Chapter 97: Kansidang Key
“Are you sure this is the blood of the captain of the Green Skull Pirate Group?”
Qi Yi held the Replica Mask in one hand, while his other hand hesitantly hovered over the bloodstained cotton swab in front of him.
“I can only use this mask once a year now.”
The Blue Sea man holding the cotton swab patted his chest.
“Don’t worry! We collected this from the blade that chopped him down!”
The people of Blue Sea weren’t fond of torturing people. To execute all the pirates swiftly, accurately, and decisively at the same time, each pirate had been assigned a personal executioner, ensuring that everyone could meet their end together in neat rows.
Fortunately, the Blue Sea man who had chopped down the Green Skull leader was busy searching for supplies and hadn’t had time to wash his blade. It had therefore been easy for them to collect the blood from it.
Qi Yi was still somewhat hesitant. “What if that resident had cut someone else before him?”
Although he was extremely reluctant, he decided to play it safe. He closed his eyes and put on an expression that said, ‘I’m very willing to sacrifice myself’:
“To make absolutely sure, we should use urine instead. At least we can be certain that the liquid in the urine bucket in the Green Skull leader’s room definitely belongs to him!”
The Blue Sea man holding the blood-soaked cotton swab: “?”
“We already asked. That resident used a light combat knife to cut other people before, while the one he used to cut down the Green Skull leader was a heavy blade. And he thoroughly cleaned that heavy blade seven days ago. The blood on it is one hundred percent the Green Skull leader’s.”
He gave an expression that said, I don’t understand, but I respect it, and prepared to put the blood-soaked cotton swab away.
“Of course, if you insist on using urine, that’s not impossible either…”
Qi Yi: “…Wait!”
Why didn’t you say earlier that it was one hundred percent certain?!
He rubbed his finger against the blood, then touched it to the mask.
The white mask rapidly changed, becoming transparent.
Qi Yi carefully picked it up and put it on his face.
The mask seemed to come alive, rapidly spreading across his face. A transparent, semi-gelatinous liquid flowed down from his face, covering every part of his body.
“Whoa!”
“Woohoo!!”
“Our God!”
“How amazing!!”
Blue Sea people crowded around them in layer after layer. Those who couldn’t fit on the ship flew in the air to watch, while those without wings simply craned their necks from their own ships to see what was happening.
Every now and then, someone would let out an exclamation of amazement or surprise.
Yuan Moshu, trapped in the middle of the crowd: “…”
He had seen plenty of strange things in his life.
But never anything this strange.
Something like this—being able to disguise oneself as another person, while visibly preparing to infiltrate a pirate gathering and requiring complete secrecy throughout the operation—shouldn’t it be carried out somewhere secluded, in secret?
Instead, Blue Sea was acting like they were putting on a concert.
Qi Yi, standing onstage, was practically one step away from waving both hands and saying, “How are you doing, everyone?”
After several ripples and shifts, Qi Yi’s face successfully transformed into the face of Soyi, the Green Skull pirate captain.
His face was narrow and long, with high cheekbones, green eyes, and a large, bushy beard. His height had also shrunk from nearly two meters to around 1.85 meters.
He touched his own face, then looked at the cheering Blue Sea people watching him. Grinning widely, he shouted:
“Well?!!! Does it look like me?!”
The Blue Sea people, who were treating this like a live performance, answered in a wave of voices:
“It does!!!”
Qi Yi touched his throat. “My voice changed too!!”
Everyone played along enthusiastically. “Woohoo!!!”
With the pirate captain’s face, Qi Yi quickly ran around, high-fiving everyone.
The Blue Sea people were already lost in beautiful fantasies of sailing into the pirate gathering and taking down pirate after pirate.
Everyone was cheering excitedly, faces full of anticipation and delight. Even the Blue Sea people hovering in the sky flew down one after another to high-five Qi Yi.
There were simply too many people, so Qi Yi ran around at random, picking people to high-five. Whenever someone got picked, everyone around him or her would cheer and celebrate as though they had won a prize too.
