An hour later.
"Come clean. Where is your base?"
Lu Ban addressed the pirates kneeling on the deck with an air of solemnity.
The pirates who had been fished out of the sea and those who had surrendered looked at one another, but no one dared speak.
There were two reasons they kept silent.
First, they knew that if they revealed the location of their base, these people would definitely kill them after finding the island.
This was not land but a resource-poor ocean. Fresh water and food would only grow scarcer with use. With so many prisoners aboard the pirate ship, there was no way they could keep and feed them all. The pirates themselves operated the same way: when raiding merchant ships, they generally took only the cargo, killed the men, and kept the women for pleasure before killing them as well. They would not keep extra mouths that did nothing but eat.
Second, their families and even more pirates were still on the island. If those people learned that they had betrayed them, then even if they made it back, they would be purged from within. In short, there was no way out alive.
They would die whether they resisted or submitted. They might as well stall for time. Dying one day later was still one day later.
Perhaps they would find a chance to escape.
Seeing that none of the pirates made a sound, Lu Ban glanced toward the captain as though troubled.
"Captain, what should we do with these people?"
Captain Nagamasu had never encountered a situation like this. At most, he had clashed with pirate ships before. He had never imagined that they could defeat three ships at once and capture so many people. His mind was still replaying Xiya's magic from earlier.
"Uh,