Chapter 345: The Fountain of Youth (2)
Over the next few days, perhaps because they were too far apart, Everly and Grant remained at peace with each other, and no one came looking for trouble with Everly.
Still, since she was putting on an act, Everly made sure to play her role as an environmental volunteer to the fullest. Every day, she would pretend to observe dolphins on the deck, occasionally scoop up some seawater for samples, write in her journal, record some videos, and so on.
Late at night, she would meet with Kesuye and learn from him about what was happening aboard Grant’s ship.
Most of it was useless junk information, but every now and then, there would be something worthwhile.
For example, on the morning of December 9, Kesuye overheard the Thorn Witch and the shaman aboard the ship getting into an argument.
The shaman wanted to teach that “insolent little girl” a lesson, so he picked up some hair she had shed and wrapped it around a voodoo doll, intending to curse the witch and make her suffer.
But the result was the exact opposite of what he intended. The Thorn Witch was the type who grew stronger the more she suffered. Pain not only failed to make her submit; it instead brought out her vicious side. She and the shaman got into a fierce fight, and the shaman suffered a regrettable defeat. After being thoroughly beaten into submission, he no longer dared challenge the witch.
From this, Everly learned that the shaman in Grant’s group most likely followed Voodoo.
Voodoo shamans often forge their bodies into vessels capable of containing spiritual power, then release that power through methods such as voodoo dolls, concocting herbal medicines, and communicating with or summoning spirits, using it to attack their enemies.
When dealing with a Voodoo shaman, there are two rules you must always remember—
Horror Movie Survival Rule #7: Be wary of any food or drinks that have left your sight, and Horror Movie Survival Rule #18: Make sure to properly dispose of anything that has fallen from your body, such as hair, flakes of skin, and blood.
Because before casting a spell, Voodoo practitioners often need to obtain a part of your body, or get you to drink a potion containing a part of their own body.
Besides the information about the shaman, Kesuye also eavesdropped on Grant and the Thorn Witch during their private conversation before bed.
According to the information he had gathered, the Thorn Witch was named Savannie, and she and Grant were lovers.
The witch had known for a long time that Grant was constantly changing bodies, and she didn’t mind it at all. In fact, she was even more sympathetic toward her boyfriend because of it. Savannie had accompanied Grant to the island this time specifically to obtain the Fountain of Youth and achieve immortality with her boyfriend.
However, the only people aboard the ship who knew about the Fountain of Youth were Grant, Savannie, and the shaman. As for the mercenaries, Grant had told them that the mission was an expedition to explore ruins and search for treasure. The mercenaries knew nothing about the Fountain of Youth; they had come solely for the generous pay.
Everly suspected that once they reached the Fountain of Youth, Grant would very likely kill the mercenaries after they had outlived their usefulness.
“…After Grant and the witch finished talking, they started fighting. The two of them were making all sorts of noises in bed, like they were in a lot of pain.” Kesuye added innocently.
Everly: “…”
That wasn’t called fighting. That was the great harmony of human life.
Everly felt that once they returned, she might have to make Kesuye complete one of those educational apps covering everything from elementary school through high school. Otherwise, being so ignorant, he was bound to get b*llied whenever he went out.
In any case, thanks to Kesuye’s eavesdropping, Everly had gotten a great deal of information about Grant’s group ahead of time. Grant and his people didn’t even know that Everly, a potential competitor, existed.
Time flew by day after day. Amid the tense waiting on both sides, December 11 finally arrived.
According to the local Bahamian news broadcast, the transit of Venus would begin at 8:19 a.m. and end at 2:49 p.m. in the Bahamas, lasting approximately 6.5 hours.
Everly had prepared well in advance. She filled her stomach, put on her diving suit, and packed firearms and other equipment into a waterproof backpack, which she slung over her back.
At 8:00 a.m., she jumped into the sea and, guided by Kesuye, swam northward beneath the surface until she reached a spot several hundred meters from Grant’s ship. There, she quietly hid underwater by creating pockets of air.