This was a live face transformation! How fun was that!
Yuan Moshu, who was witnessing something that wasn’t a concert but might as well have been one: “…”
When Qi Yi ran up to him, smiled, and held out his hand for a high-five, Yuan Moshu froze.
He saw himself as Blue Sea’s bait ship, so naturally, as a bait, Yuan Moshu’s status wasn’t particularly high.
There had been social classes even before the apocalypse, let alone after it.
So he had always been quite self-aware, keeping himself tucked away in the crowd. He had never imagined that the other party would interact with him at all.
Yet Qi Yi not only wanted to high-five him, he was also wearing the face of the Green Skull pirate captain while grinning like a blooming flower.
“Come on, brother!”
Yuan Moshu stared at that face with a surreal feeling, then cautiously extended his hand and high-fived him.
“Woohoo!!!”
The Blue Sea people around him immediately swarmed around Yuan Moshu as though they had just received some incredible treasure, jumping and shouting with excitement.
Qi Yi was very strong, and he had also run all the way over, so the force of his high-five left Yuan Moshu’s palm slightly sore.
But as he looked at his palm, still faintly warm and aching, while the Blue Sea people around him naturally patted him on the shoulder in celebration, the corners of Yuan Moshu’s mouth couldn’t help curling upward.
He seemed to… be starting to like Blue Sea.
—
After the celebration, Qi Yi got down to business.
Taking up the crystal ball as the pirate captain Soyi, he allowed it to automatically scan him. Once it confirmed that the identity of the account owner was correct, a screen was projected in front of everyone.
“Whoa! He sure has a lot of friends!”
Soyi had dozens of friends, and naturally, all of them were pirates.
Whether this was some kind of Green Billow Star tradition or not, their names were all bizarre. Green Skull and Red Ant were relatively normal; there was even a pirate who had named his pirate group Whale Nose Mountain.
Qi Yi glanced through the names of the other pirates, then opened his chat history with Red Ant and quickly skimmed through what the original owner and Red Ant had talked about.
At the same time, Cheng Qisheng relayed the contents to Blue Sea’s experts, so that after analyzing them, they could teach Qi Yi how to continue chatting with Red Ant in a way that wouldn’t give him away.
But as she continued relaying the messages, she realized there was actually no need to worry about his tone being suspicious. There was practically no sign of any personal friendship in Soy’s chat history with Red Ant.
Cheng Qisheng stared at the chat history with an indescribable expression.
[Red Ant: Soil Monkey Pirate Group. You in?]
[Green Skull: I’m in. Send the location.]
Five days later—
[Red Ant: Why did you fire on me? Trying to start a fight and keep the loot for yourself?]
[Green Skull: It was an accident. I didn’t mean to. You didn’t get hit, did you?]
Four months later—
[Green Skull: Found a fat sheep. You coming?]
[Red Ant: Coming. Send the location.]
Ten days later—
[Red Ant: The fat sheep said you promised them that if they helped deal with me, you’d let them go?]
[Green Skull: All slander. Do I look like the kind of person who’d do that? The fat sheep knew they were about to die, so they were trying to drive a wedge between us.]
[Red Ant: I believe you.]
Fifteen days later—
[Green Skull: The sl*ve we captured from the fat sheep last time poisoned me. I tortured him, and he said you ordered him to do it?]
[Red Ant: Why would I do something like that? They’re obviously trying to drive a wedge between us too.]
[Green Skull: I believe you.]
Seven months later—
[Red Ant: My boss got attacked by the fat sheep. He’s calling me to help. You coming?]
[Green Skull: Green Spider, right? I’ve been wanting to meet the old man myself. We have to help with this. Send me the location, and I’ll get there as soon as I can.]
Four days later—
[Green Skull: Didn’t they say Green Spider had a machine that could produce nutritional solution? Why can’t we find it?]
[Red Ant: No idea. Maybe you fired in the wrong place and blasted the machine into the sea.]
