The deeper they ventured into the rotting bowels of the ancient vessel, the more the world seemed to fundamentally forget how physics was supposed to work.
The floorboards were no longer just slightly uneven; the entire corridor had canted at a nausea-inducing angle. Sunny and Cielle were essentially forced to hike along the intersection where the right wall met the floor, their boots and feet slipping against damp timber. Cielle almost shivered at the touch. Almost.
Broken pieces of unrecognizable furniture jutted out of the spongy red moss at odd intervals, half-swallowed by the creeping rot. It felt less like walking through a ship and more like navigating the digestive tract of some colossal, long-dead beast.
The most unsettling part was the rhythm. The thick green vines running along the ceiling did not just hang there in the darkness. They actually pulsed. Every time that warm, foul gust of wind rolled down the corridor, bringing with it the stench of decay, the vines flexed in a sickening synchronization.
It was a steady heartbeat. The ship was breathing.
Cielle kept her Seraphic Domain active, pushing back the toxic, spore-filled air. The illumination of the aspect cast strange, dancing shadows against the rotting wood, highlighting the path ahead.
Sunny paused, bracing his boot against a splintered support beam to keep from sliding down the slanted floor. He reached out and picked up another gold coin from a relatively dry patch of wood. He wiped a smudge of reddish dirt off its face with his thumb, the image of the blooming tree catching the light, and tossed it into his leather pouch.
That was the fifth one.
"This is getting completely ridiculous," Sunny muttered, wiping his gloved hand on the fabric of the puppeteer's shroud. He eyed the dark corridor ahead, his thoughts gnawing fiercely at the edges of his consciousness. "Look at the placement of these things. I mean atleast try to hide the obvious trap!They placed them exactly where an greedy idiot would be forced to step or pause."
Cielle leaned slightly against the shaft of her spear, watching the red moss squelch and bubble just a few inches beyond the edge of her glowing barrier.
"Then we should not follow it" she said plainly, her green eyes shifting to meet his. "If you know it is a trap, walking directly into it seems like a very poor decision."
"Usually, I would agree with you," Sunny sighed. He ran a hand through his dark hair, feeling the cold sweat clinging to his forehead despite the warm, humid air of the ship. "I hate traps. I hate them with a burning passion. But think about it for a second. The rest of this wreck is a massive maze of toxic spores and these vines. We have absolutely no idea what the layout is. If we go rogue and try to find our own way around, we might walk right into a central nest of those parasitic vines, or meet an even worse fate."
He gestured vaguely down the illuminated path with Cruel Sight. "At least this trail leads somewhere specific. The safest path in the Dream Realm is usually the one where you know exactly what is trying to kill you. Better the devil we can see, right?"
Cielle didn't look entirely convinced. She tilted her head, her expression as unreadable as ever. "Do you think a monster is laying out coins to catch us?"
"I don't know," Sunny admitted, his jaw tightening. "Maybe? Some Nightmare Creatures are terrifyingly smart. Or maybe it was a human who died here, trying to mark a path. Either way, I want the rest of the coins. We need them."
"Alright," Cielle nodded slowly, adjusting her grip on the pale spear.
They resumed their agonizingly slow trek down the corridor. To mitigate the risk of stumbling blindly into whatever lay at the end of the breadcrumb trail, Sunny decided to leverage his shadow. It was a little risky, especially considering that he had no idea what kind of creature was hiding in this ship.
Sunny was still a little shook by their encounter with the mirror beast. It was the first time something had actually damaged his shadow, the realisation that the worst was no longer just the shadow being discovered filled him with a layer of dread and alarm.
He hesitantly commanded Gloomy to detach from his heel and scout ahead. The dark silhouette slithered seamlessly into the gloom, sliding under the narrow gaps of warped doors and squeezing through jagged cracks in the rotting hull. Through their unique connection, Sunny was bombarded with disjointed glimpses of the ship's interior.
He saw massive caverns hollowed out of the lower decks, spaces that should have held cargo but were instead entirely choked by coiled, writhing masses of green vines. He felt the weight, which seemed to settle deep into the ancient timbers. But most importantly, through Gloomy's senses, he felt a massive, open space drawing closer, a space completely blocked by a towering wall of warped wood.
