So the side quest reward is a Soul Pearl?

Nana Toki narrowed her eyes, suspicion like a drawn bowstring. You’re scheming again, System?

So you had Soul Pearls and didn’t hand me one?

Nope, Host. Side-quest rewards are separate. If you stop Chiliao from breaking the South Sea seal, you’ll receive a Soul Pearl.

How do I get it?

No idea. Just do the quest. Thus spoke the System, bland as rain on stone.

Nana Toki fell silent, her patience a thin sheet of ice. Like a ghost.

Luoluo, can we kill them all?

By her side, Nesting Phoenix already burned with bright scarlet fire, a sunrise wrapped around a blade. I hate their stench.

…

Near the Oceanward Tower, the shore crawled with beasts from the deep, a tide of scales and fangs pressing like a stormfront.

Jagged bone-teeth gleamed like reefs, and flying scales pitted walls and stone, leaving the coast a map of wounds.

Residents near the Oceanward Tower had fled like leaves on a gale, while waves of cultivators surged in like a new tide.

They formed seals with their hands, drew lines in the rain-slick sand, and laid formations as if planting flags on a cliff.

They were disciples of sects that guarded the South Sea’s rim, lodestars all cued to the Oceanward Tower, sworn to the same old seal.

That South Sea seal carried old thunder. Legend said this sea had been the beasts’ domain, until wanderers reshaped it into homes and harbors.

Yet people and monsters had clashed since dawn and frost, oil and water in one bowl, never mixing under one sky.

Humans trespassed on the beasts’ ancestral grounds. The South Sea tribes bristled like a storm, raised banners like waves, and marched to take back the reefs.

Take Chiliao, for instance.

A thousand years ago, it ruled these waters as a lord of the depths, its coils the very arteries of the sea.

Human audacity stirred its wrath like a hooked whale, but the first master of the Oceanward Tower met it with steel and storm.

They fought nine days and nine nights, the sea red as a sunset that wouldn’t end, corpses drifting like broken oars.

In the end, the Tower’s first master stood like a lone pass against ten thousand, and staked his life to seal all the South Sea beasts beneath the waves.

He pressed Chiliao under the Oceanward Tower, cold and merciless as iron, and ended a war that etched itself into spray and legend.

Yet the first master knew a lord of the depths wouldn’t lie quiet forever. He struck a pact, clear as moonlight.

After his death, if Chiliao guarded the Tower’s prosperity for a thousand years, it could leave and return to its sea.

Chiliao agreed, and it obeyed. But two centuries shy of the promise, it soured like brine.

The South Sea flourished like spring, while the seal’s force thinned like old rope under salt.

Breaking the seal was only a matter of time. It felt it in its bones, like thunder before rain.

If it cultivated beneath the Tower, then, at the brink of ascension, it could borrow Heavenly Tribulation lightning and shatter the centuries-old chains in one stroke.

The South Sea clans would return to the continent like dawn returning to the horizon.

Unluckily for them, they met Nana Toki.

She had no intention of letting Chiliao crack any so-called South Sea seal, not even a seam.

She’d been out nearly half a month. If she didn’t get back, that bargain master of hers would blow a gasket.

So.

Nana Toki conferred with Nesting Phoenix, the way sparks speak with oil. You help me stop that slippery serpent’s tribulation. The beasts here are yours to butcher, no leash.

The South Sea stretched out black as ink, waves like mountains torn up by wind, heaved skyward, then slammed down like hammers.

Only ghosts knew how many beasts swarmed below—maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands, like fish eggs in a net.

Fine. Easy fix. Kill them all.

Kill!

Facing the shore-surge of beasts and their mountain-heavy aura, the coastal disciples pressed fear down like a shaky lid and charged anyway.

They knew if they failed here, the whole South Sea and the mortal lands beyond would drown in claw and smoke.

They had to run forward with death behind them, resolve tight as a knotted rope.

Rain poured from a sky of slate, while spells flew like shooting stars, each boom a drumbeat on a battlefield of waves.

Sword cultivators and rogues alike burned their Spirit Energy to the roots, fighting with twelve parts of strength and thirteen of stubbornness.

Courting death!

Angered by the mortals’ grit, Chiliao lashed its massive tail around the Oceanward Tower, a falling peak in the shape of a whip.

Dozens on the shore crushed into a single foul smear, like meat ground by a tide.

