Disaster in the Bay

This surprise raid continued until they had stolen six large ships, at which point the remaining vessels took warning and heightened their guard. Watching the stolen ships steer toward Luting Beach, Wulu made a swift decision. "Send the remaining ships in pursuit!" "Understood!" Earlier, a few small boats had been shuttling Bailong people at Luting Beach, but Wulu had paid them little mind. Small boats could carry few people, and those ferried away were merely women and children. These large ships were a completely different story—each could hold at least three to five hundred people. With just a few trips, several thousand Bailong could successfully slip away. An archipelago lay thirty li offshore. Once the Bailong escaped Storm Bay, catching them again would be no easy feat. Fortunately, these large ships moved at a crawl, sometimes stalling on the water, sometimes spinning in circles. Clearly, the Bailong steering them were clumsy at the helm. At this sluggish pace, catching up would be child's play. The Ya troops freed the boatmen on shore and forced them to take the helm. Following Wulu's orders, they stationed two hundred elite soldiers on each large ship and twenty on each small vessel, surging out into the bay in hot pursuit. It had to be said that Wulu's troops carried out orders with ruthless efficiency. In just over a quarter of an hour, more than a dozen ships had put out to sea. A long natural barrier reef lay between Storm Bay and Luting Beach; vessels had to round it before they could reach the beach. One side fled while the other gave chase. In the blink of an eye, both had traveled over a hundred zhang from shore. The golden eagle swept forward as well, wheeling back and forth above the fleeing vessels. Soon, it noticed something shifting back and forth atop one of the masts, partially obscured by the canvas sail. Great billows of thick fog were rolling in as well, swallowing the sails and making it difficult to get a clear look. The object moved again. What was that...? It swooped lower, drawing close to peer through the mist. It looked like a person! Someone was standing at the very top of the canvas sail. As the eagle circled near once more, a gust of wind caught the sail on the bow side and pulled it aside, bringing the figure face to face with the raptor! It was a Ya soldier, but his hands were tied behind his back and a gag was stuffed into his mouth, leaving him dangling from the mast and swaying to and fro. He had been one of the ship's guards. Why had the thieves tied him up here? While the eagle was still bewildered, another silhouette emerged from beneath the lower sail. It was a young Bailong man, his loose braids swept behind his head, his eyes burning with focused intent. His clothes were a brownish yellow that matched the canvas, making him nearly invisible while standing behind the sail. In his hands rested a crossbow. The moment the wind swept the canvas open, the golden eagle caught sight of two dark, menacing bolt tips trained straight at it! Terror seized the bird. It flipped over, beating its wings to pull away, but the young man pressed the trigger a fraction of a second sooner. A faint twang sounded, barely audible above the howling wind, yet the special bolts loosed from the crossbow split from two into four, then eight... The farther they traveled, the faster they multiplied. Fortunately, the distance between them was only twelve zhang, so the bolts had split only three times before arriving right before the eagle's face. Frightened out of its wits, the golden eagle surged upward and snapped its wings shut to present as small a target as possible. Even so, sixteen bolts blanketed a wide spread, and at least three slammed into its flesh! This was one of the magic artifacts Mou Kingdom's National Preceptor Wang Xingyi had gifted to He Lingchuan: the Arrow Locust. He Lingchuan had previously found the Torrential Pear Blossom Needles too labor-intensive and costly to replenish, and coincidentally, the refiners of Lingshan felt the same way. The Arrow Locust they forged possessed the divine power of fission—the farther the target, the more bolts it produced. At a range of a hundred zhang, accuracy aside, it could loose a downpour of arrows as dense as a swarm of locusts. It was intended as an area-of-effect weapon for mass casualties, but knowing the golden eagle was exceptionally nimble and that standing atop a rolling mast would spoil Moqi Feng's aim, He Lingchuan had lent the artifact to him. Though origin power shielded the golden eagle's body and astral winds gusted from its wings to deflect several shafts, it was heavily wounded nonetheless. Two gaping holes punctured its wings, leaving it unable to ride the wind, and it plummeted toward the sea. That was precisely Moqi Feng's objective: bringing it down was enough to rob the Ya army of their eyes in the sky. *Hiss.* Wulu drew a sharp breath as a dull ache flared beneath his ribs. The golden eagle was his spirit pet, capable of sharing its field of vision with him. Yet whenever he invoked this link, their sightlines merged and influenced one another. In other words, when the eagle shared its view, its sight was constrained by human limits, leaving it less sharp at long range than usual. The same held true for He Lingchuan and his eyeball spiders. Real-time, firsthand surveillance always came at a price. Moreover, bound by their contract, Wulu had to bear a share of the damage whenever the eagle was hurt. "Damn it!" Once he caught that Bailong, he would execute him with his own hands! Just then, two small boats suddenly capsized out on the water. Wulu initially suspected the boatmen were up to tricks, but when he raised his spyglass to look, his eyes went wide. Snake-men. More snake-men. Yet these were vastly larger, measuring several zhang in length, rivaling mid-sized whales. Teaming up, they seized the small boats and shook them violently. Before the soldiers aboard could even scream, the vessels flipped upside down! They repeated the tactic against the large ships, though capsizing such massive craft proved far more difficult. Fortunately, the snake-men had another trick. These cargo vessels had been chartered from Blade Harbor by Bailie. To maximize passenger capacity, their holds had been emptied before departure, leaving them without heavy ballast, so they pitched and rolled with violent fury. The roll easily swept through an arc of over ninety degrees, plunging the inner gunwales beneath the surface several times. The snake-men were seasoned at ambushing ships. They knew they did not need to fight these land-bound humans hand-to-hand; they only had to dump them into the water. The sea would handle the rest. Faced with such ferocious listing, even seasoned boatmen and sailors could not keep their footing, let alone the Ya soldiers. Born and bred on land, accustomed to solid ground underfoot, most of them were thrown off balance before they could even react, tumbling headlong into the sea. The distance was too great for Wulu to hear, but he could readily imagine the terrified shrieks of his drowning men. *Plop, splash, plunge!