Villain: Manipulating the Heroines into hating the Protagonist

Ten thousand feet beneath the tumultuous waves south of Black-Scale Strait, the light of the upper world had been extinguished since the dawn of the mortal plane. Here lay the Abyssal Trench Courts, a sprawling range of sunken volcanic calderas and glowing hydrothermal vents that had served for ten millennia as the sacred spawning grounds of the Deep-Sea Demon Beast Tribes.

For four hundred years, the deep currents flowing through these calderas had run clear and warm, nourished by the southern root-branches of the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein extending from the Dragon-Spine Trench.

Today, however, the ancient spawning waters were choking in filth.

Thick, viscous ribbons of dark crimson sludge drifted down like sunken fog from the human naval war raging two thousand fathoms overhead at Black-Scale Strait. It was the unrefined dregs of thirty-four shattered warships and six thousand slaughtered human cultivators—fermented by the corpse-rot spells of Blood-Bone True Monarch into a sinking tide of marrow-corroding poison. Worse still, because seventy percent of the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein had been diverted westward ten months prior, the hydrothermal vents along the caldera floor had cooled to a sluggish trickle, lacking the spiritual pressure required to flush the toxic human blood-sludge away from the nesting hollows.

Across three leagues of blackened coral shelves, tens of thousands of translucent eggs and newly hatched Grade 1 and Grade 2 Demon Beast fry floated belly-up in the stagnant, crimson-tinted water, their soft gills rotted away by the sinking human miasma.

At the center of the deepest caldera stood a circular palace constructed from the calcified skulls of ancient whales and pillars of dark abyssal iron.

Resting upon the central stone dais was a sovereign of the deep ocean: Shifting-Tide Patriarch, a Peak Grade 8 Eight-Armed Abyssal Kraken whose cultivation stood on par with a peak Mid-Stage Nascent Soul ancestor. Unlike lower-grade sea creatures, Shifting-Tide Patriarch had compressed his colossal, mountain-sized body into the form of a twelve-foot-tall humanoid sovereign from the waist up, with skin the color of dark indigo slate, a crown of jagged black coral horns, and eyes that burned like twin golden lanterns. Below his waist coiled eight muscular, thirty-foot tentacles lined with toothed bone-suckers that cracked the stone floor whenever they shifted.

Standing thirty paces below the dais, inspecting a handful of dead, rotted serpent fry with trembling fingers, was the second ruler of the southern abyss: Red-Scale Matriarch.

Having crossed into the Early Stage of Grade 8 three centuries ago, the Scarlet Flood-Serpent sovereign had shed her beastly husk to assume a human form of wild, breathtaking ferocity. She stood tall and statuesque, her porcelain skin flushed with a warm pink-gold hue and marked along her collarbones and outer thighs with delicate, shimmering patterns of ruby-red dragon scales. Waist-length hair the color of burning magma floated freely in the water around her bare shoulders. She wore only a battle-wrap of woven crimson sea-silk that struggled to contain the massive, heavy globes of her breasts and the wide, sinuous flare of her hips, while her vertical, golden-red slit pupils blazed with murderous fury.

Beside her stood a ten-foot-tall giant encased from head to toe in interlocking plates of dark-gold shell: Iron-Pincer General, an Early Grade 8 Demon Beast of the Deep-Sea Armored Crab Tribe, carrying a pair of crescent pincer-halberds that weighed eight thousand catties apiece.

”Forty-two nests in the third caldera have gone completely cold this morning!” Red-Scale Matriarch’s voice rang through the water like clashing bronze bells, her massive chest heaving against her crimson sea-silk wrap as she crushed the dead fry in her palm and let the gray ash drift toward the stone floor. ”Three hundred of my Scarlet Flood-Serpent brood—offspring that took fifty years of my core essence to gestate—have choked to death on the rotting corpse-grease sinking down from Blood-Bone True Monarch’s ships! And the spiritual spring beneath my molting cavern has dried up to a muddy puddle!”

She spun around, her waist-length crimson hair whipping through the current as she glared up at the twelve-foot Kraken ruler on the dais.

”How much longer will you sit on that stone throne and count the currents, Shifting-Tide Patriarch?!” Red-Scale Matriarch demanded, baring two rows of sharp, pearlescent fangs. ”First those two-legged human vermin stole the heart of the Dragon-Spine Spiritual Vein, and now their rotting ancestors treat our sacred spawning grounds as a cesspit for their butchered disciples! If we wait another three months, not a single Grade 3 juvenile in the southern sea will survive the winter!”

Shifting-Tide Patriarch slowly uncrossed his indigo arms. One of his thirty-foot tentacles rose from the dais floor, curling around a six-foot-long spiral horn carved from the tusk of an ancient Grade 9 narwhal—the Ancestral Abyssal Conch.

”This Seat waited only for the northern current-scouts to return from the Dragon-Spine Trench and Black-Scale Strait,” Shifting-Tide Patriarch spoke, his deep voice vibrating at a low frequency that caused the whale-bone pillars of the palace to hum. ”Three days ago, my shadow-octopi crept within five leagues of the Primal Dragon Grotto. The bronze dragon-lock was cleaved open by a human broadsword, the Grade 7 Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm was slain by human fire, and the root of the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein was pierced by star-iron stakes.”

Iron-Pincer General clashed his two massive pincer-halberds together, sending a booming shockwave through the caldera. ”Then there is nothing left to investigate! The Myriad Ocean Palace and the Holy Nether Sea Organization have broken the four-hundred-year seabed covenant! Let this general take the armored vanguard north tonight—I will shear the keels off their warships and drag Heavenly Tide True Monarch into the mud!”

