Chapter 103: Cruise Ship (1)

Everly had always admired Misha’s social skills.

Everyone was hanging out on the large platform on the cruise ship’s fifth deck. Everly had simply felt thirsty, so she went to the bar to buy a glass of juice and sat under a sun umbrella to drink it. Yet when she turned around, Misha had somehow already made a new friend.

“Hey, Everly, look over here—quick, see who this is!”

Excited, she pulled a young blond man over to Everly.

Who was this? She didn’t recognize him at all…

Everly took off her sunglasses and carefully looked at the young man standing beside Misha. He looked to be in his early twenties. His blond-brown hair was a bit long and messy on top of his head. His features were fairly decent, with a circle of unshaven stubble around his mouth. He wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t especially handsome either—so he probably wasn’t some big celebrity.

Everly tilted her head slightly, an invisible question mark practically floating above it.

Misha instantly understood what she meant. Stomping her foot in frustration, she said in an exasperated tone, “Did you forget already? I showed you his video last night! This is CrazyDog! CrazyDog!”

CrazyDog?

Hearing a name that hardly sounded like something a human would choose, Everly suddenly remembered. Last night while they were resting at the hotel, Misha had been holding up her phone, giggling foolishly while showing her a video from a content creator named CrazyDog.

CrazyDog was a travel blogger. However, although he had posted many serious travel-experience videos, they had never gained much attention. But recently, while traveling in Egypt, he had been repeatedly scammed by locals from the moment he landed, getting tricked again and again until he finally packed up and fled back to the United States.

Because the video showed him falling into so many bizarre traps one after another, it unexpectedly went viral. Overnight, CrazyDog gained tens of thousands of new followers.

“Ah, so you’re CrazyDog. Sorry, you’re a lot paler than in your videos, so I didn’t recognize you at first,” Everly quickly corrected herself to avoid any awkwardness.

“Haha, it’s fine, it’s fine. Everyone says I look totally different in real life than in my videos,” CrazyDog said good-naturedly, scratching the back of his head with a self-deprecating smile. “Also, you don’t have to call me CrazyDog. It’s kind of embarrassing to be called that in real life. My name’s George, George Celeste.”

“Nice to meet you, George. I’m Everly.”

“Nice to meet you too. My partners are over there, can I call them over to sit with us?”

“Of course.”

Although the cruise ship had Wi-Fi, the signal wasn’t very good and kept lagging. Since using their phones was frustrating anyway, Everly simply joined George and the others and started chatting with them.

George’s group had three people in total. Besides George, there was Jean, the cameraman he had hired, and Benny, who was responsible for video editing and post-production. According to George, he had only hired the two of them temporarily after his video suddenly went viral.

“You know that Egypt travel video you watched earlier? After it blew up on YouTube, quite a few tourist destinations contacted me, hoping I’d visit them and upload videos. The reason I’m on the Mary Jane this time is because the American Holland Cruise Company invited me. They hired me to shoot a promotional video for their East Coast cruise trips, to build hype for a ‘Coastal Travel Plan’ they’re planning to launch next year.”

American Holland Cruise Company was the company that owned the Mary Jane.

As George talked, his expression grew a bit troubled.

“But the Egypt video going viral was completely accidental. Now that they suddenly want me to film a promotional video, I honestly don’t know what to shoot. I’ve edited several versions already, but they still feel dull, there’s nothing particularly interesting about them… If only something fresh or exciting would happen during this voyage.”

At this point in the conversation, George was startled when Everly suddenly stood up.

“What’s wrong, Everly?”

“You can’t say things like that casually.” Everly crossed her arms and drew a big “X” in front of her chest.

Horror Movie Survival Rule #6: never say anything that raises a flag.

Especially right before the final battle—if someone suddenly says something like, “After we finish this, come back to my hometown and marry me,” or takes off a deeply meaningful item they’re wearing and hands it to a companion, giving them instructions like, “If I don’t make it back, give this to my wife/child back home and tell them I love them…”

People who say things like that are guaranteed to die before the ending.

The same goes for unlucky remarks made before a journey begins. In movies, those kinds of words often end up coming true later—almost like a curse where bad things are far more likely to happen than good ones.

Seeing Everly’s serious expression, George immediately covered his mouth and blinked innocently.

“Is it like that thing sailors used to believe? Like how they said women on ships would bring disaster, or that you shouldn’t say things like ‘I hope something exciting happens’ on a ship, or else something bad really will happen?”

It wasn’t completely the same, but it was close enough.

So Everly kept a straight face and nodded seriously.

George took the advice immediately. He raised his hand to his mouth and made a zipping motion from left to right, as if sealing his lips shut.

Everyone burst out laughing at the gesture. Misha, who was good at keeping conversations going, soon steered the discussion to other topics, and the atmosphere quickly relaxed again, filled with laughter and chatter.

Among the five of them, only Everly remained somewhat uneasy, with a lingering sense of foreboding. However, over the next three days, the cruise sailed smoothly without anything strange happening. Gradually, Everly began to think she had simply been overthinking things.

