Chapter 227: 3. Sea Ghost
“Hey, you don’t know, back when I rode on a bull to join the yearly hunt, I was wielding a hammer bigger than my head, and with a ‘thud’, I took down a black bear twice as thick as a mast.”
“Hahahaha, that’s amazing, come on, drink.”
“Grandpa, Grandpa.”
After several rounds of drinks, the dining table of the Sardinia Kingdom had started to lean towards chaos, not only was food scattered everywhere, but the crew also had no desire to eat, as everyone basically held a wine cup, drinking, chatting, joking, and even singing loudly.
In the midst of this chaos, three little kids, Kalma, Holly, and Diandian, who hadn’t even reached knee height of the adults, finished their food and started running around to play.
However, Emhart had shrunk back, and the steel knife remained on the mast, leaving them with nothing to play with but to find their Grandpa.
They navigated through the forest-like legs of the crew and finally found Old Jack near the edge of the deck, his not-so-aged face slightly flushed, holding a glass of wine while joking with the nearby Paz.
Kalma was the first to emerge from the crowd of crew members. She curiously glanced at Old Jack and then at the plump lady across from him, before stopping her footsteps.
“Kalma, hurry up, it’s so crowded here.”
Kalma carefully scanned Old Jack and Paz again, then turned to look at Holly and Diandian behind her, and raised a serious finger.
“Shh, don’t say anything. The plan has changed, we retreat, don’t disturb Grandpa.”
“Ah?”
Meanwhile, in the distance, Fisher and Captain Alagina were still sitting at the table. She had consumed quite a bit of alcohol, but her tolerance was clearly lower than Fisher’s.
At this moment, her fair skin appeared alluring, as if covered with a layer of pink foundation, but thankfully she was still somewhat clear-headed, not speaking nonsense, only reminiscing her past stories to Fisher.
“My mother was a very violent woman, when she had her eyes on a man, she liked to knock them out and force them to have relations with her. Many men fell victim, but at most, she would only maintain interest in one man for a year. After she had a child, she lost interest. My father was a fallen noble with beautiful white hair, which is what attracted her to him.”
“My mother maintained her passion for him longer than any other man, but my father couldn’t stand such humiliation and rarely treated her well, so she beat him up severely. Finally, when I was fifteen, his hatred for my mother outweighed his love for me, and he leapt into an icy lake, leaving me behind.”
In fact, the vassal kings of the Sardinia Kingdom wielded considerable power. In ancient times, they listened to the Female Kingdom’s sovereign, but as time went by, the sovereign’s authority became increasingly limited, even unable to intervene in the affairs of the fiefdoms.
For a recent example, when the sovereign was angered by Shivali’s human trafficking, she ordered the fiefdoms to impose restrictions on Shivali.
But when the order came, several coastal fiefdoms, which had deep trade ties with Shivali, did not respond, simply sending her explanation letters with various excuses to brush her off. Some claimed their daughters were married to Shivali men, others claimed their lovers were from Shivali, infuriating the sovereign.
It appeared that Alagina’s mother was among those who acted at will, which caused significant trauma in her childhood, making her resent her mother to the point of wanting to kill her and wander the world.
Hearing Alagina’s story, Isabel couldn’t help but glance at her, clearly touched by Alagina’s past.
She suddenly thought of her sister Elizabeth; their relationship was similar, but unlike Alagina, she had no hatred strong enough to want to kill her sister.
So what exactly was she resenting that made her want to escape from Saint Nali?
Isabel couldn’t find the answer either; perhaps she resented herself?
Resented her inability to intervene in family conflicts, resented being overly protected by her sister, missing everything, resented not growing up sooner and still hiding in her sister’s palm like a princess in a fairy tale.
As she thought about this, Isabel’s lips turned slightly bitter. She stared at her empty wine glass in front of her, the first time wishing to pour in some wine and taste that alcohol she had never experienced before.
The dark amber beer gradually filled her glass, but in the center of the glass, layers of ripples kept rising. She thought at first that a crew member nearby had drunkenly bumped into the table, but turning around, she noticed that all the crew members deliberately kept their distance from Alagina and Fisher, fully providing them with ample opportunity to flirt.
It wasn’t the table shaking; it was the ship shaking?
“Boom!”
Just when Isabel thought it was her imagination, the next moment the entire ship shook violently, all the crew members gasped in unison, the food and wine cups on the table were shaken over, Alagina and Fisher’s expressions slightly changed, and both instinctively tried to protect the people beside them.
Fisher grabbed Isabel’s back with one hand and Alagina’s back with the other, while Alagina directly grabbed the front of Fisher’s clothing at his chest.
The simultaneous action led them to exchange glances, especially Alagina, who glanced at where she was touching Fisher and somewhat shyly moved her hand to his shoulder.
