Sir! Don't close the net!

"I'm here!" The great pirate Jones waved vigorously at Li Yili.

"Where is the temple in the Sea of ​​the Dead? Let's go loot it—cough cough—pay a visit!"

"This……"

Not only Jones was stunned, but the other pirates also showed strange expressions.

"Hmm? Did I ask a strange question? I just wanted to see the temple in the Sea of ​​the Dead."

Li Yili raised an eyebrow and vigorously shook the ship's rudder with her left hand, causing the entire Mercury Queen to sway back and forth. The resulting current swept away a large school of fish, and the silent pirates were also thrown about, with many even falling headfirst into the wooden barrels.

“Cough cough cough—that is indeed a strange question,” Jones said, standing steadily on the deck, “because there are no temples in the Sea of ​​the Dead.”

"what?"

Li Yili was taken aback. The prosperity of a region is directly linked to the number and age of its temples. The reason why Instass became the world's largest seaport was because there were quite a few temples in the Sea of ​​the Dead. But now Jones was telling him that there were no temples in the Sea of ​​the Dead.

It's almost as if they're saying the world's richest person doesn't actually have a single penny.

Of course, even if the world's richest man really doesn't have a single penny, there's no way the Dead Sea wouldn't have a single temple.

"Where did the relics and living relics in the Sea of ​​Dead come from?"

“Well… there are some in the Sea of ​​the Dead,” Jones said with a slightly awkward expression. “You can stumble upon living relics or find relics while wandering around the Sea of ​​the Dead.”

"..."

Li Yili pressed the bottom of the rum bottle against the ground and fell silent.

"Can you perform for me?"

"Ah... so this is what inheritance is all about..."

Before Jones could finish speaking, the pirate on lookout duty slid down the rope with a whoosh.

"Report! A relic has been found lying at the three o'clock position!"

Li Yili blinked, straightened up, and turned her left hand, which was holding the rudder, thirty degrees to the right.

The enormous Mercury Queen turned around and began to twist its massive body toward the three o'clock position.

Jones's lips twitched, and he turned around and waved his hand forcefully. "A few people go down and prepare to receive the inheritance. You! Hold onto the rope and keep your balance! You go back and keep an eye on things. If any inheritance falls, who knows what kind of dangerous living inheritance might pop up!"

Soon, Li Yili saw something falling from above, enveloped in a light that resembled flowing golden sand.

It was like a rope thrown from the world of light, incredibly tempting to creatures living in the silent world of darkness. When a strangely shaped squid appeared, Li Yili finally understood why Jones was so nervous.

It was a giant squid over thirty meters long. Countless sharp teeth, like serrated teeth, opened and closed in the suckers on its tentacles. If that were all, it would be fine, as that was still within Li Yili's understanding. But as an invertebrate, this squid actually had a body similar to a human's.

The uncanny valley effect sent chills down Li Yili's spine, and she subconsciously recalled an absurd news story she had seen before: a man had sex in a swimming pool, resulting in a woman getting pregnant.

So, could it be these pirates...?

Jones felt a chill run down his spine and quickly raised his hand, "Fire the harpoon and kill it!"

Accompanied by heavy

With a roar, the Mercury Queen's momentum abruptly halted, and countless tiny bubbles surged forth. Before the squid could even approach the flowing golden sand, metal harpoons, their ends connected to chains and covered in barnacles, pierced through the squid's body.

"pull--"

Jones roared, and the heavy chains snapped back at high speed, dragging the squid towards the Mercury Queen as it crashed straight into it.

Watching the squid-man grow larger and larger, Li Yili tilted her head back and took a sip of rum.

"boom--"

The Mercury Queen crashed straight into the squid's body. The heavy chains tightened suddenly, but still snapped back at an extremely fast speed, and the barbed harpoons hooked fiercely into the squid's body.

