Villain: Manipulating the Heroines into hating the Protagonist

Six thousand feet beneath the churning white caps of the Myriad Reefs Sea Region, the light of the sun had never touched the black silt of the Dragon-Spine Trench. Here, at the crushing bottom of the ocean floor, the water carried the weight of falling mountains. Ordinary iron would bend and groan under the relentless hydraulic vise, and any Foundation Establishment cultivator whose protective barrier flickered for even half a breath would have their ribcage collapsed into bloody pulp before a scream could leave their throat.

Only the eerie, stuttering luminescence of broken ship-arrays, drifting phosphorescent blood-clouds, and the pale azure glow of a newly exposed Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein illuminated the deep-earth valley.

The running slaughter that had begun three days ago inside Howling Shark Gap had finally dragged its survivors down into this lightless basin. Out of the forty sword-cruisers of the Azure Wave Sword Sect and the twenty bone-galleons of the Holy Nether Sea Organization that had clashed in the canyon, not a single intact hull remained afloat. Splintered ironwood beams, shattered bone-rams, and thousands of bloated, pressure-crushed corpses littered the canyon trail for five miles back.

Now, less than thirty Core Formation experts from both warring camps stood in a ragged, bleeding semicircle upon the black basalt floor before the origin of the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein: the sunken threshold of the Primal Dragon Grotto.

Carved directly into the vertical face of an undersea mountain stood a pair of hundred-foot-tall stone doors encrusted with petrified white barnacles and ancient dragon glyphs. Thick chains forged from dark, pitted star-iron, each link the size of a carriage, crisscrossed the seam of the gateway, converging upon a massive bronze dragon-lock at the center. Through the hairline gap between the stone doors pulsed a rich, milky-white current of pure earth-qi—the core node of the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein that both superpowers had bled their vanguards dry to claim.

”Halt the pursuit!” Daoist Cang Song coughed, spitting a clot of dark blood into the shimmering water inside his personal barrier. The scarred Vanguard Commander of the Azure Wave Sword Sect leaned heavily upon his chipped Azure Wave Spirit Sword, his left ribcage bound in blood-soaked linen. Around him stood fourteen surviving righteous Core Formation deacons, including Qiu Yun, whose blue robes were torn at the sleeve. ”The demonic dogs are trapped against the cliff face! Form the sword wall—do not let them near the gate!”

Fifty yards across the silt basin, standing beside the jagged remains of a sunken bone-prow, Daoist Xue Li—the physical vessel of the Yin Severing True Monarch—lowered his Yin Severing Bone Blade. Standing with him were Su Ning, holding her Purple Crystal Toxin Gourd, and twelve surviving Core Formation elders from the Azure Blood Sect and Blood Shark Hall, led by the one-armed Daoist Mo Jue.

”Look at your pathetic deacons, Cang Song,” Daoist Mo Jue sneered, though his green-tinted skin was pale and his chest heaved as he struggled to maintain his water-repelling blood shroud against the six-thousand-foot depth. ”Half your men can barely hold their flying swords straight. If you step ten paces closer, we will detonate our remaining blood-beads and bury both fleets in this trench!”

Between the two exhausted, glaring factions stood Ye Fan.

Clad in his scarred leather mercenary armor under the alias of Han Feng, Ye Fan rested his two-handed grip on the pommel of his heavy black broadsword, its point planted two inches into the basalt seabed. Over the past seventy-two hours of continuous underwater breakouts, he had cut down four demonic Core Formation elders and shattered three rockslide blockades. His forearms ached from the bone-deep vibration of parrying heavy bone-anchors in high-pressure water, yet his breathing remained deep and rhythmic. The Temporal Jade Bead against his chest was cool, and his Peak Mid-Stage Core Formation Qi circulated smoothly through his tempered meridians.

Ye Fan did not look at Daoist Mo Jue or the demonic remnants. His eyes were fixed on the four colossal star-iron chains anchoring the base of the hundred-foot stone gateway.

’Those chains aren’t just sealing the stone doors,’ Ye Fan thought, his gaze tracing the dark links where they vanished into a yawning, pitch-black trench pit directly beneath the threshold. ’They are pulsing with a living heartbeat. Something is breathing down in that silt.’

