Inside the artillery shell, Anbaixiu felt only an immense propulsive force, the sharp screech of air scraping against the mithral casing ringing in his ears.
It was definitely supersonic, though Anbaixiu had no way of knowing his exact speed.
Fortunately, he had swapped into a mithral body; otherwise, the moment the shell blasted out of the barrel, his bones would have been reduced to dust.
Flying at extreme speed, the shell traced a flawless arc through the sky before crashing down more than a hundred kilometers away.
Anbaixiu crawled out of the silver shell and inspected his body.
There were a few minor glitches—he had just been fired out of a cannon, after all, and some internal components had come loose or warped.
Still, it was no big deal. Anbaixiu was running on dual-core power now. If dark mana could animate a skeleton missing several bones, a few slightly deformed parts were hardly worth fretting over.
Anbaixiu flew into the air to survey the terrain. Once he reoriented himself, he hauled out a second magitech cannon.
This one was a stripped-down budget version designed to collapse after a single firing, so the production cost was negligible.
In the past, Anbaixiu might have hesitated to waste it, but now that he was wealthy, he could toss them around as he pleased.
He loaded the mithral shell back into the barrel. This piece of hardware was expensive and definitely not disposable; Anbaixiu intended to ride it shot by shot all the way to his destination.
The second magitech cannon fired, and Anbaixiu went rocketing into the sky once more.
The shell landed within the projected area again. Anbaixiu recalculated the angle, brought out another single-use magitech cannon, and repeated the process.
Just like that, having burned through nearly all the low-grade materials in his stockpile and lost count of how many times he had been fired into the air, he finally caught sight of the vast, open ocean just as the sun began to dip below the horizon.
The sunset bathed the sea in warm light, the rolling waves shattering the sunbeams into flecks of golden glitter. It was a magnificent view.
Anbaixiu took out the Necrotic Codex and sent a message to the group chat: [The ocean at sunset really is beautiful. I haven't seen it in years.]
[Dislikes Humans: *******!]
[Ultraman Tiga: What's your problem? I just said the sea looks nice. Did that offend you too?!]
[Dislikes Humans: You bastard, I'm a vampire! Why the hell are you talking to me about sunsets?!]
Anbaixiu: ...
He had accidentally forgotten about that. Generally, once undead reached the legend rank, sunlight had little effect on them; Anbaixiu had no trouble walking under the blazing sun. But vampires were an exception. Sunlight was lethal poison to them, and even a legendary vampire would be reduced to ash under direct rays.
[Rose of Decay: You're already at the coast? How did you get there so fast?!]
Not long ago, Anbaixiu had mentioned being in the imperial capital of Ryan. Even if he had teleported straight to the Emerald Dream Forest, there was no way he could have reached the sea this quickly—not even by flying.
Anbaixiu explained: [Just arrived. Pulled a few little tricks to speed up the flight.]
Rose of Decay sent a private message: [You arrived sooner than anticipated. I suspect the messenger Mute sent to receive you hasn't arrived yet. You will probably have to wait a day or two.]
[Ultraman Tiga: A messenger? It seems this senior has quite a bit of influence. What does she actually do? What kind of undead living in the sea is she?]
[Rose of Decay: She didn't tell me in detail, but I'd guess that oceanic races are probably related to fishfolk.]
Fishfolk?
Kuo-toa, sahuagin, locathah, merfolk... there were far too many aquatic races, with massive disparities in strength and alignment. He wondered which kind this senior Mute belonged to, and why she called herself Mute in the first place.
Unfortunately, Rose of Decay did not know any of those specifics. She only knew that Mute seemed very eager to welcome Anbaixiu as a guest, and had already locked down the stretch of sea where the artifact was located ahead of time.
Such a grand gesture suggested she was another queen-tier powerhouse.
Since he had to wait anyway, Anbaixiu decided to give his body a thorough overhaul.
After enduring multiple cannon launches, even this mithral mechanical body was feeling the strain. Several spots were damaged and needed urgent repairs.
Anbaixiu ducked into his private demiplane and began a comprehensive overhaul of his chassis.
Fortunately, he had prepared extra mithral when he made the purchase; otherwise, repairs would have been a massive headache. Once cast into shape, the metal was extraordinarily resilient, making remelting and reforging remarkably difficult.
After tinkering away inside the demiplane for the better part of the day, swapping and patching parts, Anbaixiu finally emerged looking good as new.
Upon stepping back out, he donned a black cloak so his gleaming silver-white armor would not stand out so conspicuously.
Night fell, cloaking the coastline in darkness, though it was far from dead silent.
As the tide rose, bizarrely shaped creatures began surfacing along the shore. Each sported an oversized fish head, spindly arms and legs, and a bloated belly. To put it bluntly, they were hideously ugly, resembling oversized carp whose fins had morphed into limbs.
With a single glance, Anbaixiu recognized them as kuo-toa.
Could the messenger sent by Senior Mute be a kuo-toa?
Looking closer, Anbaixiu realized that was not the case. These kuo-toa had clearly not come to meet anyone. The moment they crawled onto the sandy beach, they began digging frantically all around.
They dug up shellfish one after another, easily prying open the sturdy shells with their sharp claws. After gobbling up the soft meat inside, they gathered the discarded shells. They seemed to possess a peculiar sensory perception; no matter how deeply the shellfish were buried, they could pinpoint their locations with pinpoint precision and dig them up to feast.
After gorging themselves, the kuo-toa began piling sand into an eccentric, towering spire, which they decorated with shells, seaweed, and other detritus. From a distance, the bizarre heap resembled a grotesquely shaped human female—one draped in shells, sporting the head and pincers of a crayfish.