”We will not merely sink a few ships at Black-Scale Strait,” Shifting-Tide Patriarch said, rising to his full twelve-foot height as all eight of his colossal tentacles fanned out behind him, unleashing the crushing, oceanic pressure of a Peak Grade 8 Demon King. ”Since the human sects have poisoned our nurseries and stolen our earth veins, we will wash their island chains clean of human footprints and drag their mountain veins down into the sea to replace what was taken!”

Shifting-Tide Patriarch raised the six-foot Ancestral Abyssal Conch to his lips and inhaled a vast torrent of deep-sea water-qi before blowing into the spiral mouthpiece.

WUUUUUUU—OOOOOOOM!

A primordial, bone-shaking horn blast erupted from the ten-thousand-foot caldera.

The sound did not dissipate in the water; carried by the deep-earth ley lines and the crushing bottom currents, the call of the Ancestral Abyssal Conch rolled across three thousand miles of the southern and eastern sea domains.

Along a hundred leagues of dark abyssal trenches, millions of pairs of glowing red, yellow, and azure eyes snapped open in the mud. Swarms of Grade 1 to Grade 4 barbed sharks, armored rays, and lightning-eels abandoned their hunting territories; hundreds of Grade 5 and Grade 6 horned sea-serpents, iron-back turtles, and bone-whales rose from their sunken caves; and thirty-six Grade 7 Demon Beast commanders marshaled their tribal packs beneath the banners of the three Grade 8 sovereigns.

The Grand Beast Tide—a calamity unseen in the Myriad Reefs Sea Region for six centuries—had begun.

Over the first two months following the sounding of the Ancestral Abyssal Conch, the southern frontier of the human sea domain turned into a drowning hell.

The Deep-Sea Demon Beast Tribes did not march directly into the main artillery line of the hundred human warships gathered at Black-Scale Strait. Instead, operating with cold, pack-hunting cunning under the direction of Shifting-Tide Patriarch, the beast legions swept wide across the eastern and southern flanks, targeting the fortified resource islands that supplied the Azure Wave Sword Sect and the Holy Nether Sea Organization with Spirit Stones, iron ore, and medicinal herbs.

On the eighteenth day of the second month, the morning mist surrounding Jade-Tide Island—the largest spirit-iron mining fortress of the Azure Wave Sword Sect, located four hundred miles south of Black-Scale Strait—suddenly turned the color of rust.

Atop the island’s central watchtower, Garrison Commander Daoist Lu, a Mid-Stage Core Formation elder of the Azure Wave Sword Sect, stared out over the battlements with white knuckles.

For ten miles in every direction around the island, the blue ocean surface had disappeared beneath a writhing, solid carpet of chitinous shells, dorsal fins, and spiked tails. Over eighty thousand Grade 1 to Grade 4 Demon Beasts—led by forty Grade 5 Saw-Tooth Manta Rays and eight Grade 6 Three-Horned Sea Wyrms—charged straight into the island’s outer Eight-Trigram Water-Repelling Barrier.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The lower-grade Demon Beasts did not care for their own lives. Driven by the sovereign bloodline command of the Ancestral Abyssal Conch, thousands of three-ton armored crabs and horned sharks slammed their bodies like living cannonballs against the glowing blue barrier dome, while the eight Grade 6 Three-Horned Sea Wyrms reared fifty feet out of the surf, spitting concentrated pillars of corrosive acid-brine onto the upper runic nodes of the formation!

”Hold the array cores! Pour another ten chests of Mid-Grade Spirit Stones into the central altar!” Daoist Lu roared down toward the three hundred righteous disciples manning the cliff bastions.

Two leagues behind the island, aboard a swift logistics supply ship that had been unloading food rations at the rear pier when the sea turned red, Qiu Yun stood at the stern rail, her blue deaconess robes snapping in the gale.

Her hand rested inside her sleeve, gripping a pulsing warning talisman sent directly from Wang Jian’s relay tower two days prior—an order instructing her to keep her vessel outside the main island barrier and abandon the outpost the instant a Grade 8 aura appeared.

”Deaconess Qiu, Commander Lu is signaling our ship to bring our spare Spirit Stones ashore to reinforce the main altar!” her first mate shouted over the deafening roar of sixty thousand beasts battering the outer dome.

Qiu Yun looked past the thrashing horde of sharks and wyrms toward the southern horizon, where a hundred-foot-tall waterspout of boiling crimson steam was racing across the sea at terrifying speed.

”Cut the mooring cables and fire the emergency wind-sails at full overload!” Qiu Yun ordered, her voice sharp and brooking no disobedience. ”That is not a Grade 6 pack leader coming from the south—it is a Grade 8 Demon King! If we stay moored to this pier for ten more breaths, not a single splinter of this ship will survive!”

Before the first mate could even question her, the hundred-foot crimson waterspout arrived five hundred yards in front of Jade-Tide Island’s main gate.

The boiling water parted, and Red-Scale Matriarch stepped out onto the crest of the waves in her tall, voluptuous human form.

Her waist-length crimson hair whipped around her bare, scale-marked shoulders like living tongues of fire, her massive breasts heaving beneath her soaked crimson sea-silk wrap as her golden-red slit eyes fixed upon the trembling blue dome of the human fortress.

”Human rats who drink our vein-marrow and dump your filth on my dead children!” Red-Scale Matriarch’s voice tore across the island, shattering every glass lantern in the watchtowers. ”Swallow the wrath of the Scarlet Serpent Clan!”

She did not summon a human weapon. Raising her right arm, her porcelain forearm thickened slightly with glowing red scales as she swung her bare hand downward in a tearing claw strike!

”Scarlet Flood-Serpent Bloodline Art: Burning-Sea Fang!”

A hundred-and-fifty-foot crescent of condensed, boiling crimson blood-flame—backed by the vast, suffocating weight of an Early Grade 8 Nascent Soul Demon Beast—erupted from her fingernails and crashed squarely into the zenith of Jade-Tide Island’s Eight-Trigram Water-Repelling Barrier!

