The Queen of Scrolls never admits defeat

Chapter 559 Bronze Coffin

Each bottle of wine in the wine cellar carries a different curse, which Moran examines one by one using his spellcasting technique.

Some drinks will make you lose your courage, some will make you feel an aversion to plain water and can only quench your thirst with alcohol, and some will completely make you lose your sense of taste...

Moran also discovered a way to break the curse on these wines—by giving them blood.

Pierce your palm with a pure silver dagger, and drink a hundred times the amount of wine you drink to repay the curse.

However, this method of lifting the curse is practically useless; it involves repaying the blood a hundredfold, but even if the blood is repaid, the person is gone.

Moran also put all the wine away.

After passing through the wine storage room, we finally arrived at the last door of the lower deck.

The door looked as if it had been soaked in blood all day long, and its original material was no longer visible.

The bone handle is cursed with blood loss; holding it will drain all the blood from your body.

Removing the curse was not difficult for Moran; a simple dispelling spell would suffice.

But Moran had no intention of opening the door with the bloody, mangled doorknob, so he simply used magic to blast the door open.

All cursed objects are inseparable from the curse carrier; destroying the curse carrier can also remove the curse.

Inside the door is a circular cabin, about ten meters in diameter, with walls made of interwoven ship ribs and whale throat bones, and the surface covered with undulating, pulsating, blood vessel-like barnacles.

In the center of the ground was a pool of blood. The viscous, dark red liquid formed a vortex as the ghost ship rocked, emitting a foul stench of rust and rotting seaweed.

Three flesh-and-blood anchor chains hung from the ceiling, their ends sinking into the blood pool. The main anchor was shaped like a giant claw, each claw tip piercing a dried-up corpse drained of its blood. The secondary anchor was connected to a bronze coffin.

Moran didn't dare to go in directly. The curse power in this cabin was much stronger than in other places, and the curse was also more domineering.

It's fortunate that she was at the peak level of curse magic before she came here, otherwise she might have really fallen victim to it.

The flesh-and-blood anchor chain inside the cabin must not be touched; the curse on it will fill the lungs of the one who touches it with salty seawater, causing them to experience the taste of drowning and the phantom pain of maggots gnawing at their body.

Approaching the blood pool, you will hear the whispers of the dead, luring you into the pool to become the next sacrifice.

The curse of the bronze coffin is strange; it's not directed at the person who opens the coffin, but at the person inside.

The bronze coffin would lock the consciousness of the person inside, constantly tormenting their soul, while slowly digesting their flesh and blood. It would use the soul as fuel to keep the ship running. Every time it devoured a soul, a waxy substance would seep out of the coffin, filling the decaying body of the person inside and keeping them in a state of semi-death.

"Could the legend of the ghost ship's immortality originate from this bronze coffin?" Moran exclaimed in surprise. "This is not immortality, it's clearly an eternal prison."

Clearly, the "person" in this bronze coffin is the living core of the ghost ship.

Moran used magic to sever the chains of flesh and blood; no other magic worked, only spatial magic was effective.

Even so, she couldn't pull the bronze coffin away from the blood pool; it was so heavy it seemed to be connected to the ship, let alone pull it out of the cabin.

Reluctantly, they had to destroy all the curses throughout the cabin before entering to open the coffin.

It was much easier to open the coffin lid than to move the bronze coffin.

Inside the coffin was the body of a human male.

Judging from his clothing, he was probably the original captain of this ship. His body had fused with the bottom of the coffin; his lower body had turned into amber with a metallic sheen, while his upper body, above his chest, still retained a human shape.

Its skin is translucent, and its internal skeleton is covered with seaweed-like blood vessels that undulate with the vascular barnacles on the cabin walls.

The skin on the head is exceptionally translucent, and the skull is as clear as crystal. Through the skull, one can see blue sky and white clouds, as well as the occasional fleeting silhouette of a child.

The left chest cavity was opened, and it was empty except for a dark red gold coin with irregular edges, as if it had been violently torn, which was constantly spinning. Tiny bone spurs grew from its edges and were deeply embedded in the surrounding wax.

As the gold coin spun, Moran seemed to hear a faint child's voice.

Moran listened intently, and it sounded like someone was calling "Father"?
She had seen many human bodies, both living and dead, but she had never seen a human body with such a strange shape.

The body seemed to be truly alive, because the semi-waxed eyeballs had been staring at her ever since she opened the coffin.

She turns around wherever she goes.

The images that flashed through his skull were, I don't know, his memories or something else.

However, apart from the gold coin that spun and beat like a heart, only his eyes could move, making him even less mobile than an undead creature.

I just don't know what "the heart of the ghost ship" actually refers to.

The information states that the heart of a ghost ship is its core, and each ghost ship has a different origin and therefore a different heart.

It's usually a part of the captain's body.

There was no heart in the captain's chest cavity inside the coffin, only a gold coin that beat like a heart. It looked unusual, but it was uncertain whether it was the heart or not.

Moran thought for a moment, then took out the coffin where Kaba was sleeping and knocked on the lid to wake him up.

Since it's something that's highly nutritious for undead creatures, it should be fatally tempting to them.

The little skeleton was a bit dazed when it crawled out of the coffin, but for the first time, it took a deep breath, even though it had no sense of taste or smell. Then it turned its head 180 degrees and stared at something in the bronze coffin, its soul fire throbbing excitedly.

Worried that Moran wouldn't understand, he pulled out his little notebook and painstakingly drew a round object in it, adding the words: "Want it~"

Moran understood; that gold coin must be the heart of the ghost ship.

"Go back first, I'll give you the things later," Moran said.

Kaba climbed back into his little coffin, looking back every few steps.

Moran put away the coffin and began to study how to extract the heart from the gold coin.

This gold coin is also cursed. Anyone who touches it will suffer a mental attack and feel the despair that the people on the ship once felt. Anyone who forcibly takes the gold coin will be cursed and assimilated into the next captain.

The captain's condition was explained by the corpse lying in the bronze coffin.

To obtain the "heart of the ghost ship," one must first understand what happened on the ship and why it became a ghost ship, in order to find a way to break the curse on the heart.

Only after the curse is broken and everyone on the ship is at peace can the heart of the ghost ship be safely retrieved.

Forcibly taking it will either incur a curse or cause the ghost ship's heart to die along with the ship.

Finding the past of a ship that sank many years ago is no easy task.