By the time the news of the Ryan imperial clan's total demise spread beyond the Ryan Empire's borders, Anbaixiu had already arrived at the shores of the Emerald Dream Forest.
Anbaixiu had no intention of meddling in Leira's task; after offering a few words of advice, he departed the Emerald Dream Forest.
This was the first task Silvanus had assigned to Leira, and the Oak Father was hardly fond of undead creatures. After all, the undead stood outside the cycle of nature, refusing even in death to become nourishment for other living things.
Offering advice was fine, but directly intervening might displease Silvanus—and displeasing the chief deity would hardly be good for Leira.
So, after dropping a few hints to the druids, Anbaixiu moved on to his next destination—the Silent Night Sea.
Reaching the shore, Anbaixiu once again met that familiar fishman zombie—Phil the Sharp Spear.
He looked just as before, his half-rotted corpse appearing somewhat wretched, but the harpoon in his hand gleamed with a faint light, suggesting he had traded up for a more formidable magic weapon.
"Yo, honored guest! Sorry to keep you waiting here!"
The fishman zombie remained as polite as ever, warmly gesturing for Anbaixiu and his companions to board the ship.
Anbaixiu had left Dahei and Erha aboard the *Black Tide*, tasked with heading in a different direction to deliver a letter to the Raging Tide Kingdom.
Anbaixiu had penned a letter to Princess Ariel of the Raging Tide under the name of that dead fellow Mengge Grayriver. When dealing with the overseas dragon clan next, he might need the Raging Tide Kingdom's assistance.
Whether the Raging Tide Kingdom helped or not didn't really matter; the key was showing them what undead alchemical technology looked like.
A top-of-the-line warship like the *Black Tide* couldn't be sold, but lower-tier versions were open to discussion—so long as they could cough up the coin.
Dahei and Erha were shrewd enough that they should be able to carry out this assignment smoothly, so Anbaixiu felt completely at ease taking Melina aboard the fishman zombies' ghost ship.
The moment she boarded, Melina couldn't resist looking around like an excited child.
She had never seen what the sea looked like, let alone how the ghost ship would soon dive beneath the waves to behold that wondrous, kaleidoscopic world.
She had clearly come along to learn from Anbaixiu, yet now she had forgotten all about it, her golden eyes piercing through the seawater to chase schools of fish.
Anbaixiu didn't mind. The girl's intelligence wasn't particularly high to begin with, and one couldn't expect her to turn clever overnight; it would take the wash of time to slowly carve a few grooves into that smooth brain of hers.
Anbaixiu simply stood on the deck drinking with Phil. His current mecha body had been waterproofed, so there was no need to worry at all.
It was still that century-old vintage laced with infernal toxins, capable of making even an undead soul feel dazed and delightfully tipsy.
"Honored guest, you have no idea how bored out of our skulls we've been lately. Now that we don't plunder ships from the Raging Tide Kingdom, there's nothing left on this sea worth plundering..."
Phil grumbled to Anbaixiu. Their lives had been quite exciting before, but ever since signing the pact with the Raging Tide Kingdom, they had abruptly lost their purpose in life.
The Raging Tide Kingdom's "reparations" held little meaning to them—the undead had no use for money. They merely enjoyed the rare thrill of an exhilarating life that could make their souls stir.
Yet there was no helping it. The captain's orders were absolute; Aige was the master of the Silent Night Sea, so Phil could only vent a little to Anbaixiu.
"Just because you don't plunder the Raging Tide Kingdom means there's nothing left to rob? Aren't there plenty of fishman tribes?"
The sea was vastly broader than the land, and the total population of fishmen might well be over a dozen times that of the entire continent.
Phil scoffed disdainfully. "What's there to steal from them? They're all just scraping by in the sea. Is there anything down there we can't dredge up ourselves? It's boring! Of course goods produced on land are what's rare and prized. Besides, bullying a bunch of low-intelligence fishheads is no fun at all."
Even though Phil himself was a fishman zombie, just as Anbaixiu never considered himself human, no matter what race one was in life, once dead and turned undead, one's race was simply undead.
Human zombies took the greatest pleasure in eating living human brains too, after all.
Anbaixiu realized he had been treating them like ordinary pirates. These were undead pirates who could dive underwater; rare sea treasures and the like were theirs for the scooping.
"What about the Githyanki? Haven't people said they're establishing city-states across the sea?" Anbaixiu asked.
Hearing that, Phil perked right up and said to Anbaixiu, "Now those are decent opponents! When that bunch of toads first showed up, I took my crew and had a brawl with them. It was thrilling—they even have dragons! It's just that the captain later ordered us not to clash with these Githyanki, so we could only dive beneath the sea and steer clear of them.
"Honored guest, you came here this time to lead us into battle, didn't you? I heard you fought a war against the people of Ryan on land—a clash of hundreds of thousands! You wiped out tens of thousands of them! Must've been wildly exciting, right?!"
Anbaixiu was somewhat speechless. What kind of wild gossip was being spread? As soon as news traveled a few hundred kilometers, it mutated into sheer rumor.
Phil was plainly a battle maniac whose greatest obsession in life had likely been combat, just as Anbaixiu loved money.
"I actually came this time to discuss some matters with your captain, but if you want battles, there certainly won't be a shortage. My targets are those Githyanki and the dragon clan."
At this, Phil broke into a wide grin, exposing rows of jagged fangs in a rather chilling display. Yet he slapped Anbaixiu on the shoulder and roared, "Splendid! Truly worthy of being our captain's honored guest, our great friend, our brother!"
Anbaixiu glanced at his pauldron with mild disgust. A palm print oozing pus and blood was left upon it—and this was crafted from mithral, no less.
"By the way, across this vast ocean, besides the dragon clan and the Githyanki, which sapient race is the strongest? Is it the fishmen?" Anbaixiu asked.
Phil pondered a moment and replied, "If you lump all fishmen together as a single race, they're indeed the most vast. In reality, though, different kinds of fishmen are completely different species, just like humans and tieflings. In life, I was a sahuagin, while the ones you captured before were kuo-toa. When I was alive, I treated kuo-toa as food!
"However, if you're talking about sheer factions, then it's the merfolk tribes that worship Eadro. They're vast in number and possess formidable spellcasting power."
Merfolk and fishmen—their names were mere inversions of each other, just like their bodies.
Most merfolk possessed a human torso with a fish's tail, whereas fishmen mostly possessed four limbs and a fish's head; some fishmen retained tails on their backs, but their heads were unmistakably those of fish.
Because of this, merfolk were often depicted by humans as beautiful creatures whose looks in tales rivaled elves, yet in truth most merfolk looked no different from ordinary humans, with an enormous disparity between the beautiful and the ugly.
If it were merely merfolk, that would be manageable, but merfolk who worshipped Eadro... Anbaixiu had come to help Aige claim faith, so he would likely clash with this deity of the merfolk, Eadro.
No way... had it come round again to the familiar script of offending a goddess?
Chapter 368