KRA-SHATTER!

The fortress-grade barrier, designed to withstand a siege by five Core Formation elders, did not even last two breaths against a furious Grade 8 sovereign. The blue runic dome split down the center like an eggshell struck by an iron sledgehammer, exploding into a million harmless sparks!

”The barrier is gone! Fly—!” Daoist Lu barely rose twenty feet off the watchtower roof on his flying sword before Red-Scale Matriarch blurred across the two-hundred-yard gap via Nascent Soul spatial movement.

Appearing directly above the Mid-Stage Core Formation elder in mid-air, Red-Scale Matriarch did not even bother weaving a spell. Her long, muscular right leg—bare from her wide, curvy hip down to her ankle and glistening with faint ruby scales—lashed out in a roundhouse kick that struck Daoist Lu’s crossed flying swords like a falling mountain ridge!

CLANG-CRACK!

Both Top-Grade Magic Tools snapped in half. Red-Scale Matriarch’s bare heel slammed straight into Daoist Lu’s chest, caving in his breastplate and sending his lifeless body shooting downward like a meteor through the roof of the central mine shaft!

Below her, eighty thousand furious Demon Beasts poured over the shattered breakwaters onto the beaches and cliff paths, tearing through the panicked garrison. Hovering above the burning fortress, Red-Scale Matriarch opened her rosy lips and inhaled a massive breath before exhaling a river of crimson serpent-fire down into the island’s central spirit-iron mine, melting the stone supports and collapsing the entire eastern half of Jade-Tide Island into the churning sea!

Five miles north, aboard the fleeing logistics cutter that had escaped just before the barrier fell, Qiu Yun stood at the stern rail, capturing the horrific sight of the sinking island inside a recording jade slip before crushing a long-range transmission talisman addressed to Abyssal Pearl City.

Within that same two-month span, three hundred miles further east, Iron-Pincer General marched his legion of forty thousand armored crabs ashore at Crimson-Tooth Reef—a major blood-refining fortress of the Blood Shark Hall—and used his eight-thousand-catty pincer-halberds to physically shear the island’s mountain peak in half, forcing Su Ning and Daoist Xue Li to retreat northward with the surviving blood-cruisers as six outer human islands were wiped off the sea charts in sixty days.

By the fourth month of the Grand Beast Tide, the chaos in the eastern and southern seas had reached a fever pitch. While the main human armadas hastily pulled back from Black-Scale Strait to defend their crumbling inner island rings, the independent bounty-hunting squads roaming the southern border grew even more desperate to claim the one-hundred-thousand High-Grade Spirit Stone bounty on Ye Fan before the beast tide swallowed the southern waters completely.

Fourteen hundred miles south of Abyssal Pearl City lay the Sunken Bone Archipelago—a treacherous maze of jagged volcanic rocks, whirlpools, and the bleached skeletons of prehistoric sea monsters that formed the lawless buffer zone between human territory and the deep beast trenches.

At dusk on the twelfth day of the fourth month, a howling thunderstorm lashed the archipelago. Towering forty-foot waves crashed against a narrow, half-submerged ridge of petrified whale ribs known as Broken-Rib Reef.

At the center of the slick, rain-swept bone ridge stood Ye Fan.

After four months of relentless flight and twenty-two bloody skirmishes from the Dragon-Spine Trench down to the southern border, the young Mid-Stage Core Formation cultivator looked like a cornered lone wolf. His salt-stained leather mercenary armor had been replaced by a sleeveless coat of dark blue shark-hide stitched over chainmail, leaving his scarred, muscular forearms bare to the freezing rain. Across his back hung the five-element bone scabbard, and in his calloused hands he gripped his four-inch-wide heavy black broadsword.

Surrounding Ye Fan in a tight thirty-yard triangle atop the surrounding bone spires stood three gaunt, identical brothers wearing soaked scarlet cloaks and holding curved, three-pronged iron grappling hooks attached to fifty-foot chains of blood-tempered steel.

They were the Three Blood-Ghosts of Black Reef—Daoist Wu, Daoist Ma, and Daoist Liu—a notorious trio of Late-Stage Core Formation bounty hunters who practiced a linked mind-and-qi cultivation art, allowing them to fight with the seamless coordination of a single three-headed monster.

Hovering ten feet above Ye Fan’s head, held taut by the chains in the three brothers’ left hands, was a glowing red web of barbed metal wires: the Three-Talon Blood-Locking Net, a combined Magic Treasure that sealed the surrounding thirty yards of air to prevent wind-escape techniques.

”Stop wasting your True Essence trying to cut the net from below, Ye Fan!” Daoist Wu, the eldest brother standing on the northern bone spire, rasped over the howling wind as he swung the three-pronged iron hook in his right hand in a tight circle. ”We tracked the lingering scent of your golden flame across four hundred miles of reef! Your left thigh is bleeding from my third brother’s hook, and you’ve been fighting our Three-Talon Blood-Locking Net for an hour! Drop the heavy black broadsword and hand over the remaining herbs from the Primal Dragon Grotto, and we’ll leave your corpse intact before handing your head to the Myriad Ocean Palace!”

Ye Fan did not waste breath replying. In the pouring rain, his breathing was deep, slow, and measured. Blood trickled from a three-inch tear in his left thigh-guard, mixing with the rainwater pooling around his boots on the slippery petrified bone, yet his dark eyes were cold and steady.

He had no room for stray thoughts during life-or-death combat—only the exact distance to the three bone spires, the tension on the three iron chains, and the rhythmic, booming vibration rising through the soles of his boots from the five-hundred-foot abyssal chasm directly beneath Broken-Rib Reef.

”He’s trying to stall until his Golden Core recovers a mouthful of Qi! Take his right arm off!” Daoist Ma snarled from the eastern spire.

