"Wenden Port? There's no telling whether we'll even make it to Wenden Port." The old sailor yanked the troublemaking newcomer over, threw him into a corner of the cabin, and used hemp rope to bind his arms behind his back to a pillar.
The sailors around them, delighted by the spectacle, watched with undisguised glee, piecing together the whole story from the curses flung amid flying fists and kicks.
Another brainless idiot. Picking a fight with the captain while standing on the crest of the waves in every sense of the word—getting punched a few times was already lucky. With a hot-tempered captain who brooked no argument, he would usually have been tossed straight overboard to feed the fish.
The lanterns swayed, and the sounds of beating and cursing went on without pause before quickly dying away.
Everyone, those dealing the blows and those watching alike, noticed that this was different from usual.
There were no cries of pain or pleas for mercy, no resistance either. It was like handling a goat that had already been bled dry—the support within had been drained away, leaving nothing but an empty shell of a body.
For a moment, they all wondered whether the guy was dead.
Clearly, he was not. His chest still rose and fell, and cloudy breaths puffed from his nostrils, white mist steaming before a face mottled with blood and bruises.
And those eyes—his constricted pupils remained nailed to the cabin wall on the left.
The man directly in his line of sight instinctively moved aside and looked behind himself. There was nothing there.
Yet he kept staring, with an unbelievable intensity, as though that single act had exhausted all his strength of mind, leaving him no room to attend to anything else.
"Playing ghost games!" The sailor who