[Green Skull: You kept it for yourself, didn’t you? A treasure like that—Green Spider would definitely hide it somewhere secret. How could it have been blown away? Did he tell you about it when you tortured him?]
[Red Spider: No. When I tortured him, all he had time to do was curse at me. You heard him too. He cursed at you as well.]
[Green Skull: Then what was the deal with you firing two shots at me when we surrounded Green Spider?]
[Red Spider: It was an accident. He dodged too quickly. You know how hard my boss is to hit.]
[Green Skull: Good, then. Haha, I thought you’d just eaten your own boss and were planning to turn around and screw me over too.]
[Red Spider: Haha, how could I? We’re good friends, after all. Hahahaha.]
The Blue Sea people stared at the chat history, falling into deep thought.
“What a bizarre relationship.”
The two of them had known each other for nine years. During those nine years, they had worked together to double-cross 45 small pirate groups, and had jointly attacked ordinary ships 101 times.
“Over these nine years, Green Skull made 98 direct attempts against Red Ant, and used poison, attempted to turn people against him, or planted spies behind his back a total of 32 times.”
“Red Ant made 49 direct attempts against Green Skull, and used underhanded methods against him a total of 99 times.”
Of the 45 times the two of them jointly double-crossed small pirate groups, 27 occurred when those pirate groups ran into trouble and asked one of the two for help, only to be double-crossed instead.
This also explained why, despite Green Skull possessing such a high-tech crystal ball, he hadn’t chosen to call for help from other pirates when faced with Blue Sea.
With Qi Yi operating it, everyone also figured out what the so-called “send location” function was about.
The crystal ball had a positioning function. As long as you shared your location with a friend, both sides could see each other’s positions, allowing them to move toward one another.
Judging from Soyi’s chat history with his various “friends,” many large pirate groups possessed these crystal balls. They normally used them to exchange information, much of which was false, cooperate in attacking others, with a high likelihood of double-crossing each other afterward, discuss their future plans, and profess their trust in one another, all of which was basically lies.
These pirates had all obtained their crystal balls at the pirate gathering held ten years ago.
The Blue Sea experts studying the chat records quickly summarized the information that could be useful to Blue Sea.
“The person who distributed these crystal-ball communication devices to them was named Kansidang. He is the leader of the Kansidang Pirate Group, currently the largest known pirate group on Green Billow Star.”
“According to Green Skull’s chat history, five years ago he mentioned to another pirate that he envied Kansidang for having a territory of his own. Seven years ago, he also mentioned that he had seized a Kansidang Key and planned to sell it to a pirate group called Biatu.”
The experts speculated that the deal had never gone through.
About half a year later, Green Skull happened to mention while chatting with someone that Biatu had already been killed by him. Another two years passed before this Kansidang Key was finally sold for an astronomical price.
“Kansidang is the largest pirate power on Green Billow Star. You could even say that he has his own pirate fleet and is essentially the uncrowned king in the eyes of all pirates.”
In fact, Kansidang really did become king.
But before he crowned himself king, he spent several years as a pirate. He had clearly gotten a taste for the profits of plunder, so his so-called kingship was only among the pirates.
The ordinary ships that survived on Green Billow Star were collectively known as fat sheep.
These ordinary ships fought sea monsters in dangerous waters and salvaged all kinds of items and supplies.
The pirates, meanwhile, only needed to attack these ships to seize the supplies they had accumulated. They could also ensl*ve the original crew and exploit them, or even use them as food.
At the mention of this, the experts’ expressions immediately darkened.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single pirate around for them to chop down at the moment, so after Our God gave them a pat on the head, they barely managed to calm themselves down enough to continue their analysis.
Because of the pirates’ rampant activities, there were also quite a few coalitions of ships operating in the waters around Green Billow Star, with many smaller ships attaching themselves to these powers.
Of the three worlds Blue Sea had experienced, this was the only one where a large number of different factions had emerged after the apocalypse.
