Endless Ocean: Survival Begins with a Dugout Canoe-Chapter 39 - 37: A Bold Speculation

As for the "ally" the other party mentioned?

Heh.

How could someone I’ve never met, who won’t even reveal their identity, be called an ally?

Shi Ming began to speculate on the other party’s identity and intentions.

First, he could rule out anyone from the Sakura Go.

After all, considering the state Nailu Ye had been in for the past thirty years, she didn’t seem like someone with any backing. If she truly had power within the Black Society, she wouldn’t have ended up in such a miserable state—the entire Sakura Go had so few supplies worth Shi Ming’s notice that even scavengers wouldn’t bother with it.

Was it a political rival of the Great Wilderness?

What benefit could they possibly gain by risking exposure just to warn me of a crisis? To stop the Great Wilderness from recovering the secret treasure, then use the opportunity to attack them?

Or perhaps this "well-intentioned reminder" understood the true value of this secret treasure and figured they’d have a better chance of intercepting it if it was in my hands?

Shi Ming didn’t reply to the message.

He increasingly felt that there was more to this "nautical chart" than met the eye.

He took the map out of his system inventory again. Using his own Awakened power, he reactivated the strange map, placed it on the table, and began studying it meticulously with a magnifying glass.

After a long search, he only found two or three tiny black dots on the map, all of them near his current coordinates, within 3,000 nautical miles.

There were no other discoveries.

’Something’s wrong. Maybe my entire approach to investigating it has been flawed.’

’Perhaps I should try thinking about it differently.’

’Let’s assume... I’m Chunyi. How would I use this map?’

He withdrew the power he had infused into the map, waiting for it to revert to a normal world map. Then, he took out the vial of "Black Shark Blood" treasured by the former captain, Chunyi. He carefully extracted a single drop of Black Shark Blood and let it fall on the edge of the map.

This Black Shark Blood was a catalyst for human Awakening, so it naturally possessed the power to activate the nautical chart, equivalent to Chunyi himself using it.

WHOOSH—

The map changed again!

The map, which had returned to its original state, once again turned azure!

But! This time was different!

Shi Ming’s eyes widened!

This time, on the blue map, within a circular area with a radius of about 20 centimeters centered on Shi Ming’s location, a dense cluster of tiny black dots had appeared!

Hundreds of them.

No.

Maybe even more!

The closer a black dot was to Shi Ming’s coordinates, the darker its color. The dots at the edge of the circular area were so faint they were almost invisible. From this, he inferred that this 20-centimeter-radius circle was likely the nautical chart’s detection range.

Amid his shock, Shi Ming also keenly picked up on a detail.

’When I use my Black Tortoise Power to activate it, very few black spots appear within the circle, only two or three. One of them is the Black Tortoise’s location.’

’But when I use Black Shark Blood, the circle fills with a dense spread of black spots. Although there’s a spot at the Black Tortoise’s location, it’s relatively faint, clearly different from before.’

’The Black Tortoise is an S-rank sea beast, while the Black Shark is only a D-rank sea beast.’

’Could it be that the map gives different feedback depending on how it’s activated?’

A bold hypothesis requires careful verification!

Shi Ming guessed the principle behind this "secret treasure"! It was:

It matches strength with strength!

If it meets S-rank, it detects S-rank!

Based on the information he had, Shi Ming made a bold deduction: if an S-rank Awakened catalyzed its power, the map would display the locations of S-rank sea beasts within its range! If a D-rank Awakened catalyzed it, it would display the locations of D-rank sea beasts.

The closer the sea beast was to the user’s position, the darker the black dot!

But that didn’t mean they could be encountered on the sea’s surface. Most powerful sea beasts were active in the deep sea, or even deeper.

In other words, the power of the nautical chart likely depended on the user’s own rank. It was a pity that ever since this powerful secret treasure was obtained by the Black Society, its true potential had been left undiscovered, like a pearl gathering dust!

No wonder. The Black Society didn’t even have any S-rank Awakened!

Even if they had A-rank or B-rank Awakened, their higher status or other reasons might have prevented them from ever coming into contact with this treasure. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

That’s why Chunyi was able to borrow it so easily! And now, it had fallen into Shi Ming’s hands!

...

Of course, this was all just Shi Ming’s speculation.

It had yet to be proven.

Besides, due to a lack of information, his deductions could have many inconsistencies.

But that didn’t matter. Verification wasn’t the hard part; the hard part was having no leads at all. He would gradually figure out the true purpose of this map.

’If my deductions are true, then this map is an incredible treasure!’

Shi Ming stared at the map spread out on his desk, his eyes gleaming as he looked at the dense cluster of black dots in the surrounding sea regions.

The map was a quad-folio world map with a very small scale of 1:30,000,000. Every centimeter on the map represented 300 kilometers in the real world, or 162 nautical miles. The map’s circular detection radius was 20 centimeters. ’If my guess is correct,’ he thought, ’does that mean the map can detect sea beasts up to 3,240 nautical miles away?’

At the same time, using the intensity of the dot for the Black Tortoise floating on the sea’s surface as a baseline, could he infer the depth of other sea beasts based on the shade of their respective dots?

The potential applications were immense!

Information is often hidden in the meticulous analysis of details.

It was thanks to the intelligence analysis skills Shi Ming had developed while on missions that he was able to perceive this and guess at a possibility.

...

「Yinping Sea Region. 138°E, 35°N.」

A thick fog permeated the air.

The colossal, admiral-class wandering ship, the "Black Society," loomed like a mountain, appearing and disappearing within the dense fog. In an office somewhere aboard this giant vessel, Great Wilderness was reporting to his direct superior, the distinguished "Admiral of the Sea," Yan Dao Lin.

"Admiral of Yan Dao, the Xirang Research Institute, which is affiliated with [Da Yu], recently announced they’ve deciphered a portion of the text from the Mysterious Stele on Mount Everest. Should we contact them soon to purchase some of this intelligence?"

"The Xirang Research Institute’s intelligence has always been expensive. Did they reveal what kind of information it is?"

Admiral of the Sea, Yan Dao Lin, sat on a deerskin sofa in an extremely comfortable posture.

He was looking at a document in his hand while discussing matters with his subordinate, Great Wilderness.

"It’s supposedly a list—a ranking of special and unusual treasures in the Endless Ocean. Only the bottom half."

After the dawn of the Wandering Era, Mount Everest, as one of the few areas not submerged by the sea, came to be known as Earth’s last sanctuary.

During several expeditions, human survivors unexpectedly discovered a Mysterious Stele at the Top of Mount Everest.

The inscription contained thirty-three thousand characters, yet they belonged to no known civilization’s writing system.

On the back of the stele, there was also a rock painting.

Inspired by that rock painting, and through the arduous explorations of a few human pioneers, the survivors discovered the method of Awakening.

Yan Dao Lin pondered for a long time.

"We’ll buy it."