The key to the Juque lay in anchoring to the ley lines below and resonating with the stars above.
When the celestial gravitation inverted into repulsion and the ley lines' repulsion inverted into attraction, the Prosperity—plummeting from the heavens like a massive meteorite, stacked to the brim with armor—had transformed into an unprecedented, overloaded dump truck!
Who gave a damn whether you were Desolation-grade or Extinction-grade, a calamity beast or a common brute...
It was just going to fucking ram you.
Under this earth-shattering collision, the mere aftershocks raised terrifying waves hundreds of meters high across the sea. Gales like solid walls blew the entire fleet backward.
At the very center of the impact, the newly coalesced head of the Azure Jiao was already riddled with fissures, and jammed halfway into its colossal maw was an iron-gray hull.
It couldn't even manage a wail or a hiss.
It could only whimper and whine.
Because the hull was still drilling relentlessly inward!
It was as though an invisible giant hand were forcibly shoving the massive Prosperity—an essence of the Desolate Ruins rivaling mountains and seas—down its throat.
Disregarding its rejection and nausea: Eat it!
Drop the act—you like it like this, don't you?
Amid wet squelching and churning sounds, the giant serpent's eyes rolled back completely white. Had its avatar been fully formed, a chilling bulge would surely have protruded right through its throat.
Boiling darkness expanded incessantly. The serpent thrashed its head again and again, yet couldn't spit the Prosperity back out.
The Azure Jiao was furious.
Right then, continuous shattering sounds rang out. The two giant serpents coiled around the Titan giant had completely burned into charred cinders.
And then...
When that indistinct face slowly lifted to look over, it seemed to wear a bone-chilling grin.
And so, beneath the giant serpent's despairing gaze, Peñarosa took a step back, another step, and yet another... until, having backed up a great distance, he broke into a sprint toward it, toward the Prosperity!
Trampling the ocean, whipping up a tempest.
Mid-dash, the giant suddenly leaped into the air, driving the full violence of the Swarm—buttressed by Tianyuan—straight onto the Juque!
A fucking flying kick!
BOOM!
The Prosperity punched clean through the avatar serpent's maw, driving all the way into the Azure Jiao's gut!
A final, muffled wail echoed.
Immediately followed by the sound of shattering... from the inside out.
Like a volcanic eruption, the serpent's jaws gaped wide, unable to stop itself from retching and heaving. Darkness surged out like a tide, while the serpent head continued to rapidly swell, swelling, swelling...
Until it completely exploded!
Darkness spouted like a torrent; a rain of blood and bone fragments rocketed into the sky, scattering down as a downpour. Meanwhile, the fully intact Prosperity, drenched in crimson, returned once more to the open horizon.
What exploded was not merely the serpent head. Shattering alongside the Azure Jiao's avatar were the merfolk across the entire sea zone; amid shrill screams, they were swallowed by the shared, distributed damage.
One after another, they burst into blood mist, wiped out to the last!
Yet as the dense blood mist dispersed, the faint silhouette of a human-faced serpent seemed to manifest once again!
Upon that face, eerily resembling a human's, hung raw, profound malice.
Slitted pupils glared unblinkingly, an unyielding specter!
Having firmly memorized the auras of Peñarosa and the Prosperity, the spirit of the calamity beast sank back into the bloody mist and vanished.
Evidently, it was holding a grudge!
Just you wait!
A gaze like that sent a prickle down even Peñarosa's spine.
A beast was a beast; it really had zero sense of reason. It had botched its own ambush, gotten blown to bits, and still had the gall to nurse a grudge?
He laughed out of sheer annoyance.
You brute, you really don't give a damn about the Holy Tree family, do you?
Fine. Come down Empire Avenue—see if I don't rip your head clean off!
A long while later, a solemn-faced Ji Jue finally emerged from the Prosperity.
Fashionably late.
Looking as though he had suffered immense exhaustion, his steps were faintly unsteady.
He had mainly wasted some time using the Veil to stash away the massive chunk of remnant spirit he had just forcefully snatched from the Azure Jiao's avatar...
Good thing he had reacted fast and struck ruthlessly!
He had nearly made the trip empty-handed!
Now, beneath Peñarosa's grateful gaze, Ji Jue merely shrugged with a self-deprecating smile. "From here on out, I'm afraid peace and quiet will be hard to come by."
"Rest assured, Mr. Ji. Whatever consequences stem from this, my family will shoulder them entirely!"
Peñarosa bowed slightly, placing a hand over his chest against the crest of the Holy Tree family, nodding in thanks. "The Holy Tree always repays a kindness. We will never let your goodwill be wasted."
"Really?"
Ji Jue's eyes lit up as he looked toward Peñarosa's right hand tucked behind his back. "Then can you let me feel it?"
"..."
Peñarosa took a subconscious step back, clenching the rifle scope in his hand as his expression twitched.
As if faced with an agonized dilemma, no matter how hurt or innocent Ji Jue looked, he wouldn't budge an inch.
He could only grit his teeth, harden his heart, and look away to dodge Ji Jue's gaze.
"I'm sorry, but no."
The honor of the Holy Tree family forbade him from leaving a kindness unrequited. But the teachings of the Holy Tree family also forbade him from handing such a precious treasure over to an artisan!
That was an artisan...
And a purebred Embers artisan of the Ring of Taiyi, the kind that appeared once every few decades!
