Maybe My Soulmate! (GL)

By the time they made it up to the deck, the ship’s alarm bell was already ringing, and three low, dark hulled vessels had emerged out of the black water on all sides, moving far too smoothly and far too quietly for ordinary ships, their sails a deep rust red color that looked almost black in the moonlight. Figures leapt from the decks of those ships onto the Tide Dragon in twos and threes, dressed in tattered dark robes, and the moment they landed the air around them thickened with something sour and wrong, the unmistakable stench of old blood and worse things left to fester.

”Blood Shadow Sect,” Captain Han spat, already moving to engage the nearest attacker with a short blade of his own. ”Should have known they would try something out here, where nobody official comes looking for months at a time.”

The attackers were not weak, not by any normal measure, several of them clearly at Core Formation stage and one or two possibly higher, but they fought with a wrongness to their technique that made even the young disciples watching feel faintly sick, drawing dark red qi that seemed to pulse like something alive rather than simple cultivated energy. A few of the Blood Shadow cultivators had brought corpse puppets with them too, stitched together things wrapped in preserving talismans that moved with jerky, unnatural speed, and for a moment the whole deck of the Tide Dragon dissolved into genuine, frightening chaos, the kind of fight that could actually kill people who were not careful about it.

Mo Yuxin was not one of those people, and neither was Su Yubing.

Mo Yuxin moved through the mess of fighting with the same unbothered calm she had shown the jiao beast weeks earlier, her sword finding openings in Blood Shadow formations that should not have existed, cutting down two corpse puppets with a single sweeping strike that scattered their preserving talismans into ash mid air. Su Yubing worked the edges of the fight instead, frost spreading outward from her palms in slow, deliberate waves that locked attackers in place just long enough for the ship’s own defenders to finish them off properly, her expression calm the entire time despite the chaos around her, like she was tending a garden rather than fighting for her life against blood cultists.

It took less than ten minutes for the tide of the battle to turn completely, the remaining Blood Shadow cultivators realizing far too late that they had picked the wrong ship to raid, and the ones still capable of fleeing scrambled back toward their own vessels while Mo Yuxin let them go, mostly because chasing them into open water in the dark did not seem worth the effort involved. One cultivator, slower than the rest, got caught by a thin tendril of frost wrapped around his ankle before he could escape, and Su Yubing dragged him back onto the deck with an almost gentle looking motion that still managed to look faintly terrifying given the circumstances surrounding it.

The captured cultivator, once questioned properly by Captain Han with Mo Yuxin standing close enough behind him that he kept nervously glancing at her sword, eventually admitted, between a lot of stammering and at least one attempt to bite down on a suicide talisman that Su Yubing calmly froze solid before he could activate it, that the Blood Shadow Sect had been tracking rumors of an ancient sea cultivator’s treasure vault hidden somewhere on an island called Xuanchao Isle, several days off their current route, and had assumed the Tide Dragon might be carrying a map or clue toward it based on some overheard sect gossip back in Yanhai.

”There is no map on this ship,” Captain Han said flatly, clearly annoyed at having been raided over what amounted to bad information.

”There might not need to be,” Mo Yuxin said thoughtfully, exchanging a look with Su Yubing. ”If Xuanchao Isle is real and this close to our route, it might be worth a look ourselves. Ancient sea cultivator vaults do not just sit around waiting to be found twice by people who deserve them less than we do.”

Ruan Xue, who had been listening from a safe distance with wide eyes throughout the entire interrogation, immediately perked up at the idea of an actual treasure hunting detour, and even Chen Hao, normally the more cautious of the two, seemed intrigued enough not to object to the idea.

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Two days later, following coordinates dragged reluctantly out of the captured cultivator before he was handed over to sect authorities at the next waypoint for proper punishment, the Tide Dragon anchored off the coast of a small, mist wrapped island that did not appear on any of the captain’s usual charts. Xuanchao Isle looked, from a distance, like nothing more than a jagged spine of dark rock covered in twisted trees, but the moment they got close enough, everyone on deck could feel the pressure radiating off it, an old, heavy kind of spiritual energy that made the hair on your arms stand up even from a hundred meters out.

”There is a barrier around the whole island,” Su Yubing said, studying the faint shimmer in the air that most of the other passengers could not even perceive. ”Old formation work. Sea Sovereign grade, maybe higher, if the age of it is any indication.”

They took a smaller boat over, Mo Yuxin and Su Yubing along with Ruan Xue, Chen Hao, Captain Han, and two other trusted disciples, leaving the bulk of the passengers safely aboard the anchored Tide Dragon. Getting through the barrier itself turned out to be the first real test, since the ancient formation recognized cultivation base the way a lock recognizes the shape of its proper key, and anyone below Core Formation stage found themselves gently but firmly repelled the moment they tried to cross the shimmering boundary, pushed back like they had walked into an invisible wall of water.

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TO BE CONTINUED.