Cold Iron and White Lamp

After a brief deathly silence in the hold, the suppressed panic finally found an outlet and exploded.

People scrambled up from their filthy bunks in terror. Crying, curses, and desperate prayers mingled together, battering Lin Jie's eardrums.

The hatch had been locked from the outside with a heavy bolt. The laborers trapped inside the iron canister pounded madly on the thick metal door, producing futile, thunderous bangs.

Lin Jie did not join the pointless riot.

There was no point in pounding on the door.

The people outside—the sailors and overseers—were probably unable to save themselves now.

He forced his chaotic thoughts back into reason, his mind racing. That thing he had seen was clearly no ordinary creature.

It could affect his mind and create fear. Its song could stop the ship itself. This was simply beyond the realm of science.

"Ah—!!"

A shrill scream came from the deck, followed by the blast of gunfire.

The shots were scattered and hurried, more like a trapped beast lashing out wildly in its final struggle. Lin Jie's heart sank even lower. This proved that the battle had begun.

He turned his gaze toward the hold's only exit—a cargo lift shaft leading to the upper deck, likewise sealed behind iron bars.

The lock on the bars was an old-fashioned brass padlock. In his current situation, there was no way he could open it.

Yet Lin Jie's gaze passed over the lock and settled on one of the joints in the bars. The rivets there had been corroded by seawater for years and were covered in rust.

There was no time to hesitate.

Lin Jie pushed through the chaotic crowd and came to the side of a middle-aged laborer who was already barely breathing. The man was burning with fever, muttering incoherently.

Lin Jie crouched and carefully pulled a thin iron rod, worn so smooth its original color was unrecognizable, from the man's waist.

This was one of the laborers' few "personal possessions."

"Sorry, uncle," Lin Jie murmured. Then he turned and tore off a strip of oilcloth, wrapping it around one end of the rod to keep it from slipping.

He aimed the other end at the weakest rivet, then picked up a small piece of pig iron used as ballast and treated it as a hammer.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

After who knew how long, a dull crack finally sounded. The rivet could no longer bear the strain and snapped, leaving a small gap in the iron bars.

Lin Jie quickly inserted the iron rod into the gap and pried with all his strength!

Creak— Amid the screech of twisting metal, an opening just large enough for one person to crawl through appeared.

Just as he was about to crawl out, the sounds of battle on the deck grew fiercer.

The gunfire was mixed with sharp cracks that sounded like bones being forcibly broken, as well as the final choking gurgles of sailors being dragged away.

Then a bright light illuminated the deck.

Lin Jie saw a German gentleman in a well-tailored traveling coat rush out from the upper cabins.

The man had a resolute face. Though tension filled his eyes, there was not the slightest sign of panic, making him stand out sharply from the sailors in complete disarray around him.

In one hand, he carried a portable lamp emitting a steady white light. In the other, he gripped a heavy Webley revolver.

"Everyone to the deck! Form a circle! Aim the light at the water! At those Deep Sea Resentful Women!"

The German man shouted in German, but in the chaos, no one understood him. Yet what he did next shook everyone who saw it.

A slick creature crawled out from the shadow by the ship's rail and lunged at him. The German gentleman did not look back. He pointed his revolver behind him and fired without hesitation.

Bang!

A burst of scorching fire exploded from the muzzle with a deafening report.

The instant the bullet struck the Deep Sea Resentful Woman, a cluster of silver light burst across its pale body.

The struck monster let out a shrill screech. Its body stiffened, its movements slowing for a second.

In that instant, the German gentleman had already turned around and calmly fired a second shot into its head.

The Grudge Woman's head exploded, turning into a cloud of black mist mixed with foul seawater before dispersing into the air.

"It works!" Lin Jie's heart began to pound as he watched.

That gun, those bullets, were clearly made specifically to deal with these monsters!

But the situation on the battlefield did not improve because of it.

There were simply too many of those creatures.

They climbed onto the deck from the pitch-black seawater without end. Their most terrifying weapon was not their claws, but an invisible fear that could shatter a person's will.

Most sailors had not even had time to fire before extreme terror made their bodies go limp and their minds freeze, leaving them to watch helplessly as they were dragged into the abyss.

The German gentleman stood firm in the center of the deck.

His marksmanship was terrifyingly precise; every shot hit its mark. That strange portable lamp also seemed capable of driving the Grudge Women back to some extent.

