Lucky Cruise Ship
Chapter 624: The Prophet who manipulates fate
Under the crazy roar and the screech of metal, the entire world seemed to be collapsing.
In this apocalyptic scene, only the Tarot Master’s eyes were as clear as a sunny day.
“No—” Wen Jianyan’s pupils constricted, and he lunged forward abruptly. “Su Cheng!”
The walls made of flesh and blood twisted, writhed, and gnawed at each other.
They submerged those sorrowful black eyes.
Chen Cheng was quick to grab Wen Jianyan, yanking him backward violently, barely saving him from being swallowed by the suddenly expanding wall of flesh. The spot where Wen Jianyan had just been standing was now covered, and the liquid flowing from the flesh corroded the steel-hard floor, emitting sizzling white smoke, a shocking sight.
Beep beep beep.
Without warning, a piercing electronic sound rang in everyone’s ears.
“Detected—beep beep beep—abnormal data surge—beep beep beep—”
“Instance…!”
In such a frantic situation, the weird mechanical voice of the Nightmare System seemed so insignificant.
“Haha…”
Suddenly, a soft female voice sounded. It was so light it was almost swallowed up, until it gradually grew manic, overwhelming everything.
“Hahahahahaha!”
It was Dan Zhu laughing.
“Ridiculous, truly ridiculous!”
Seemingly forgetting her demeanor, Dan Zhu laughed so hard she leaned back and forth, breathless.
“Want to sink into the sea with this ship? I’ve never heard such laughable words in my life—”
“What do you mean?” Wen Ya turned sharply to look at her, her gaze solemn. “You mean he can’t do it?”
“No, quite the opposite. He can absolutely do it.”
Amidst the suddenly exploding, dangerously ripe scent of rotting flowers, Dan Zhu raised her eyes, gazing at the flesh monster that had grown level with the ceiling. A shocking smile stretched across her lips.
“But what such an action will bring, that’s hard to say…”
Blood-red flower buds, accompanied by fragrance, began to grow rapidly on the floor and walls, destroying the ship’s structure, which was as hard as reinforced steel. They attacked in Su Cheng’s direction at a terrifying speed.
Dan Zhu looked at Wen Jianyan: “The tokens, give them to me, now.”
“If you win, what will happen to Su Cheng?” Wen Jianyan’s gaze was deep.
“Honestly? I don’t know.”
A smile played on Dan Zhu’s lips.
Even at a moment like this, she was the type of person who disdained disguising herself with lies—or perhaps she knew lies wouldn’t work on someone like Wen Jianyan, and telling the truth was far better.
“He might die, he might not. Or he might be kept on this ship forever, becoming a part of it. As for whether he can retain his consciousness, that’s another matter.”
Dan Zhu glanced at him.
“Darling, what’s happening to your friend is unprecedented—you don’t think he can do this without paying any price, do you?”
“But trust me, no matter what, the situation won’t be worse than him becoming Captain.”
Dan Zhu stared at Wen Jianyan, her tone meaningful.
“Whether for you and me, or for this world.”
Wen Jianyan seemed to have made up his mind. He raised his hand and tossed the three coins toward Dan Zhu.
A flower bud opened its mouth and swallowed the coins.
The next second, the flower branches surged violently!
Overwhelming blood-colored flowers, like rolling waves, rushed towards Su Cheng. In the blink of an eye, they covered every inch of the walls, entangling with the writhing flesh, growing madly like living things, digging deep downward.
The tokens Wen Jianyan threw gave Dan Zhu the qualification to compete on the same stage as Su Cheng.
And in terms of parasitism and destruction, her Talent had a crushing advantage.
“Su Cheng’s goal as Captain is to sink the ship… What about you? Why do you want to be Captain?”
From a distance, Wen Jianyan looked at Dan Zhu.
“Ambition, of course! Ambition, darling!”
Dan Zhu laughed heartily. Amidst the sea of blood-red flowers, she looked breathtakingly beautiful and shockingly terrifying.
“If you don’t climb up, you’ll be drowned in death. Only the winners survive—why do some people never understand such a simple truth?”
Tiny flower branches pierced into the flesh. The seemingly weak stems were incredibly tenacious. They parasitized, snatched, and grew barbarically, eventually strangling the great tree to death with vine-like endurance.
It’s true that everyone’s Talent is born from their soul.
Dan Zhu’s Talent was just like her: soft, patient, ambitious, constantly seizing everything around her, fighting for all available resources, until all competitors were entangled and exhausted.
The two forces wrestled and fought, deadlocked.
