Edrick had only slept for six hours and was already awake before ten o'clock. Upon waking up in the cramped, musty room, Edrick saw a plate of breakfast on the stool by the bed: two slices of wheat bread without sawdust, a small piece of salted pork, and some cheap cheese crumbs.
Edrick picked up the bread and examined it—it was even spread with butter instead of cheap lard!
This breakfast was a real treat for the Croft family. If it weren't for the silver coins Edrick had brought back last night, they wouldn't have been able to afford wheat bread even once a month.
However, eating black bread all the time was very unhealthy for Miryam, who was still growing, and her father, who did heavy physical labor, had been suffering from various illnesses due to malnutrition despite being in his early forties.
"Not fast enough... I need to speed up the plan." Edrick wolfed down this 'sumptuous' breakfast and hurried to the dock.
Although, according to his plan, the meager daily income of a dock worker was no longer important, he needed to gather some necessary intelligence before officially beginning his plan, especially regarding the 'Pureblood Order' mentioned by Griff, which had piqued his interest.
If he got caught up in a struggle of this magnitude, one wrong move could mean certain death.
Edrick arrived at the dock. His former coworkers had already heard about the tragedy that had befallen the Croft family. Four or five of them passed by and offered a few words of comfort.
However, the dockworkers' shift ended at 7 a.m., so arriving at the dock at this hour meant there wasn't even work to be had, not even moving rotten vegetables.
Edrick looked around but didn't see the two men he usually worked with.
Dockworkers relied on teamwork; they typically worked in groups of four. With his father dead and Edrick absent, the other two found it difficult to find work. However, when someone took a day off, they would usually seek out nearby vagrants or elderly beggars to fill in.
This usually meant heavier labor and less pay, but they couldn't afford to skip work. Otherwise, they wouldn't have money for the day's meals, and frequent absences would label them as loafers, making it even harder to get work and leading to a vicious cycle of hunger, weakness, and inability to work.
This was a brutal survival game.
The Croft family was destined to be trapped in this vicious cycle or an even more tragic fate. Fortunately, Edrick was still there. He keenly noticed something unusual at the dock today.
There were more unfamiliar workers and fewer familiar faces.
Edrick looked at the foreman, who wasn't the usual limping Jack but a stranger who bore a striking resemblance to the man Edrick had killed two days earlier.
Though he had never seen this man before, combining the information he had obtained from Griff, it wasn't hard to guess that this was Maud "Mudbeak," the younger brother of the man Edrick had beaten to death.
Who was he? It didn't matter. Edrick didn't want to waste his brain capacity remembering the name of a dead henchman, but Maud "Mudbeak" was clearly an obstacle. Since he had appeared at the dock, he was likely involved in planning his father's death.
There were no decent jobs to be found, but Edrick wasn't one to sit idle. He took a job helping a cook move coal, earning seven pence an hour—a wage so pitiful it was almost laughable given the workload.
While moving coal, he kept an eye on the dockworkers coming and going, and three of them stood out as particularly suspicious.
Edrick's coal basket swayed on his shoulder, making a faint rattling sound. As coal dust seeped through the worn collar of his shirt, he fixed his gaze on the third new porter—a skinny man wearing a necklace made of broken gears.
The rusty gear fragment drew a gray line under his collarbone, perfectly matching the curve of his spine as he bent over to carry coal. It was a mark left by years of hunching over in narrow chimney flues, a mark of the chimney sweeps of Soot Street!
The skinny man's fingertips unconsciously rubbed the necklace, the pads of his fingers stained a greenish-black color from the coal dust — a mark left by the Scamps of Soot Street who made their living in the chimneys, where they always hid stolen tobacco leaves or cheap gin in the cracks of the boiler pipes.
Another was a burly, bald man with an iron anchor tattoo.
"Damn this rope!" the burly man suddenly cursed, twisting the rope into a crooked single knot with his rough palms.
Edrick raised an eyebrow — dockworkers used the Brin knot, which could withstand three times the weight, but this rookie with the fresh tattoo had used an outdated sailor's knot.
Edrick glanced at the iron anchor tattoo on his forearm: the ink was so fresh that it looked like it could bleed, and the tip of the anchor was bent inward.