But under the siege of several monsters, even he gradually began to struggle alone. He was soon wounded.

Seizing the opportunity, Lin Jie crawled through the opening on all fours and rolled into a pile of debris on the deck.

He did not dare make a sound, holding his breath as he watched.

Suddenly, a Grudge Woman larger than the others charged out from behind the shadow of the main mast, moving with unimaginable speed.

The German gentleman had just driven back a monster on his flank and had no time to turn around.

The tremendous impact sent him flying. His Webley revolver traced an arc through the air, then slid toward Lin Jie across the wet deck, slick from the ship's tilt.

Acting on instinct, Lin Jie lunged forward and grabbed the revolver, still warm in his hand.

An icy sensation unlike anything he had ever experienced surged from his palm, making him feel as though he had not grasped a gun, but a chunk of ice taken from the depths of the polar regions.

The chill flashed into his mind, which had gone blank with fear. The suffocating mental pressure that had weakened his limbs was miraculously driven away.

"Ha... ha..." Lin Jie gasped for breath. He finally understood why this German man had been able to remain calm amid such terror.

A Grudge Woman spotted him and lunged over with a shriek.

The mental pressure descended again, but with the "barrier" provided by the gun in his hand, Lin Jie's legs only went weak instead of collapsing completely.

The instinct to survive overwhelmed everything. Imitating the stance from movies he remembered, he raised the heavy lump of iron with trembling hands, aimed at that featureless white face, squeezed his eyes shut, and pulled the trigger!

Bang!!!

The immense recoil slammed his thin body backward. The gunshot briefly deafened him, and the dazzling muzzle flash left his vision a sheet of white.

He could see nothing and hear nothing. He only felt himself falling backward uncontrollably.

The instinct to survive made him fling out his hands wildly, trying to grab something on the slippery deck to steady himself.

His right palm came down hard on a hard yet slimy surface.

The wound in his palm, cut open by sheet metal, burned fiercely. Warm blood immediately mingled with that slick, clammy texture.

"—!!!"

Without warning.

The world vanished.

It felt as though an invisible hand had brutally torn Lin Jie's consciousness from his body, then smashed it into an abyss made of pure malice.

He was no longer Lin Jie, no longer a young man struggling for survival on a ship's deck.

He became something else.

He "felt" that he had no lungs, yet could breathe freely beneath the horrifying pressure of the ocean ten thousand meters below.

He "felt" that he had no eyes, yet could "see" everything around him—a perception of space and existence that transcended sight.

He "felt" an eternal, bone-deep hunger, an absolute hatred for all things warm and alive.

Soon, another human emotion was forcibly shoved into that vast consciousness belonging to an "unknown other."

It was an extreme concentration and unwillingness to yield, stabbing fiercely into that cold darkness with resolute will.

"Licht... Licht!"

The German gentleman's final obsession before death and the ancient, immense malice belonging to the Deep Sea Resentful Woman—these two utterly different yet equally powerful fragments of consciousness used Lin Jie's mind as their battlefield, beginning a silent and brutal collision.

His brain was the anvil upon which they collided.

Boom—!!

Pain. Pain beyond all words.

Countless fragments of memories and sensory information that did not belong to him violently battered the fragile dam of his mind.

He saw it.

He saw densely packed, deathly pale nests in the depths of an abyssal trench...

He heard countless Grudge Women wailing in inhuman voices, their cries merging into a grand hymn that blasphemed the gods...

He also saw the German man's perspective: a pale hand rapidly growing larger...

Lin Jie could not make a sound. He could not even feel the existence of his own body.

Like a fallen leaf in a storm, he could be torn to pieces at any moment between those two immense wills.

At the critical point where his consciousness was about to be completely overwhelmed, the instinct to survive made him desperately seize that fragment of human obsession imbued with resolute will.

"Licht... mehr Licht!"

(Light... more light!)

Lin Jie suddenly struggled awake from that lethal sensory invasion. He looked at the revolver in his hand, which allowed him to retain the barest shred of sanity, then at the Grudge Women hesitating and retreating in fear of the muzzle flash.

Finally, his gaze pierced through the layers of ghostly figures on the deck and locked onto the portable lamp not far away—the lamp the investigator had dropped, yet which still stubbornly emitted a steady white light in the wind.

A bold plan took shape in his mind.