WHIRRRR—CLANG!

All three Late-Stage Core Formation brothers moved in the same heartbeat.

Daoist Wu pulled his left-hand chain taut, dropping the Three-Talon Blood-Locking Net three feet lower to force Ye Fan into a crouch, while Daoist Ma and Daoist Liu launched their right-hand three-pronged iron hooks horizontally from the east and west—one hook aimed at Ye Fan’s right wrist, the other aimed at the back of his left knee!

Ye Fan sank his hips low, his boots gripping a grooved ridge in the wet whale-bone.

Instead of retreating, he pivoted ninety degrees to his right, swinging his heavy black broadsword in a low, sweeping arc shrouded in deep-blue glacial fire.

KRA-CLANG!

The flat spine of the four-inch-wide broadsword slammed squarely into Daoist Liu’s incoming iron hook, knocking the three-pronged claw downward into the bone reef where its barbs wedged three inches deep into the petrified bone!

In the exact split-second that Daoist Liu yanked backward on his chain to free the stuck hook, Ye Fan did not pull his broadsword back to block Daoist Ma’s hook coming from the east.

Instead, Ye Fan released his left hand from the broadsword hilt and thrust his bare left forearm straight into the path of Daoist Ma’s flying three-pronged hook!

SHRRRIP!

The razor-sharp iron prongs tore three deep, bloody gouges across Ye Fan’s muscular left forearm, grating against his tempered Spirit Bones! Yet before Daoist Ma could yank the hook back to rip the flesh away, Ye Fan’s bleeding left hand snapped shut like an iron vise around the shaft of the hook, locking it against his forearm!

”What?!” Daoist Ma gasped on the eastern spire.

Using the taut chain in Daoist Ma’s hand as a lever and his own bleeding forearm as the anchor, Ye Fan ignited the Peak Mid-Stage Core Formation Qi in his legs and stomped his right boot down onto the narrow bridge of petrified bone between them!

”Heavenly Gale Calamity Sword: Undertow Cleave!”

Ye Fan did not swing the broadsword at Daoist Ma. Pulling violently on the iron chain with his bleeding left arm to drag Daoist Ma half a step forward off his spire, Ye Fan drove the heavy black broadsword—blazing with deep-blue glacial frost and a hidden core of golden purifying flame—straight down into the cracked petrified whale-rib directly beneath his own feet, while simultaneously kicking a fist-sized pouch of crushed, blood-soaked Six-Thousand-Year Thunder-Attracting Kelp off the edge of the bone bridge into the churning black chasm below!

BOOOOOOM!

The downward strike of the broadsword shattered the middle span of Broken-Rib Reef into falling boulders, and down in the dark water fifty fathoms below, the crushed pouch of Thunder-Attracting Kelp mixed with the fresh, fiery Core Formation blood dripping from Ye Fan’s left forearm exploded into a blinding blue-gold scent cloud!

”Idiot! You destroyed your own footing!” Daoist Wu yelled from the northern spire, leaping into the air and pulling the Three-Talon Blood-Locking Net inward to wrap Ye Fan up as the bone ridge collapsed.

Before the red wire net could close around Ye Fan’s shoulders, the black water in the five-hundred-foot chasm beneath the reef turned blindingly white with millions of volts of wild, natural sea-lightning!

ROOOOOOOOAR—CRACK!

A colossal shadow—ninety feet long, covered in jagged, cobalt-blue metallic scales, and crowned with a fifteen-foot dorsal fin that crackled like a miniature thunderstorm—erupted vertically out of the chasm at terrifying speed!

It was a Grade 7 Thunder-Fin Leviathan—an apex Late-Stage Core Formation Demon Beast that Ye Fan had spotted lurking at the bottom of the chasm two hours ago before deliberately luring the Three Blood-Ghosts onto the bridge directly above its lair!

Enraged by the falling boulders striking its snout and driven into a feeding frenzy by the scent of the Thunder-Attracting Kelp and Ye Fan’s potent blood, the ninety-foot Leviathan breached straight up through the center of the collapsing reef—passing right through the gap between the eastern and western spires!

”A Grade 7 Thunder-Fin Leviathan?!” Daoist Ma’s eyes bulged in sheer terror as the ninety-foot monster’s gaping jaws rose directly beneath his airborne boots—and worse still, the iron chain wrapped around Daoist Ma’s left wrist was still hooked to Ye Fan’s broadsword wedged in the falling rock!

”Brother Ma, cut the chain—!” Daoist Wu screamed.

Too late. As Ye Fan kicked off the falling boulder and somersaulted backward toward the northern rock shelf, the rising snout of the Grade 7 Thunder-Fin Leviathan slammed straight into the taut iron chains of the Three-Talon Blood-Locking Net!

SNAP—ZAAAAAP!

A blinding arc of blue-white Grade 7 beast lightning shot down the wet iron chains into the hands of Daoist Ma and Daoist Liu!

Both brothers went rigid in mid-air as the beast lightning paralyzed their meridians for half a breath. Before Daoist Liu could recover, the Leviathan’s fifteen-foot lightning dorsal fin sliced sideways like a guillotine blade, shearing straight through Daoist Liu’s waist and cutting the third brother cleanly in half in a spray of charred blood!

At the same instant, the Leviathan’s cavernous jaws snapped shut around Daoist Ma’s legs, dragging the screaming second brother down toward the churning surf!

”Second Brother! Third Brother!” Daoist Wu shrieked in madness atop the northern spire, throwing two Talisman Treasures downward to blast the Leviathan’s eye.

Before the talismans could even ignite, a wet, blood-streaked shadow landed silently on the slick rock three paces behind Daoist Wu’s back.

Having used the upward hydraulic draft of the breaching Leviathan to vault onto the northern spire, Ye Fan pivoted on his front heel. His bleeding left arm hung at his side, but his right hand gripped the hilt of his heavy black broadsword close to his hip.

