Kiyoshima Yūrei

The Deathsong Sect’s ghost ship is a colossal flying vessel crewed by Hungry ghosts, and its brief appearance in the History Road race turns the competition into an airborne battle. More than a vehicle, it embodies the setting’s fusion of transportation, warfare, dead matter, and supernatural survival: a ship made from bones, animated by qi, carrying spectral artillery, and then erased by one of the road’s reconstructed landmarks. Its destruction demonstrates that the History Road is not merely a route through the wasteland but a lethal system in which mobility itself is subject to ancient powers and hidden weapons.

Identity and Appearance

The ghost ship belongs to the Deathsong Sect, whose crew is said to consist of Hungry ghosts. It is described as a colossal boat made entirely of bones, floating a few feet above the ground. Tattered, rotting sails hang from masts formed by the ship’s spine-like structure, making the vessel resemble both a maritime craft and an enormous assembled corpse. Its size is sufficient to rival or surpass the spirit-train in strangeness, placing it among the extraordinary vehicles gathered for the race rather than among ordinary transport.

The ship’s construction gives it a distinctive material identity. Its skeletal hull is not a passive decoration: it is the body that houses its weapons, bears the impact of attacks, and visibly breaks apart under fire. The vessel’s dead architecture also connects it to the wider world of weaponized remains. The race includes bizarre machines, giant vehicles, and creatures pressed into transport or combat roles, but the ghost ship is uniquely defined by the persistence of death within its structure. The Hungry ghosts are not merely passengers; they are the crew and animating force of a warship that flies through qi rather than conventional technology.

Role in the History Road Race

The Deathsong Sect sends the ghost ship to compete in the race, where it becomes part of a wider contest shaped by the Yinyang Khan’s promised prize. The winner will select a target for the Khan to annihilate with an arrow of light, so every racer is competing not only for victory but for the authority to direct catastrophic destruction. The ghost ship therefore enters a contest whose apparent sporting form conceals political and military stakes.

Its method of movement distinguishes it from the Metallists’ aircraft. The ghost ship imitates the plane’s ascent, but it flies through its own qi rather than through mechanical technology. This contrast places the vessel between supernatural creature and engineered machine. It is a ship, a weapon, and a manifestation of the Deathsong Sect’s particular power, while the surrounding race converts those different forms of mobility into direct competition.

When the racers move along the History Road, the ghost ship attacks the vehicles ahead while continuing to advance. It approaches the first landmark, the metal structure Orient calls the Eiffel Tower, and attempts to circle the landmark so it can ambush the giant centidead vehicle after that vehicle emerges from beneath it. The maneuver shows tactical intent: the ship does not simply charge forward or fire indiscriminately, but uses altitude and the landmark’s structure to seek a better firing position.

Combat Against the Spirit-Train

The ghost ship first reveals its offensive capability when rusted steel cannons emerge from its skeletal hull and point downward at the racers. Yuan Guang orders the crew to shoot both attacking aircraft. He doubts that ordinary weapons can strike a spectral vehicle, so he directs his own attack toward the ghost ship and prepares a Recoil Blast by forming a Barrier around his arm.

Yuan Guang’s Recoil Blast strikes before the ship can open fire. The impact pulverizes roughly one-fifth of the bones composing its bulk, shatters several cannons, and scatters steel fragments through the air. The Hungry ghosts respond with shrieks and wails, presenting the attack as both a material defeat and a supernatural outcry. Yet the ship remains operational. It continues climbing while its surviving weapons return fire with spectral cannonballs, establishing that its skeletal body can absorb severe damage without immediately losing its capacity to fight.

The assault coincides with the Metallists’ plane dropping bombs over the road. Explosives and enchanted cannonballs strike together, producing a chain of detonations that fills the landscape with fire, smoke, dust, and debris. Vehicles and drivers are destroyed throughout the pack. The spirit-train survives because Orient raises a moving defensive system around it, using short-lived overlapping stationary Barriers to protect separate wagons while the train remains in motion. The ship’s attack consequently exposes the difference between the racers’ offensive mobility and Orient’s protective, collective mobility: the ghost ship turns the road into a kill zone, while the spirit-train survives by treating its many wagons as coordinated parts of one living defense.

Destruction at the Eiffel Tower

The ghost ship continues flying after its initial exchange with the spirit-train and shifts its attention toward the centidead vehicle farther ahead. As both machines reach the Eiffel Tower landmark, the structure draws qi from the leylines. Energy climbs through the metal pylon toward its antenna, transforming the tower into a luminous beacon before it releases a thunderous discharge.

A crimson qi beam then fires from the Eiffel Tower and strikes the ghost ship. The ray passes completely through the floating vessel, piercing its skeletal structure and tearing a large hole through it. The ship and its ghostly crew cry out as though suffering a living wound; its rotting sails evaporate immediately, and the vessel begins to lose altitude. It ultimately crashes into the wasteland, its final descent marked not by a victorious maneuver or a last attack but by a weakening whimper.

The destruction is especially significant because the ship is not defeated by Yuan Guang’s direct assault. His Recoil Blast cripples part of its hull and destroys weapons, but the vessel remains capable of combat. The Eiffel Tower, an artificial landmark built into the History Road, delivers the decisive blow. The scene therefore establishes the road’s landmarks as active weapons rather than scenery. Their power can overwhelm even a supernatural warship, and their operation is not necessarily aligned with any racer’s intentions.

Narrative Significance

The ghost ship concentrates several recurring tensions in the world. It is mobile but made from the dead; it is assembled from bones yet functions as a machine; it is supernatural but participates in a highly organized race; and it is both a remnant of death and an instrument for producing more death. Its presence makes the History Road’s promise of speed inseparable from destruction, while its Hungry ghost crew turns the familiar idea of a ship and crew into a grotesque image of collective undeath.

Its encounter with the spirit-train also clarifies the moral and structural contrast between the two vehicles. The ghost ship advances through attack, firing down at competitors and accepting damage as the cost of pursuit. Orient’s train, by contrast, survives through adaptation, coordinated defense, and the protection of everyone inside its wagons. The ghost ship’s weapons destroy other racers, but its own end comes when the road’s material infrastructure suddenly asserts greater power than the dead vessel. In that reversal, the race becomes a contest not simply among drivers and sects but among competing forms of agency: living passengers, transformed vehicles, spectral crews, ancient leylines, and landmarks that have become weapons.

The ship’s final fate also extends the book’s treatment of ruins and recycled remnants. The wasteland is filled with the remains of an earlier civilization, while the History Road repurposes recognizable structures as instruments of annihilation. The ghost ship is itself a moving ruin, carrying the dead through a landscape where old forms have acquired new violent functions. Its crash beside the road completes that image: one relic of death is destroyed by another relic, and the surviving racers continue onward through the space between them.