Everly had survived safely until now because, although her bad premonitions sometimes came true, there were also many times when they turned out to be nothing more than overthinking. She had long since grown used to it.

In the blink of an eye, the cruise reached the fourth day of its voyage.

That morning, Everly was woken by the pattering sound of raindrops hitting the window.

The ship was swaying slightly. Holding onto the wall, Everly walked to the window and pulled open the curtain to take a look. Sure enough, it was raining outside. Bean-sized raindrops struck the glass, splashing into large droplets, while streams of rainwater slid down the window, washing the surface clean.

Along with the rain came howling sea winds. Under the constant gusts, the enormous cruise ship rose and fell among the waves, rocking back and forth, looking as fragile as a tiny piece of duckweed drifting in a storm.

After a while, even Everly—who normally never got seasick—started to feel a little dizzy.

When she went to the dining hall for the buffet, the ship’s broadcast system came on. In an apologetic tone, the crew informed everyone that due to a localized storm in the nearshore waters, the originally scheduled stop at the port in North Naradeca State had been temporarily canceled. The ship would continue sailing north along its route. They apologized for any inconvenience this might cause the passengers, and so on.

For sea travel, changes to the itinerary due to weather were quite common. The agreement passengers signed before boarding the cruise ship even included a specific disclaimer about situations like this.

So although some passengers felt disappointed about not being able to go ashore at the port, everyone quickly accepted the situation and stayed inside the ship’s cabins, finding their own ways to pass the time.

The storm turned out to cover an unusually large area. After returning to the cabin, Everly used the ship’s not-so-reliable Wi-Fi to check online. She found that a large portion of the eastern coastline of the United States was under heavy rain warnings, and media reports were describing the situation as something “not seen in over a decade.”

The Mary Jane struggled through wind and rain all morning. To avoid the storm, it even deviated from its original route, heading several miles into the open sea away from the coast. Yet despite hours of effort, the waves still churned around the ship, and the storm raged on.

Just after 1:00 PM, before the cruise could completely escape the storm, the ship’s network signal went out.

Everly was watching videos with Misha at the time. Suddenly, the screen in the middle started spinning endlessly. They waited a while, but the connection didn’t return. Frustrated, they had no choice but to put their phones aside and stare at the heavy rain outside.

Misha’s worry was obvious but relatively superficial. A rare cruise trip swallowed up by a storm for an entire day was enough to leave her in a bad mood.

Everly’s worry, however, was far more complicated—she suspected she might have accidentally stumbled onto some horror-movie scenario. First, someone said a “flag-raising” line; then, they encountered a rare storm that hadn’t been seen in over a decade; and now, out on the vast ocean, they had lost all signal. She didn’t know what was happening in the captain’s cabin, and she hoped the ship’s radio wasn’t malfunctioning…

As if to confirm Everly’s ominous premonition, Misha—who had been leaning against the window watching the rain—suddenly tapped the glass and called Everly over.

“Everly, look! Am I seeing things? What’s that?!”

Everly hurried to the window and looked through the rain in the direction Misha was pointing.

A strong sixth-sense warning shot through her as she saw a moving white giant island.

It was a massive cruise ship, easily dozens of stories high. Forget the pyramid-like stacked passenger decks—the bow alone, rising above the water, was taller than the entire Mary Jane.

The enormous ship’s snow-white, pointed bow was aimed directly at the middle of the Mary Jane, slowly approaching. Strangely, despite the surrounding storm—howling winds, torrential rain, and three- to four-meter waves—the giant ship sailed remarkably smoothly, showing no sign of rocking in the rough seas.

The sheer size of the ship was overwhelming. Even though it was still some distance away, the shadow of its massive bow had already stretched over the comparatively tiny Mary Jane, evoking the image of a deep-sea predator opening its gigantic, world-encompassing jaws toward its prey…

For a brief moment, Everly almost thought the two ships were going to collide head-on.

Fortunately, the crew of the Mary Jane was far from incompetent.

As soon as the radar detected an approaching vessel, the captain attempted to send radio signals to the other ship, trying to confirm its course to avoid a potential collision.

However, no matter how many signals were sent, the Mary Jane received no response.

As the two ships closed to a mere dozen meters apart, the captain made a split-second decision. He hard-turned the wheel to port, steering the cruise ship to the left, narrowly avoiding the massive, rampaging vessel. The ships’ positions changed from a perpendicular angle to sailing side by side.

The sudden maneuver caused the passengers inside to sway with the motion. Everly grabbed the window ledge to steady herself, and when she looked out, she saw that the Mary Jane had already reached the side of the giant cruise ship.

There was roughly ten meters between the two ships. Through the glass, Everly could see the snow-white hull of the massive ship, with the words “GOLDEN ANCHOR” painted in deep blue across it. Each letter was about the size of a double cabin on a regular cruise ship, leaving a deep impression on anyone who laid eyes on it.

GOLDEN ANCHOR—the name of the colossal cruise ship.