A few minutes later, Sunny and Cielle rounded a sharp bend in the corridor and found themselves standing in a cramped antechamber.
Directly in front of them stood a massive, reinforced wooden gate. It was clearly the primary entrance to the ship's main interior. But the gate was in terrible condition. The thick iron bands holding it together were screaming under immense pressure, and the timber itself was horribly bulged outward, as if something gargantuan was pressing its entire body weight against the other side.
Sunny stepped closer, signaling for Cielle to watch out. He extended his shadow sense through the thick wood, reaching into the darkness of the hold.
His breath caught sharply in his throat.
Behind that gate was a shadow. It was so impossibly, overwhelmingly huge that Sunny's mind actually struggled to comprehend its edges. It filled the entire colossal space of the cargo hold, a literal mountain of shifting mass that slowly expanded and contracted in the darkness.
'Breathe in. Breathe out.'
The warped wood of the gate groaned in agonizing protest with every single cycle.
Cielle walked up beside him. Her footsteps were completely silent. Without saying a word, she reached out and placed her palm flat against the bulging timber. She closed her eyes, letting her innate senses pick up the minute vibrations echoing through the ship's skeleton.
When she pulled her hand back a few seconds later, her face was completely devoid of its usual color. She looked paler than the bone-white stones outside.
"It's asleep," she whispered. Her voice was so quiet Sunny had to strain to hear it over the creak of the hull. "I can feel its heart. It is very slow. But Sunny... if whatever is behind this wall wakes up, neither of us will get out of here. It is too big. We won't even have time to turn around"
Sunny stared at the bulging wood, a cold sweat breaking out across his back. He wanted treasure, yes. He was incredibly greedy, and he knew it. He had faced down absolute horrors on the Forgotten Shore, survived the Dark City, and fought Nightmare Creatures that defied logic. But waking up a dormant titan trapped inside a rotting, falling shipwreck was exactly where he firmly drew the line.
"Good talk," Sunny said, his voice tight and clipped. "Lets let the gentleman sleep, no?"
He turned away from the now terrifying gate, his eyes frantically scanning the cramped antechamber for an alternative route. He spotted a jagged, uneven hole in the ceiling where the upper deck had completely caved in, leaving a mess of splintered beams and trailing vines.
"Up," he ordered, pointing the tip of Cruel Sight at the breach. "We can go over it."
Cielle did not argue. She bent her knees and launched herself upward, her wings flaring briefly to carry her through the hole and onto the deck above. Sunny followed immediately, using a shadow-augmented leap to haul himself up through the splintered wood, leaving the sleeping nightmare behind.
They emerged out of the suffocating interior and onto the exterior hull of the ship.
The freezing wind hit them instantly, howling across the slanted deck, tearing right through Sunny's memory, but after breathing the sickly-sweet, toxic air below for so long, the bitter cold felt like an undeniable blessing.
They began to walk along the spine of the ruined ship, moving cautiously toward the bow. The angle of the deck was treacherous, forcing them to take slow, deliberate steps to avoid slipping on the slick black moss and plummeting off the edge into the abyss or back to the sailor dolls. Whenever they passed a jagged breach in the hull where the thick green vines crawled outward, seeking the dim light of the sky, they gave it an incredibly wide berth.
Sunny kept his eyes peeled, watching the colossal, dead tree branches scraping against the bruised sky high above them. The sheer scale of the devastation was awe-inspiring in a grim, depressing sort of way.
Cielle walked slightly ahead of him, her white wings acting as perfect stabilizers against the violent gusts of wind. She moved with a natural grace that Sunny couldn't help but envy. Her time in the Dream Realm, combined with whatever challenged she had endured in her past, made her incredibly adaptable to environments that would shatter a normal Awakened's mind.
After making their way safely past the section of the hull that housed the dormant nightmare, Sunny found another large hole leading back down into the ship's interior.
He dropped inside without hesitation, landing with a heavy thud on the floorboards. Cielle followed a second later, her feet hitting the wood with a soft click.
