The Big-Bearded Pirate

In the woods east of the dilapidated town, Feng Buzhi continued onward.

As time passed, the side effects of breaking his bodily shackles eased somewhat, and he had stopped falling over.

His physical condition was still terrible, though, so he moved very slowly.

Suddenly, Feng Buzhi stopped and looked toward a spot to the southeast. The fog there was so thick it seemed almost solid.

To ordinary people, stepping into the mist at first brought a sense of sudden clarity. They felt that the mist beyond the town did not block their view, but they soon realized that wasn't the case once they ventured deeper.

The mist's density varied. In some places it was thin; in others, thick.

With no landmarks to guide them, the forest in the mist seemed like a vast maze, and people could easily lose their way.

In the seven days of exploring the mist, the humans who never returned had not all been killed by monsters like Goblins. Many had simply lost their way in the fog.

Eerie murmurs echoed through the mist without end. The more uneasy and afraid people became, the louder the murmurs grew. In the end, those who lost their way would die in fear and panic—in other words, they would be scared to death.

Feng Buzhi had found one such corpse. A man sat crouched on the ground, both hands clamped over his ears, his expression panicked and his eyes vacant.

Feng Buzhi reached out to examine the corpse, but when his fingers touched it, it collapsed like a pile of building blocks.

Rotten flesh and decayed bones tumbled to the ground, and foul-smelling brown fluid trickled out. The man's clothes, at least, were mostly intact, though now they were stained with the fluid and rotting flesh.

"This corpse's decay is highly unusual. For one thing, it's decayed far too quickly. A person couldn't rot like this in seven days. For another, there were no obvious changes to its appearance as it decayed. It only fell apart when touched."

"Could the fog here have some kind of effect that accelerates decay?"

Feng Buzhi murmured softly. When he saw the corpse crumble and rot, he felt his Reincarnated Memories loosen again as they began to awaken. Unfortunately, he was still just short of that final step, and in the end, he failed to cross it.

For a moment, he seemed to sense something.

Feng Buzhi continued deeper into the mist. He didn't know how long he walked, but he was now very close to the spot where he had heard, "Do you want power?"

Then, as he walked, he seemed to trigger some kind of mechanism. Countless strands wrapped around his body.

The strands were neither living creatures nor corpses, so they didn't trigger any sonar-like response from the murmurs.

At first, the strands were sticky. After a few breaths, they lost their stickiness and grew tough, then began to tighten, binding Feng Buzhi fast. Before long, a giant spider, three meters long, arrived.

As the giant spider tugged on the strands, it dragged Feng Buzhi along with them.

Feng Buzhi didn't break his bodily shackles to escape. Seeing no sign that the giant spider intended to attack him, he let it drag him along.

Because the moment he saw the giant spider, his Reincarnated Memories had already begun to awaken.

It would still take some time for them to awaken completely, and Feng Buzhi didn't want to interrupt the process.

The giant spider dragged Feng Buzhi to a rocky cave. Inside, he saw two familiar figures.

One was the shadow he often encountered while sitting in meditation these past few days. The other was the bearded man he had seen while scouting the town seven days earlier.

Feng Buzhi remembered that the bearded man had carried a cleaver. He had even taken a quick look at the material it was made from.

But after studying the bearded man for a while, Feng Buzhi couldn't see the cleaver anywhere on him.

The bearded man was bound in spider silk too, with far more strands wrapped around him than around Feng Buzhi.

It was an instinctive habit of spiders. When they found prey struggling violently in their web, they would add more strands until the prey could no longer move. Only then would they stop wrapping it up.

The bearded man had struggled so much that the spider had bound him tight. The only parts of him he could move were his eyes and mouth.

By comparison, Feng Buzhi had been focused on awakening his Reincarnated Memories. He hadn't struggled at all while the spider dragged him, so there were far fewer strands wrapped around him.

Of course, that was only by comparison. Feng Buzhi was still wrapped in plenty of spider silk—more than enough to stop an ordinary person from breaking free.

"Damn beast, come on and eat me! Come on! I don't want to live anyway!"

"Come on, bite me, you beast! Hurry up and put me out of my misery!"

When he saw the giant spider dragging Feng Buzhi into the cave, the bearded man began to curse.

But the giant spider didn't seem hungry just then, and it soon left the cave.

"Hey! How'd you get caught? Are you alone?"

"Hey! Are you mute?"

"Dead?"

The bearded man looked at Feng Buzhi, but got no response. He couldn't even see Feng Buzhi's chest rising and falling with each breath.

Feng Buzhi's breathing was simply too calm.

The bearded man shifted his gaze. Near him and Feng Buzhi lay the remains of several corpses, some human and some Goblin.

They looked like nothing more than a pile of fragments, as though they had been drained dry, crushed, and ground to pieces.

Clearly, this spider preferred to feed on living things. It didn't collect corpses.

This guy was definitely pretending to be dead!

"I know you're still alive. Quit pretending!"

"I said quit pretending to be dead!"

"Say something!"

"Fuck!"

"Ah!!!"

The bearded man let out an enraged roar, but Feng Buzhi still didn't move.

The cave gradually fell silent. Then, barely audible, a strange sigh came from somewhere inside—the shadow wandering through the cave had sighed once again.

The shadow glanced at Feng Buzhi, then looked back at the bound bearded man, its expression full of disappointment and grief.

After a while, the shadow spoke. "How could you let it catch you so easily? You're the most talented human in this town..."

Its words became strange murmurs that echoed endlessly through the cave.

The bearded man couldn't hear them. Instead, the murmurs made him tense and agitated.

The bearded man roared in fury, "Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Why am I in this godforsaken place?!"

The bearded man's name was Pei Chao. He had lived on a small island in the Caribbean Sea ever since he could remember. After his parents died in an accident, he somehow became a pirate. Later, he rose to become a pirate captain with dozens of men under his command.

Piracy had always been a high-risk profession, especially in the Caribbean.

In truth, Pei Chao couldn't remember how he had died in his previous life. He remembered setting out that day, then seeing a blindingly bright light. After that, he knew nothing...