“Sorry.”
“You’re fine.”
Fisher looked below, confirming that there was no second shaking before deducing, “There seems to be something under the water.”
Fisher released Isabel and squeezed through the crowd with Alagina to the edge of the deck, looking down at the ship’s hull.
The nighttime sea remained dark, but at this moment, the sea surface was surging violently as if something was stirring it up madly.
Aoxi, who had been standing on the mast, seemed to have stood up already, gazing far out at the sea surface. The next second, she lightly leaped, landing beside Alagina as if weightless.
Up close, Fisher noticed her upper face looked very young, but she was quite tall, around 1.75 meters.
The adult female members of the Cangniao tribe in the Northern Region usually ranged from 1.7 to 1.8 meters tall, while those from the Southern Continent were only around 1.5 to 1.6 meters. Aoxi was among the taller members of the Northern Region’s Cangniao tribe.
Under her white short hair, her beautiful face was partially obscured by an inappropriate robe, making it hard to see her full beauty. At this moment, she was staring intently at the calm water surface, and then she spoke for the first time in front of Fisher, “Sea Ghost.”
Her voice seemed to have little fluctuation, and her tone was quite similar to Alagina’s, but her timbre sounded younger than Alagina’s mature one.
“Sea Ghost?”
After hearing her words, Fisher looked closely at the dark sea surface below. It seemed that some enormous creature was swimming beneath, but due to the darkness, he couldn’t see it clearly.
However, the term Aoxi mentioned was not unfamiliar to him; both Jasmine and Rena had said it when they were frightened, but at that time, he only thought of that thing as a ghost in the sea, something illusory with no discernible shape. He didn’t expect it to be a real existence.
At that moment, Sir Book Emhart also floated out from Fisher’s pocket, looking amazed at the shadow below the water.
“Ah, yes, that’s a sea ghost surfacing for air. There are many strange-looking, large creatures in the ocean, and the sea ghost is one of them. It’s a notorious predator in the water, very formidable. Usually, they operate in the deep sea and rarely appear on the surface. Only close to winter do they come up for air.”
At this time, Paz, who was holding a cup of wine, leaning against the railing with a flushed face, smiled and chimed in, “That’s right. In the past winters, we would specifically set sail to the northern ocean to hunt for such monsters, but you’d encounter them only once every ten or eight years. I didn’t expect we’d find a sea ghost in the southern ocean. They have many treasures: their teeth can be made into ornaments or weapons, and there’s a magical material within that is twenty times more precious than gold. A creature this large is worth even more than robbing three Shivali merchant ships.”
As she spoke, she naturally put her arm around Old Jack’s shoulder and patted his chest, “Jack, we’re going to get rich, just a few days from now.”
At that moment, Old Jack, already quite tipsy, had no awareness that the woman next to him was a fierce lady from the Sardinia Kingdom; he merely thought she was a drinking friend.
Hearing Paz’s words, he squinted at the distant sea, finally catching sight of the enormous creature hidden in the water as the moonlight gradually brightened.
It turned out to be a giant creature resembling a squid, predominantly pure black in color, but its skin was not smooth like that of a squid; rather, it was hard and uneven like volcanic rock.
“Thud…”
From behind it trailed countless long and short giant tentacles. As it moved away, the tentacles, resembling steel, lightly smacked against the bottom of the Iceberg Queen, producing a crisp sound.
All the crew members looked on with shining eyes at the massive beast that was moving away. After a pause, Alagina decisively raised her hand to give orders, “Everyone, the Iceberg Queen immediately advance at half speed, and the night shift will change from two shifts to four shifts, ensuring we keep pace with the sea ghost.”
“Yes!”
Old Jack, awakened slightly by the surrounding excitement and the sea breeze, shook his head. Hearing the captain wanted to chase that giant monster, he forgot about being robbed by Paz and quickly spoke up, “Wait a minute, so we’re really going to catch that giant sea monster?”
Paz, slightly drunk, leaned a bit closer to Old Jack, gazing at the giant sea ghost approaching under the bright moon, and gestured a few simple movements as if describing a moving mountain of gold to him, “Don’t rush, don’t rush, Jack. We certainly aren’t going to catch it now. This sea ghost has just surfaced and is still at its peak state. But in the next few days, it has to endure the low pressure on the surface to expel the waste gas inside and must store the air it needs to use at the bottom of the sea. This process will take at least two or three days.”
“We’re just waiting until it’s at its wits’ end, forced to return to the sea before making our move. That being said, take advantage of its illness to take its life. Don’t worry, I’ll buy you a gold chain with the money we make.”
Old Jack opened his mouth, his alcohol-fueled brain momentarily unable to process whether to complain about hunting the sea ghost or about Paz wanting to gift him a gold chain.
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(The End of This Chapter)