Beep beep beep beep beep beep—
As seconds ticked by, the instance’s alarm in their ears became sharper.
The floral scent expanded even more crazily. The excessively thick odor filled the air, molecules compressed to the limit, filling the entire space like a solid, making it impossible to breathe.
However, even though Dan Zhu quickly seized the advantage with her Talent, it was still difficult to decide the winner quickly.
And in this situation, a slight advantage meant total defeat.
Remember, all Su Cheng needed to become Captain was time.
And after he actively merged with the instance, this number became shorter and more urgent.
Dan Zhu clearly knew this too.
As time passed, her expression gradually lost patience, and an emotion called anger brewed in her eyes.
“Dragging this out isn’t a solution,” Wen Jianyan turned sharply to Dan Zhu, shouting sternly. “If this continues, Su Cheng’s alienation will be complete—if he really becomes Captain, everything will be irreversible.”
“…What are you going to do?”
“Give me three minutes.” Wen Jianyan spoke extremely fast. “I want to talk to Su Cheng.”
“Talk?” Dan Zhu laughed, seeming to find the proposal absurd. “Before this, how many three minutes did you have? Did you succeed? Wake up, you weren’t this ignorant before—your old friend has gone too far down that path. It’s no longer something words can salvage.”
Amidst the scene of collapse, Wen Jianyan’s expression remained unwavering: “Or do you have other options?”
“…” That hit the nail on the head.
Dan Zhu gave Wen Jianyan a deep look, her gaze lingering on him for two seconds.
“Give me three minutes.”
Wen Jianyan repeated.
“Too long,” Dan Zhu said.
“Then two minutes!” Wen Jianyan gritted his teeth.
“Fine.” Finally, Dan Zhu nodded. “But not without conditions—remember the question I asked you before coming in?”
“…” Wen Jianyan’s heart tightened instantly.
Before teaming up with Dan Zhu, the question she had asked him now jumped into his mind with incredible clarity.
[“If you want to stop him from becoming Captain, you must kill him—can you do such a thing?”]
“I will dig open that wall and let you chat with your friend for two minutes. But if the time ends and you still can’t stop him… then kill him yourself.”
Dan Zhu’s eyes stared coldly from where she stood.
“This is not a negotiation.”
In the suffocating scent of decay, blood-red flower branches climbed onto everyone’s bodies below—”Every one of you has my flower seeds inside. Making you die suddenly is just a thought away for me. It’s far simpler than me killing that Tarot Master.”
“…” Amidst the piercing alarm, Wen Jianyan’s gaze wavered.
“Deal?” Dan Zhu asked.
Time waited for no one.
Wen Jianyan gritted his teeth: “…Deal.”
The moment Wen Jianyan’s voice fell, the flower branches densely attacking the flesh wall instantly changed direction. They entangled with each other, rushing quickly toward the middle-top part of the wall.
With every bit broken open, the flesh would crowd and continue to grow, but it still couldn’t withstand Dan Zhu’s full-force attack after abandoning all other positions.
The moment a large hole was broken in the wall, scarlet vines surged toward Wen Jianyan.
“Get ready,” Dan Zhu said.
Before Wen Jianyan could even answer, he was captured by infinite weightlessness.
Wind rushed into his ears. In the next second, cold, viscous flesh crowded in.
Wen Jianyan was submerged into the bizarre organism that had swallowed Su Cheng whole—!
However, he wasn’t directly swallowed as he imagined. Blood-red flower branches wrapped around him, blocking all attacks for him and pushing away everything in his path.
The Tarot Master’s pale face was sunken in darkness. Countless pulsating blood-red veins spread from his face, making his features almost indistinct.
“…” Seeming to sense something, his eyelids twitched slightly.
He raised his eyes expressionlessly.
A gaze devoid of normal human emotions, hollow and cold, cast from the depths of darkness.
Like a pale ghost.
A shadow from memory.
At this moment, before Wen Jianyan was the next President of Oracle, and the new Captain of the Lucky Cruise Ship about to gain eternal life in the Nightmare…
But he looked nothing like Su Cheng.
“You shouldn’t have come,” his voice was flat. “You can’t change anything.”
Wen Jianyan gritted his teeth, his internal organs feeling twisted together.
“—Is that what you say, or what your prophecy says?”
Su Cheng seemed to want to answer, but before he could speak, he was ruthlessly interrupted by Wen Jianyan:
“Do you know what that pile of stuff you said earlier sounds like to me?”
He enunciated clearly and forcefully.
“Bullshit!”
“Where does your Talent come from? Whose fate do you see?”
