Swimming ability is the primary criterion for the Southern Archives to select trainees. People are naturally divided into those who are hydrophilic and those who are hydrophobic. Zhang Haiyan and Zhang Haixia find that their heartbeats slow down in the water, feeling more comfortable than on land. That’s why their names include the character for “sea,” to distinguish them. At the Maritime Office in Nanyang, those with “sea” in their names receive an extra bundle of cured meat with their lunch, and they can also have an extra steamed bun, which is quite enviable.

The two of them move in the water like fish, and every time they dive in and surface, they have already advanced several meters, showing no signs of effort in their movements. Only they know how they developed this swimming ability. On the rocky shores of Gulangyu in Xiamen, there is a pit about twenty to thirty meters wide and bottomless. When the tide comes in, the pit is swallowed by the sea level, and when the tide goes out, it becomes a deep pool. The deep pool is not connected to the sea; fish and shrimp come and go with the ebb and flow of the tides.

Zhang Haiyan remembers that the pool was filled with crabs, so many that they couldn’t catch them all. Their foster mother would catch a snapper from the sea and toss it into the deep pool at low tide, letting them catch it barehanded. If they managed to catch it by evening, they could sleep in the same bed as their foster mother.

A snapper is certainly not something that can be caught by hand. Eight months later, the children’s shoulders and abdominal muscles were as if carved out by a knife, but of course, they had never caught a snapper. That snapper always died of fright.

Zhang Haiyan still clearly remembers the azure sea and blue sky, a group of little ghosts slowly growing into adults, standing by that deep pool, no longer sighing and lamenting about not catching the snapper. Those years were so beautiful that they evoke nostalgia, allowing him to swim forward in the waves of the sea like a fish.

Soon, they could no longer see the coral reefs, surrounded entirely by the sea. The waves grew larger, and Zhang Haixia surfaced. After each adjustment of direction, he continued forward without hesitation. They had swum for about four or five kilometers when they finally saw lights on the sea.

The lights were bluish-green, the kind used by pirates during attacks. They were made from rotten egg whites mixed with oil, and from a distance, they resembled the moonlight reflecting on the sea, making them hard to detect.

The two of them slowly approached and discovered that it was a large iron passenger ship, and there was more than one. With their eyesight, they could see four or five large ships and a dozen smaller ones, all locked together with iron chains, forming a fleet.

The ships were already quite old, covered in barnacles and rust, clearly neglected. They could vaguely see the closest ship to them, named “Rushan.” Zhang Haiyan remembered that it was one of the passenger ships that went missing ten years ago, with over two hundred passengers disappearing along with it.

Around the fleet, there were a dozen anchor cables thrown into the sea. The waves here were not big, and Zhang Haiyan knew this indicated shallow waters below, with rocks beneath them.

The two of them climbed up the cable, hanging upside down on an anchor cable, and could already hear voices on the ship. They crawled to the ship’s side, stepping on the anchor cable to peek inside, and saw four or five guards at the top of the passenger cabin, armed with rifles and surprisingly dressed in military uniforms.

Murmurs could be heard from various parts of the ship, and they focused their attention to listen.

“What’s the Guixi accent?” Zhang Haixia asked. There are many warlord factions in Guixi, each swallowing the other, making it hard to figure out who’s who. They’ve heard of warlords manipulating fishing boats to go out to sea from the Gulf of Tonkin to become pirates and seize military funds. But this place is too far from the Gulf of Tonkin. What are the Guixi warlords doing in Malacca?

The two of them listened intently for a while longer. They couldn’t understand much of the Guangxi dialect, but they were certain that these soldiers definitely belonged to a warlord faction.

Zhang Haiyan looked at the soldiers’ rifles, all of which were German-made Mauser rifles, not Hanyang-made. This was already a significant investment among warlords, indicating that these soldiers held a high rank. Upon closer inspection, he could also see that the soldiers were carrying a type of German-made handgun. During his mission, Zhang Haiyan had handled the import of this kind of handgun, having shipped twelve of them from Malacca to Xiamen for the officials of the Nanyang Maritime Bureau. He knew the power of these handguns.

“Could the Gui faction warlords be in Malacca as pirates? Could they be remnants of defeated warlords trying to make a living, hijacking ships at sea to make a comeback?” Zhang Haixia asked.

Zhang Haiyan carefully observed the formation of the ships and thought to himself that these ships had been hijacked ten years ago, and they were still here. Hijacking ships back then had already been a bizarre case, and now connecting those hijacked ships into a formation and operating them for ten years was even more extraordinary. To hide a case on an international shipping route for ten years and still be active at the scene—such a grand operation must have a mastermind behind it who was undoubtedly a schemer!

How could someone with such capabilities be a defeated army’s remnant? Looking again at the ship formation, the iron chains were linked very reasonably, and the sentry posts were clearly and tightly distributed. After ten years, the sentry on top of the Ru Sheng had not shown the slightest sign of slack; the commanders here were certainly not ordinary people.

Zhang Haiyan said to Zhang Haixia, “Look at this ship formation; the center is empty, forming a hollow square, as if something is enclosed in the middle.”

The two boarded the ship, with Zhang Haiyan shrinking into the shadows. He looked up at the sentry above; the sentry post was well-designed, and the deck was illuminated clearly by sixteen well-placed lights, making it impossible to pass through.

Zhang Haiyan focused and took a deep breath, then suddenly exhaled three beams of cold light, extinguishing three of the blue lamps. The guards were distracted by the suddenly extinguished lights, and in that instant, the two of them dashed forward, rolling across the deck until they reached the side of the passenger ship and shrank back into a shadow.

Behind them was the ship’s railing, which enclosed the area covered by the entire ship formation. They could see that the lights outside the railing were even denser, confirming that there was indeed something there.

The two of them stealthily peeked out and discovered that in the center of the ship formation, there was a rock surrounded by mining equipment and scaffolding. There was a huge hole in the rock, which seemed to have been artificially dug and was already quite deep.

The soldiers had surrounded a rock in this sea area with so many ships and had dug a hole in the rock.

They could see many people who were not in military uniforms working on the rock, all of whom were shackled. Zhang Haixia covered his nose.

Zhang Haiyan asked, “What do you smell?”

Zhang Haixia replied, “There’s an indescribable smell coming from that hole; it smells very ominous.”