The nautical charts were drawn on parchment and looked very old. Because the charts only marked islands and shipping routes and did not show clear outlines of the continents, it was difficult to determine where the islands were located.
Petru didn't take it too seriously after looking at it, assuming it was just something that some grave robbers or antique dealers had put out, probably to be smuggled to some place in Asia along with the Mummy. There, some perverted rich people often collect strange and unusual things, such as rusty weapons, porcelain urns for ashes, and bones from the dead. They also like to hold and rub jade Tushu pulled from the anus of the dead.
This perfectly aligned with his established rules: any smuggling ship, unless it had prior notice to him, would be robbed clean, regardless of which gang it belonged to. However, this robbery came at a high price; dozens of elite men were lost in exchange for a the Mummy and a few tattered maps. Crucially, the Mummy was thrown into the sea by the superstitious Somalia pirates.
It's unclear which museum this the Mummy came from. Although it might be valuable, Petru doesn't want to retrieve an ancient corpse from the sea, and the Mummy's value would likely be greatly reduced after being submerged in water.
Those few parchment charts were quite good; he believed they were drawn by some pirate centuries or even longer ago. The great seafaring endeavors on Earth did not begin with trade, but with piracy. It was his ambitious and dedicated predecessors who found most of the continents and meticulously mapped out the outlines of the oceans and land.
The islands marked on the nautical charts might hide pirate treasure. Petru carefully kept them, taking them out to study from time to time, but he never managed to figure out exactly where the charts indicated.
After this operation, Petru continued to recruit soldiers and prepare to implement his grand plan—the transformation from a pirate into a political leader.
At that time, he had no idea how disastrous this event would be, so much so that he had to leave the Gulf of Aden, travel halfway around the world, and hide in the South Pacific. In the end, what saved him was those few tattered nautical charts.
He had once thought that people like the Pastor were extremely rare in human society, and that the creature he encountered at sea, which seemed much stronger than the Pastor, must be even rarer, perhaps not much more numerous than the black rhinoceros of West Africa. This subspecies of black rhinoceros was once widely distributed across the grasslands, but became endangered due to overhunting. The International Alliance for Conservation of Nature declared it extinct as early as 2011, but one of Petru's men swore that he had seen a black rhinoceros in the border area between Cameroon and Chad.
However, over the next year, Petru experienced the most terrifying hunt and escape of his life.
The first to confront him was a short Europe whose mental abilities were roughly equivalent to the Pastor's, enough to subdue Petru. However, the man's goal wasn't revenge or to kill him, but rather to obtain the Mummy and the sea chart, thus giving Petru an opportunity to escape. When he encountered the man again, just as the Pastor had predicted, he didn't even think; almost instinctively, at a suitable distance, he decisively shot the man dead. Although he desperately wanted to know who they were and what organization they belonged to, he knew even better that he only had two or three seconds to kill his opponent.
The bullet flew through the jungles of Somalia's East China Sea, slicing off half of the man's face. Petru thought of the Pastor; the manner of death was almost identical. Perhaps the person who killed the Pastor, like him, knew of the threat posed by spiritual beings.
Petru began to suspect that mentally strong individuals might not be so rare. From then on, he resumed his Mental Power training according to the methods the Pastor had taught him.
However, in the ensuing relentless pursuit of powerful figures, he didn't have time to become stronger and was forced to flee. The mental suppression from these powerful individuals and the unpredictable dream world once drove Petru to despair. Fortunately, he was also making progress, and his pirate empire was vast enough that countless pirate brothers paid the ultimate price to save him.
Petru suspected that the Mummy and the nautical charts weren't simply stolen artifacts, but he couldn't figure out exactly what they were. He had even considered retrieving the Mummy from the seabed and handing it over along with the charts to avoid trouble. However, the water where the Mummy fell into the sea was probably five to six thousand feet deep, and no one could say for sure where a small crystal coffin, big enough for only one person, would drift with the ocean currents as it sank to the bottom of the sea; the retrieval would be extremely difficult.
Furthermore, he understood that he was only alive because the nautical chart was in the other party's possession; if he handed over the chart, he would likely be killed to silence him.
Unable to stay in the Gulf of Aden, he began his life as a fugitive, eventually arriving in the South Pacific after several journeys. After hiding for a while in the Cook Islands and Tubuai Islands, he suddenly discovered that the islands marked on those old nautical charts were located on the edge of the South Pacific Basin, a vast area within a 700-nautical-mile radius of approximately 150°W and 30°S.
Not all the islands on the nautical charts can be found. At first, Petru thought the charts were mislabeled, or that some islands had disappeared due to underwater volcanic activity over thousands of years. But one day, he saw an island that suddenly appeared, and realized that many of the islands marked on the charts were Ghost Island.
These Ghost Island are strange. If you land on one, you won't feel anything special; it's just an ordinary deserted island. But once you leave by boat, you might turn around and find the island gone, and you might never see it again for a long time, perhaps even in your lifetime.
Petru must have been some incredibly brilliant man to have marked all these Ghost Island; it seemed like an impossible task. Without these nautical charts, even if he brought all the Somalia pirates over, it would take decades to figure out how many islands there were.
A triangle is drawn in the center of the nautical chart, with many radiating straight lines connecting it to some surrounding islands. A vertical line also radiates from the apex of the triangle, extending directly to the edge of the chart, seemingly connecting to somewhere outside the chart.
Petru didn't know what the triangle represented. He had sailed to that area many times, but there was nothing there except the vast ocean.
However, on those islands connected to the triangle by straight lines, Petru found some strange piles of stones, clearly showing signs of human construction, like relics left by the island's original natives.
Not all the islands in the picture are Ghost Island; some are real and even inhabited. The largest of these is Tubuai Island. There is a hillside there with such stones, which the locals say is an ancient altar. They call it Tapu, meaning "forbidden place," and mortals are not allowed to approach it, otherwise they will offend the gods and go Madman.