”Senior Brother Han,” Deacon Lin Feng limped up behind Ye Fan, his formerly gilded armor dented and stripped of its ornaments. Gone was the haughty core disciple who had mocked the wandering mercenary three days prior; Lin Feng now looked at Ye Fan’s broad back with desperate reliance. ”Commander Cang Song says we have twenty breaths to catch our wind before we charge the Blood Shark Hall remnants. Once we slaughter them, the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein is ours.”

”Nobody is charging anyone,” Ye Fan said, his voice cutting through the water via a crisp spiritual transmission. He lifted his heavy black broadsword from the stone, shifting his feet into a wide, earth-rooted stance. ”Tell Cang Song and the demonic elders to pull back thirty yards from the depression in front of the gate. Now.”

”Pull back?” Daoist Cang Song frowned, overhearing the transmission. ”Brother Han, if we cede the threshold, Xue Li and Mo Jue will plant their blood flags on the Spiritual Vein node!”

”Look at the barnacles on the lower chains, Cang Song!” Ye Fan snapped, pointing the four-inch-wide tip of his black broadsword toward the trench pit at the base of the gateway. ”The Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein isn’t leaking out of the grotto naturally—it’s being drawn outward through those star-iron links to feed a guardian beast chained in the pit! Your three days of spilling Core Formation blood into the currents above just woke it up!”

Across the basin, Daoist Xue Li narrowed his hollow dark eyes. Through his ancient senses as the Yin Severing True Monarch, he felt the sudden, terrifying contraction of water pressure beneath the silt. Moving only his left pinky finger behind his robe, he sent a silent signal to Su Ning to step back toward the outer rocks.

Daoist Gui Yao, a hot-tempered Middle-Stage Core Formation elder of the Azure Blood Sect with a hooked nose and blood-red robes, let out a harsh laugh. ”A cheap trick by a hired mercenary to scare us away from the gate! The Spiritual Vein is right behind that bronze lock! Watch me claim the first mouthful of essence!”

Ignoring Daoist Xue Li’s cold silence, Daoist Gui Yao kicked off the sunken bone-prow, shooting forward like a crimson dart toward the hundred-foot stone doors, his clawed hand reaching out to grab the glowing white stream of Spiritual Qi leaking from the bronze dragon-lock.

He made it within fifteen feet of the stone doors.

CLANK-RATTLE!

The four carriage-sized star-iron chains buried in the silt pit violently snapped taut. The sound was like four underwater volcanoes erupting simultaneously, sending a concussive hydraulic wave across the seabed that knocked six injured righteous and demonic deacons flat onto their backs.

The black silt in the pit before the gateway exploded upward in a blinding cloud.

Rising from the abyssal mud was a prehistoric horror that had slumbered upon the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein for eight hundred years: the Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm.

Its main serpentine body was two hundred feet long and thicker than a watchtower, covered in overlapping plates of pitch-black obsidian scales that drank the faint light of the spiritual arrays. Along its arched spinal ridge grew a forest of jagged, dorsal bone-fins pulsing with dark purple venom lines. Worse still, splitting from its massive, muscular shoulders were four distinct, long-necked serpentine heads—each crowned with a curved horn of dark abyssal iron and eight lidless, milky-white eyes that locked onto the trespassing cultivators through thermal and spiritual fluctuations.

The aura of a Peak Seventh-Grade Spirit Beast—a terrifying Half-Step Nascent Soul monstrosity raised in the crushing pressures of the six-thousand-foot trench—slammed down upon the basin.

Daoist Gui Yao froze in mid-water, the blood draining from his hooked face as the central head of the Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm opened its jaws twenty feet above him.

”Save me—!”

The central head did not bite. Its throat sac swelled and contracted, spitting a thick, pressurized stream of freezing black venom straight down onto Daoist Gui Yao.

HSSSS-CRACK!

Daoist Gui Yao’s protective blood-shield lasted less than a tenth of a breath. The freezing black venom ate through his Late-Grade Spirit Tool robe on contact, simultaneously flash-freezing his flesh into black ice and dissolving the frozen chunks into bubbling, foul-smelling slurry. Before his screaming soul could even flee his Dantian, the second head of the Wyrm snapped forward, its obsidian fangs crushing his skull and swallowing the dissolving upper torso whole.

