And then something even stranger happened: the sunken wreck was actually swallowed by the Void along with everything else, the broken bow vanishing as well.

Lance stood there a bit dazed, but one thing in his heart was now confirmed.

So it really was a whole set...

He couldn’t help thinking of that Romani ship that had been enhanced by the ritual. If that ship hadn’t been wrecked and snapped in half by the rampaging force of nature beforehand, then after the ritual’s buff, even Lance probably wouldn’t have been able to shake that anchor stuffed full of bizarre power.

The reward appeared: a Music Box fell into Lance’s hand.

He opened it and a light, lilting melody floated out; even Lance’s slightly exhausted mind felt as if it had been healed.

Holy shit! This Bay is the real sanatorium, isn’t it?

First the Siren Conch, then the Purification Coral, and now an Aria Music Box on top of that—my stress just dropped to the floor!

And another part of the reward was the Bell that had just been in the drowned captain’s hand.

At first Lance didn’t feel anything special about it, just that it was another piece of Extraordinary Equipment.

But once he held the Captain’s Bell in his hand and studied it for a bit, he suddenly seemed to realize something and went into a frenzy of joy.

He turned back to scan the scene once more. After confirming there was nothing else of value, he rushed toward the source of that light.

The water level rose from his feet to his calves and was still steadily deepening, but on both sides there were stone paths cut into the rock. Lance dashed along one of them, his excitement downright baffling to behold.

He once again faced the sea directly, only this time Lance didn’t seem to care about any of that. He stood at the mouth of the cave and shook the Bell with all his might. Mist inexplicably rose in the air, and the next second a ship with a dilapidated, eerie silhouette burst through the fog and appeared on the surface of the water.

"Holy shit! A Ghost Ship!"

Lance wasn’t exactly well-read; all he could do was blurt out that exclamation.

That’s right, the Bell in Lance’s hand was the key to this ship, capable of summoning it out of the Void.

And if you studied it carefully, you’d notice this was the same sunken ship from earlier. The fracture marks were still there, only now it had been forcibly pieced together.

But looking at it, no one could say when it might snap apart again...

No wonder he sacrificed something that big just now and didn’t get a single point of Spiritual Essence out of it—only a Music Box and a Bell dropped.

Lance stared at that ragged-ass pirate ship, but he was absolutely thrilled. Of course the Bell in his hand could also control other things on board, because this ship was alive.

Not alive in the literal sense, but the power on this ship had vivified everything on it, which was why Lance could control it through the Bell.

As for its abilities...

Lance still needed to explore them, but the one thing he could be sure of was that summoning it cost so much Spiritual Essence it made his heart bleed.

Once the initial excitement faded, Lance realized what a dumbass he was—this was enough Spiritual Essence to raise a person to Elite.

Meaning every time this ship set sail, it would cost one Elite. Even more of a scam than the Black Armor.

He stood on the rocks, letting the sea breeze cool his overheated brain.

That was when Lance noticed something interesting: go a bit further out and there were some wooden man-made structures, looking very out of place over there.

Curious, Lance walked over and could roughly make out that it was the ruins of a small dock.

Undead, a wreck, a Bay, a dock... the sight triggered something in Lance’s mind, and those blurry memories started to revive.

Right!

He’d heard before that in order to collect Mysticism knowledge and material for research, the ancestor had hired a notorious fleet.

Those Pirates had roamed far and wide under the ancestor’s orders, collecting all sorts of rare artifacts, remains, and ancient texts.

But as the excavations went on, more and more curious spies appeared along the old route, so the ancestor had no choice but to start considering moving the weirdest cargo by secret waterways.

The location was reached by following a stone path from the back door of the old mansion to the edge of the sea cliffs, then down to where this small dock was built.

For this, the ancestor even designed an intricate pulley system to haul the heaviest cargo safely up from the ships.

In this way he avoided the eyes of those snooping into his secrets.

Since they were described as infamous Pirates, there was no way they’d stay obedient forever—especially as Hamlet declined while those Pirates, thanks to the ancestor, were well on their way to becoming Pirate Kings.

Until that day finally came, when the Pirates used the ancestor’s demand for secrecy to try to raise their cut.

But their opponent was the ancestor, for fuck’s sake—this was basically suicide!

Because the ancestor would never allow his secrets to leak, and besides, that precious money had long since been spent where he needed it.

So while soothing them with one hand, with the other the ancestor prepared... another kind of "payment" for them.

The Pirates trusted him all too easily. When this greedy lot fell asleep after their revelry, the ancestor boarded their ship and laid on their anchor every bit of Curse Magic he’d ever come up with in his life.

Back then the ancestor had already been studying Mysticism for quite some time; those Necromancers had even sailed in on the Pirates’ own ship to Hamlet to become his students.

When the magic erupted, the anchor, carrying a supernatural force loaded with his Curse and contempt for their blackmail, plus the thousand-ton momentum of the ancestor’s burning ambition, dragged the entire ship and everyone on it down into the bottomless abyssal trench.

At last, these pitiful souls, chained and sunk to the seabed, died a sailor’s death—drowned, bound in chains forever... They must have screamed in utter despair, yet not even the most despairing wail escaped that pitch-black, surging sea...

For the ancestor, having that pirate captain and crew—who’d been dragged down to the depths in chains—die a sailor’s death was perfectly fitting.

It might have been the intense resentment reacting with the ship’s ritual.

Or maybe, after the captain had come into contact with so many strange artifacts, one or two had been left aboard and got triggered.

Anyway, in some indescribable process, the entire pirate ship transformed into a Ghost Ship, and the crew were twisted into Undead.

Even so, their souls were still trapped aboard, forced to relive that drowning over and over.

They were cursed to drift here forever, in the deep darkness beneath the raging waves, in a place where light could never reach...

All that can be said is that the ancestor was vicious as hell. Killing a man is one thing, but this level of torment? Shows just how ruthless that bastard really was.

And now, for some unknown reason, that wreck had returned from the lightless trench to seek revenge on the ancestor, only to find that time had passed and everything had changed.

All of this linked up neatly; no doubt it was yet another masterpiece of the ancestor’s handiwork. Lance finally realized he’d basically taken the hit for that bastard.

Looked at this way, both the Deep Diver in the Bay and those drowned sailors were inextricably tied to the ancestor.

And Lance?

Sure, he slaughtered the Deep Diver and sacrificed the wreck, but he was just a poor, ordinary guy dragged into the mess.

He quickly sorted through the events that had happened, and only because he’d personally experienced it all did it make any sense—otherwise, it was all way too damn abstract.

A fallen civilization twisted into Deep Divers, and a crew turned into Undead by the ancestor’s spell and Curse.

By now, both had long since been swept into the dust of history; besides Lance, no one would ever know the truth.

Lance had a lot of feelings about it, but he knew that mood wasn’t for him. He immediately shifted his gaze back to the Ghost Ship.

"What should I name it? The Flying Henan Man? The Auditorium Black Pearl? Would Iceberg Queen sound a bit more normal..."

Lance agonized over it for quite a while; naming things was what he hated most.

Just then something interrupted his thoughts. He looked out and saw a mast and sail rising over the sea’s horizon.

The flag wasn’t visible, but for a ship to be approaching the Hamlet Old City side at a time like this...

Could it be that after Sela the Romani went back, the news had already spread to the Pirates?

Otherwise there’d be no explaining why anyone would come to a place like this.

Except...

"How do you people know Hamlet is short on ships? And how do you know I’m racking my brains over how to haul my loot back?"

Watching the ship sail closer, Lance muttered to himself...