A true member of the Blackbeard Gang would have the tip of the anchor pointing toward the wrist to symbolize "anchoring the dock's hegemony," but this idiot had tattooed it the wrong way around.
Of course, you couldn't expect these guys, who couldn't even spell their own names, to pull off a high-end undercover operation.
The burly man's work pants were washed white, and tucked into his waistband was not a Blackbeard Gang hook, but broken glass wrapped in oilcloth.
When he bent over, his belt sagged, revealing a dandelion pattern embroidered on the inside — the secret sign of the Soot Street dung collectors, hidden under the Blackbeard Gang uniform like a festering wound.
The most dangerous one was the short man. As he carried coal, he stayed close to the steam pipes, and every thirty seconds, he would use his little finger to check the hidden pocket in his waistband.
The outline beneath the fabric revealed the curved shape of a wax-paper-wrapped cylinder — Edrick recognized the shape: "Black Honey," a drug circulating in the dockyard black market, often poured into hollow coal blocks and coated with coal dust to disguise it.
The Scamps hid the drugs in the protective gear on their lower backs, which was the easiest place for the foreman to overlook when searching them.
When the short man passed through the boiler area, his sleeve brushed against the condensation on the pipe, and a faint purple stain immediately appeared on the edge of the fabric — it was the urine alkali reaction used by the Scamps to reveal secret messages.
The rusty sand on the soles of his shoes was not from Blackbeard's Gang's dock, but from the alkaline water crystals in the sewers of Soot Street, mixed with dandelion fluff, as if singing a funeral song for every boiler that passed by.
Edrick crouched in the shadows of the boiler room, scraping his fingernails across the cracks in the bricks and picking out half a broken gear—it fit perfectly into the gap in the skinny man's necklace.
At that moment, he couldn't help but feel a sense of pride in his own insight—this was the result of a scholar's mind combined with the memory of a butcher.
People always think scholars are stubborn and biased, but in reality, as long as there is sufficient evidence, scholars are the easiest to understand and accept.
This was also why Edrick could adapt so quickly to this unfamiliar world… Of course, his six months locked inside the statue had something to do with it. If an ordinary person had been thrown into this world, they probably wouldn't have survived a week.
Edrick continued to observe. The tattooed anchor on the big man's arm pointed inward, which was a fake tattoo worn in the wrong direction by the Soot Street thugs.
The broken glass shards he was hiding were still sticky with the sour smell of sewage, clearly a weapon used by the Scamps after being soaked in a cesspool.
The purple marks on the short man's hidden pocket became more visible in the firelight—urine alkaline reacting with water.
The alkaline crystals on the soles of his shoes were slowly grinding into the brick surface, as if spelling out the location of Warehouse 3.
Three clues pieced together in Edrick's mind to form a triangle: the skinny man scouting, the burly man carrying out the attack, and the short man delivering the message.
Their work pants were washed white, but they couldn't hide the layers of coal dust on their cuffs.
The Blackbeard Gang's uniforms were soaked in fish oil to prevent staining, but the fabric of these three men still had the acrid smell of chimney soot.
The heat from the boiler made the back of his neck tight, and he suddenly remembered that last week, when the foreman was counting the rum in Warehouse No. 3, Iron Hook Hack had deliberately sent four of his trusted men to stand guard.
The Scamps were going to burn the rum!
They would use lye to write secret messages, cut open the barrels with broken glass, mix the rum with coal dust and pour it into the sewers, then frame Blackbeard's "own people" to cause infighting within the gang.
But why would an undercover agent bring drugs? Edrick quickly understood what the scamps were up to. They planned to burn the rum, plant drugs in the ruins, and frame Blackbeard's gang.
Such a frame-up didn't require much sophistication. After all, the conflict between the two gangs was essentially a struggle among the upper echelons of power.
No concrete evidence was needed; as long as there was a pretext to involve the police and patrolmen, the politicians could exert their influence to ensure Blackbeard's downfall.
Moreover, the cargo they had chosen was easy to handle. Rum was highly flammable and didn't require many people to carry out the plan.
Dockworkers were highly mobile, and three strangers wouldn't arouse suspicion under normal circumstances.
"Not bad. For a bunch of thugs, this plan is quite diabolical," Edrick crushed the alkaline paper fragments in his palm, staining his fingertips purple. "If I hadn't discovered it."