Daoist Wu felt the murderously cold wind at his neck and spun around, raising his remaining iron hook to parry.

Ye Fan’s eyes were devoid of mercy. Channeling every ounce of his waist and shoulder torque into a single, blinding horizontal draw-slash, he unleashed the pure, uncloaked core of his golden purifying flame along the razor edge of the black steel.

SHING!

The four-inch-wide black broadsword flashed across Daoist Wu’s throat faster than the rain could fall. The iron hook in Daoist Wu’s hand was cleaved in two, and the eldest brother’s head flew ten feet into the storm, his neck stump cauterized by golden fire before his headless corpse tumbled into the sea.

Down in the churning white surf below the spire, the ninety-foot Grade 7 Thunder-Fin Leviathan crushed the last life out of Daoist Ma inside its jaws—only to let out a pained roar as Daoist Ma’s dying hand detonated three blood-mines inside the beast’s throat, blowing a ragged, bleeding hole through the softer scales beneath its lower jaw!

Standing atop the northern bone spire in the pouring rain, Ye Fan looked down at the thrashing, wounded Grade 7 Leviathan below.

Instead of fleeing while the beast was injured from swallowing the dead bounty hunter’s blood-mines, a fierce, ruthless light flashed in Ye Fan’s dark eyes.

”You want my blood?” Ye Fan growled into the thunder. ”Then pay for it with your Grade 7 Beast Core!”

Gripping his heavy black broadsword with both hands, Ye Fan leaped forty feet straight down off the bone spire into the boiling lightning-surf, landing directly atop the wounded Leviathan’s thrashing head to begin a brutal, two-hour life-or-death struggle in the waves.

By midnight, when the storm finally passed over Broken-Rib Reef, the ninety-foot carcass of the Grade 7 Thunder-Fin Leviathan floated dead in the crimson foam, its skull split open to the brain pan.

Dragging himself into a concealed underwater air-cave half a mile away with his left arm broken and his body covered in lightning burns, Ye Fan clutched the fist-sized, crackling blue Grade 7 Thunder-Fin Beast Core and the three spatial pouches of the dead bounty hunters in his bloodied hand.

As he collapsed against the cold cave wall and activated the milky-white time barrier of his Temporal Jade Bead to enter seclusion, Ye Fan closed his eyes—and once again, in the darkness behind his eyelids, he saw Shen Mengqi’s flushed, exquisite face resting against Wang Jian’s shoulder while she looked down at him like dirt on the floor of the Dragon-Spine Trench.

”Wait for me in Abyssal Pearl City...” Ye Fan whispered through cracked, bleeding lips as he pressed the violent Grade 7 lightning core against his chest to temper his Golden Core with raw thunder. ”Even if you have Nascent Soul monsters guarding your bed... I will sharpen this blade on the bones of every beast in this sea until I can cleave your head from your shoulders!”

Fourteen hundred miles north of the Sunken Bone Archipelago, as the Grand Beast Tide entered its fifth and sixth months, Abyssal Pearl City stood like an unshakeable granite mountain amid a rising sea of chaos.

Because forty fleeing merchant convoys and twelve defeated patrol squadrons from the eastern islands had crowded into the outer anchorage zones seeking protection, the daily harbor fees collected by Shangguan Wan’er had reached astronomical sums.

On the first morning of the fifth month, inside the sunlit municipal war hall of the City Lord’s Manor, a formal defense council was underway.

At the center of the long jade table stood Yue Lingshan, dressed in her immaculate white Thousand-Year Spirit-Silk robes, using a glowing pointer-wand to indicate twelve flashing red runes along the southern edge of the regional sea chart. Seated around the table in their full, dignified ceremonial regalia were Wang Jian, City Lord Lin Wanyue, Executive Shangguan Wan’er, the two revered Nascent Soul guests Senior Mu Lianhua and Senior Su Binglan, High Elder Bing Yun, Sect Leader Hua Yimei, and Daoist Shen Mengqi.

Looking around the room, Yue Lingshan felt a deep sense of gratitude that so many virtuous, powerful female cultivators had allied with her husband to protect their home.

”During my four-week survey of the southern reef chain, seventy-two of our deep-water pressure beacons recorded continuous southward and westward migrations of Grade 4 and Grade 5 sea packs,” Yue Lingshan reported earnestly, her dark eyes clear and focused. ”The Grand Beast Tide has already destroyed six outer resource islands belonging to the Azure Wave Sword Sect and Blood Shark Hall. Worse, because so many merchant ships are anchored outside our breakwaters, the concentrated spiritual aura of the harbor is acting like a lantern in the dark.”

”Sister Lingshan is right to be cautious,” City Lord Lin Wanyue spoke in a poised, regal voice, sitting straight on her throne with her hands folded neatly in her deep-blue silk lap—giving no hint that her thighs beneath the heavy skirt were still faintly sore from Wang Jian’s rough hands two nights ago. ”If a stray wave of five or ten thousand mid-grade Demon Beasts breaks off from the southern front and strikes our commercial anchorage, the panic among the foreign ship captains could disrupt our foundry shipments.”

”I have designed a twelve-node reinforcement ring for the western and southern breakwater locks,” Yue Lingshan said, turning warmly toward Wang Jian. ”Husband, if you permit me to take thirty array disciples and eight hundred High-Grade Spirit Stones to the western sea-wall bastion, I can weave a secondary Water-Crushing Reef Formation outside the main dome. However, locking the twelve nodes into the seabed will require twelve days of continuous chanting at the western sea-wall tower.”

Wang Jian smiled gently at his wife, stepping forward to touch her shoulder with affectionate care. ”The western sea-wall is five leagues from the central manor, Lingshan. Take the six newly forged Profound Iron Dao Soldiers and two squads of municipal guards to stand watch while you weave the array nodes. Once your twelve-day locking sequence is complete, I will come to inspect the western locks myself.”