As the minutes ticked by, 8:19 a.m. finally arrived. Everly brought her face close to the surface and looked up at the sky. Through the shimmering ripples of the water, she saw a small black dot slowly appear along the edge of the sun.
That black dot was Venus.
It had moved between the Earth and the sun. Because of its relatively small size, it could only block part of the sunlight, causing it to appear as a black dot slowly moving from one side of the sun to the other.
“Rumble… rumble-rumble…”
At the same time, a low-frequency sound wave traveled through the seawater and reached Everly’s ears.
The ocean was trembling.
In the seawater, the schools of fish that had been swimming slowly suddenly scattered in all directions as though they had gone mad, their silvery scales reflecting countless tiny points of light beneath the water.
Then, enormous amounts of swirling silt rose from the seafloor, spreading from the deep sea into the shallower waters within moments. Countless bubbles and fragments of shattered reef were mixed into the sediment, obscuring her vision in a murky haze.
Looking down from above, the entire sea was shrouded in a thick gray-black cloud of silt, becoming a dark abyss whose bottom could not be seen.
Then Everly saw the light.
A ghostly green glow appeared from far, far down at the very end of the abyss. At first, it was faint, like a fresh sprout just emerging from a branch, like a star embedded in the night sky. As time passed, the light grew brighter and more dazzling, while the source of the light rose higher and higher.
It was like a strange-colored sun rising from the bottom of the sea, burning, rumbling, and roaring as it slowly ascended from the dark seafloor, causing the ocean to shake with unprecedented violence.
Surrounded by seawater, Everly felt as though she had been tossed into a running washing machine, helplessly tumbling along with the waves. Even with Kesuye helping to keep her steady, she was still shaken so badly that she became dizzy and nauseous.
She had no idea how much time had passed when, with a tremendous “CRASH!”, an enormous island suddenly broke through the surface of the sea and emerged into the open air.
With that as the dividing line, the trembling that had continued through the ocean for so long finally came to an end, and the brilliant green light vanished as well. Only the clouds of silt that had been stirred up remained suspended in the seawater, rising and settling again as marine creatures swam through them.
Everly cautiously poked half her head out of the water.
It was actually somewhat risky to do this, but she felt that at a time like this, no one was likely to have the attention to spare for anything else.
Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the island.
It was an enormous circular island.
The island was almost as large as a medium-sized town. Along its edges, there were none of the sandy beaches or rocky slopes commonly found on ordinary islands. Instead, the entire perimeter was lined with steep cliffs. The gray-black cliffs stood roughly two stories high, their faces almost perpendicular to the surface of the sea.
The cliffs were covered in a thick layer of silt. Green-blue seaweed grew densely through the mud, interspersed with corals and seashells of various colors, all dripping streams of water down the cliff face.
Beyond the cliffs, farther inland, there seemed to be a vast plain. Because of her angle from the water, Everly couldn’t make out exactly what was on the plain. She could only see large numbers of strange blue-green plants growing there with utterly unnatural abandon.
The island had been submerged beneath the sea all this time, so there shouldn’t have been any terrestrial plants growing on it at all. Yet there they were, flourishing wildly and bursting with vitality, making the island look like a vast green maze.
The outer plain occupied roughly three-quarters of the island’s radius. The remaining quarter was the central region, where there was a curved mountain.
The mountain was remarkably regular in shape, resembling an upside-down pudding. The “pudding” was likewise covered in dense vegetation. It was too far away for Everly to make out what species they were, but she could tell that the plants had astonishingly large leaves, some of them twisted into strange curls.
“It’s getting foggy…”
As she stared blankly at the sight, Kesuye’s voice suddenly sounded beside her. Prompted by him, Everly looked around, and sure enough, as the island rose from the sea, thick fog began to appear around the island and over the surrounding surface of the ocean.
The fog was extremely strange. At first glance, it was as thick as milk, and Everly couldn’t even see the surface of the sea more than two meters away through it. Yet when she looked toward the Island of the Fountain of Youth or at the sun directly overhead, her vision was completely unaffected.