* The bay was in an uproar as bodies tumbled in like dumplings tossed into boiling broth. A true disaster at sea was unfolding right inside the bay! Even watching from the shore, the spectacle was harrowing and grim. Every single ship pursuing the Bailong ground to a halt. Some had overturned; on others, soldiers battled snake-men across the listing decks in blind hysteria. Who had time to care about the fleeing vessels ahead? "What in the world are these damned things?!" How could they be so ferocious in the water? Wulu's face turned livid. His fingers clenched so hard he nearly crushed the brass spyglass. A catastrophic miscalculation—there were behemoths among these snake-men! They had been lurking beneath the waves all along. Who could have known that monsters capable of assaulting large sea vessels were hiding in these waters? Born in the inland plains, the Ya soldiers could not swim. Once dumped into the sea, they could only thrash and scream for help, their martial prowess entirely useless. The surrounding yin hui glided in, butchering them with effortless ease! A few yin hui with arrows bristling from their backs slaughtered with particular vengeance, whipping the sea into a bloody froth. Earlier, soldiers standing on the decks had shot them with origin power, causing them agonizing pain. Now, retribution had arrived in the blink of an eye! Watching his soldiers thrashing and being slaughtered, Wulu barked urgent orders for troops to sprint to the barrier reef. Some fired arrows at the yin hui in the water, while others shot corded arrows and tethered spears to the drowning men, giving them lines to grab so they could be hauled ashore. In the water, snake-men moved like flood dragons; no human dared dive in. That Wulu could conceive such a plan in the heat of the moment showed impressive wits, and he did not forget to dispatch reinforcements toward Luting Beach to stabilize the lines. A total of thirteen hundred soldiers had boarded ships for the pursuit, and nearly all were now thrashing in the water. Counting the two thousand six hundred besieging the Bailong, he still had over two thousand three hundred troops at his disposal. Of those two thousand three hundred, four hundred were sent to rescue their drowning comrades. Immediately after, deafening battle cries erupted to the northeast: The Bailie and Bailong forces had launched an all-out charge toward Storm Bay! This army had been turtled up in defensive positions for a long time, falling into temporary disarray after Moqi Tong was critically wounded, which had led the Ya soldiers to believe victory was imminent. Yet in just this brief window, they had switched from defense to attack, crashing violently into the Ya lines attempting to encircle them! Clearly, they intended to seize this opening and coordinate an attack from both inside and outside with the snake-men. Wulu let out a cold sneer. Did the Bailong truly believe they could turn the tide relying on these snake-men alone? How naive! With thirteen hundred men dumped into the sea, Wulu's room for maneuver was indeed tighter than before, but his remaining near-two-thousand soldiers were more than enough to crush this counterattack! His forces had fought in rotations and were well-rested. By contrast, the Bailong had fought desperately for ten shichen. Though stubborn and brave, they were an arrow at the end of its flight. This final charge was nothing more than the dying flare of an ember. The moment the Ya army crushed it, the Bailong would be completely broken! Far from alarmed, Wulu was delighted. He promptly dispatched another seventeen hundred men to assault Luting Beach, keeping only two hundred personal guards at his side. The enemy's reinforcements had revealed themselves. Once a trump card was shown, it ceased to be a secret. Now it was his turn to play his hand. At his command, the troops deployed at once. The fighting at Luting Beach escalated to a white-hot pitch once more. With these seventeen hundred fresh troops thrown in, the situation shifted drastically. The Bailong's sheer ferocity could not overcome the vast disparity in numbers and origin power. Wulu had originally planned to grind them down slowly to secure total victory with minimal casualties, but now he had changed his mind. The finale of this battle was drawing near, wasn't it? He admired the Bailong's tenacity. So let the Moqi clan take that tenacity and courage with them as they plunged forever into Wuxiang! After a long while, a trusted aide hurried over with a soldier in tow. "Reporting, General! This man has information regarding the sea beasts!" This was precisely what Wulu needed most right now. "Speak." The Ya soldier bowed. "Reporting, General! These snake-like monsters are called 'yin hui'. My elder brother told me about them—they are native to the Yangshan Archipelago to the west." Wulu's heart stirred, recalling that the Bailong prisoners had mentioned reinforcements coming from the west. "My brother is a merchant who frequently travels back and forth to Blade Harbor in the west. He said the Yangshan Archipelago across from the harbor once belonged to Bailie, but it was shrouded in fiendish miasma and infested with man-eating yin hui, rendering it unapproachable to mankind. Later, Bailie sold the land to someone else. Strangely enough, the fiendish miasma dissipated shortly after, and the yin hui born of yin fiend energy have lived in peace with sea vessels and humans ever since." Living in peace with humans, yet traveling hundreds of li to ambush the Ya army? Wulu's brow furrowed. "Who subdued them? The person who bought the islands?"