“Why can you use your Talent frantically and frequently in the Anchor Hall?”
“Why did Oracle choose not to pursue after you entered the Negative 6th Floor?”
“Is the future you see something that will truly happen, or something the Nightmare wants you to see?”
“Is the path you tread one you actively chose, or one the Nightmare guided you to find?”
“Can you tell the difference?”
Wen Jianyan struggled to reach his hand out of the flower branch protection, letting the flesh sizzle and corrode his unprotected skin, eating away flesh to reveal bone, and finally grabbed the other’s collar firmly.
His eyes burned like fire, flashing with angry light:
“Are you a prophet controlling fate, or a puppet driven by your own prophecies?!”
“…”
Su Cheng let Wen Jianyan grab his collar, looking up at him.
In those hollow black eyes, a dazed look flashed for the first time.
“When I was holding the Captain’s tokens, I heard voices coming from inside the walls… Do you know what they said?”
Wen Jianyan’s finger bones spasmed, but he tightened his grip inch by inch.
Gritting his teeth, he hissed in a near-whisper:
“‘Let me out’.”
That wasn’t one voice.
But a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million voices!
Those voices were cold, terrifying, filled with malice, and a desperate desire to be born into the world.
They whispered in the cracks of the floorboards, in the spaces between the walls, overlapping and merging, converging into a tide of madness. They were imprisoned, trapped, waiting only for an opportunity to be born into the world.
“‘The Nightmare arrived on this ship’, that’s what you said.”
Those were Su Cheng’s exact words just now.
And this sentence happened to become the last puzzle piece filling the void.
Wen Jianyan had guessed early on that the “Lucky Cruise Ship Instance” was pivotal to the Nightmare, but even so, he still hadn’t expected… this cruise ship would be so important.
“It doesn’t exist in our world; it rode this ship to arrive here.”
The so-called Anchor Space was merely a port built by the Nightmare around where it docked, not its point of origin.
This was why the opening of the [Lucky Cruise Ship Instance] was counting down the mileage backwards!
“The walls here are all pipes. The factory on the Negative 5th Floor uses the liquid inside the pipes to continuously produce ‘toys’.”
“Don’t forget, the cruise ship was there from the beginning. In other words, before this instance took shape, these factories were already operating continuously.”
“Remember the Fantasy Amusement Park? It’s not just a microcosm of the Nightmare in its operation, but it shares the same underlying logic—”
“Guess where these manufactured ‘toys’, representing fierce ghosts, were eventually sent?”
Veins bulged on Wen Jianyan’s arms.
Dragging Su Cheng, his knuckles cracking, a voice like it was scorched by fire surged from his throat. “Where did that eternal former Oracle President, the Lucky Cruise Ship Captain, send them?”
Reality.
Every instance was born from reality.
The formation of every instance was the Nightmare’s work.
It chose a building, a location, even a town, or sent its puppet personally, or simply threw the manufactured fierce ghosts into it… enough to alienate them into independent instances.
Every instance was a crafted miniature garden.
All joys and sorrows, all tragedies were sealed within that small garden, opened again and again, cycled repeatedly under the “gaze” and “observation” of countless viewers.
“Become Captain, sink the ship into the deep sea, and everything will end?”
Wen Jianyan retracted all outward emotions, staring at all this with a near-indifferent calmness.
“Maybe it’s true.”
There was even a high probability it was true.
A half-hidden truth was far more terrifying than a lie.
“But the Nightmare won’t be destroyed because of it. Otherwise, this ship wouldn’t have left the port so easily. However, all these fierce ghosts imprisoned on the ship will be poured unreservedly into reality—is this what you want to see?”
Su Cheng stared blankly at Wen Jianyan, opened his mouth, but made no sound.
Wen Jianyan slowly released his hand. Corroded blood dripped down, pale finger bones trembling slightly under damaged flesh.
He gazed at Su Cheng, gazing at this friend who had accompanied him the longest and was there from the very beginning.
He asked very softly:
“This time, I give you the choice.”
“Do you believe the prophecy, or do you believe me?”
As time passed, Wen Jianyan’s hand dropped bit by bit due to exhaustion and trembling.
But before it fell completely, another pale hand, corroded beyond recognition, reached out from the flesh, gently held his, and shook it up and down.
“…”
The Tarot Master slowly raised his eyes, his voice like a sigh:
“You know…”
His expression was so familiar—just like every time Wen Jianyan pulled a prank and he innocently fell for it, inexplicably becoming the victim… although helpless, it always ended in compromise.
“When it comes to eloquence, I always seem to have a hard time beating you.”
