Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day - Chapter 370: Escape [I]

Chapter 370: Escape [I]

We started off fairly well.

Lily used the Bringer of the Lost Winds to summon powerful gales directly into the sail, propelling the vessel forward at remarkable speed.

My sand constructs only accelerated our pace further, piling the heavy oars, rowing nonstop.

Michael would occasionally change places with me to maintain them and give me a rest from time to time.

Whenever that happened, I would climb up to the deck to take his place at the lookout alongside Kang.

Here’s a surprising fact: Alexia was astonishingly good at telling whenever we were drifting off course.

She explained that she could extend the range of her aura field far enough to notice subtle changes in the deep ocean swells.

According to her, navigating the Lake felt like following a winding road through dense fog. While she could not see very far ahead, she could still sense when we were slowly veering off the path by just studying the currents.

And that was how a blind girl became our sea navigator. She stood near the prow of the vessel and barked orders, basically doing what she was already good at — bossing others around.

Of course, we also used the bleeding moon behind us as our compass point, since we needed to travel in the opposite direction from it. It was Vince’s duty to keep checking on that.

Ray, on the other hand, was assigned to act as our living cannon. Whenever something floated too close for our comfort, he was free to open fire at will.

And at last, there was Juliana, who had been tasked with assisting everyone else in their duties.

One moment she would help Lily manage the sail, the next she would change places with Vince, and shortly afterward she would be standing beside Ray, launching kunai at supersonic speeds.

The girl was constantly multitasking.

So you could understand why we were confident that we would reach the Golden Sanctuary without too much trouble.

Our vessel continued to cut through the savage waters of the Lake of Grief with slow ease, racing forward at full speed.

But before long… we were reminded why confidence almost always comes before a fall, especially inside a Death Zone.

You see, the Lake of Grief was not some normal ocean like the Pacific. It had been formed from the literal tears of a fallen angel.

Because of that, the monsters that survived within its deeper reaches were creatures truly worthy of calling that dreadful sea their home. Each one of them was an apex predator in its own right, and none of them could be considered ordinary by any standard even in their own ranks.

Lily’s winds carried our ship swiftly, but sometimes they were simply not swift enough.

She was now capable of gazing into both the past and the future for nearly the span of a full minute. Yet there were moments when even that was insufficient.

Also, Alexia perceived the world through her aura sight. That meant she did not see you, she saw the life energy being emanated from you.

Her range was extensive as well. So in the middle of that vast sea, where there was nowhere to hide behind, she was capable of gazing deep into the silver waters to notice the presence of leviathans long before they struck.

And then we had Kang. His senses were not quite as extraordinary in the middle of the ocean as they were on land, but his hearing and intuition were still just as uncanny.

With so many people capable of predicting any sort of danger, one would assume that we were practically invincible, that there’s no way anything could’ve snuck up on us.

For a time, that assumption seemed almost true.

But after the first few days, things began to change.

At first, we started getting ambushed by abominations skilled enough to completely hide their presence, while also being quick enough to render any form of foresight useless.

Because so what if we detected them coming? We still couldn’t get away from them in time.

Basically, it was getting harder now.

Though the problem was still manageable compared to what awaited us later. After all, up until then we could still identify the obstacle and fight our way through it.

The real challenge began on the fifth day.

The crimson moonlight had been growing dimmer and dimmer over the previous nights until it eventually vanished altogether.

It happened slowly, over the course of several days.

One night the moon appeared slightly paler. The next night it seemed thinner. After that, it dimmed further still, until it was looking like a dying coal buried beneath layers of ash.

And then, one evening, it simply was… not there anymore.

The sky above us turned into a vast, colorless void, while the Lake below seemed to swallow what little light remained.

Darkness above and darkness below.

We tried to convince ourselves that everything was fine. Nothing had truly changed in the way anything mattered.

The winds still filled the sail. The ship still creaked forward across the water. The Lake still continued to part beneath the hull like any other sea.

…But the absence of the bleeding moon altered something far deeper than simple visibility.

It altered the very feeling of the world.

Before that moment, even within the Lake of Grief, there had always been a distant crimson glow stretching across the silver waters.

It served as a faint reassurance that the sky still existed above our heads and that we were not completely alone within that grim expanse.

Now there was nothing at all.

The sky had become vast and depthless, and the Lake mirrored that emptiness perfectly. We were now sailing through a world that seemed to have lost both its ceiling and its floor.

And the longer we continued, the more threatening the dark ocean really began to feel.

The waters of the Lake of Grief had never been calm. Even earlier they had shifted restlessly, swelling and dipping like something enormous was breathing beneath the surface. But now the waves had grown stranger.

Sometimes the ship drifted through stretches where the water felt thick and sluggish, almost resistant, as though we were sailing through a liquid far heavier than seawater.

At other times the lake would become unnaturally still. The waves would flatten so completely that our ship appeared to have been suspended between two endless abysses.

During those moments the world felt wrong in a way that is difficult to explain for me in words.

You could only know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever sailed the ocean in the dead of night, with no land anywhere in sight and not a spark of light to illuminate the pitch-black darkness.

In that sinister setting, the creaking of the hull sounded too loud. The wind striking the sail sounded too loud.

And occasionally the surface of the water would ripple outward in slow circles, as if whatever unimaginably large thing that was there beneath the sea was shifting.

We never saw what caused those ripples for ourselves.

But we felt its existence.

•••

On the third night after the moon disappeared, we began hearing whispers. Or at least, that is the only word I can use to describe them now.

In reality, those whispers did not come from any particular direction. They did not even resemble voices in the usual sense.

They felt more like… I don’t know… like something alien brushing against the edges of our awareness, far too faint to be audible and yet far too tangible for us to ignore.

We tried to blame it on exhaustion.

Everyone aboard the ship was already worn thin by the taxing voyage. And the constant danger surrounding us, that constant need to always be on high alert, was already taking a toll on our minds. We were also fighting monsters on a near-daily basis.

Under those circumstances, it was easy to dismiss any strange sensations as simple fatigue or stress.

But it just kept happening.

The feeling would come when someone spent too long alone, staring into the dark water or standing watch beneath the empty sky.

We would clearly hear faint murmurs in that quietness. Sometimes they sounded like a woman crying. Sometimes they sounded like the laughter of a child.

Most times they sounded like someone you knew calling your name from far away, though the voice would always be too distorted and too far away to recognize with certainty.

Whenever someone turned their head to listen more carefully, the whispers vanished immediately. Yet the unease they left behind by them lingered.

Those effects not only kept worsening as the days passed, but they were also more pronounced on some crewmembers than others.

Vince, more than once, tried to jump into the water. In the end, we made the decision to always keep him tied to something on the deck.

Sleep also slowly became difficult.

Those who managed to doze off often woke only minutes later with the uncomfortable sensation that something had been standing nearby, quietly watching them breathe.

Once or twice Michael claimed that he had seen shapes moving along the surface of the water. Not beneath it. On it.

Thin silhouettes walking silently atop the Lake, their bodies long and scrawny like scarecrows wandering through a field of darkness.

The unsettling part was that everyone else had noticed them as well. But whenever we tried to look directly at those figures, they vanished without leaving even a ripple behind.

After a while, we stopped pointing them out to each other.

There was no real purpose in acknowledging something that you could never truly see.