She immediately dropped her Seraphic Domain. The dim light faded instantly, throwing them back into the gloomy, oppressive shadows of the ship. Sunny tensed, his hand flying up to pull the dark cloth mask back over his nose and mouth, fully expecting the toxic air to rush back into his lungs.
But he stopped, his hand hovering in mid-air.
The air was completely clear.
The cloying, sweet smell of the deadly spores was entirely gone. Sunny blinked in confusion, looking down at his boots. The spongy, reddish moss that had coated every single inch of the lower decks had vanished. The floorboards beneath them were dry, solid, and miraculously clean. Even the pulsing green vines had stopped creeping a good twenty feet back down the corridor they had just dropped into, as if they were stubbornly refusing to cross an invisible line.
They were standing in a wide, pristine hallway. At the very end of the corridor stood a heavy, iron-reinforced door that looked like it belonged in a heavily guarded fortress, not an ancient sailing vessel.
Cielle stared at the perfectly clean wood beneath her feet, her green eyes narrowing dangerously. All of her ingrained survival instincts flared up at once, her posture shifting into a defensive crouch.
"This is bad," she said flatly, her grip tightening on her spear.
"What do you mean?" Sunny asked, keeping Cruel Sight raised. "It's clean. The air is breathable. Clean is good."
"No, Sunny, clean is worse," Cielle corrected him, stepping up to examine the exact edge where the red moss abruptly stopped. " In the dream realm, corruption spreads everywhere. It is like a plague. If a place is completely untouched by the local parasite, it means one of two things. Either there is an incredibly strong enchantment placed on this specific room..."
"Or?" Sunny prompted, not liking where this was going.
"Or whatever lives behind that heavy door is scary enough to keep the parasite away. "
Sunny grimaced, the cold logic of her words sinking in. She wasn't wrong. Though awfully chatty today, but not wrong. Still, his eyes were locked hungrily onto that heavy iron door. A door like that, completely pristine and untouched by the rampant rot consuming the rest of the ship, usually guarded something incredibly valuable. His spiritual intuition was screaming at him, yet a grin tugged at the corners of his mouth.
"Eureka," he whispered.
He didn't want to risk opening the door blindly, so he commanded Happy to slide under the narrow gap beneath the iron-bound frame. The shadow slipping inside the sealed room seamlessly.
Through its eyes, Sunny saw the interior.
It was an armored treasury. The walls were lined with reinforced, rust-free metal, and sitting perfectly undisturbed right in the center of the room were three heavy wooden chests, bound in silver and gold. The sight alone was enough to make Sunny's heart skip a beat.
He also noticed a massive, jagged breach in the rear wall of the treasury, the edges of the metal splintered violently outward. That had to be how the dead Chain Worm had squeezed its massive body inside the ship before it eventually retreated and died on the island outside.
There were no monsters in the room. There was no predator waiting in ambush. Just beautiful, gleaming gold and the promise of secrets.
Sunny didn't wait another second.The world around him blurred instantly, the colors bleeding away into a canvas of dark, swirling ink. An instant later, Sunny stepped seamlessly out of the shadows directly inside the armored room, bypassing the heavy door entirely.
He took a deep breath, ready to admire the pristine chests and plan how to open them without triggering any hidden traps.
He barely had a moment to take in the sight before a deafening, explosive crash shook the entire room.
The heavy, iron-reinforced door buckled violently inward. The thick wood splintered into a hundred pieces, and the hinges shrieked in agony as Cielle kicked the door completely off its frame. The massive slab of wood slammed into the floorboards with a thunderous thud, kicking up a massive cloud of dust that immediately coated Sunny's boots.
Cielle stepped calmly through the ruined doorway, her spear resting casually against her shoulder. She didn't look the least bit impressed by the silver-bound chests or the gleam of gold. Instead, her sharp green eyes darted immediately to the dark corners of the room, scanning relentlessly for threats, clearly still incredibly uneasy about how suspiciously pristine the treasury felt.
Sunny stood frozen for a second, slowly lowering Cruel Sight as the dust settled around them. He looked at the shattered remains of the incredibly sturdy door, then back up at the suspect standing in the threshold.
"You know," Sunny said dryly, vigorously dusting off the dust "you could have just knocked."