There was no official authority. Everyone was caught up in a massive free-for-all, and in the midst of that chaos, they also had to face a common enemy: sea monsters.
As Green Billow Star continued to expand, the pirate groups and these various factions maintained a delicate balance, while also leaving room for ships that had joined no faction and sailed independently to survive.
It was said that Kansidang possessed countless treasures and supplies, but he was not content to stop there.
He gathered numerous large pirate groups under his banner, demanding that they offer him treasures and large numbers of sl*ves every year. Pirates who earned Kansidang’s approval would then be incorporated into the Kansidang Pirate Group.
His pirate group was also divided into a strict hierarchy, with the ships beneath it ranked as Kui, Feng, Lie, Ji, Fu, Shao, and You.
Ordinary pirate groups like the Green Skull were eager to join Kansidang.
Once they became Kansidang’s members, other ordinary pirates would not dare provoke them. As long as they offered enough supplies and sl*ves, they could enter the Kingdom of Kansidang and live there, no longer having to face sea monsters every day out on the waters.
The Kingdom of Kansidang was the “territory” belonging to Kansidang that had been mentioned in the chat records.
“This territory isn’t disturbed by sea monsters, and it’s located somewhere safe.”
According to the experts’ analysis, the safety of this place did not seem to come from the Kansidang Pirate Group having a huge number of people and overwhelming military strength.
“That place sounds more like some kind of spatial rift. It’s unaffected by the various disasters on Green Billow Star. According to Green Skull, people without a key can’t even see it. But there’s one thing worth noting: we believe Kansidang possesses a large area of floating farmland, because Green Skull once mentioned that he also wanted that kind of farmland floating in the sky where crops could be grown.”
Cheng Qisheng, who had been quietly listening, immediately pictured the scene in her mind.
Huge piles of supplies and treasures offered up by the pirates, with a vast stretch of floating farmland above them.
“The pirate gathering is held here as well, once every five years.”
The experts’ voices were filled with regret as they analyzed the situation.
“Only ships carrying a Kansidang Key can enter. The key in Green Skull’s possession can bring in only one thousand people.”
The problem wasn’t that anyone exceeding one thousand people would simply be stopped at the entrance.
Rather, once the number exceeded one thousand, the passage would automatically close.
This was a real headache for the people of Blue Sea.
Their original plan had been to coax the coordinates of the pirate gathering out of them, then immediately mobilize everyone, rush to the coordinates, and simply wipe them out.
But now, a single Kansidang Key could only bring one thousand people inside.
Even though the people of Blue Sea were fearless in battle, they certainly didn’t think that one thousand people would be enough to take down the largest local pirate group.
Green Skull had taken a photo while trying to sell the key through the crystal ball, so Blue Sea quickly used the photo to find the Kansidang Key in the item storage.
It was a small, dark stone with a leaf-shaped mark carved on it.
The reason it had been placed in the item storage rather than the miscellaneous storage was simply that it had been found in the captain’s cabin, and whoever found it had thought it might be a Space Stone.
Cheng Qisheng looked at it curiously, but she couldn’t sense any power of a Rule within the little stone.
What a pity.
If there were some kind of key-related Rule on it, she could devour that Rule. Then wouldn’t she be able to make as many copies as she wanted?
“This is a travel-grade key, so it can only bring one thousand people. If there are higher-grade keys, they should be able to bring in more people.”
The Blue Sea experts, who had been somewhat disappointed, quickly perked up again.
“The good news is that Kansidang only cares about maintaining his position as the overlord. Aside from his own ships, he doesn’t interfere when other pirates attack each other or seize each other’s keys. And no one cares whether the crews aboard those pirate ships are still the original crews.”
The more the experts talked, the more excited they became. They practically looked as though they couldn’t wait to row out into the waters, find a pirate possessing a Kansidang Key, take him down, and claim the key for themselves.
President Qin Zhi was also visibly excited.
Just like Cheng Qisheng, her attention had been completely captured by that floating farmland.