This was Blibdoolpoolp, the deity of the kuo-toa. Her visual aesthetic was every bit as grotesque as her worshippers, easily ranking among the top three ugliest deities in existence.
Amusingly, according to written lore, the Sea Mother Blibdoolpoolp had not originally existed at all. Her original form was merely a damaged human statue discovered by kuo-toa. After praying to it year in and year out and adorning it with various sea creatures, their ceaseless devotion had eventually brought the goddess into being in the mortal world.
One could say she was a deity truly born entirely from faith.
This was thanks to a unique trait of the kuo-toa: an ability known as god-making. They were a race with an innate, instinctual need to believe in something.
For the vast majority of intelligent beings, faith was cultivated after birth. Humans, naturally, worshipped all manner of deities based entirely on personal choice. Even elves required indoctrination from an early age to revere the elven pantheon, while drow born underground were typically groomed into perverts who worshipped Lolth the Spider Queen.
Most people believed that without upbringing and instruction, sapient races were born faithless.
Kuo-toa were different. From the moment they were born, they seemed to harbor a desperate urge to worship something.
Because the vast majority of kuo-toa possessed very low intelligence, they did not necessarily have coherent cultural traditions. Consequently, some kuo-toa would revere the aboleths commonly found in the sea as their gods, while others would drop to their knees before any reasonably powerful creature they happened to come across. The faith they generated was on par with that of the most devout fanatics—so palpable that even mortals could sense it and harness its power.
Many races had exploited this kuo-toa trait in the past. Monsters like mind flayers had once enslaved hordes of kuo-toa to feed on the divine power of their faith. Even lesser monsters would sometimes dupe a small kuo-toa tribe into worshipping them, and the gullible fishfolk would almost always buy into it.
Yet for all these apparent advantages, kuo-toa possessed an unsettling quirk: they reshaped gods according to their own imaginations. If they felt you did not look enough like their envisioned deity, they were entirely capable of taking matters into their own hands and 'pruning' you to fit the mold.
The bizarre, twisted appearance of Blibdoolpoolp the Sea Mother was the direct result of the kuo-toa's peculiar aesthetic taste.
Other gods dared not take in this bunch of 'premium believers,' lest their weird faith contaminate them and warp their forms into something hideous.
With their sandy statue of the goddess complete, the kuo-toa began their prostration ritual.
Ancient, bizarre chanting issued from their mouths. Accompanied by pulses of crimson radiance, it flowed directly into the effigy. This was the raw faith of the kuo-toa, condensed to the point of being visible to the naked eye.
Anbaixiu watched with a twinge of envy. If he had this bunch of kuo-toa serving as his followers, the Golden Throne might finally have a steady replenishment of gold. In any case, he was a lich; he hardly cared if he looked a little more twisted. At worst, he could just craft a 'body' tailored to kuo-toa aesthetics.
Being a man of immediate action, Anbaixiu at once began plotting how to trick this tribe into becoming his worshippers.
However, his knowledge of kuo-toa was limited, and pandering to their tastes without sufficient intelligence was no easy task.
*How did those mind flayers trick the kuo-toa back then? Did they just use psionics?*
Just as Anbaixiu was about to flip through his collection of books to see if he could dig up any useful information, changes began manifesting on the sand statue.
The crimson faith of the kuo-toa converged, dyeing the entire statue red until it looked as though it were drenched in fresh blood.
Anbaixiu could sense a foul, sinister aura emanating from the effigy.
*The Sea Mother has descended? Surely not. Even if she isn't terribly powerful for a deity, she shouldn't be summoned this easily.*
If you could summon a god just by scraping together some shells and piling up an ugly sand sculpture, how was any other religion supposed to survive?
Anbaixiu quickly determined that it was not a deity. The sinister aura lacked divine majesty—that overbearing presence that loomed over all living things, which was exceedingly hard to fake.
This sinister aura possessed no divine grandeur whatsoever, carrying only raw bloodlust and savagery.
When the crimson hue completely engulfed the effigy, its torso suddenly expanded by a full size, as if pregnant.
Immediately afterward, a sharp sickle sliced open the sand statue's belly, and a hunched, diminutive figure clambered out.
It was a tiny monster wearing a red leather cap, half a head shorter than a dwarf.
This creature was called a redcap.
Whenever a living creature harbored intense murderous intent, redcaps would spawn at the site of the crime, in the exact spot drenched in blood.
Though a redcap resembled a hunchbacked gnome, it was actually a monster hailing from the Feywild. From the moment they were born, they would hunt down the murderous culprit—their creator. Once they slew their creator, they earned the right to remain in this world, indulging their depraved urges through an unending string of murders and slaughter.
Yet they were far from mindless. On the contrary, a redcap was capable of orchestrating an elaborate, meticulous murder, treating it with the same sense of sacred ritual as blowing out birthday candles.
Seeing the redcap appear, Anbaixiu's spirits lifted.
Someone had beaten him to the punch and tricked these kuo-toa into becoming believers. That meant stealing them away would be vastly simpler.
When deities competed for worshippers, a divine war was always the most direct and efficient solution.
Still, if Senior Mute was indeed an aquatic creature, could she be connected to these kuo-toa... Whatever, no point overthinking it. These kuo-toa were already being deceived by a redcap. Even if Mute turned out to be a kuo-toa, he would merely be avenging her.
With so much faith power laid out right in front of him, he would be a fool not to take it!
Chapter 169