"puff--"

Accompanied by surging undercurrents, the Mercury Queen crashed through, all the harpoons returned to their positions, and Li Yili glanced sideways, her eyes reflecting the fragments of the squid man, whether smashed or torn apart by the harpoons.

The fish, lurking in the darkness, swirled around the squid man's fragments, gnawing at his body. Li Yili narrowed her eyes slightly, her left index finger gripping the black ring on her thumb and turning it gently, her black pupils dilating slightly.

He saw that some of the deep-sea fish that were eating the squid were swelling and bursting like balloons, becoming part of what was being eaten, while others were undergoing strange changes in their bodies.

He had seen similar situations before, in Guoweidun. Although he hadn't witnessed the Guoweidun residents ingesting pollutants, he had seen the process of those Guoweidun residents undergoing mutations.

It's not that they're completely unrelated; they're practically identical.

However, fish are obviously less resilient than humans, and in just a short while, they exploded like firecrackers.

Judging from the squid-man's movements just now, it's clear that he intends to hunt down the fallen relics.

If organisms consume the legacy and cannot withstand it, they will spiral out of control and become pollutants. Other organisms that consume the pollutants will also become pollutants, regardless of whether they survive or die...

The Mercury Queen shuddered, and the pungent smell of fish and the cheers of the pirates interrupted Li Yili's thoughts. Several wet pirates cheered as they carried a two-meter-high stone onto the deck.

"Open the box! Open the box!" Jones shouted, looking up at Li Yili standing by the ship's wheel. "Mr. Li Yili, would you like to give it a shot? Maybe you can get some top-quality heirlooms! Of course, these are spoils of war from the Mercury Queen. Mr. Li Yili, you can only touch them. If they're not that great, we can sell them to you if you offer the right price."

"Never mind, I've always had bad luck."

Li Yili raised her hand and turned the rudder to change the direction of the Mercury Queen, while glancing out of the corner of her eye at the stone that Jones was about to open.

Chapter 44 Are you implying something?

"Ah—"

Jones yelled and swung his hammer down onto the wet rock. With a crisp cracking sound and flying debris, a huge crack split the two-meter-high rock in two, centered on the hammer.

Golden coins gushed out like a waterfall.

“Only gold coins?!” Jones tossed the hammer aside.

“O————”

Disappointment is visible to the naked eye.

A gleaming golden crown slid down the gold coin.

“But there was a crown hidden inside the gold coins!” Jones bent down and picked up the crown.

"Yay! Yay! Yay!"

“But this crown…it looks absolutely hideous!” Jones fiddled with the crown in his hand and shook his head helplessly.

“O————”

"But Mr. Li Yili will buy it!"

"Yay! Yay! Yay! Yay!!!"

"Hey, hey, hey—don't make decisions on your own, okay?" Li Yili's eyes twitched wildly.

"Mr. Li Yili, please don't be in such a hurry to refuse."

Jones, holding the crown, smiled awkwardly as he walked to the side of the ship's wheel, hunched over, and raised the crown in his hands. "This is an inheritance~ an inheritance from the Sea of ​​the Dead!"

“It looks like a low-grade inheritance,” Li Yili said, glancing up and down at the crown in Jones’s hand.

The crown in Jones's hand must have had some metal mixed in during its creation, giving it a soft, strange glow. The golden-sand-like light he had seen earlier was probably the light from this crown.

He had purchased many heritage jewelry pieces from Hagen, crafted by the living heritage dwarves, so he knew very well that this crown was a low-grade heritage piece, meant only for decoration. However, his gaze was firmly drawn to the geometric patterns on the crown, curves that could not possibly be drawn in this world.

He seemed to have seen these geometric shapes somewhere before.

Li Yili shook her head, then casually waved her hand, "Mr. Jones, you're quite adept at this. You haven't used the same lines to trick others into buying similar things, have you?"

Jones's expression stiffened, and he looked away somewhat guiltily.

Hmm, it seems this isn't the first time.

