The Informal Tomb Raiding Diary: She is the occupant of the tomb!-Chapter 116: Too Many Spiders, Too Little Meat
Bi Shi rushed out of the room, buttoning her shirt as she asked what was going on and why the ship was shaking.
Her hair still had some foam that wasn’t rinsed out, and she wasn’t wearing slippers. I told her there was something under the ship, and I was going to deal with it.
She immediately grabbed me, asking if I planned to use Karmic Fire.
I said, indeed, otherwise there’s no better way. There are no weapons on the ship, and we can’t just use a Dao to slice the big creature into sashimi pieces.
Bi Shi said that although the Karmic Fire is powerful, excessive use of it consumes me as well. The larger the target, the greater the consumption; it won’t appear immediately, but once it accumulates to a certain point, it’ll suddenly manifest.
"Sudden death?" But when I learned the real name of Karmic Fire, I checked my memory and found nothing like what Bi Shi mentioned.
"Sudden coma. Otherwise, they couldn’t have caught you. They took advantage of your coma to lock you in the Tomb Prison."
"How long was the coma?" Chen Qinghan asked this.
"Not long, just a few hundred years."
I wanted to punch her, a few hundred years isn’t long? No wonder when I woke up in the coffin, a thick layer of dust settled on me, and that was with the coffin lid on.
"That was your first time experiencing the side effects from excessive use of Karmic Fire."
If that’s the case, now I understand why I don’t remember Karmic Fire having side effects—because I lost my memory after the coma, thinking I was resurrected, and didn’t know it was a side effect of Karmic Fire.
The emergence of Karmic Fire is actually linked to even older, mysterious ancestors of my tribe. Simply put, it was dug out from our ancestral graves.
It was surprising to recall this memory when searching for it. I thought digging graves alongside others was unusual, but it turns out my tribe has a history of grave digging.
And it’s not illegal; Karmic Fire was dug out from one of our tribe’s ancient tombs.
We even dug up all the ancestral graves we could, just to find those forgotten powers.
It’s power, not wealth. In addition to Karmic Fire, we must have unearthed many other things, but I can’t recall them because I’ve forgotten their names.
Perhaps my fellow tribesmen know more about my situation than I do. Shui Wu’s words aren’t baseless; the more I recall, the more danger I’m in.
Bi Shi’s words struck me; maybe Shui Wu meant the same. Recalling the past seems fine now, but when the accumulated harm reaches a certain point, it’ll suddenly explode.
I decided not to recall the past anymore; if I fall into a coma again, there’s always hope of waking up, but what if I become demented? I’d rather die than go insane.
The demented snakes in the tomb are examples. Anyway, I plan to stay away from my tribe’s disputes in the future, not caring about past events won’t affect anything.
"What should we do? If we don’t kill it, it’ll flip the ship over soon." Before my words settled, the ship suddenly tilted.
The creature able to flip a cruise ship must be huge. The few of us combined wouldn’t even be enough to fill its teeth gaps, so it’s flipping the ship probably not to eat us but to retaliate for me bursting its extended intestines.
I glanced at Bi Shi, "Aren’t you able to transform? Why don’t you turn into intestines, dive down to distract it, and make it think its intestines have grown again?"
"You jerk, how could I turn into something so disgusting?" Bi Shi wrinkled her nose, seemingly forgetting she turned into chicken droppings in the tomb.
We grabbed the handrails in the corridor to maintain balance, Chen Qinghan turned toward the staircase, "I’m going to the lower deck to see if we can get the fuel out."
Such a big ship surely has a lot of oil, and leaking oil would float on the sea. If we ignite it, maybe that thing will stop attacking the ship.
This dead sea area can’t really be considered an ecosystem anymore. I told Bi Shi to check on He Su in the room, while I followed Chen Qinghan downstairs, maybe he couldn’t do it alone.
Tap, tap, tap—
Just two levels down, I heard noises coming from below. The stairs were carpeted, and the sound was coming from the wall, like something sharp tapping against it.
But I’ve heard this sound more than once; it’s the sound of a living thing crawling on the wall.
Chen Qinghan drew out the treasure sword, and I noticed something wasn’t right—the sword had turned into a shortsword?
Chen Qinghan explained he accidentally discovered the sword could be shortened, there was a mechanism on the hilt.
Using a Longsword in narrow spaces is inconvenient, whereas a shortsword is perfect. I picked it up and hadn’t noticed its feature.
Chen Qinghan led ahead with the shortsword; a few large spiders crawled up from the lower stairway wall.
Calling them spiders isn’t quite right; for instance, they don’t have fur, their legs appear very hard, and their bodies have skin like fish scales, making them slippery.
They resemble alien creatures from the movies. Chen Qinghan and I separated a bit, I retreated two steps, being too close made it hard to fight.
These creatures carried a fishy smell, quite unpleasant. Clearly they came from the sea. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶
It’s unclear whether they have any relation to the sea intestines. I retreated to the corridor, ready to assist when Chen Qinghan couldn’t handle them.
These sea spiders have bone spurs on their legs—not on the joints, but similar to bayonets—making them absolute predators in the sea and on the ship.
The first sea spider jumped toward Chen Qinghan, who sliced off its four front legs with two slashes, causing the spider to drop to the floor, roll a few rounds, and spit out a web like glue from its mouth.
But Chen Qinghan dodged, and I stepped forward to smash its compound eyes with an ax.
They’re quite large, with bodies as big as a laundry basin, and Chen Qinghan’s sword wielded ceaselessly.
There were too many of them, so we fought while retreating, and fortunately bumped into Bi Shi rushing over.
"Holy crap, it’s this thing! They’re chasing us!" Bi Shi’s poised character cracked, even swearing easily.
"Damn it, they must have followed us here!"
Hearing her say that, I kicked a sea spider attempting to attack my calf and quickly said, "No, it’s what brought you here."
Without further explanation, I shouted to Chen Qinghan, "Lure them to the kitchen."
The kitchen has combustible gases, along with alcohol and oil; let’s conduct an experiment, try burning them.
We retreated to the floor where the kitchen is, killing no less than dozens of sea spiders along the way, but many still pursued.
Bi Shi said this count isn’t as many as those on the Ghost Ship, thousands were there, hand-to-hand combat wouldn’t stand a chance.
I wondered if these creatures indeed have intelligence, knowing our ship has fewer people, thus not sending many of them over, fearing there’s not enough meat?
But I didn’t receive their ’voices,’ neither did the sea intestines.
Bi Shi heard me shout kitchen, and she rushed ahead, splashing vegetable oil and alcohol everywhere, especially on the walls and the inside of the door.
