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—re humans turning into sothing 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 ntal 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 transford. 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the sea, crew mbers mutating after being bitten… With so many bizarre events, are you still unable to abandon your outdated beliefs and accept that what we’re dealing with now is sothing completely beyond scientific explanation—a supernatural phenonon?”
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 ti pressing, she didn’t have the luxury to argue, so she could only settle for a temporary asure.
The captain held his forehead, hesitated for a mont, then nodded, deciding to follow the “expert’s” advice.
He had several crew mbers 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 so kind of analysis. After a long period of thought, she indeed ca up with an initial idea.
Then, under everyone’s gaze, she calmly revealed her conclusion—
“I suspect what we’ve encountered is a ‘ti loop.’”
“A ti loop?”
“That’s right. It’s a concept in occult studies. It refers to using certain special abilities to completely fix the ti of a specific area within a particular unit, causing it to repeat endlessly… Let think of an example—imagine you’re playing a video and set it to loop. That video, inside your phone, forms a two-dinsional ‘ti loop.’ Without outside interference, no matter how ti passes in the real world, the people in the video will forever repeat the sa 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 ti!” George reacted quickly and imdiately 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 ti, 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 sothing 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 so unknown reason, jumped into the sea. We don’t know why they did it, but once you consider the concept of a ‘ti loop,’ it’s not hard to see that this mass jump is likely the reason the passengers mysteriously disappeared.”
“What do you an?”
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 ti 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 ti was flowing normally. But in reality, the “ti 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 ti loop is temporarily broken. Whether intentional or accidental, during those few seconds, the ti loop was inactive.
“To make things easier to reference, let’s call the starting point of the ti 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 so 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 ans ‘offering.’ The nearby circular pattern stands for ‘life,’ and that crescent shape over there ans ‘absorption.’”
Her previous misadventures at the theater had now beco a foundation for Everly’s experience. Runic has twenty-four letters, all twisting and curving in strange ways. Everly might not be able to rember the aning of every rarely used symbol, but the few that appeared in the theater’s sacrificial magic circle—she could recite them from mory even with her eyes closed!
“From this, it’s clear that this was a magic circle designed to offer living human sacrifices to so 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 mbers 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 ti, the segnt of ti captured by the ti 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 asured 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 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 mont when the group first stepped onto the deck. “See the sli 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 sa kind of sli. If you look closely enough, you’ll notice that the sli 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 sli looks a lot like the substance on Dali, do you?”
At the ntion of Dali, everyone’s faces went pale.
“Yes. I suspect the evil god they worshiped might be so 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 sli. 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 ho.”
“Wait—so according to you, that ans the water right now…” The captain’s face suddenly went pale.
Everly nodded. “Exactly. This is why I said that the environnt the Mary Jane is currently in is extrely 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 Ho for Peculiar Children
The Ti Loop in the original work is quite mysterious, but since the author isn’t very bright, the Ti Loop in this dungeon is a heavily modified version:
The ti loop lasts 24 hours (full version). During this period, all recorded living beings cannot escape the boundaries of the ti 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 tis, because to them, each iteration feels like their “first experience.”
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