pathways. They traveled deep inside smoothly and unimpeded.
It only took a short minute or two for them to enter the heart of their destination.
No. 8’s expression suddenly changed drastically, and he looked up:
“Not good!”
As soon as his voice fell, everything around them began to shake.
Everyone was startled. They looked up sharply, standing ready.
As they watched helplessly, the originally shattered corridor began to repair and restructure bit by bit. The broken joints were pressed back into place by an invisible force. From deep beneath their feet came a rumbling sound, and it seemed the entire world began to come alive bit by bit.
“Hurry up, we must—”
Suddenly, a cold and seductive female voice rang out, overpowering everything. Its source couldn’t be distinguished, as if coming from all directions at once.
“What a pity.”
“Did you know? I originally really was going to let you go.”
“But, you just don’t know the meaning of giving up, do you?”
The walls on all four sides let out cracking sounds, seemingly twisting under some bizarre, mighty power, while Dan Zhu’s voice echoed within it.
“That poor fellow, his life has been wasted by you guys for nothing.”
“First, let’s start with you.”
The woman’s voice suddenly turned cold.
“Traitor.”
The next second, No. 8 threw his head back with a pained expression. There was clearly nothing around his neck, yet deep, livid strangulation marks appeared. He was pulled by an invisible force, his toes slowly leaving the ground.
No matter how frantically he scratched, those strangulation marks deepened unstoppably.
“I truly underestimated your influence—if not for you, they probably wouldn’t have been able to find this place,” the voice in the air let out a light laugh. “Not killing you directly earlier was truly my mistake.”
“However, there’s something you seem to have forgotten.”
A very gentle voice, but inexplicably bone-chilling.
“No matter what, you are still a crew member belonging to this cruise ship.”
“And I, am now the captain.”
“I hold the power of life and death over you, and can dispose of your body and soul as I please.”
As Dan Zhu’s voice fell, No. 8 was slammed into the wall by an invisible strange force. Under the fierce impact, that baby face twisted in pain, and dark red blood mixed with fine bubbles slowly overflowed from the corners of his mouth.
Beneath his body, those pipes that made up the walls began to squirm.
They acted like soft sponges, instantly sucking No. 8 in, and also like living worms, biting his body, eating his flesh and blood.
“Hey, hey!”
The expressions of the few people beside him grew anxious, and they pounced forward fiercely.
They reached out trying to help No. 8, but to no avail.
“…………”
In just the blink of an eye, half of No. 8’s body had already sunk deep into the wall.
He let out rapid, painful gasps. Deep within his wide-staring eyes was heavy despair and fear.
…He was going to disappear.
He should have expected this long ago.
He was a crew member of this ship; everything of his belonged here.
Betraying this ship to help these people who didn’t know whether to live or die, who had nothing to do with him, was no different from seeking his own death.
At first, it was due to coercion, then it was out of necessity…
And then what?
No. 8 didn’t know.
In his boundless, walking-corpse-like career as a dealer, he viewed human life as nothing, and viewed his own body as a puppet.
It should have always been like this.
But why did he feel fear and reluctance now?
“Save…” He struggled to raise his hand, a choked sob escaping his throat.
Me.
“No, no—”
Wen Ya’s pupils trembled. She clenched her teeth tightly, pulling hard at No. 8’s body, but no matter what she couldn’t pull him out from deep within the wall. She could only watch his fingers slip from her palm and disappear.
“No, no, no, no—”
The emotions that had been building up for a long time suddenly erupted at this moment. She frantically scratched and tore at the wall, refusing to stop until her fingertips were a bloody mess.
Lilith.
Su Cheng.
One living person after another passed away under her watch. One smiling face after another became pained and pale in her memory. One hand after another slipped from her palm.
Things like this kept happening…
As if endless.
“Look… now he can never betray his own existence anymore,” the woman’s voice carried a cruel, terrifyingly chilling smile. “Welcome, welcome, now you’ve finally, completely become a member of this ship.”
“…”
Chen Cheng slowly lowered his blood-dripping, still slightly trembling hands. He jerked his head up, his eyes burning red-hot, staring fixedly into the air.
“Dan, Zhu.”
His enunciation wasn’t heavy, but heavily suppressed, as if curbing some erupting negative emotions.
“—You deserve to die.”
A blood debt must be paid with blood.
