Rules Ch.109

Chapter 109: Cruise Ship (7)

Compared to George, Everly had slightly higher tolerance.

Having already been exposed to all kinds of nauseating scenes—exploding, rotting corpses, giant cockroaches scurrying everywhere, bodies covered entirely in teeth, and more—mere humans turning into something resembling seafood wasn’t enough to break her psychological defenses.

That said, the sight was indeed horrifying. What it brought wasn’t just simple shock, but a kind of absurdity, discomfort, and incomprehensibility that went beyond common sense. It also tapped into humanity’s innate fear of the unknown, delivering a powerful mental impact.

“So, Miss Everly, is there any way you can restore Dali?” The captain, seeing that the young woman remained calm in the face of such a scene, couldn’t help but feel a flicker of hope.

Unfortunately, Everly wasn’t a witch, nor had she brought anything that could stop the mutation on this trip.

So she shook her head regretfully. “No. It’s been too long—he’s already fully transformed. I can’t save him.”

The captain was unwilling to give up. “There’s really no way? If it’s just money, we can negotiate any amount.”

Everly still shook her head, her tone cold. “No matter how much you offer, I can’t save him. And for the safety of everyone else on the ship, I suggest you deal with Dali as soon as possible, to prevent him from spreading this abnormality to others.”

“Deal with Dali? You must be joking. He’s worked on the Mary Jane for five years—he’s an indispensable companion. How could we possibly harm one of our own? Miss Everly, even if you’re a witch, you shouldn’t—”

“Do you still not understand what we’re facing?” Everly cut him off bluntly. “A ghost ship that vanishes and reappears mysteriously, a storm that isolates us from the outside, missing passengers, strange traces of religious rituals, legends of witches on board, monsters beneath the sea, crew members mutating after being bitten… With so many bizarre events, are you still unable to abandon your outdated beliefs and accept that what we’re dealing with now is something completely beyond scientific explanation—a supernatural phenomenon?”

The captain was left speechless by the retort.

Of course he knew that none of this was normal—otherwise, he wouldn’t have summoned an unknown “descendant of a witch” for help over a single remark. But still…

“If you truly can’t bring yourself to act, then at least find a place where no one can get close, and lock Dali up for now.”

Everly softened her tone, giving the captain a way out.

From experience, in horror stories it’s practically impossible to get the protagonists to eliminate an infected companion before they’ve shown obvious danger—the group simply won’t listen. With time pressing, she didn’t have the luxury to argue, so she could only settle for a temporary measure.

The captain held his forehead, hesitated for a moment, then nodded, deciding to follow the “expert’s” advice.

He had several crew members who were aware of the situation find an empty luxury suite. They pushed Dali—bed and all—into the room and locked it.

Afterward, the group returned to the captain’s cabin and sat around the table.

Everyone turned questioning eyes toward Everly, hoping that this seemingly professional occult expert could offer some kind of analysis. After a long period of thought, she indeed came up with an initial idea.

Then, under everyone’s gaze, she calmly revealed her conclusion—

“I suspect what we’ve encountered is a ‘time loop.’”

“A time loop?”

“That’s right. It’s a concept in occult studies. It refers to using certain special abilities to completely fix the time of a specific area within a particular unit, causing it to repeat endlessly… Let me think of an example—imagine you’re playing a video and set it to loop. That video, inside your phone, forms a two-dimensional ‘time loop.’ Without outside interference, no matter how time passes in the real world, the people in the video will forever repeat the same sequence of actions.”

“I see, so that’s why the Golden Anchor has remained in the state it was in when it first set sail over a decade ago. Even the surrounding sea has stayed completely calm and undisturbed. That’s because the cruise ship and the area around it are locked in time!” George reacted quickly and immediately understood Everly’s explanation.

“Exactly. Did any of you notice the abnormal state of the Golden Anchor last night?”

Everyone nodded in unison, their expressions still tinged with lingering fear. “We all saw it. After eight o’clock last night, the ship suddenly lit up, and there was singing and cheering—like a party was going on… But damn it, every one of us can swear there was no one on that ship!”

“Then did you notice what happened in the early hours this morning—the mass jumping into the sea?”

“The mass jumping into the sea?”

This time, almost everyone looked completely confused.

Everly sighed helplessly. With so many bizarre events happening, how had they all managed to sleep so soundly at night?

Fortunately, she had been prepared and had recorded what happened the night before. Although the video quality was a bit blurry, it was still clear enough if you looked closely.

“In the early hours this morning, all the lights on the ship suddenly went out, and the noise stopped abruptly. I felt something was wrong, so I took out my phone and recorded this… We can set aside the earlier parts, but look at the end of the video—everyone on the ship, for some unknown reason, jumped into the sea. We don’t know why they did it, but once you consider the concept of a ‘time loop,’ it’s not hard to see that this mass jump is likely the reason the passengers mysteriously disappeared.”