”Thank you, Husband! With Sisters Binglan, Lianhua, and Mengqi staying here at the central peak to help you monitor the deep-earth veins, I can focus completely on the sea-wall!” Yue Lingshan said brightly, bowing politely to the revered seniors around the table before gathering her formation scrolls and departing with her disciples toward the western harbor battlements.

For an hour after Yue Lingshan’s white-robed figure departed the manor compound, the remaining council members calmly finished reviewing the commercial ledgers and the intelligence reports from Black-Scale Strait.

Then, once the heavy ironwood doors of the war hall were bolted and Wang Jian stepped onto the private descending lift leading down to the newly constructed Star-Pearl Pleasure Pavilion carved inside the warm cliffside grotto beneath Azure Peak, the polite, sisterly masks of the women melted away like spring snow under a blazing sun.

Inside the sprawling, two-tiered Star-Pearl Pleasure Pavilion—where warm cascades of floral-scented spring water flowed down walls of polished pink coral into a wide, shallow bathing lagoon surrounded by silk-draped divans—seven of Wang Jian’s most breathtaking beauties immediately stripped off their heavy, formal public robes.

Within three minutes, the austere Nascent Soul Grandmasters, the cold Sword Fairy, the noble Sect Leader, and the dignified City Lord had transformed into a shameless, competing harem dressed in the most decadent, revealing outfits Wang Jian had commissioned from the Golden-Scale silk weavers.

Su Binglan and Mu Lianhua, the two supreme Early-Stage Nascent Soul pillars of the island, stepped out from behind a mother-of-pearl changing screen first.

Su Binglan wore a bridal-white Frost-Spider Lace teddy that was completely transparent when damp; the delicate lace cups were cut in half-moons that supported the undersides of her massive, snow-white breasts while leaving the entire upper globes and her stiff, dark-rose nipples jutting out in the warm air. High-cut lace straps rode high up on her wide, luscious hips, framing her smooth lower mound and leaving her round, alabaster buttocks completely bare behind her.

Beside her, Mu Lianhua wore a crimson-and-gold Phoenix-Tail Cheongsam that had been tailored without a back or sides—held together only by thin gold chains stretching across her narrow waist and curvy hips, while the front silk panel featured a wide diamond cutout from her collarbones down to her navel that pushed her huge, creamy breasts together so tightly they overflowed the golden trim with every step.

Right behind them came Shen Mengqi and Liu Ruyan, followed by City Lord Lin Wanyue and the mother-and-daughter pair Hua Yimei and Hua Ling’er.

Shen Mengqi—whose Peak Late-Stage Core Formation aura now carried a seductive, bone-melting Yin chill—wore a sheer black silk kimono left completely untied in the front, paired with black silk thigh-high stockings and a silver belly-chain dangling a tiny crystal drop directly between the slick, hairless lips of her core.

And at the edge of the warm pink-coral bathing lagoon knelt Hua Yimei and Hua Ling’er. Having served Wang Jian together for years since the conquest of the Fragrance Melody Sect, the mother and daughter wore matching two-piece outfits of wet, clinging lavender-and-rose gauze tied with silk ribbons at their necks and hips—their four massive, heavy breasts glistening with fragrant camellia oil and their gold nipple rings connected by a single thin gold chain linking mother to daughter!

”Did you see how earnestly Lingshan thanked us for staying behind at the central peak to ’monitor the deep-earth veins’ with Master?” Hua Yimei laughed in a low, sultry purr as she knelt beside Wang Jian’s divan, lifting her massive, oil-slicked breasts with both hands to press them flat against his bare, muscular thigh while her daughter Hua Ling’er knelt on the other side, eagerly unfastening Wang Jian’s dark silk trousers. ”While that sweet, innocent wife of yours spends the next twelve days chanting on the cold sea-wall five leagues away, she has no idea her respected seniors and sisters are down here fighting to swallow every drop of her husband’s Yang essence!”

”Mother, stop talking and hold still—you’re pulling the gold chain on my nipples!” Hua Ling’er gasped with a shameless giggle as Wang Jian’s thick, scorching manhood sprang free from his trousers, slapping heavily against Hua Ling’er’s flushed cheek and making the chain linking her pierced nipples to her mother’s chest jingle taut across Wang Jian’s lap. ”Look how hard Master is already! Master, let Mother and me wrap all four of our oiled breasts around your divine rod together!”

Wang Jian leaned back against the pile of pink silk pillows on the wide poolside divan, a dark, appreciative smile curving his lips as he looked down at the mother-and-daughter duo kneeling between his knees, with Su Binglan, Mu Lianhua, Shen Mengqi, Lin Wanyue, and Liu Ruyan gathering eagerly around the cushions.

”Both of you have grown bolder since advancing in the Core Formation Realm,” Wang Jian rumbled, reaching down with both large, calloused hands to grab Hua Yimei’s heavy right breast and Hua Ling’er’s lush left breast, squishing the four camellia-oiled globes tightly around his pulsing, rock-hard shaft while the gold chain between their nipples rubbed directly against the sensitive underside of his glans. ”Let’s see if your rhythmic coordination matches your mouths.”

”Watch us closely, Master!” Hua Yimei moaned huskily, pressing her shoulder tight against her daughter’s shoulder as both women moved their torsos up and down in synchronized, sliding strokes—encasing Wang Jian’s scorching length in a hot, slippery valley of four massive, bouncing breasts and clinking gold rings while their two hot tongues darted out at the top of every stroke to swirl around the swollen purple tip together!

Standing beside the divan, watching the mother and daughter service Wang Jian with such practiced, shameless skill, Shen Mengqi felt her Nine-Turn Profound Yin Scripture surge with intense, competitive heat.

