Chapter 113: Cruise Ship: A Monster Rising from the Deep Sea

Chapter 113: Cruise Ship: A Monster Rising from the Deep Sea

At Sritan's command, the Mary Jane's passengers were split into two groups—more than 170 were sent to the Golden Anchor to search for the legendary "witch's corpse," while the remaining dozen or so stayed behind in the banquet hall to guard the 77 bound crew members.

Destroying the witch's corpse was the main mission of this trip, and to make sure nothing went wrong, Sritan went along himself.

Originally, Everly and Misha were also supposed to go with the group searching for the witch's corpse. But as they were leaving the banquet hall, the two slipped into a nearby hallway when no one was looking, and stayed on the Mary Jane.

"Alright, Misha, you can take out your earplugs now."

Once the sound of the main group's footsteps faded away, Everly made hand gestures to Misha.

Thanks to years of steady meditation practice, Everly had built up a decent resistance to psychic attacks. Once she realized Sritan's voice had a hypnotic effect, she and Misha immediately popped in earplugs to block it out.

So the two of them were the only ones on the ship, besides the crew, who hadn't been brainwashed by Sritan.

Now that the search party was gone, only 13 guards were left in the hall. They were all regular passengers with no guns—cruise ships had strict security checks, so there was no way to bring weapons on board. So even though they looked big and tough, in a real fight they might not even be a match for Everly, who worked out regularly.

The two girls huddled together, talked it over, and quickly came up with a plan—Everly, who was in better shape and had better fighting skills, would charge into the hall to distract the guards, while Misha would sneak in and cut the crew's ropes with a knife.

The crew working on the cruise ship were generally in better physical shape than regular folks stuck in the concrete jungle. As long as Misha was quick and freed enough crew members, taking down just 13 guards would be a piece of cake!

The plan was crude, but as long as it worked, that's all that mattered.

Relying on the unspoken understanding they'd built over years of friendship, the two girls charged into the banquet hall one after the other.

Ten minutes later, the ones tied up in the banquet hall were 13 passengers with battered, swollen faces, and all 77 crew members were free.

"That Sritan knows about the witch, and he can even say flat-out that she's dead and only her corpse is left—he's definitely in league with the cultists who performed the sacrifice on the ship 13 years ago!" George, the movie's male lead, immediately blurted out loudly once he was freed.

He was still sharp as ever, and Everly agreed with him: "Exactly. I don't think he would've left unless he was absolutely sure he could break the witch's time loop. So we'd better pull up the gangway and get the Mary Jane moving ASAP, putting as much distance between us and the Golden Anchor as we can. That way, once the time loop breaks, we can get out of here right away."

It was a bit unfair to the 170-plus passengers taken to the Golden Anchor, but neither Everly nor anyone else on the Mary Jane had the confidence to take on the cult Sritan represented.

Everyone's life was precious, and when you didn't have the strength to help others, looking out for yourself first wasn't something to be judged.

The Captain thought for a moment and nodded. "Got it. Let's move!"

The crew got their orders and split up—some pulled up the gangway, others raised the anchor. Everyone's survival instinct was strong, and they moved fast. Within a few minutes, the engines roared to life, and before the people searching the Golden Anchor could react, they saw the Mary Jane below turn and head toward the edge of the time loop, away from the massive ship.

"They're running. What now? Should we chase them?"

"High Priest Sritan said to focus on finding the witch's corpse. Everything else can wait."

"Understood!"

Bits of conversation drifted over from the Golden Anchor, quickly fading as the distance grew. Since the time loop was still up, the cruise ship couldn't escape, so the Captain drove the Mary Jane in a slow circle along the outer edge of the loop.

After waiting like that for about ten minutes, a sudden burst of cheers erupted from the distant giant ship.

Everly stood on the Mary Jane's top deck, standing on her tiptoes to see, and spotted a tall bonfire on the deck of the massive cruise ship.

They'd somehow gotten their hands on wood, stacking big pieces of timber one on top of another into a mountain. On top of the pile stood a cross-shaped wooden frame, and tied to it was a young child in a red dress.

She was a very young girl, six or seven at most—the age of innocence. Her slightly wavy black hair was tied into two cute braids hanging over her chest, and her closed eyes had thick, curled lashes like two little feather fans.

As she watched, the Mary Jane kept moving forward a bit more. With the change in angle, Everly noticed a dagger plunged deep into the girl's heart. And what she'd first thought was a red dress wasn't red at all—it was a white dress soaked through with blood.

If it weren't for the dagger, anyone seeing the girl for the first time would've thought she was just sleeping.

Was that the witch Sritan had mentioned? But from what she knew, young witches didn't awaken their powers until they were 12. That girl looked so small—how could she have that much power?

Everly was puzzled for a moment, but then it hit her: the one who created the time loop wasn't an ordinary witch, but a Time-space witch. With their control over time and space, changing your age and appearance was simple. So the witch who looked like a girl wasn't necessarily just a little girl—she could easily be old enough to be Everly's grandmother.

On the massive cruise ship, once the bonfire platform was built, everyone respectfully stepped back.

Sritan, now draped in a black robe, stepped out of the crowd holding a strangely shaped dagger and approached the Time-space witch's corpse.