“What do you mean?”

George, true to his role as the likely protagonist, was once again the first to catch on. “Are you saying the starting point of the time loop is the evening banquet?”

Everly nodded.

Because the Mary Jane encountered the Golden Anchor at noon, it was easy for people to fall into the assumption that time was flowing normally. But in reality, the “time loop” trapping the cruise ship actually starts at 8:00 PM and ends at 7:59 PM the following day.

The reason it doesn’t start and end exactly on the hour is because Misha witnessed the massive ship briefly appear “aged” for about ten seconds last night. This state closely resembled what happens when the time loop is temporarily broken. Whether intentional or accidental, during those few seconds, the time loop was inactive.

“To make things easier to reference, let’s call the starting point of the time loop Point A. Point A very likely corresponds to the night the ship disappeared thirteen years ago. The passengers held a banquet on the cruise ship, indulging in food and drink. Then, in the early hours, for unknown reasons, all the lights on the ship went out. Figures appeared—people holding torches and wearing black cloaks. They took over the banquet hall to perform some kind of sinister sacrificial ritual…”

“A sacrificial ritual?”

“Exactly.” Everly dragged the video on her tablet to the middle portion and paused it on the magic circle. Pointing to the symbols around the circle, she explained, “See this triangle-like pattern? In Runic, it means ‘offering.’ The nearby circular pattern stands for ‘life,’ and that crescent shape over there means ‘absorption.’”

Her previous misadventures at the theater had now become a foundation for Everly’s experience. Runic has twenty-four letters, all twisting and curving in strange ways. Everly might not be able to remember the meaning of every rarely used symbol, but the few that appeared in the theater’s sacrificial magic circle—she could recite them from memory even with her eyes closed!

“From this, it’s clear that this was a magic circle designed to offer living human sacrifices to some entity—a particularly insidious kind that doesn’t limit its targets. Now, looking at the video I recorded of the mass jumping into the sea—even without counting carefully, it’s obvious to the naked eye that far fewer people jumped than the 4,700 on board. So we can infer that after the circle took effect, those crew members and passengers who weren’t in the ballroom were likely used as sacrifices, which explains why they vanished on the spot. Am I making sense so far?”

Everyone nodded.

Everly continued, “After the sacrifices were completed, the innocent crew and passengers were all absorbed by the evil god, leaving only the hooded cultists. They removed their cloaks, dropped their torches, and gathered on the deck, jumping into the sea one by one until the entire cruise ship was empty. And during this time, the segment of time captured by the time loop hadn’t ended yet. So the ship would continue to drift at sea until 7:59 PM the next day, when the loop completed one cycle. After a short interval measured in seconds, the cycle would begin again…”

“But why did they jump into the sea?” the first mate asked.

Everly shrugged. “I don’t know. There are far too many evil gods in this world for me to recognize which one they were worshipping. But I do have a hypothesis. Look here—”

She moved the video’s progress bar forward to the moment when the group first stepped onto the deck. “See the slime on the floor and railings?”

Then she dragged it back to when they were at the entrance of the ballroom. “And here too, there’s the same kind of slime. If you look closely enough, you’ll notice that the slime stretches from the ballroom all the way out to the deck, perfectly matching the final paths of the hooded cultists. There’s one more detail—you don’t think this slime looks a lot like the substance on Dali, do you?”

At the mention of Dali, everyone’s faces went pale.

“Yes. I suspect the evil god they worshiped might be some deity of the sea. Under its influence, the bodies of the cultists who completed the sacrificial ritual mutated, transforming into aquatic monsters similar to Dali—covered entirely in slime. For these creatures, the ocean is their natural habitat. So once the ritual is over, they don’t remain on the ship; they choose to leap into the sea, returning to their true home.”

“Wait—so according to you, that means the water right now…” The captain’s face suddenly went pale.

Everly nodded. “Exactly. This is why I said that the environment the Mary Jane is currently in is extremely dangerous—because the waters beneath the ship could very well be hiding thousands of monsters.”

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Author’s Note:

This scenario draws partial inspiration from: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The Time Loop in the original work is quite mysterious, but since the author isn’t very bright, the Time Loop in this dungeon is a heavily modified version:

The time loop lasts 24 hours (full version). During this period, all recorded living beings cannot escape the boundaries of the time loop. For example, leaving from one direction in the sky will result in re-entering from another direction in the sky, and diving into the deep sea will bring them back from another underwater location. Creatures are aware that they are trapped, but they cannot realize that these events have repeated countless times, because to them, each iteration feels like their “first experience.”

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