Once an item landed in his hands, could you ever fucking expect to get it back?
Even if you did get it back, could you expect it to still be the original item?
Anything else was negotiable. This alone was strictly off-limits!
Why don't we settle in cash instead? Supplies and materials work too. Name your price.
Just as he was agonizing in hesitation, he heard Ji Jue's chuckling voice: "Then explaining the applications of the Way of Conquest wouldn't be a problem, would it?"
"Huh?"
Peñarosa froze, looking up in disbelief.
Wait, man, what do you even want that for?
As it turned out, the 'open a window' principle held true everywhere.
With the joke beforehand, the condition that followed was immediately open to consideration—while the inheritance of the Way of Conquest was profound and exquisite, it wasn't exclusive to one family. The Federation had it too!
Important as it was, the crucial parts were the Sacrificial Lord and the Legacy Burnt Offering; studying the rest wouldn't do you any good anyway!
Across the whole world, very few Swarms were compatible with this set of inheritances. Could he possibly poach the Knights of Homecoming from the Red States?
Don't kid yourself—those priests guarded their heritage more jealously than their own lives!
"It's doable, but..."
"Don't worry, nothing touching the core, just a few small questions," Ji Jue said with a wave of his hand, assuaging his doubts. "Just an overview will do. After all, this system happens to mesh quite well with my Deus Ex Machina."
"I see."
Peñarosa broke into a wide smile. Recalling Ji Jue's dossier, he nodded repeatedly. "No problem at all. Leave it to me—I'll tell you everything I know."
"That's wonderful."
Ji Jue smiled as well, looking just as sincere, rustic, and radiant.
The two men shook hands in mutual appreciation, their bond seeming to deepen by a degree, looking on the verge of swearing brotherhood the next second... Leaving only Haming, who had just crawled up from the bottom of the ship, unable to smile.
No, Colonel, do you even remember what you came here for?
Yet having just caused such a colossal blunder, Haming dared not utter a peep. He could only bite a handkerchief and weep little pearls in solitude, watching helplessly as his patron grew closer and closer to Ji Jue, strolling side by side like family.
In short, the expedition was a resounding success: the banquet resumed, and it was time to head home!
Cue the music, keep on dancing!
Unfortunately, there was no music, and there was no dance.
Just as the fleet verified that no remnants remained and prepared to sail home, everyone heard it...
In the deep of the night, a vast resonation rising from the ocean's deepest depths!
It sounded like a whale song.
Yet there was nothing ethereal or graceful about it; on the contrary, it was venomous and ravenous, like some starving behemoth rising from the deep, roaring into the dark!
On the magnified satellite imagery, phosphorescent fires surged like a tide across the ocean surface. Swarms of fully hatched Sea Locusts burst from the water, soaring willfully and blotting out the sky!
Even more aberrant schools of fish coalesced, forming a dark torrent visible to the naked eye on the sea's surface, stretching in from afar and branching out in all directions...
And so, before everyone's eyes, the vast tide of calamity beasts swept across the waters less than two hundred li away, spreading outward and vanishing into the distance.
Dead silence.
In the long silence, the lingering echo of that ravenous sound seemed still to reverberate.
No one spoke.
At this moment, everyone could only stare blankly at the horrifying tide sweeping past the distant horizon.
Subconsciously, they held their breath.
Until, after a long silence, a soft sigh broke it.
"...Head back early, everyone."
Ji Jue drew back his gaze and walked expressionlessly toward the Prosperity. "The fine autumn is over."
"Winter," he said, "has arrived."
Late on the night of November 3, Ji Jue reported to the Security Bureau: a large-scale biological disaster had appeared in the western Endless Sea, north of the Seven Cities, preceded by confirmed convergence of numerous merfolk tribes, suggesting a premature hatching and revival of the Azure Jiao!
The situation drew high priority from the Haizhou Security Bureau, which rushed an urgent report to Midtown. Yet before Midtown could respond, new intelligence came pouring in.
In the early hours of November 4, grim news arrived from the White River Belt in the northern Endless Sea, near the polar permafrost: the North Sea Kraken, known as the 'Lord of White River,' had entered an unprecedented period of activity. Multiple clues indicated that this veteran Extinction-grade calamity beast might be on the verge of stepping into the Terminus-grade.
On the same day, in the Huangzhou region of the eastern Endless Sea, Leviathan, a Terminus-grade calamity beast that had been dead for many years, showed signs of reactivation...
On November 5, a magnitude-12 earthquake struck the seas east of Mid-Continent. Satellite imagery confirmed the hatching of a calamity beast, which was assessed as Extinction-grade the instant it was born.
On the same day, a moving whirlpool several kilometers wide appeared on the sea surface near the Empire's coast, suspected to be an unknown calamity beast.
Meanwhile, under the Federal Security Bureau's urgent investigation, Observation Station Dijing confirmed abnormal geological changes in the Kunwu Plateau while simultaneously enduring an unprecedented onslaught from a beast tide—a sea of calamity beasts and aberrant species fleeing outward in droves as though facing the end of the world...
Disastrous reports followed one after another in relentless succession; everyone was stretched to the limit, barely able to fend for themselves.
The portents had passed; the disaster wind had begun to blow.
A terrifying storm unseen in a hundred years had arrived ahead of schedule!
Chapter 742