"Mr. Jones, for what price and to whom did you sell similar items?" Li Yili swayed the ship's rudder from side to side with her left hand, controlling the direction of the Mercury Queen. "Although I have a lot of money, I'm not stupid."

“Uh… but you slashed your ransom to half,” Jones retorted after a moment’s hesitation.

“That’s not important. It’s not that I can’t buy this crown, but you have to let me know who bought it before,” Li Yili said, extending her fingers to touch the crown.

The ornament curled up, "I'll sell it to them at a high price, they must really want to collect the whole picture book."

"Cough cough cough-"

Jones coughed heavily a few times, glanced at Li Yili up and down with a subtle expression, and then slumped his shoulders. "Ips, the curator of the Instas Museum, sold all the similar crowns we had previously salvaged to him."

Jones paused, lowered his voice, and gently rubbed his index finger and thumb together.

"He's quite generous; he usually buys crowns like this for around this price."

Jones wrote a string of numbers in the center of his palm.

"Why?" Li Yili held the edge of the crown and waved it up and down. "That amount can buy more than three artifacts made by dwarf masters in Hagen, and with a little more, you can also get artifacts containing ancient power from the black market."

“Well… it’s about enriching ourselves and Instas,” Jones said, spreading his hands. “Although everyone knows that there are multiple temples in the Dead Sea, as you can see, there’s not a single one, let alone anything to dig up from them. There are a lot of dangerous fish, though.”

Li Yili raised an eyebrow.

“Multiple temples will make the local life stronger. Do the people of Instas look like they are blessed by the temples?” Jones grinned.

"When you put it that way... it does seem to make sense."

Li Yili turned her head and glanced at the spot where the squid man had been smashed. The bizarre and ominous wreckage had disappeared, replaced by a large group of even more bizarre-looking deep-sea fish. Although the failure rate was extremely high, there were just enough marine creatures to go around.

"Compared to the Instas, who are unremarkable and resemble human batteries that keep Instas running, these fish seem to have been blessed by the temple."

“The temple’s blessing range is limited. We can’t even find a trace of the temple, so one thing is certain: Instas is not within the temple’s blessing range, and they are the world’s largest seaport,” Jones grinned. “That’s why they want these low-level relics that are suspected to come from the Temple of the Dead Sea.”

"If it's too strong, it will be camped out and wiped out by the Galar Horn, so what they want is this kind of useless low-level ancient heritage to prove that Instas is blessed by the temple of the Sea of ​​Dead. How old-fashioned."

Li Yili casually stuffed the crown into her backpack and let out a long yawn.

“There’s an even older one. They claim to be descendants of the gods’ servants from the Sea of ​​the Dead. Their ancestors left the sacred land of the Sea of ​​the Dead with a noble mission and came to Instas. They couldn’t return to the sacred land until their mission was completed, so they bought these legacies from us as evidence.” Jones grabbed Li Yili’s backpack with his left hand and rubbed his right index finger and thumb together.

“But I haven’t heard this from any of the residents of Instas,” Li Yili said, slapping the empty rum bottle into Jones’s hand.

Jones wanted to smash the empty rum bottle open, but he couldn't resist the smell of rum emanating from it.

“Of course, how could they be willing to share such a high status with other Instas residents?” Jones said, reluctantly hiding the empty bottle in his pocket. “Those people are only Instas residents when they need them to work. When it comes to distinguishing between different statuses, they can dismiss those residents from Instas status in a heartbeat.”

Jones shrugged.

"After all, it's McCarthy and his team who are working, not residents of Instas. Haha—anyone except Instas residents can get the treatment they deserve in Instas."

"Heh~ And what about you guys? Which role do you belong to?" Li Yili raised her eyebrows and smiled meaningfully.

Jones's lips twitched violently. "Mr. Li Yili, you're not implying something, are you?"

"Don't you find dealing with guys like that annoying? Why not just give them a good beating and make them cough up the shit?" Li Yili shrugged and voiced her true feelings.