Chapter 194 - 170: Undersea Shipwreck - Valentine

Chapter 194: Chapter 170: Undersea Shipwreck - Valentine

The sunken ship at the bottom of the sea had a name: the Valentine.

Rowan Rhodes had seen it written on the hull. The Valentine was a massive cruise ship, standing five stories tall. Perhaps due to the game’s settings, the hull lacked the heavy rust typically found on sunken ships. Instead, it revealed the cruise liner’s original colors.

However, despite the lack of rust, there were plenty of marine creatures roaming around the ship. Earlier, when Rowan had descended wearing her diving suit, the marine life had swarmed around her to investigate, acting incredibly restless and eager to strike. But now, with the Water-Repelling Pearl in use, it didn’t just keep the seawater at bay—it kept these marine creatures away as well. In fact, the surrounding marine life gave Rowan a wide berth, as if sensing some kind of threat.

Rowan immediately realized that the Water-Repelling Pearl was far from ordinary.

Upon stepping onto the Valentine’s deck, she instantly felt the pearl’s unique effect. It allowed players to walk freely across the sunken ship at the bottom of the sea without feeling a single ounce of water pressure. It was truly magical! Naturally, this made her exploration much more convenient.

With that, Rowan didn’t hold back and began to freely roam the Valentine. The first place she entered was the bridge. The Valentine’s bridge was several times larger than the one on the previous sunken ship she had searched. The sheer variety of precision instruments was dazzling. However, the entire room looked a bit messy, with boxes and other sundries floating in mid-air.

Looking at the suspended boxes, Rowan thought for a moment before directly tossing them into her inventory. After all, she couldn’t exactly unpack them right there on the ocean floor. Now that her inventory slots were plentiful and spacious, she showed no restraint in collecting everything she could.

In a word: loot, loot, loot.

As for the instruments and gauges, she took whatever she could. Breaking them down for materials was never as good as taking them whole. For the next while, Rowan went into full scavenging mode.

After sweeping the bridge, she moved on to the kitchen and dining hall. True to its status as a cruise liner, the kitchen was astonishingly large. More importantly, it was fully equipped with all sorts of culinary appliances.

Once again, Rowan saw traces of Azure on these sunken ships. If she didn’t know that the Deep Sea Region was home to many different races, she wouldn’t have thought much of it. But knowing this, she felt that many of the resources in the Coastal Waters Region and the Shallow Sea Region were based on Azure. It was just that the Sea Survival Game had added certain special elements to fit its own mechanics. However, as the game progressed, resources with these special elements would only become more common. This meant that Azure players were continuously adapting to the Sea Survival Game, getting used to life here, and slowly blending in.

So far, though, Rowan didn’t think blending in was a bad thing. At the very least, Azure players were undoubtedly on the path to growing stronger. Whether or not they were being fattened up for the slaughter, this process gave them channels to improve and armed them with the capital to fight back.

In the kitchen, there was everything one could need: knives, storage racks, tableware, pots and pans, freezers, and more. Rowan packed it all away.

After the kitchen came the various guest cabins. It had to be said, the cabins held an abundance of items. Rowan rummaged through them one by one. Many were completely bare, but a Wooden Treasure Chest would occasionally appear, which she promptly stored away. The cabins took up a significant amount of her time, but looking at her increasingly full inventory, she felt it was well worth the effort.

Once she finished exploring the cabin area, Rowan turned her attention to the cargo hold. The loot in the cargo hold was even more bountiful. There were all sorts of wooden crates, oil drums filled with gasoline, shipping containers packed with supplies, boxes of waterproof cloth, crates of ores, mechanical parts, building materials, and more. All of it was good stuff.

Next up was the engine room. This was Rowan’s primary objective for this trip. Because the engine room housed the generator. Since she needed a blueprint for a generator, Nature directed her to look only here.

Inside the engine room were various mechanical components, and the generator unit stood out prominently among them. Rowan collected it without a second thought. Then, she began searching for wooden crates. Blueprints were more easily obtained from wooden crates found in specific locations. Sure enough, once the engine room was cleared out, a wooden crate became glaringly obvious.

Once again: loot, loot, loot.

After the interior of the ship was completely searched, she moved on to the cruise liner’s corridors and exterior areas. At a glance, Rowan spotted the ship’s attached vehicles—neatly secured rubber rafts—as well as the wooden crates scattered around them. By the end of it all, she had scoured the ship inside and out, storing everything she could possibly fit into her inventory.

And just like that, after Rowan’s sweeping plunder, the Valentine was left as nothing but an empty shell. This meant she only had one final move left.

Dismantling.

Looking at her control panel, Rowan first checked the time, then her current status. She was very certain that her current condition was far from enough to dismantle the main body of the Valentine. However, she still had time! And she had medicine! At worst, she would just have to make a few extra trips.

Estimating her stamina, Rowan began dismantling the ship layer by layer. Once her status bottomed out, she immediately used a Heart of Life. Not daring to push her luck too far this time, she stopped when she had half of her stamina left and returned from the ocean floor to her raft.

As soon as she returned to the raft, Rowan noticed that the countdown timer for the Water-Repelling Pearl on her panel had paused. Seeing this put her mind at ease. She had been worried that the countdown would continue while she was on the raft, which wouldn’t have left her enough time! Now, it seemed she had more than enough.

"Master, you’re back! You were down there for a long time," Seabird One said, flying over to Rowan with concern.

Because she had been gone for so long, Seabird One and the others had grown a little anxious while waiting. As flying creatures, what they feared most was the deep sea. To them, it was a bottomless abyss—the kind of place where you went in and never came out. Previously, when Rowan entered the water, she would surface within half an hour. Being able to see her from time to time, Nature kept them from worrying too much.

During the hours they spent waiting, they incessantly pestered Void Beast Atticus, asking if the Water-Repelling Pearl was actually reliable. They pestered him so much that Void Beast Atticus went from being absolutely certain to second-guessing himself. But it was fine now; she was back.

"I was too excited after getting the Water-Repelling Pearl and jumped straight into the water. I forgot to tell you guys, sorry about that." Rowan smiled, the corners of her lips curling up. "But the reason I stayed down there for so long was due to Nature providing so much good loot."

"Are you going back down?"

Rowan nodded. "I still have to go back down. I just came up to get something to eat."

As she spoke, she took out some Healing Ointment, food, drinks, and other items. Exploring the cruise liner drained a significant amount of stamina, after all! The Seagull Family and Void Beast Atticus joined her and started eating as well.

Once they had eaten and drank their fill, and her status was fully restored, Rowan entered the water once more. But the very moment she dove in, not too far away, a raft was sailing directly toward her own raft’s position.