Edrick had no fond memories of the Blackbeard Gang. He and his father had worked at the Blackbeard Gang's dock, where the work was hard and exhausting, and they were often beaten and cursed. On top of that, the Blackbeard Gang would deduct a large portion of the money he and his father earned.
The best outcome for Edrick would be for the two gangs to destroy each other.
There were two hours left before the ebb tide bell rang. When the bell rang, it meant that the ships remaining at the dock would be stranded, and the dock workers would not be able to continue working. Therefore, the ebb tide bell was also the signal for the dock workers to finish work.
He had to let the Blackbeard Gang find the soles of those three idiots' shoes before the tide rose.
The gears creaked in the distance, urging him to crush the first brick of this conspiracy. Whether it was the Blackbeard Gang or the Scamps of Soot Street, Edrick didn't want any of them to win too easily.
The ebb tide bell suddenly tore through the morning mist in the distance, and he counted the rhythm of the bell striking the brick surface — in one hour, the Blackbeard Gang's wine ship would leave the shore.
Normally, Edrick would have been exhausted from moving so much coal by himself, but now he could feel that his physique was different from that of ordinary people.
He had been doing heavy work for most of the day and still had energy to spare.
The skinny man suddenly straightened up, and his rusty gear necklace scraped against the rivets of the boiler, making an almost inaudible sound. This was the "code" of the Soot Street Scamps, meaning that the operation had begun.
Edrick watched the short man slip along the wall toward Warehouse No. 3, the lye crystals on the soles of his shoes leaving faint marks on the brick surface, like a string of symbols guiding the Grim Reaper.
He reached into his pocket and felt the small, immature fruits of his "hard work" in the niter field over the past two days.
When the short man's little finger hooked toward the hidden pocket at his waist for the third time, Edrick suddenly stood up and deliberately kicked over the coal basket at his feet.
As the coal dust exploded, the poor-quality coal dust raised a cloud of dust. Edrick took advantage of the commotion to shout at the Iron Hook Gang guards patrolling nearby, "There's a rat chewing on a wine barrel in Warehouse 3!"
His hoarse voice was mixed with coughing, sounding just like an old dock worker who had been pickled in coal dust.
When the burly man turned around, Edrick deliberately bumped into him, and broken glass shards fell from the oilcloth, glistening coldly under the steam lamp.
One of the Blackbeard Gang's thugs looked at the broken glass on the ground and immediately became tense—these glass shards soaked in feces were the special weapons of those damn scamps!
These filthy scum! Daring to cause trouble at the dock! The thug shouted to catch the "rat" and lunged at the bald, burly man.
Outside, chaos erupted. Edrick slipped into the warehouse amid the commotion and pulled out a small bag of black powder from his pocket.
This was something Edrick had rushed to prepare over the past two days.
The formula for black powder was actually quite simple: charcoal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate in the right proportions would yield black powder.
Charcoal and sulfur were common items that even the poorest could obtain.
The main challenge was obtaining saltpeter, but it could be scraped off the walls of public toilets in significant quantities.
After soaking, filtering, evaporating, and crystallizing, pure saltpeter could be obtained.
Feces is an important source of saltpeter, which is why Edrick has been collecting feces for the past two days. He wants to create a niter field to stabilize the production of saltpeter.
In Stellaxis, where gunpowder and firearms have not been developed for some unknown reason, this will be his trump card.
The amount he currently has is not enough to cause a large explosion, but it is enough to start a fierce fire.
In the corner of the warehouse, twenty barrels of rum were piled up.
The bottoms of the barrels had been scratched by broken glass, and the dark brown liquid was seeping into the coal ash, like a poisonous snake about to suffocate.
Just as Edrick was about to set the fire, he suddenly furrowed his brows.
If it weren't for his extraordinary sense of smell, he wouldn't have noticed the abnormality. Amidst the strong smell of alcohol, there was a faint hint of blood.
Edrick's first instinct was that there were bodies in the barrels, but when he opened one of the barrels, which was about the size of a gasoline drum, he discovered that it had two layers.
The outer layer was the usual strong rum, but the inner layer was fresh blood.
The dark brown, gelatinous substance was unmistakably blood.