Chapter 413 - 3. Sea ghost

Chapter 413: 3. Sea ghost"Hey, you don’t know, back when I rode on a bull to join the annual hunt... I held a hammer bigger than my head, and with a ’bang,’ I knocked down a black bear twice as thick as the mast."

"Hahaha, that’s really something... here, drink up."

"Grandpa, grandpa."

The Sardinia Female Country’s feast, after three rounds of drinks, was already descending into chaos, not only was food spilled everywhere on the table, but the sailors had completely lost any desire to eat anything else, mostly just holding a cup each, drinking, chatting, teasing, and even bursting into song.

In this rather chaotic scene, Karma, Holly, and Dian Dian, these three little kids, all not yet as tall as someone’s knee, were full from eating and started running around to play.

However, Emhardt stayed put, and with Steel Blade always perched on the mast, there wasn’t much for them to play with, so they had to find their grandpa.

They crossed the forest-like thicket of sailor’s thighs, and finally found their Grandpa Old Jack near the edge of the deck, with a slightly flushed but not old-looking face, holding a cup of wine and jesting with Pahetz across from him.

Karma was the first to emerge from the pile of sailors, she curiously glanced at Old Jack and then at the chubby grandma opposite her, before stopping dead in her tracks.

"Karma, come on, it’s so crowded here..."

Karma took another careful look at Old Jack and Pahetz, then turned to Holly and Dian Dian behind her, and with a serious expression, raised a finger,

"Shh, no talking. Change of plan, we retreat, don’t disturb grandpa."

"Huh?"

Meanwhile, Fisher and Alagina were still sitting at the table, she’d drunk quite a bit, but her tolerance was clearly not as good as Fisher’s.

At that moment, her fair skin seemed covered with a seductive layer of pink foundation, but thankfully she was still lucid and didn’t blurt out any nonsense, just reminisced about her earlier story for Fisher,

"My mother... was a very violent woman. Whenever she took a fancy to a man, she enjoyed knocking them out and dragging them back to her room to force herself on them. As a result, many men were victims, but at most, she only retained interest in one man for a year, losing that interest after giving birth to a child. And my father was a down-on-his-luck noble with beautiful white hair, which is exactly what caught my mother’s eye and she made her move on him..."

"My mother had the longest passion for him, more than for any other man, but my father couldn’t stand such humiliation and rarely showed her a pleasant face, so she ended up beating my father. Finally, when I was fifteen, his hatred for my mother outweighed his love for me, and just like that, he jumped into a frozen lake, leaving me behind."

In fact, the power of the Feudal Kings in Sardinia Female Country was enormous, these Feudal Kings in ancient times still listened to the Female Country’s Sovereign, but as time went on, the Sovereign’s power became more and more limited, to the point where she couldn’t even intervene in the affairs of the Feudal Countries.

Take a recent example: when the Female Country’s Sovereign was enraged by Schwali’s trafficking, she ordered the Feudal Countries to impose restrictions on Schwali.

But when the order came down, several coastal Feudal Countries with deep trade ties to Schwali didn’t respond to it, just sent their own explanatory letters to her, using various excuses as shields and bantering with the Sovereign, some saying their daughter married a man from Schwali, others claiming their lover was from Schwali, leaving the Sovereign quite furious.

It seemed that Alagina’s mother was one of those who did as she pleased, and this caused a great deal of trauma in her childhood, making her resent her mother enough to kill her and then wander around the world.

Isabella, hearing Alagina’s story, couldn’t help but cast a sympathetic look her way, clearly moved by Alagina’s past.

She suddenly thought of her sister Elizabeth; their feelings were similar, but unlike Alagina, she didn’t resent her sister enough to want to kill her.

So what exactly was she resenting that made her want to flee from Saint Nali?

Isabella couldn’t come up with an answer; perhaps, she resented herself?

Resenting her inability to interfere in family strife, resenting the over-protection from her sister, leaving her oblivious to many things, resenting that she didn’t grow up sooner, still hiding in her sister’s palm like the princess in the fairy tales...

Thinking this, Isabella’s lips tinged with bitterness, she stared at her empty cup in front of her, reaching out for the first time wanting to pour some wine into it and taste the alcohol flavor she had never tried before.

The deep color of the wheat beer gradually filled the cup, but ripples kept forming in its center. She thought maybe a sailor next to her drunkenly bumped the table, but when she looked around, no sailor was close enough to Alagina and Fisher, giving them ample opportunity for a flirtatious encounter.

If it wasn’t the table that was shaking, was it the ship?

"Boom!"

Just when Isabella thought it might be her imagination, in the next second the whole ship shuddered violently, and all the sailors let out a startled cry, with food and glasses on the table tipping over. Both Alagina and Fisher’s expressions changed slightly, both instinctively wanting to protect those nearby.

Fisher grabbed onto Isabella’s back with one hand and Alagina’s back with the other, while Alagina directly grabbed the front of Fisher’s shirt.