It was as though that island had become the sun of the human world, constantly radiating an irresistible attraction, drawing moths to a flame, one after another, urging them to throw themselves forward and give everything they had in exchange for immortality…
“Grant and the others are getting closer,” Kesuye said again.
Everly looked in the direction he was pointing and saw a gray-black boat appear in front of the cliffs on the right side of the island. Judging by its appearance, it was the speedboat being used by Grant’s group.
The speedboat traveled along the island’s edge for a while, presumably looking for a place where they could land. But the entire perimeter of the island was made up of cliffs, with no low-lying sections at all. Before long, their pointless search came to an end. Instead, a small inflatable boat was lowered from the speedboat’s deck.
Several well-trained mercenaries were aboard the inflatable boat.
They rowed it to the foot of the cliffs and stopped. Then, two of the mercenaries strapped ropes to their backs and took climbing axes and other tools. After feeling their way along the cliff for a while, they grabbed hold of protrusions such as coral reefs and began slowly and laboriously climbing upward.
The cliff face was wet and slippery, with a steep incline. The protrusions clinging to the rock sometimes couldn’t support a person’s weight, causing both the person and the handhold to fall together. Even with the other mercenaries providing support from below, the two men still took nearly ten minutes to successfully climb to the top of the cliff.
After reaching the top, according to the usual procedure, the two mercenaries should have searched for a large tree or rock at the cliff’s edge, secured the end of their ropes, and then thrown the other ends down so their teammates below could climb up along them.
However, whether they had simply exhausted themselves or for some other reason, the two began moving at an absurdly slow pace as soon as they reached the top. They spent several minutes kneeling on the ground, panting and resting, before finally getting to their feet at a snail’s pace. Then, step by step, at a speed that made anyone watching grow anxious, they slowly made their way toward the inner side of the cliff.
The two were gone for nearly another ten minutes.
During that time, the people below shouted to them and called over the radio, but received no response.
Roused by the shouting, Grant and the other two, who had been waiting inside the cabin, finally appeared and stepped onto the deck. Together with the other mercenaries, they looked up at the empty top of the cliff, their expressions grave as they watched for any sign of what was happening.
As the seconds ticked by, the people below gradually lost patience. They assumed that the two mercenaries had met with an accident and were preparing to send another team up to investigate when, suddenly, two ropes were thrown down from the cliff above.
Then, two heads slowly poked out over the edge of the cliff, one on the left and one on the right. Their mouths opened and closed slowly as they said something to the people below.
Everly didn’t know how the mercenaries below responded. Her attention had been completely captured by the enormous bird that appeared behind the two men.
Judging by its proportions, the giant bird had a wingspan of nearly five meters, and the outline of its head looked remarkably similar to that of the pterosaurs displayed in museums. However, its wings weren’t bat-like membranes; its body was also covered in thick feathers. If not for the structure of its head, it really would have been nothing more than an absurdly gigantic bird.
It flew out from the island, slowly beating its enormous wings as its center of gravity sank and its legs stretched diagonally downward. It swooped toward the two people on the cliff.
To be fair, the bird was flying very slowly. From the moment it appeared in the sky to the moment it seized the mercenary below, nearly ten seconds passed. Its speed was practically comparable to that of a fluttering butterfly.
Naturally, the mercenaries below the cliff also spotted the bird. They shouted loudly to warn their teammates at the top, their voices carrying far enough that even Everly could hear them.
Under normal circumstances, faced with an attack from a giant bird of this level, any well-trained mercenary should have had plenty of time to dodge. Yet the two people at the top of the cliff acted as though their bodies had been frozen in place. No matter how loudly their teammates shouted warnings from below, they remained sitting there in a daze, kneeling motionless on the ground. Only their heads slowly turned upward at an angle.
And so, amid everyone’s desperate cries, the giant bird eventually reached the mercenaries. It seized the unlucky man on the left with its pincer-like talons, then beat its wings and took off from the ground.
“No——!!!”
An angry shout erupted from the mercenaries below the cliff. Far away in the seawater, Everly watched everything happening there with a frown, a thoughtful look on her face.