”Gui Yao!” Daoist Mo Jue roared in horror, stumbling backward across the basalt rocks.

Before the surviving cultivators could scatter, the third and fourth heads of the Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm swung wide toward the righteous flank.

Deacon Zhou of the Azure Wave Sword Sect raised his bronze defensive buckler and two flying swords, pouring every drop of his Middle-Stage Core Formation Qi into a three-layered water barrier. The fourth head of the Wyrm did not even use venom; it lashed out like a battering ram, slamming its heavy horned snout directly into Deacon Zhou’s buckler.

BOOM!

The bronze buckler bent inward like wet paper. The sheer physical weight of the strike crushed Deacon Zhou’s forearms against his chest, shattering his sternum and sending his broken body spinning backward into a basalt pillar, where the surrounding six-thousand-foot water pressure instantly crushed his unshielded corpse into a shapeless red pulp.

Eight hundred yards above the chaotic seabed, perched upon an overhanging shelf of pitch-black volcanic rock that jutted out from the trench wall, the flagship of the three Abyssal Stealth Galleons rested in absolute, undetectable stillness.

Inside the plush, heavily heated master stateroom behind the command bridge, the atmosphere was a striking contrast to the freezing, death-filled waters below.

Yue Lingshan remained stationed at the forward array spire with her formation disciples, tirelessly maintaining the Grade-4 sound-and-aura muting veil around the three vessels so that her husband and the senior sect leaders could ”observe the battle from the rear.” She had no inkling that the heavy Star-Core Iron doors dividing the forward spire from the rear stateroom locked her out of a den of unbridled, shameless debauchery.

Inside the stateroom, a wide projection screen formed of condensed water-mirror runes hovered in the air, displaying every detail of the Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm’s rampage on the trench floor below.

Wang Jian reclined on a deep, velvet-cushioned throne facing the screen, his black robes completely open from the collar to the waist. He was not alone.

Seated directly in his lap, facing the glowing water-screen with her back pressed flush against Wang Jian’s muscular chest, was Lin Wanyue. The dignified City Lord of Abyssal Pearl City wore a scandalous, custom-tailored outfit that Wang Jian had forced her into an hour ago: a pair of sheer, thigh-high dark blue silk stockings held up by golden garter straps, and a microscopic blue satin corset that left her massive, heavy breasts completely bare and pushed up like two pale, bouncing moons. Her wide, juicy hips were impaled all the way down to the hilt upon Wang Jian’s thick, scorching shaft, which remained buried deep inside her soaking wet core as he casually bounced her up and down on his thighs.

Kneeling on the soft carpet to Wang Jian’s left and right were Hua Yimei and Hua Ling’er. The mother-and-daughter duo were completely naked save for matching crimson velvet collars around their necks and thin gold chains connecting their pierced nipples. Hua Yimei had her face buried against the side of Wang Jian’s hip, her hot tongue licking the junction where his thick shaft stretched Lin Wanyue’s wet labia, while Hua Ling’er knelt beside Lin Wanyue’s spread knees, eagerly sucking and kissing the City Lord’s heavy, swaying left breast while rubbing her own dripping core against Wang Jian’s boot.

Standing respectfully behind the throne were Mu Lianhua, Su Binglan, and Shangguan Wan’er. Even the two supreme Nascent Soul grandmasters were dressed to please his eyes while off the battlefield: Su Binglan wore a floor-length slit robe of transparent ice-gauze with nothing underneath, her pale, heavy breasts pressed against the back of Wang Jian’s head as she gently massaged his temples with cool, fragrant fingers, while Mu Lianhua stood beside her in a low-cut crimson halter wrap that barely contained her ripe, voluptuous figure.

”Look at how quickly Gui Yao melted,” Wang Jian remarked casually, his large, calloused hands gripping Lin Wanyue’s wide, fleshy hips and lifting her up six inches before slamming her juicy backside hard down onto his lap, driving his rock-hard length against her cervix. ”That Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm has been feeding on the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein for at least eight centuries. Its venom has mutated into a half-step Nascent Soul marrow-rot toxin.”