This instinctive action made them look at each other, especially Alagina, who glanced at where she touched Fisher and, somewhat embarrassedly, moved her hand to his shoulder,

"Sorry..."

"No problem."

Fisher looked down to confirm there wasn’t a second sway before he conjectured,

"It seems like there’s something under the water."

Fisher released Isabella and, along with Alagina, squeezed through the crowd to the edge of the deck to look down at what was beneath the hull.

The ocean water at night was still pitch-dark, but the surface now was tumultuous, as if something was stirring it madly.

Ossie, who was on the mast, had stood up at some point and was looking out at the ocean from afar. The next second, she lightly leaped down, landing next to Alagina as if weightless.

Now that he was closer, Fisher noticed that her upper face looked very young, but she was quite tall, roughly 1.75 meters.

In the Northern Realm, the adult height range for female Grey Bird Species generally spanned from 1.7 to 1.8 meters, whereas those from the South Continent were only between 1.5 and 1.6 meters. Ossie was already among the taller ones from the Northern Realm.

Beneath her short white hair, her pleasant face was half-covered by an untimely robe, preventing a full appreciation of her beauty. Right then, she focused intently on the calm surface, and for the first time spoke in front of Fisher,

"Sea ghost..."

Her voice seemed unfluctuating, and her tone was very similar to that of Alagina, but her voice was not as mature sounding, and seemed much younger.

"Sea ghost?"

Hearing her words, Fisher scrutinized the pitch-black water below more closely. It appeared that some giant creature was moving about underneath, but the darkness of the night made it difficult to see clearly.

He had heard of the term Ossie used before. Both Moli and Lingna had mentioned it when they were frightened, but he had just assumed it was like an apparition of the sea—an illusory and indistinct shape, not something that actually existed.

At that moment, Sir Emhart, the Book Knight, also floated out of Fisher’s pocket, looking admiringly at the shadowy mass below the water,

"Ah, indeed, that’s a sea ghost that’s surfaced to breathe. There are many strange, giant creatures in the ocean—sea ghosts are one of them. These creatures are notorious predators, truly formidable. However, they usually reside in the deep sea and seldom appear on the surface. Only near winter do they come up to breathe."

By then, Pahetz, grasping a cup of drink and leaning against the railing, blushed and laughed, segueing into the conversation,

"That’s right, we used to sail to the Northern Ocean during winter specifically to hunt for such monsters, though we might only encounter one every ten or eight years. I did not expect to come across one here in the Southern Ocean... Sea ghosts have many treasures on them. Their teeth can be made into ornaments or weapons, and they contain a type of Magic Materials within them that is twenty times more precious than gold. Such a large one would be worth more than robbing a Schwali merchant ship thrice."

As she spoke, she naturally put her arm around Old Jack’s shoulder and then patted his chest,

"Mr. Jack, we’re going to be rich in just a few days."

Old Jack, deep in his cups, was oblivious to the fact that the woman beside him was a fierce warrioress from Sardinia Female Country, treating her merely as a drinking companion.

Hearing Pahetz’s words, he squinted towards the distant ocean surface and, under the increasingly clear moonlight, finally caught sight of the immense creature making its way beneath the water.

It turned out to be a giant creature with a shape similar to that of a squid, primarily black in color, but its skin was unlike the smoothness of a squid’s—it resembled the rugged and uneven surface of volcanic rock.

"Snap, snap..."

Trailing behind it were myriad long and short tentacles that, as it gradually moved away, lightly slapped against the hull of the Iceberg Queen, producing a crisp sound.

All the crew members looked with gleaming eyes at the departing giant beast. After a second’s pause, Alagina decisively issued a command,

"Everyone, the Iceberg Queen shall immediately proceed at half speed, and the night shift will change from two squads to four. We must keep pace with the sea ghost."

"Yes!"

Old Jack sobered up slightly due to the excited response around him and the sea breeze. Shaking his head, he realized the Captain beside him intended to chase the colossal sea monster with the ship. Disregarding Pahetz’s flirtatious touch, he quickly interjected,

"Wait, so we’re going to chase that huge sea monster now?"

Pahetz, tipsily inching closer to Old Jack, gazed at the vast sea ghost approaching under the moonlight, and with a simple gesture or two, she implied a moving mountain of gold to him,

"Don’t rush, Mr. Jack. We’re certainly not about to catch it right now. This sea ghost has just surfaced, and it’s currently at its peak condition. But over the next few days, it must endure the low pressure of the surface to expel the waste gases from its body and to store the air it needs for the deep sea. This process will take at least two or three days..."

"We plan to wait until it’s at the end of its strength and must return to the sea floor before we make our move. That being said, we’d take advantage of its weakness, going for the kill... Don’t worry, with the spoils we earn, I’ll buy you a gold chain."

Old Jack’s mouth hung open as his alcohol-saturated brain struggled to compute—uncertain whether to complain about hunting the sea ghost or the fact that Pahetz intended to buy him a gold chain.