The Curse of the Crimson Reprieve: The Library of Ma Tsu and Sailing Toward Acererak's Island

At the quiet inn on Tushuguan Island, where the adventurers had first sought rest, the walls shook with monstrous force. A massive, armor-plated ox thundered through, its eyes glowing with unnatural fury, and its hooves sparking as it turned the nearest patrons to stone with a stomping roar.

Salt, ever quick and fierce, unleashed a torrent of scalding steam from her breath, searing across the ox’s flank. Wu Jian Fen followed with a volley of magic missiles, shimmering darts of arcane energy that struck like hammers. Bojing and Tetsukichi loosed arrows with deadly precision, their shafts singing through the smoky air.

The beast roared once, staggered—and collapsed to the floor, dead.

From the smoke emerged a towering figure. A woman, immense and regal, bearing a gleaming trident with the ease of a queen holding court. Her presence silenced the room. With a flick of her wrist, she returned the stone-struck patrons to flesh and breath.

“I am Ma Tsu,” she said, her voice like deep waves over coral. “Priestess of the Ocean’s Goddess. Lao Ren, it looks like someone knew you were coming.”

Lao Ren stepped forward, his tone as calm as ever. “She is my friend,” he said. “But this creature came not for me. It came for the clever ones.”

The name he had spoken before. The name he had always used for them. Ma Tsu looked them over with affable skepticism. “Is that why you brought them to my library?”

Ma Tsu offered sanctuary and scholarship. Tushuguan’s libraries, a cluster of squat, crumbling stone houses, were placed at the party’s disposal. Salt dove into charts and maps of distant seas. Tetsukichi pored over dusty histories and the whispers of dark legends — all concerning the dreaded Acererak.

But just as they were settling into their scholarship, a new terror struck. A shattering crack tore through the ceiling — and then, with thunderous violence, a monstrous creature plunged into the study hall.

Its face was a stone gargoyle wreathed in smoke, and it bore four grotesque arms, each ending in claws soaked with rot. It landed beside the grand carousel — a turning tower of scrolls holding secrets thought long lost — and let out a bone-rattling shriek.

They could not risk the knowledge it threatened.

Salt was the first to act, unleashing a bolt of force. Wu Jian Fen and Zakshi followed, while Bojing shot arrows with precision. But it was Tetsukichi who delivered the final blow — his katana, blessed and blooded, sliced through the creature’s neck. The head tumbled, the body convulsed — and then exploded in a minor detonation.

Scrolls ignited.

Flames licked the edges of the knowledge they had come so far to find. But Salt, with a moment of rare grace, tore the cloak from her shoulders and smothered the fire before it could consume more than the outer layers.

Then, a voice boomed through the stone. Ma Tsu.

“They are looking for you. You cannot stay here and risk my libraries.”

The adventurers protested. Ma Tsu relented. She would allow until nightfall. “And then you and your ship and your Captain must be gone.”

They made the most of the next few hours.

With the wind rising and the cursed dead still unavenged, the party returned to the Crimson Reprieve, set once again to sail.

Based on what they had learned in the library, Bo-Jing set a course for Acererak’s Island.

They should sail east, then further east, skimming over silent waters along the equator, and until the solstice, then sail across the equator and continue eastwards. When they reached a great land mass, they should sail north along its coastline, until they reached the massive delta of a wide, turgid river. They would sail up the river to reach Acererak’s Island.

Captain Hu spent several days in his cabin, recovering from injuries he had sustained in the ship’s galley while the party was visiting the libraries. 

The voyage was long, and the sea vast and dreamlike. It gave the party time — time to reflect on what they had uncovered in the libraries of Tushuguan, and to weigh the dangers they would face upon landfall.

What they had learned was grim. Acererak, the ancient and monstrous lich, had constructed his infamous Tomb of Horrors on marshland, a mire of fetid waters and treacherous mists. Captain Hu — cursed, ragged, and bound by a past he could never escape — had said that Youshi’s body lay close to the tomb, by a river that twisted through the swamp. It was not inside the tomb itself. That detail had comforted some of the party, though it did little to lessen the sense of foreboding.

 

The name Mouru Zhai had risen often in their research. Acererak’s former apprentice, a powerful and twisted mind in his own right, had played a pivotal role in the tomb’s construction. He had created the maze of bait and traps that filled the temple: a fake treasure chamber that might yet hold real gold, a shimmering blue door that opened into a pair of rooms — one empty, the other home to a sarcophagus. Within that sarcophagus, the party had read, lay a bandaged corpse with a jewel in its eye — a gem both beautiful and evil, which, if disturbed, would reanimate the foul creature.

Mouru Zhai had been happy to serve Acererak, crafting death for the tomb’s intruders — until he discovered his own death had been planned as part of its completion, alongside every other servant. Now he was a fugitive, hiding far from his master’s gaze.

Mustafa had already learned Shatter, one of Mouru Zhai’s arcane legacies, and studied its uses carefully. The party spoke often of the traps and illusions they might face — but more often still, they argued about whether they needed to face them at all.

Captain Hu urged the party to avoid the tomb. The river, he said, would yield Youshi’s body. They need not enter the cursed place. His goal was simple: lift the curse that bound him and his ship. Since laying Niao to rest, her spirit had vanished. But those of Youshi — and of the murdered ship’s carpenter Tong — still haunted the crew night after night.

Salt, Tetsukichi, and most of the party agreed with Hu. Their course, they felt, should be swift and direct.

But Lao Ren disagreed — passionately. To him, this was no simple mission. This was destiny. He believed the adventurers were the clever ones, prophesied in old stories, fated to destroy Acererak once and for all. He revealed that Mouru Zhai was now in exile on Guibao, the island of cursed nobles they had recently left. Though the time was not yet right, both Mouru Zhai and Ma Tsu — the powerful priestess of Tushuguan and one-time ally of the apprentice — might one day stand with the party in a future campaign against the lich.

Bojing, meanwhile, had come to suspect a deeper deception. He believed Captain Hu might be a lich himself, and that the ship’s curse could be lifted by Ryu, his magician henchman, without going to the island at all. But his claims failed to sway the others.

For all their disagreements, fate had other plans.

One night, as the ship rocked gently under a full moon, screams rang out. Steel clashed on deck. When the party rushed topside, they found a massacre in progress. Bloodthirsty cannibal pirates had attacked — silent, swift, and savage. Crew members lay slaughtered. Others were being dragged to small boats, bound and unconscious.

And suddenly, all talk of tombs and liches was swept aside. The party now had a new challenge. And it would not wait.