”Nngh—! Aaaah, Master!” Lin Wanyue cried out, her noble face twisted in shameless, panting pleasure as her massive breasts bounced violently from the brutal upward jolt of his hips. She gripped Wang Jian’s thick forearms sitting on the armrests, rolling her wide hips in a slow, grinding circle to milk his pulsing shaft inside her. ”That... that beast’s scales are tempered by six thousand feet of trench pressure... haaah... standard Core Formation flying swords can’t even leave a white mark on its hide! Please, Master... pinch my nipples harder while I ride you...”

Wang Jian smirked, shifting his left hand from her hip to roughly seize her bare right breast, twisting the stiff, swollen pink bud between his calloused fingers until Lin Wanyue arched her back with a loud, wet whimper, her inner walls clamping down like a hot silk vise around his manhood.

Beside the throne, Shangguan Wan’er—dressed in a tight black leather bodice that cinched her narrow waist and emphasized the flared, curvy flare of her hips—flicked her slender fingers across the glowing beads of her Celestial-Tide Abacus.

”Master, based on the beast’s spiritual output and the rate at which the surviving twenty-six cultivators below are burning through their Qi to maintain their water-repelling barriers,” Shangguan Wan’er reported, her voice cool and precise despite the wet, rhythmic slap-slap-slap of Lin Wanyue’s juicy backside bouncing on Wang Jian’s lap, ”if they remain uncoordinated, the Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm will slaughter the entire group within forty breaths. However, if Ye Fan rallies them into a unified formation, the battle will drag out for roughly six hours, draining both the beast and the survivors to less than five percent of their reserves.”

”He won’t let them die yet,” Wang Jian said, his dark eyes watching the leather-clad figure of Ye Fan on the water-screen while he suddenly accelerated the pace of his hips, pistoning upward into Lin Wanyue with rapid, aggressive thrusts that made the dignified City Lord sob and drool onto her own heaving chest. ”He needs their bodies as meat-shields to hold the three outer heads while he goes for the central spine. Yimei, stop licking the outside and use your fingers on Wanyue’s clit—make her scream louder for me.”

”Yes, Master!” Hua Yimei purred eagerly, sliding two slender fingers between Lin Wanyue’s trembling thighs to rub her swollen clitoris in time with Wang Jian’s savage upward thrusts, while Hua Ling’er moved her mouth up to kiss Lin Wanyue’s parted, moaning lips, swallowing the City Lord’s shameless cries.

Behind the throne, Su Binglan looked down at the screen, her ice-blue eyes lingering on the four massive star-iron chains anchoring the beast to the sunken gate.

”Master,” Su Binglan murmured softly, leaning down so her heavy, cool breasts rested directly atop Wang Jian’s bare shoulders, her fragrant breath tickling his ear. ”Once the boy breaks the dragon-lock on those stone doors, the surge from the unsealed Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein might give him a burst of restorative Qi. Should Lianhua and I deploy our domains outside the hull now to seal the trench?”

Wang Jian reached up with his right hand, sliding his palm behind his neck to firmly cup Su Binglan’s soft, bare cheek before sliding his fingers down to fondle her heavy, cool breast through the sheer ice-gauze.

”Not yet, Binglan,” Wang Jian said smoothly, enjoying the way the proud former Palace Mistress shivered and leaned her breast harder into his rough grip. ”That Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm has keen instincts. If a genuine Nascent Soul aura leaks into the water before its spinal marrow is severed, the beast will abandon the fight, retreat into the grotto fissure, and trigger the self-collapsing runes on the gateway. Wait until Ye Fan severs its central nerve conduit. In the meantime, Binglan, Lianhua—take off those wraps. When I finish filling Wanyue’s womb, I want both of my Nascent Soul grandmasters kneeling on this cushion with your hips raised.”

”As Master commands,” Mu Lianhua and Su Binglan replied in breathless unison, their cheeks flushing crimson as they untied their sheer sashes, letting the silk fall to the carpet to reveal their breathtaking, mature, hourglass bodies while down on the screen, Ye Fan made his move.

On the freezing basalt floor of the trench, panic threatened to shatter the surviving twenty-six Core Formation experts.