Stepping out of her untied black silk kimono so she wore only her black thigh-high stockings and silver belly-chain, the former righteous Sword Fairy climbed onto the divan on Wang Jian’s right side, while Su Binglan climbed onto his left.

”Master,” Shen Mengqi whispered breathlessly against his neck, taking Wang Jian’s right hand and placing it roughly onto her own full, cool breast while she rubbed her soaking wet core against his muscular hip. ”Ever since you pushed me to the Peak of the Late-Stage Core Formation Realm two months ago, my Golden Core has been humming day and night. When I sat across from Lingshan in the war hall twenty minutes ago, my inner thighs were already wet beneath my righteous robes just thinking about what you would do to me once she left... Please, don’t let Yimei and Ling’er waste your seed on their chests! Put it straight into my Yin cauldron!”

”Mengqi has become the greediest one among us,” Su Binglan murmured with a flushed, breathtaking smile on Wang Jian’s left, pressing her massive, lace-framed breasts against his chest as she guided his left hand down between her wide, alabaster thighs—where her Pure Glacial Yin was already dripping over her pearl-string thong. ”Master, Lianhua and I are genuine Nascent Soul Grandmasters. If you wish to keep your Initial Stage foundation polished while the beast tide rages in the south, our Nascent Soul Yin essence is far richer than a Core Formation girl’s.”

”Then prove it with your hips instead of your titles,” Wang Jian growled darkly.

Pulling his oil-glistening shaft out from between Hua Yimei and Hua Ling’er’s heaving breasts, Wang Jian grabbed Shen Mengqi by her narrow waist and flipped her onto her hands and knees across the center of the velvet divan, while simultaneously pulling the Nascent Soul Ice Palace Mistress Su Binglan down onto her back right underneath Shen Mengqi—so that Su Binglan’s face lay directly beneath Shen Mengqi’s swaying breasts and their two wide, curvy backsides were positioned within inches of each other!

Without a second of gentle warm-up, Wang Jian gripped Shen Mengqi’s porcelain-white, juicy hips with both hands and drove his thick, scorching manhood straight to the hilt inside the former Sword Fairy’s freezing, soaking core!

”AAAAAH! MASTER!” Shen Mengqi’s high, ringing cry echoed off the pink coral walls of the pavilion as her back arched violently, her raven hair tumbling down over Su Binglan’s chest below her.

Wang Jian hammered his hips forward with savage, relentless power. Every deep, bone-shaking thrust slammed his heavy pelvis against Shen Mengqi’s round, wobbling buttocks with a loud smack, driving her forward so that her heavy, swaying breasts brushed and slapped across Su Binglan’s flushed face and massive chest underneath her!

”Hnnngh—! Yes! Harder, Master!” Shen Mengqi sobbed, her fingers clawing into the silk sheets as Wang Jian’s Nascent Soul Yang essence poured into her Peak Core Formation meridians like liquid magma. ”Look at me, Sister Binglan... the proud Palace Mistress of the Ice Heart Palace is lying beneath my chest watching Master breed me like a bitch!”

Down on her back beneath Shen Mengqi, Su Binglan’s deep blue eyes blazed with humiliated arousal and competitive fire. Reaching up with both alabaster hands, the Nascent Soul Grandmaster grabbed Shen Mengqi’s swinging breasts and sucked hard on the sword fairy’s stiff nipple while lifting her own long, white-stockinged legs into the air—spreading her wide, lush hips right beneath Shen Mengqi’s thighs to offer her own dripping, pearl-framed Nascent Soul core to Wang Jian!

”Master, look right below Mengqi’s thighs!” Su Binglan moaned shamelessly, pulling her pearl-string thong aside with two fingers to reveal her glistening pink entrance. ”Her Core Formation passage is already spasming after thirty strokes! Pull out of her and plunge straight down into my Glacial Yin furnace!”

Wang Jian smirked, slapping Shen Mengqi’s juicy backside hard before pulling his glistening, throbbing shaft out of her quivering core and angling his hips three inches lower—slamming his entire scorching length straight down to the hilt inside Su Binglan’s tight, icy-hot Nascent Soul passage!

”EEEYAAAH!” Su Binglan arched her back off the cushions, wrapping her long, white-stockinged legs tightly around Wang Jian’s waist while Shen Mengqi collapsed forward onto her elbows atop Su Binglan’s stomach, moaning into the Ice Palace Mistress’s neck as Wang Jian pounded both women into the mattress together!

Around the divan and inside the warm, flower-strewn bathing lagoon, Mu Lianhua, Lin Wanyue, Liu Ruyan, Hua Yimei, and Hua Ling’er did not wait passively.

Mu Lianhua climbed behind Wang Jian on the divan, pressing her huge, diamond-cutout-framed breasts against his sweaty muscular back while her hands reached around his ribs to fondle his chest and kiss his jawline. At the same time, Hua Yimei and Hua Ling’er crawled to the side of the divan where Shen Mengqi and Su Binglan were tangled together—the mother and daughter lowering their heads to eagerly lick the mingled Yang and Yin juices trickling down from the two women’s joined hips while rubbing their own oil-slicked breasts against Wang Jian’s flexing thighs!

For all twelve days and nights while Yue Lingshan remained stationed at the western sea-wall tower weaving the outer reef arrays, the Star-Pearl Pleasure Pavilion echoed continuously with breathless cries, the rhythmic slapping of bare flesh, and the splash of warm spring water.

Wang Jian showed boundless, tyrannical stamina. When Su Binglan and Shen Mengqi were left twitching and overflowing with his thick seed on the divan, he carried Hua Yimei and Hua Ling’er into the shallow pink-coral lagoon—holding the daughter’s curvy legs wrapped around his waist in the warm water while her mother knelt on the submerged stone step behind her, taking turns pounding the mature Sect Leader and her luscious daughter until their gold nipple-chain snapped from the violent bouncing of their four massive breasts. From the lagoon, he bent Mu Lianhua, Lin Wanyue, and Liu Ruyan over the padded coral balustrades, using their lush, mature bodies through the night until every single woman in his hidden court had her meridians nourished to the brim and her mind utterly intoxicated by his dominance.

