Chapter 2181: Chapter 2181

"Sir, is there something you need?"

The girl asked Jenkins timidly, using the common tongue of the 18th Epoch, just like the man before her. This only further confirmed that the setting of this Mysterious Realm was fabricated, not real. In the era when the common tongue was spoken, there was no history of a world-ending cataclysm.

"I want to know about this disaster. Can you give me any clues?" Fınd the newest release on novel※fire.net

"Yes, I can, but I don't know much. And... I can't give you information for free."

"That's fine. What do you want me to do? Is it fishing again?"

If he had the time, Jenkins was quite curious to see what else that fishing rod could pull from the depths.

"No, I don't eat fish. Mother said you can choke on the bones, and it's bad for your teeth... I want some flowers. Can you find some flowers for me on the ship? They have to be from the ship, and they must have bloomed before you appeared."

That ruled out any possibility of Jenkins using the seeds in his pack to grow flowers, or even finding seeds on the deck to cultivate.

"Alright. But how many flowers do you need?"

The girl shakily uttered the word for the number.

After his last exchange, Jenkins understood that the number represented how many pieces of information he would receive.

"No, I only want two," the girl insisted.

"Very well. Oh, one more thing. Do you know of anything nearby that can light up the area?"

He hadn't forgotten the threat of the black fog surrounding the vessel, and the battered lantern he had fished out earlier didn't look like it would last much longer.

"I remember there was a sunflower on the ship. If you find it, I can make it glow for a while."

Jenkins nodded, pushing the bizarre mental image of a sunflower producing small, bright yellow orbs of light from his mind.

"Looks like I'll have to do some serious searching this time."

He turned to face the deck, which looked like a veritable junkyard, and couldn't decide if he was relieved or disappointed that he didn't have to fish.

The deck was cluttered with an incredible amount of debris. When Jenkins had been looking for the fishing rod, he had spotted his target immediately, so he hadn't truly rummaged through the mess. Now, as his gaze swept across the scene, it seemed that anything from an overturned wooden crate to a pile of kitchen scraps could be hiding something.

But instead of diving in, Jenkins simply pressed his hands flat against the deck.

"Let's see where the plants are."

Unleashing one's spirit to probe the surroundings in a Mysterious Realm was an inherently dangerous act. Jenkins only dared to be so bold because of his current power, but the moment he released his spirit, he yanked it back, his entire body jolting upward as if he'd been launched.

The sense of danger emanating from the deck was somehow even stronger than that from the unseen waters below. Moreover, he had the distinct feeling that the ship was alive—part of some colossal entity. It wasn't entirely biological, but it was most certainly not an inanimate object.

"What's this about? Is the ship a problem too? No matter, I have another trick."

With that thought, he pulled out the compass he had acquired in the Blood Therapy Ancient Town and later reinforced in the Steel Forge. He focused his mind on finding flowers, and the compass needle immediately began to whirl frantically, spinning so fast he could feel a faint breeze against his fingers.

"Alright, I knew the Mysterious Realm wouldn't leave a loophole . Even if there are other ways to search, a single item can't just override the realm's rules."

Deciding against any more risky experiments, he resigned himself to searching the old-fashioned way.

The Mysterious Realm was saturated with a black spiritual light. Unless an aura was exceptionally bright, it would be impossible to see it through this gloom. The life force of an ordinary plant was incredibly faint compared to the oppressive atmosphere of the realm, so his Eye of Reality was of little use here.

For the sake of caution, Jenkins decided to start his search on one side of the deck and work his way to the other. During his search, he not only had to be careful not to touch the huddled refugees, but also had to be wary of the dangers lurking within the junk itself.

It wasn't that someone had planted bombs under the debris, but rather that the deck was infested with small creatures like rats and cockroaches. An ordinary rat was hardly a threat, but when said rat was bigger than Chocolate and could breathe blue fire, Jenkins had no choice but to be careful.

The cat, of course, was the first to spot the rat. Just as Jenkins was about to lift a piece of a shattered wooden crate, Chocolate let out a warning hiss. A moment later, a massive, red-eyed rat shot out from the shadows and spat a gout of fire right at Jenkins's hand.

The fur on the rat's back was rotting away, and in the decaying flesh, an eye seemed to have grown, giving it a truly grotesque appearance.

Though startled, he snatched his hand back just in time. Seeing its attack had missed, the rat tried to retreat back into the heap of garbage, but Jenkins's sword was faster.

To his surprise, the blade of his magic sword didn't easily pierce the rat's hide. Instead, the force of the blow pushed the creature deeper into the shadows of the debris, giving it an escape route. By the time Jenkins lifted the rotting planks of the crate, the rat was long gone.

"A rat that can breathe Soul Fire? How peculiar."

He straightened up, muttering to himself, then marveled that the creature's hide was even tougher than the fish he had caught earlier.

"Is this another manifestation of the disaster? Then again, animal mutations aren't exactly unheard of."

He didn't forget to pat Chocolate's little head, rewarding the cat for its timely warning.

"Come to think of it, this might be the first time you've ever actively sought out a mouse, isn't it?"

Jenkins recalled a time when he had tossed a white mouse in front of Chocolate. The cat had completely ignored it. When Jenkins had persisted, Chocolate, thoroughly annoyed, had simply kicked the poor mouse off the table. That had been right after Jenkins's first transformation into a mouse, when he'd wanted to test his cat's attitude toward rodents.

Utterly baffled by Jenkins's line of thought, the cat could only offer a soft, plaintive cry.

Besides rats the size of cats and rat-sized, flying cockroaches that seemed to love aiming for one's face, the debris on deck actually contained some rather useful things. There were no ready-made cataloged artifacts waiting to be picked up, of course, but he did find a fair amount of alchemical and potion-making ingredients mixed in with the junk.

According to the rules of this Mysterious Realm, everything on the ship should have belonged to the huddled refugees scattered around him. Yet, no one objected, no matter what he took.

As it happened, Jenkins had used up a good portion of his materials in the last seven Mysterious Realms, so this was a welcome, if modest, restock. This gave him a new idea. Searching by hand would take who-knows-how-long, and he could see the fog closing in. Since the compass alone was useless, perhaps combining it with a specialized locating ritual would do the trick.