Relic Grades

The next day, the sea was calm and the wind still.

The Black Knife continued sailing toward Little Will Island.

Little Will Island was not in the Pras Sea. As the name implied, the Seven Seas consisted of seven sea regions.

Opening the nautical chart and counting from left to right, then top to bottom, the Pras Sea was the sixth sea region, while Little Will Island lay in the seventh—the Sylvia Sea.

There were only three viable routes for the Black Knife to reach Little Will Island.

The first was to take a detour through the fifth, fourth, and second sea regions, making a huge circuit before entering the Sylvia Sea.

That would take an enormous amount of time. It would take at least a year to reach the Sylvia Sea.

There were two other options: passing through the Vesipus Strait between Yazhong Island and Vitalia Island, or passing beneath Vitalia Island.

The former might mean being attacked by the naval soldiers of both Yazhong Island and Vitalia Island, though it was also possible that the Black Knife could slip through quietly before they noticed him.

The latter was more dangerous. Beneath Vitalia Island lay the Black Sea, along with countless reefs. One careless mistake could mean shipwreck and death.

At present, the Black Knife was heading toward the Vesipus Strait.

Hawkins sat in a deck chair, carefully sensing the changes in his body. The electric arcs on his fingertips gradually turned into a bird, then suddenly softened and formed a fierce tiger.

"Kill me, Son of Pirates! Why won't you kill me?"

The little bat Julian had turned into hung upside down from the mast, staring fixedly at Hawkins. He struggled as he roared in fury.

He was an extremely proud man. Defeat and retreat would have been one thing, but Hawkins had captured him alive. Even if Joyce rescued him afterward, he would no longer have the face to keep living. Rather than become the laughingstock of the Lineage, he would rather die.

Hawkins looked up at Julian with a half-smile. "Do you really want to die?"

"Hmph. If you've got the guts, kill me!" Julian replied with a cold sneer.

Hawkins shook his head and smiled. "No, I won't kill you. And you may not truly want to die either. You simply can't accept being defeated by me right now, and the intense humiliation has given rise to this extreme thought. But deep down, your subconscious doesn't truly want death."

"Son of Pirates, you'll regret not killing me today!" Julian threatened darkly.

Hawkins nodded. "I look forward to that day."

In fact, after reading Julian's memories, Hawkins had embedded a biological virus in Julian's brain. At critical moments, it could operate in place of the Mind Virus.

People often found it difficult to distinguish the source of every thought they had. The principle behind Hawkins's Mind Virus stemmed from precisely this.

The naval soldiers aboard the Black Knife were not completely controlled by Hawkins.

Suppose Naval Soldier A was preparing to sleep and was about to carry out the command "sleep." At that moment, Hawkins's Mind Virus intercepted the thought of "sleep" and released the thought of "dance."

Naval Soldier A would not know that he had wanted to sleep. Instead, he would believe that he wanted to dance, and so he began dancing.

This was how Hawkins's Mind Virus controlled the naval soldiers aboard the Black Knife, making them carry out Hawkins's orders.

The thoughts of most living creatures were exceedingly muddled. It was difficult for them to clearly identify the source of every thought, much less distinguish where their ideas truly came from.

Because of the cursed relic, a pure Mind Virus could not affect Julian. Physical-level interference was needed instead—the Physical Consciousness Virus.

It was like how Hawkins used hair to read Julian's memories. The biological virus carrying the Mind Virus emitted static electricity, gradually altering Julian's brain waves. In the end, Julian would make choices beneficial to Hawkins without ever realizing that the virus had influenced his thoughts.

Unfortunately, this method did not work on everyone.

The main reason it worked on Julian was that the cursed relic had left him with an immunological flaw, allowing the virus to be implanted. If an ordinary person were implanted with such a virus, they would quickly catch a cold and develop a fever. Their body temperature would rise sharply, eventually killing the virus with heat—or killing them in their sickbed.

Whether the virus was eliminated or the person died from illness, neither was the outcome Hawkins wanted.

Hawkins had no intention of taking any living being's life. He had come to this world only to begin a new adventure and meet beings he could communicate with amicably. Killing and enslavement had never been his intention.

Of course, neither was he some saint. He knew full well how cruel nature was, so if anyone blocked his path, he would not mind sending them out of this world.

First was the matter of Joyce.

In Julian's memories, Joyce was unimaginably powerful. If Julian's combat strength was 100, then Joyce's was 9,999,999,999+.

Joyce's body could turn into countless paper figures, and he had no weaknesses whatsoever.

In Julian's memories, people had tried attacking those paper figures with flames, concentrated acid, and weapons, but none of it posed any threat to them.

Moreover, when Julian had gone out with Joyce on missions, they had encountered thunderstorms. Lightning had likewise failed to harm Joyce.

In his paper-figure state, Joyce was as though he had activated invincibility. To this day, he had never been defeated.

However, Hawkins did not believe Joyce was absolutely invincible. If he were truly that powerful, Vitalia Island would have changed rulers long ago.

Julian's memories revealed that Joyce did not rank highly among Jabus's subordinates. He was not even in the top ten. Therefore, Joyce's ability definitely had a flaw—it was simply one Julian had never discovered.

There was also the matter of cursed relic classifications.

Among the nobility, cursed relics had strict grades: "good," "dangerous," "ferocious," and "death."

Good-grade relics carried curses as well, but those curses generally were not fatal.

For example, Julian's cursed relic was a good-grade relic called the Bat Necklace. It granted its wearer the ability to turn into a bat, while its curse was that the wearer could thereafter survive only by drinking blood.

Dangerous-grade Cursed Relics, as their name implied, were extremely dangerous relics.

Jordas's Bride's Scimitar was a Dangerous-grade Cursed Relic. Without the correct countermeasures, touching it meant certain death.

The grades of cursed relics did not represent the strength of the relics themselves, only the severity of their curses. The stronger the curse, the more complicated the necessary countermeasures usually were.

As for the final "death-grade" relics, their curses were essentially impossible to offset. Whoever touched one died, and it could even implicate all blood relatives, instantly wiping out an entire clan.

After learning about cursed relic grades, Hawkins developed a series of suspicions.

Could the Black Knife he possessed, along with that mysterious nautical chart, also be cursed relics? Perhaps they were merely good-grade relics, which was why they were not fatal.

If that guess was correct, what were their curses?

Though good-grade relics were not fatal, their curses had to exist. Hawkins simply had never discovered them before.

Hawkins drew the Black Knife and gave it a light swing, then began carefully searching through the original Hawkins's memories for every clue and trace.

Both the Black Knife and the nautical chart had been inherited by Hawkins from his father.

After inheriting the Black Knife and nautical chart, Hawkins had not undergone any mental changes. Nor had any physical mutations appeared.

"No, judging from the data, Hawkins's luck had been both good and bad in the past."

"But after inheriting the Black Knife and nautical chart, he had one especially unlucky day every month, exactly thirty days apart from the previous unlucky day."

"Did that bad luck come from the nautical chart, or the Black Knife?"

"And if the Black Knife really was a cursed relic, what was its effect? It couldn't just be especially hard, could it?"

Countless questions flashed rapidly through Hawkins's mind. At last, he opened his eyes and looked at the Black Knife in his hand. Yet the Black Knife was still the Black Knife; it showed no changes because of his discoveries.