”Scatter! Head for the upper canyon walls!” Daoist Mo Jue screamed, his one remaining arm waving wildly as the Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm’s four heads reared back, their throat sacs glowing with dark purple light to unleash a four-directional spray of marrow-rotting venom. ”This monster is a Half-Step Nascent Soul beast! Fighting it at this depth is suicide!”

”If anyone breaks formation and swims upward, you’ll be picked off in the open water like blind fish!” Ye Fan’s voice thundered across the basin, backed by a burst of his Peak Mid-Stage Core Formation Qi that rattled the teeth of every cultivator present.

Before the panic could turn into a rout, Ye Fan stomped his right boot against the basalt floor, cracking the stone, and raised the bronze tiger-tally of the Azure Wave Sword Sect in his left hand.

”Cang Song! Xue Li! Listen to me if you want to leave this trench alive!” Ye Fan barked, his eyes blazing beneath the brim of his bamboo hat as he pointed his heavy black broadsword at the thick star-iron chains bolted into the beast’s lower abdomen. ”The beast is chained to the gate! Its reach is limited to a hundred and fifty yards from the threshold, and its four heads share a single central spinal nexus right between its front shoulders!”

”Even if its reach is limited, the canyon exit behind us is blocked by the rockslide from Howling Shark Gap!” Daoist Cang Song shouted back, parrying a sweeping lash from the Wyrm’s spiked tail that sent him skidding twenty feet across the silt. ”And none of our blades can pierce those obsidian scales!”

”Mine can!” Ye Fan roared. ”But I need the four heads pinned downward for ten breaths! Cang Song, take your fourteen deacons and form the Seven-Star Azure Wave Array on the left flank! Xue Li, Mo Jue, take your thirteen elders on the right and cast a Joint Blood-Miasma Binding Net! Don’t aim for its scales—aim your spells and flying swords at the unarmored gills beneath the lower jaws of the four necks to force its heads toward the seabed!”

Daoist Mo Jue bared his teeth. ”Take orders from a righteous mercenary?! Who do you think—”

”Do as he says, Mo Jue!” Daoist Xue Li snapped coldly, his Yin Severing Bone Blade already slashing out a crescent of freezing gray Qi to intercept a glob of black venom. ”Unless you wish to dissolve into mud like Gui Yao! Form the blood net on the right flank!”

With both Daoist Cang Song and Daoist Xue Li enforcing the command, the instinct for survival overrode centuries of sect hatred.

For the next two days of grueling, continuous underwater attrition, the basin before the Primal Dragon Grotto became a relentless, grinding crucible.

Neither side could afford a single lapse in concentration. In the crushing six-thousand-foot pressure, every swing of a sword and every hand-seal woven consumed three times the normal amount of Spiritual Qi. On the left flank, Daoist Cang Song, Qiu Yun, and Lin Feng led the righteous deacons in a tight, rotating heptagram, linking their azure water barriers to deflect the crushing tail sweeps and horn-rams of the left two heads. On the right flank, Daoist Xue Li, Su Ning, and Daoist Mo Jue condensed thick ropes of sticky, corrosive blood-qi mixed with Su Ning’s purple numbing toxin, tangling the jaws of the right two heads whenever they tried to spit venom.

Hour after hour dragged by in the freezing dark. Three more righteous deacons and four demonic elders had their barriers shattered by glancing blows from the beast’s two-hundred-foot coils, their bodies instantly crushed by the deep-sea pressure before their comrades’ eyes. Pill bottles were emptied; muscles tore under the strain of anchoring boots to the slick basalt; throats burned with the coppery taste of swallowed blood.

By the final hour of the third day, the remaining nineteen Core Formation cultivators on the seabed were trembling wrecks, their spiritual seas drained to the bottom dregs, their faces pale as ghosts.

Yet the Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm was finally faltering. Dark purple blood leaked from dozens of shallow cuts along its gill slits, and its four serpentine necks hung low, weighed down by twenty layers of frozen azure sword-threads and coagulated blood-ropes.

”Brother Han...!” Daoist Cang Song wheezed, his knees buckling as blood trickled from his ears and nostrils from the hydraulic strain. ”My Dantian is empty... the Seven-Star Array won’t hold another strike! If you have a killing blow... use it now!”

”Pull the chains downward with everything you have left!” Ye Fan roared from the base of the cliff wall. ”Pin its necks for three breaths!”

