1888, Indian Ocean.
The metal frame of the steam freighter Sea Witch groaned rhythmically beneath the relentless monsoon winds.
The air in the hold was as thick as half-congealed grease, a toxic rot that could soften a person's will. The stench of coal soot, rancid engine oil, sour sweat, and vomit all mingled together.
In this floating hell, Lin Jie curled up in a corner too cramped to stretch his legs, doing his best to keep his breathing slow and even.
A piercing scream tore through the gloom of the hold without warning, followed by the dull, sharp crack of leather against flesh.
A gaunt laborer collapsed from dysentery and exhaustion. In an instant, a towering Indian overseer dragged him out, the rough wooden boards carving bloody streaks across his back.
Lin Jie's eyelids merely twitched. He didn't look up.
He had long since grown used to it. Ever since he'd been tricked into boarding this ship as a "coolie" at Guangzhou Harbor two months ago, scenes like this had become a part of daily life.
Resist, and you sank to the bottom of the sea. Numbness was the only way to survive.
But unlike his other companions, who meekly accepted their lot with vacant eyes, Lin Jie's eyes, hidden beneath his unkempt hair, still held a clarity and discernment that didn't belong to this era.
"Useless bastard! If you can't get up, go feed the sharks!" the overseer cursed in heavily accented English, driving his boot hard into the man's ribs.
No one pleaded for mercy.
They all watched in silence, like livestock waiting to be slaughtered. In the shadow where no one could see, Lin Jie dug his fingernails deep into his palm.
He wasn't truly numb. As a history student from the twenty-first century who had accidentally fallen into this savage age, he understood his situation better than anyone.
There was no law, no human rights—only the barest law of the jungle.
His knowledge was worthless in the face of absolute violence. All he could do was disguise himself as a harmless sheep, absorbing every scrap of information around him while waiting for that one-in-a-million chance of survival that might never come.
It was time for the food distribution. A spoonful of viscous mush, barely recognizable as oats, was slopped into each person's wooden bowl, giving off a sour smell.
A scramble broke out, with people shoving and fighting. But Lin Jie took advantage of his slight build to slip through a gap in the crowd before the chaos began. He collected his portion, then retreated to his corner and swallowed it in quick, small bites, giving no one a chance to snatch it away.
This was a pattern he had worked out—a survival advantage gained through a modern person's powers of analysis in this miniature social experiment.
Yet in recent days, an inexplicable anomaly had disrupted that "pattern."
He was the first to notice something was wrong.
Based on his hazy recollection of the world's nautical charts and his estimates of the sun's position, the Sea Witch had already veered far from the usual trade route to the Suez Canal.
They were heading into an unknown stretch of sea that appeared blank on every chart and was rarely visited by ships.
The discovery sent a chill through Lin Jie.
What could possibly make a profit-seeking freighter burn extra fuel and waste time to avoid the busy main shipping lanes?
Soon after, the atmosphere aboard the ship began to turn strange as well.
The sailors, who usually sang nothing but bawdy shanties, had lately been humming a gloomy folk song on deck, over and over, in a dreamy, distant voice.
Lin Jie had caught snatches of it. The lyrics were ancient and obscure, telling of a woman cast into the sea and her vengeful spirit, of how she used her long hair to ensnare a ship's anchor and drag the sailors down to the cold seabed.
Panic spread like a plague, breaking out first among the laborers in the lowest hold.
Three days ago, a young countryman from the Chaoshan region had suddenly gone mad in the middle of the night. He clawed at his own throat, gouging bloody furrows into his neck with his nails, and screamed, "Water... There's hair in the water! It's all over the side of the ship!"
The next day, he was gone.
The overseer's explanation was dismissive: "Fell overboard. There's always some idiot every year."
But Lin Jie clearly remembered that the sea had been calm that night, and all the laborers had been locked in the hold. There was no way they could have gotten near the ship's rail.
From that day on, an invisible pressure had shrouded the entire ship. Even the thick air seemed steeped in malice from the deep sea.
Tonight, that malice reached its peak.
The night was deep, and the sea was as still as a single sheet of black glass. Most of the people in the hold had fallen into exhausted sleep, broken now and then by muffled sobs and the groans of the sick.
With his back against the cold hull, Lin Jie forced himself to remain in a light sleep. Suddenly, he was jolted awake by a sound that was faint, yet unmistakably clear.
It wasn't the creaking of the ship's timbers or the dull thud of waves against the hull.
It sounded as if someone with extremely long fingernails were slowly and deliberately scraping the outside of the hull, their fingertips dragging over the thick iron plating, encrusted with moss and barnacles.
Scrape... scrape...
The sound was steady and continuous.
Every hair on Lin Jie's body stood on end.
He held his breath and silently edged toward the nearest round porthole.
The glass was covered in grime and salt deposits, letting in only a faint glimmer of phosphorescence from the sea. Squinting, he strained to peer out into the vague darkness.
He saw it.
Just a few meters from the ship's rail, in the sea fog, a vaguely human-shaped silhouette, unnaturally pale, flashed past.
It seemed to have no legs. Its long body twisted in the water in an impossible way, and he could make out what appeared to be its lower half: a mass of tangled black hair like seaweed, interwoven with slick gray tentacles.
Just as Lin Jie tried to get a better look, the silhouette sensed his gaze.
It stopped, then slowly "turned" in the fog to face the porthole.
Lin Jie couldn't make out its features. All he could see were two points of faint red light on a deathly pale, featureless face.
They weren't reflections, but some kind of bioluminescent organs. Those two red points simply "stared" at the tiny window.
There was no killing intent, no anger.
The instant that gaze fell upon him, a chill from the deepest part of his soul swept over Lin Jie like a tsunami.
It was an emotion beyond fear—the sickening, shuddering sensation of having his reason torn apart and his very existence utterly rejected.
His mind went blank. His stomach heaved, and he was on the verge of vomiting.
He jerked his gaze away and clamped a hand over his mouth, his body shaking so violently that he slammed into the hull.
At that very moment, the scraping against the hull stopped.
But something even more terrifying happened.
The steam engine had always been the ship's "heart," providing everyone with both the power to move and the comfort of its steady rhythm. Now, after a strained metallic groan, its heavy, regular thumping—"thump... thump..."—cut off abruptly.
The heart of the steel behemoth had stopped beating.
The entire Sea Witch shuddered violently, and the vibration that had sustained its pulse of life vanished.
After a brief silence, panic erupted in the hold.
On this dead sea, glimmering with pale phosphorescence, the entire ship had come to a complete halt.
At the same time, a strange humming grew clearer, rising from a distant murmur.
There was no longer just one source. It sounded from every direction, from all around the ship, overlapping and intertwining into a grand requiem.
A requiem prepared for them, the shipload of sacrifices.
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