The Great Ship

On the deck lay melted candles and some bone ritual implements, as though some kind of ceremony had been taking place.

Seven corpses lay nearby. Their flesh had vanished, leaving only grayish-yellow bones. Like melted candles, half of their skeletal bodies had fused with the deck, seeming likely to continue melting.

Their arms were twisted irregularly behind their backs, as though they had been bound before death.

"A living sacrifice!"

Seeing the scene, Wu Heng understood what had happened here.

He turned and drifted toward the cabin. Yes, he was an evil ghost now, so he drifted.

Above the cabin entrance were blurred Korean characters. He could vaguely make out the words "Sewol."

Seeing this, Wu Heng recalled a shipwreck associated with those two words.

Entering the cabin, the floor was covered in scattered newspapers. They lay densely spread across the ground, covering all kinds of objects.

The newspapers still looked half-new!

Yet the furniture and other objects beneath them had completely rotted away. The wood had crumbled into scraps, and even the ship's planks felt like slices of bread beneath his feet, with a nauseating texture.

The ropes that had bound the corpses outside had long since corroded away.

Yet these newspapers were so new!

Wu Heng picked one up and began reading. The first article was about Park Jeong-yeong taking office as president on May 16, 1961.

The article directly beneath it, however, bore the same date and celebrated the "official opening of Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital"!

Both reports had black-and-white photographs.

The psychiatric hospital director and the president looked seventy percent alike.

The first report about Park Jeong-yeong described her background.

"Graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy and was assigned to the northeast of the Eastern Nation after graduation.

"At the time, Japan's Unit 731 was also