”HEAAAH!”

With a final, desperate battle cry, Daoist Cang Song, Daoist Xue Li, and the seventeen surviving cultivators poured the last remnants of their Core Formation Qi into the glowing sword-threads and blood-ropes wrapped around the Wyrm’s four throats. The four massive serpentine heads were yanked violently downward, their chins slamming into the black silt of the trench floor, exposing the thick, ridged hump where all four necks joined the main spinal column.

Ye Fan moved.

He did not swim through the open water where the displaced currents would slow his momentum. Instead, he used the vertical basalt cliff beside the gateway as a launchpad. Channeling the ancient wind-movement art of the Abyssal Zephyr Lord into his legs, Ye Fan ran forty feet straight up the sheer rock face, each stomp of his leather boots blasting a crater into the stone.

At the peak of his climb, thirty feet above the beast’s pinned backs, Ye Fan kicked off the cliff wall with explosive physical force.

The water parted around him with a deafening sonic boom. Gravity and leg drive combined with the crushing downward pressure of the trench, turning Ye Fan and his heavy black broadsword into a falling meteorite.

Sensing the mortal threat descending from above, the Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm let out a muffled, quatre-layered roar that shook the entire valley. Its central head tore free of two righteous sword-threads, rearing upward to impale Ye Fan in mid-air with its three-foot abyssal iron horn.

Ye Fan did not alter his trajectory or raise his blade to block. In the heat of life-or-death combat, his mind was empty of hesitation—focused solely on blade angle, physical leverage, and the glowing nerve junction three feet behind the rising horn.

As the razor-sharp abyssal iron horn lunged toward his abdomen, Ye Fan twisted his torso three inches to the left in mid-water.

SHRRRIIIP!

The curved horn tore straight through the thick leather of his mercenary breastplate on his right ribcage, carving a deep, bloody furrow across his side and shattering the outer defensive talisman at his belt. Ye Fan ignored the searing pain and the freezing seawater biting into his torn flesh.

Using the upward collision of the beast’s horn as a fulcrum, Ye Fan clamped his left boot onto the side of the central head’s snout, vaulted over the snapping jaws, and slammed both boots straight down onto the main spinal ridge between the beast’s four shoulders!

THUD-CRACK!

Ye Fan gripped the long hilt of his heavy black broadsword with both bleeding hands, raising it high above his head.

Inside his Dantian, his Golden Core spun at maximum speed, and the Temporal Jade Bead against his chest grew warm as he drew out every ounce of the Seven-Star Glacial-Flame essence he had refined over the past two months.

A roaring, six-foot pillar of deep-blue glacial fire erupted along the broad black steel—and hidden deep inside that freezing blue shell burned a compressed, blinding needle of golden purifying flame.

”Sever!” Ye Fan roared into the water.

He drove the heavy black broadsword straight down between the overlapping joints of the two largest dorsal obsidian scales at the base of the beast’s neck.

KRA-SHING!

Sparks of blue frost and golden fire exploded underwater as the four-inch-wide blade wedged four feet deep into the beast’s armored flesh, striking the calcified spinal bone protecting its central nerve conduit.

The Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm shrieked in agony, all four heads whipping backward to bite the human standing on its back, while its two-hundred-foot tail lashed upward to smash him into paste.

Before the jaws could reach him, Ye Fan locked his wrists, leaned his entire body weight onto the pommel, and unleashed the full torrent of his cold-cloaked golden flame straight down the fuller of the blade into the beast’s spinal cord!

BOOOOOOM!

The deep-blue glacial flame instantly froze the surrounding purple venom glands into solid ice, preventing a toxic backlash, while the hidden core of golden purifying flame shot down the beast’s central nerve conduit like liquid lightning—incinerating its brain stem and boiling the marrow inside its spine from the inside out!

All four serpentine heads went rigid mid-snap, their milky-white eyes bulging as blue frost and golden smoke burst from their nostrils and mouths.

Driven by the final, convulsive death-throes of its incinerated nervous system, the two-hundred-foot body of the Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm thrashed with catastrophic physical force.

Its colossal tail—weighing hundreds of tons—whipped sideways in a blind spasm and smashed directly into the four star-iron anchor chains bolted across the center of the Primal Dragon Grotto gateway.