Everly had sharp eyes, and she saw that the dagger in Sritan's hand had a golden hilt that looked like twisted octopus tentacles, while the blade was pitch black and curved, like deep-sea kelp.

He raised the dagger high, muttered some incantations under his breath, then let out a sharp yell and drove the tip straight into the witch's skull.

The moment the black blade touched the witch's forehead, everyone in the time loop—including Everly—heard a piercing scream that tore at the soul.

It was the young, soft voice of a girl. Like a dull knife or a rusty saw, it scraped at everyone's nerves, filling them with sorrow, despair, and agony.

The blade met some resistance at the witch's forehead, but soon thick black blood, like crude oil, flowed down the bridge of her nose from the wound. The dagger sank in like a hot knife through butter, driving into the witch's skull all the way to the hilt.

At the same time, the time loop around them started to destabilize. The previously invisible transparent membrane began to ripple like disturbed water, producing chaotic waves. Some rain that had been blocked outside seeped through the gaps in the ripples, falling from the sky and striking Everly's face.

The boundary between here and there was becoming increasingly indistinct.

"Light it!"

At Sritan's command, someone immediately raised a torch and tossed it onto the woodpile that had been doused with gasoline.

"Whoosh!" Orange-red flames shot up violently, curling tongues of fire wrapped in thick smoke engulfing the witch's corpse at the top.

To truly kill a witch, both body and soul had to be erased, and fire was the most effective weapon for purifying a witch.

As the flames burned, the membrane of the time loop visibly shrank at an alarming rate, disappearing entirely before long. The Golden Anchor, long favored by time, finally revealed its true appearance—old, dilapidated, and decaying.

Torrential rain and howling winds once again took control of the entire sky and sea. Waves surged, and the ship pitched and rolled.

Everly grabbed the railing in the storm to steady herself, raised a hand, and wiped it across her cheek.

It was wet there. At some point, tears had streamed down her face.

Witches were beings beloved by nature. If humans were the spirit of all things, then witches were the spirit of humanity—naturally born within the collective as the bridge connecting humans to the universe and all creation.

Every witch was born with blessings.

These tears were shed for a departed Time-space witch whose name was never known. Even in death, she had used her immense power to trap over a thousand fallen monsters within the time loop, preventing them from wreaking havoc on the world.

But now, the time loop was broken, and the underwater monsters that had been sealed in the crevice of time for 13 years had finally bared their sharp claws.

The Captain reacted quickly. The moment the time loop vanished, he turned the bow and charged straight away from the Golden Anchor.

However, the relentless storm and waves greatly slowed the ship's progress. The thousand-plus freed monsters underwater, under Sritan's command, clung to the Mary Jane like hyenas, using their bodies to jam the propellers and pushing against the hull beneath the waves, trapping the ship in place, unable to move an inch.

Everly leaned over the railing and looked down.

Beneath the surface, countless pale, bloated monsters crowded together, densely packed, completely surrounding the cruise ship—reminiscent of maggots writhing on a corpse or white ants swarming in a nest.

They all had fish-like heads, protruding eyes, and rows of sharp teeth. Hard spines pierced through their skin on their backs, and their entire bodies were coated in a yellowish, translucent slime. If not for their bloated humanoid forms, they would have been little more than fish monsters.

Their hideous, grotesque appearance alone was enough to send chills down one's spine.

Everly couldn't understand at all why those cultists would choose to turn themselves into something like this. Wasn't being human good enough?

Cold sweat beaded on her forehead as she racked her brain for a way to escape the monsters below and get the Mary Jane moving.

Just then, however, a vaguely familiar, eerie chant drifted over from the weather-beaten Golden Anchor in the distance. Having pored over the footage she'd shot multiple times, Everly was certain it was the same strange song that emanated from the Cultists' gathering spot every night after the Golden Anchor's lights went out.

She looked up, turning her gaze back to the distant vessel.

At some point, the stage curtain from George's video had been hauled out of the ballroom and hung over the deck. On the faded fabric, someone had painted a bizarre, eye-like symbol with fresh blood of unknown origin.

In front of the curtain, Sritan stood with arms outstretched, lost in song.

As his chant progressed, a blinding red glow began to flare on the deck before him. Wherever the light touched, the passengers he had beguiled convulsed and burst on the spot, like eggs popping in a microwave, their agonized screams filling the air before they turned into sickening mounds of flesh that the red light drank up, leaving nothing behind.

The storm raged on.

The sky pressed down, gray and heavy, and torrential rain poured down as if the heavens had overturned, hammering the sea and pitting its surface with countless tiny craters.

Everly noticed that, at a certain moment, the water beneath the Golden Anchor's hull began to darken ominously.

At first, the patch was small, barely covering half the vessel's bottom.

But soon, the dark area swelled outward, engulfing the entire hull, and still it seemed unsatisfied, spreading further and growing darker by the second.

In the blink of an eye, the darkness had stretched to the edge of the Mary Jane.

Through the thin layer of seawater, Everly caught sight of a colossal, scale-covered body in sickly green, and a deep yellow eye larger than a hot-air balloon.

It wasn't the sea that had darkened—it was a gargantuan monster, surging up from the deep at a terrifying speed.