The farmland in Blue Sea Safe City had yet to reach the point of being self-sufficient. Although Blue Sea currently had no food crisis, as the saying went, just because they didn’t need something now didn’t mean they wouldn’t need it in the future.
The floating farmland was simply too appealing to Qin Zhi. It was incredibly useful, could automatically regulate the weather, and with the same amount of land, its harvest could equal 1.3 times that of ordinary farmland.
If entering the area where the Kansidang Pirate Group was located didn’t require a key and come with a population limit, she would have loved to mobilize the army right now, air-drop them into the Safe City, and have one thoroughly satisfying battle.
But reason told her that they couldn’t alert the enemy.
Since Kansidang had keys, what if he could “lock the door” too?
If they revealed something suspicious and alerted Kansidang, causing him to simply seal himself inside that territory, he could stay there for fifty years, but Blue Sea couldn’t possibly wait for him for fifty years, could they?
Cheng Qisheng understood now.
“So basically, although Blue Sea can’t fight a full-scale battle right now, we can let the residents put their own minds to work and use all kinds of methods to infiltrate the next pirate gathering?”
For example, Qi Yi could pretend to be the original Green Skull and attend the gathering.
Other residents could seize a pirate ship and its key, then claim to be pirates themselves.
Some could even impersonate pirate crew members. So what if only one thousand people could enter at a time? A thousand here, a thousand there—if they gathered enough of them, couldn’t they eventually amass a combat force of a hundred million?
When the time came, it would be up to the people of Blue Sea to cross the sea in their own ways, each relying on their own abilities.
Cheng Qisheng: “…Why does this feel like playing a game?”
She issued a world quest, the “players” accepted the quest, and then completed it through all kinds of different methods.
Huh?
Come to think of it, weren’t the previous two worlds more or less the same kind of setup?
The experts and Qin Zhi had already respectfully lowered their heads toward the sky.
“Our God, your people will surely offer you victory at the pirate gathering.”
Blue Sea really liked charging straight in and fighting with real weapons.
But when they encountered a difficult prey, they could also be very patient.
Patiently closing in, slowly wrapping around their target, tightening the noose around its life little by little.
Then, they would offer the prey to Our God—
—
After receiving the divine oracle, Qi Yi looked at his bearded face in the mirror.
He crooked his mouth, trying his best to produce a sleazy-looking grin.
“From this moment on, I am the captain of the Green Skull Pirate Group.”
Behind him, Qi Er and Lu Song also nodded firmly, trying to look carefree and roguish, like proper pirates.
“We’re members of the Green Skull Pirate Group!”
At the moment, they were aboard a Green Skull pirate ship, with their own ship following behind. They had also painted a huge green skull on it using paint they had found in the Green Skull’s supply crates. Their disguise was quite convincing.
The two ships sped forward. Ahead of them, a small boat was also moving rapidly.
“It’s going really fast! Is there a sea monster ahead?” Qi Yi asked.
Lu Song had a better grasp of how non-Blue Sea people thought. “Normally, if it’s moving that fast, there should be a sea monster chasing it, right?”
“There is? Where?”
The Blue Sea people aboard the pirate ship immediately became excited and kept looking back, but they couldn’t spot any sea monster. They could only turn back in disappointment. Maybe the other ship simply wanted to go faster. The thought immediately awakened Blue Sea’s competitive spirit.
The small boat sped up, and they sped up too. The small boat went even faster, and they went even faster still. Before long, they overtook the small boat that had been accelerating nonstop.
Qi Yi proudly stood on the deck and waved at the locals on the small boat, who stared at them in stunned disbelief. To maintain his pirate persona, he put on a mocking expression.
“Hey there! Hahahahahahaha! We’re faster!!”
The locals stared blankly at the cheerful bunch of pirates. “…”
After spotting the Green Skull pirate ship, they had desperately pushed their boat to the limit, trying to escape Green Skull’s pursuit.
And it turned out the other side had only been trying to overtake them?!!!