CLANG-CRAAAACK!

Having been corroded by eight centuries of deep-sea pressure and strained by three days of battle, two of the four massive star-iron chains snapped in a shower of dark sparks. The heavy bronze dragon-lock at the center of the hundred-foot stone doors groaned loudly, its internal runic gears fracturing from the violent jerk of the dying beast’s weight.

Standing atop the shuddering shoulders of the dying Wyrm, Ye Fan saw the hairline cracks spiderwebbing across the central bronze dragon-lock thirty feet ahead of him.

’If the beast collapses before that lock breaks, the residual formation on the gate will draw Qi from the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein to repair the seal!’ Ye Fan realized instantly.

His muscles screamed from three days of non-stop combat, the gash along his right ribs bled dark crimson clouds into the water, and less than ten percent of the Qi remained in his Dantian. Yet Ye Fan refused to yield a single step.

He planted his right foot against the dorsal spine of the collapsing Wyrm and yanked his heavy black broadsword out of its neck in a spray of frozen purple blood.

Channeling the final, scraping dregs of his Core Formation Qi through his burning arm meridians, Ye Fan kicked off the dying beast’s skull, shooting horizontally through the dark water straight toward the cracked bronze dragon-lock at the center of the stone doors.

”Heavenly Gale Calamity Sword: Mountain-Splitting Cleave!”

Ye Fan swung the heavy black broadsword in a two-handed overhead chop, putting his entire physical frame, his bone weight, and his remaining wind-and-flame momentum into a single point of impact right on the central seam of the bronze dragon-lock.

KRA-BOOOOOOM!

The metallic roar echoed for ten miles down the Dragon-Spine Trench.

The ancient bronze dragon-lock split cleanly into two smoking halves, falling away from the doors and crashing into the silt pit below. Deprived of their central keystone, the remaining two star-iron chains slithered off the stone brackets like dead snakes.

For three seconds, the seabed was silent. Then, with a deep, earth-shaking grind that sent plumes of white silt rising toward the surface, the hundred-foot-tall stone doors of the Primal Dragon Grotto slowly slid inward, parting by six feet.

A blinding, warm golden-white light—coupled with a rich, intoxicating tide of uncorrupted Fourth-Grade Spiritual Qi and the unmistakable scent of ten-thousand-year medicinal herbs stored in a dry interior cavern—washed out through the gap, pushing back the freezing black water of the trench.

THUUUUUD.

Behind Ye Fan, the two-hundred-foot carcass of the Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm hit the basalt seabed, kicking up a slow curtain of mud before lying completely still.

Around the threshold, the nineteen surviving Core Formation cultivators of the Azure Wave Sword Sect and the Holy Nether Sea Organization did not charge the open gate. They couldn’t.

Daoist Cang Song dropped to both knees in the silt, his chipped spirit sword falling from his numb fingers as he gasped for breath inside his flickering barrier. Across from him, Daoist Mo Jue and the surviving demonic elders slumped against the broken rocks, their arms hanging limply at their sides, their Dantians completely wrung dry from holding down the Half-Step Nascent Soul beast. Nobody had the strength left to lift a blade against an enemy ten feet away.

Ye Fan landed heavily atop the flat, horned skull of the dead Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm right in front of the parted stone doors.

He dropped to one knee, leaning on the hilt of his heavy black broadsword as he coughed up two mouthfuls of dark, bruised blood. His vision blurred slightly from exhaustion and blood loss, and his ribs throbbed with every ragged breath. Yet as he raised his head and looked through the six-foot gap into the dry, golden-lit interior of the Primal Dragon Grotto—seeing rows of ancient jade pill-shelves and a glowing pool of liquid spirit-vein marrow—a fierce, triumphant light burned in his eyes.

He reached out his bruised left hand toward the radiant gateway. For three slow heartbeats, as the surviving elders behind him stared at his back in exhausted awe, Ye Fan believed he had survived the impossible ambush, conquered the abyssal guardian, and claimed the greatest legacy of the sea domain.

Then, the water temperature across the entire six-thousand-foot trench dropped to absolute zero, and twelve pairs of heavy, pitch-black iron boots stepped out from the shadows of the canyon walls to form an unbroken circle around the basin.