Before dawn.
Breaking Waves Wharf.
As the heart of Barracuda Bay's harbor, the air here was always filled with noise and clamor.
Especially at this hour, just before sunrise, the stink of fish mixed with the cries of fishmongers, and the racket would not stop until noon.
Yet at this moment, the entire wharf had fallen into an indescribably strange silence, one that even carried a hint of sanctity.
Night still shrouded most of the sky, but beneath the glow of the rising sun hidden beyond the horizon, its original blackness had begun to fade.
The heavens had become a hazy, profound deep blue, as though blending into the sea itself.
The wharf was packed with people.
Unlike the sweat-soaked laborers, penny-pinching merchants, and crude, reckless sailors of the past—
The crowd at Breaking Waves Wharf was clearly far more varied.
Men, women, the elderly, children—even many nobles and officials who should have still been asleep in their lavish White Cliff District mansions had come, surrounded by their guards and squeezed into the crowd.
Every one of them wore what they considered their most solemn and proper clothing.
Even the vagrants who lived like rats in the depths of Saltwater District's alleys had cleaned themselves up somewhere in advance, then dug out the least-patched thin hemp garments from the bottoms of their luggage piles.
The wind lamps atop the towers, the kerosene lamps beside the mooring posts, and the candlelight spilling from the windows of the wooden houses along the shore—all had been extinguished beforehand.
If someone had been high enough in the air to look down at that moment, they would have seen it.
With Breaking Waves Wharf at its center, a vast stretch of the surrounding area had been swallowed by darkness, without the slightest trace of light.