On the final evening of the sixth month, six full months after the Deep-Sea Demon Beast Tribes had first sounded the Ancestral Abyssal Conch, a cold autumn gale swept across the high stone observation spire atop Azure Peak.

Having spent the afternoon inspecting the completed western sea-wall locks alongside a beaming, proud Yue Lingshan before sending her to oversee the inner city array-lamp maintenance, Wang Jian stood alone at the northern balustrade of the summit spire, flanked by Su Binglan, Mu Lianhua, and Shangguan Wan’er in their formal robes.

Wang Jian closed his eyes for three breaths and extended his Nascent Soul mental awareness southward, resonating with the microscopic wisp of Verdant Eternal Spring Essence fused inside the crystalline core of Ye Fan’s broadsword fourteen hundred miles away.

Through the faint, indestructible wood-life link, Wang Jian felt the distant beacon sitting stationary inside a time-distorted pocket in the Sunken Bone Archipelago—surrounded by the violent, crackling aura of a freshly refined Grade 7 lightning core and a surging Core Formation pressure that had just crossed from the Mid Stage into the Late-Stage Core Formation Realm.

”The boy survived the Three Blood-Ghosts and swallowed a Grade 7 Thunder-Fin Leviathan core inside his temporal treasure,” Wang Jian murmured, opening his dark, starlit eyes with a calm, cold gleam. ”Hatred truly is the finest fuel for a hunting dog. Let him keep grinding his teeth in the southern bone reefs for another two or three years until he reaches the Peak of Core Formation.”

Before Shangguan Wan’er could reply, the master defensive compass mounted on the central basalt pedestal of the spire suddenly let out three sharp, urgent chimes!

A projection of the western and southern ocean sectors rose from the pedestal. Fifty leagues southeast of Abyssal Pearl City, where the main torrent of the Grand Beast Tide was pushing northward toward Black-Scale Strait, a massive crimson cluster of deep-sea pressure signatures had abruptly broken off from the main beast host, altering its course ninety degrees to march straight westward along the seabed toward Abyssal Pearl City!

Shangguan Wan’er stepped forward, her fingers flying across the Abyssal Star-Iron beads of her Celestial-Tide Abacus as she decoded the acoustic readings from the outer seabed buoys.

”Master, our deep-trench buoys at the fifty-league line have locked onto their weight and spiritual signatures!” Shangguan Wan’er reported, her pale blue eyes narrowing. ”It is an elite vanguard column of fifty thousand armored sea beasts, accompanied by twelve Grade 6 and Grade 7 Demon Beast commanders. And at the center of the column marches an Early Grade 8 Demon King—Iron-Pincer General of the Deep-Sea Armored Crab Tribe!”

”Iron-Pincer General,” Su Binglan said, stepping up beside Wang Jian as a cold frost mist gathered around her jade-white hands. ”Among the three sovereigns under Shifting-Tide Patriarch, his dark-gold carapace possesses the toughest physical defense—comparable to a Mid-Stage Nascent Soul body refiner. He ignored four closer human islands to turn straight toward our waters.”

”Deep-Sea Armored Crabs feed on concentrated earth-mineral essence during their shell-hardening cycles,” Mu Lianhua noted, her crimson robes fluttering in the wind. ”Even with Sister Lingshan’s Grade-4 Void-Shrouding Sanctuary Formation masking our islands from human spiritual scans, a Grade 8 crab general marching along the ocean floor can smell the rich mineral vitality of our dual Fourth-Grade Spiritual Veins through the bedrock itself.”

”If we allow fifty thousand sea beasts and a Grade 8 Demon King to reach the outer harbor of Abyssal Pearl City,” Shangguan Wan’er calculated rapidly, ”we would have to unleash all three of our Nascent Soul domains in front of the forty foreign merchant convoys and the palace spies docked in the bay. Within three days, both Heavenly Tide True Monarch and Blood-Bone True Monarch would deduce that Abyssal Pearl City is the hidden hand that drained the Dragon-Spine Trench.”

Wang Jian looked down at the glowing blue map on the pedestal, his gaze settling on a sunken, bowl-shaped depression on the ocean floor fifty miles west of the city’s outer reefs: the Dead-Kelp Basin.

”Iron-Pincer General will never come within fifty miles of our harbor walls, and the foreign merchants in our bay will never see a single Nascent Soul spell,” Wang Jian said, his voice carrying the chill of an executioner’s blade.

He reached out and placed his finger squarely on the narrow eastern entrance of the Dead-Kelp Basin.

”Wan’er, have Wanyue release three barrels of diluted, low-grade herb dregs into the southern tidal current tomorrow morning to draw a stray pack of two thousand Grade 3 and Grade 4 reef-sharks toward the main harbor,” Wang Jian ordered smoothly. ”Lingshan and Wanyue will lead the municipal garrison to publicly repel that minor shark pack with the new western sea-wall arrays—convincing every spy in the city that Abyssal Pearl City barely survived a glancing brush with the beast tide using Core Formation defenses.”

Wang Jian turned his dark eyes toward Su Binglan and Mu Lianhua, his hand resting on the hilt of his saber Blood’s Thirst.

”Meanwhile, the three of us will take the flagship stealth galleon and forty-eight Profound Iron Array Anchors out to the Dead-Kelp Basin tonight. Since Iron-Pincer General has walked all this way to deliver a Grade 8 Demon Core and a set of indestructible carapace armor to my forge, it would be rude not to bury his entire vanguard in the dark.”