The tail’s shockwave hurled cultivators like reeds in a gale, and the coast rang with screams like gulls in a storm. Blood-scent woke the frenzy in the beasts that had climbed ashore.

Shnk! Shnk! Shnk!

Razor claws tore open chests like paper lanterns in rain, organs thudding wet onto stone, and the shoreline turned into a red-lacquered gutter.

Guo Wentao, stationed by the Oceanward Tower, watched disciples who once bowed and smiled die like snuffed candles, one after another.

He went mad with grief, driving all his Spirit Energy into his strikes, smashing beast after beast into meat and rain.

He stood with hair unbound like dark kelp, leather armor shredded like old sail, his eyes webbed with red like shattered glass.

He felt his Spirit Energy draining like water through a cracked jar, and despair grew like mold in a cellar.

But he couldn’t stop. As lord of this shore, as long as one breath burned in him, he would not step back.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Bolt after bolt of Heavenly Tribulation slashed from the lightless clouds, and more feral beasts stalked from the South Sea, eyes red as coals.

Their roars shook heaven and surf, louder by the breath, like drums rolling toward a breach.

The front line frayed to madness. Comrades fell like wheat in rain, while the black sea below spawned beasts like a bottomless maw spitting teeth.

Despair spread across the South Sea coast like fog, seeping into bone. In a blink, hope felt like rainwater trickling through the tiles, sliding down into the deep.

Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!

Elsewhere along the coast, heads burst with dull pops, like fruit crushed underfoot.

A Black Great Axe flashed with edge-light in Nana Toki’s hands, spinning like a black comet through storm.

She was only Foundation Establishment, a sapling in a forest of old pines, yet her face stayed calm before shapes twisted from nightmare.

Nesting Phoenix had pulled her flames back. Everything coming for Nana now, she met alone, iron against tide.

Beasts’ blood fountained bright as roses, spraying far, while corpses stacked into a small hill, a cairn of scales and bone.

She moved like an artist walking through bloody rain, each chop and sweep a stroke that felt born perfect, cruel and clean.

It wasn’t slaughter. It was painting.

Only up close could you feel the weight sealed in her gestures, each lift of hand a landslide, each step a crack of ice.

And Nesting Phoenix?

She stood on the sea ahead, a red figure on black water, a lantern in a night without stars.

To erase every beast on the South Sea in a breath wasn’t simple. She’d never tried. Today, she might.

Szzzz…

Her pale jade foot touched the fathomless surface, and steam rose like ghosts. Rain hammered down, yet not a drop touched her robe.

The wild sea calmed under her steps, as if a hand smoothed a snarled mane.

One step. Then another.

In a robe of red, she walked as lotuses bloomed from flame, leaving clusters of fire where her feet had been.

Those scarlet flames glowed like a lone lighthouse in a black squall, refusing to die no matter how the swells bucked.

Chiliao wrapped around the Oceanward Tower noticed her at once, its attention a knife drawn from a scabbard.

It shrieked and whipped its tail toward her, a cliff falling where a woman stood on water.

Szzzz…

Flame-lotuses opened one by one, rocking with the waves, bright as dawn.

Nesting Phoenix never spared Chiliao a glance. Its vast tail smashed into a wall of fire beside her, and the sound of burning cracked like scorched glass.

Roar!

The keen, tearing wail carried Spirit Energy like a collapsing sky. Many cultivators on the shore clutched their heads and coughed blood, faces chalk-white, strength pouring out like sand.

On the Tower, Chiliao plunged its blazing tail into the sea, thrashing to drown the flame, rage boiling like a red tide.

Useless. The black waves it raised turned to steam the instant they neared the Phoenix fire, then vanished into the rain.

Rocks shattered and fell from Chiliao’s coils into the sea, kicking up fountains of spray like white flags.

It raged to the edge of madness, yet found no purchase, like a storm clawing at a cliff.

The searing heat drove the undersea beasts back in instinctive fear, their eyes fixed on the red-robed woman on the water, terror bright as winter moonlight.

Nesting Phoenix stood upon the sea like an untouchable fairy, every gaze dragged to her as if by tide.

She paused not far from Chiliao, and her pale foot tapped the water, light as a bell struck by a fingertip.

Ding—

For a breath, the world seemed to go silent, sound pulled out like a net emptying.

In the eyes of the South Sea’s people, awe and fear mingled like storm and spray.

Yes.

Beneath the surface, at her feet, a colossal Spirit Array bloomed like a star under black water.