The endless sea churned like a living beast—vast, ancient, and restless, as though something beneath its depths had begun to wake.
Its blue expanse split apart in silence as two figures tore through the ocean at impossible speed. One was human. The other was not something the ocean itself could easily define.
A colossal shadow moved beneath him.
Eldred's immense form glided through the abyss with terrifying ease, the currents bending and folding away as though the sea instinctively refused to resist him. Water did not break against him—it surrendered.
On his back stood Kaelen.
His robes fluttered in defiance of crushing pressure that would have reduced mountains to dust. The ocean did not dare press upon him fully, as if some unseen law bent itself around his existence.
Above the abyssal dark, his gaze remained fixed forward.
"Master…"
Eldred's voice rumbled through the water, deep and resonant.
"Why are we rushing toward the Dàxīyáng Kingdom?"
Kaelen did not answer immediately.
The distant horizon—where light fractured and dissolved into deeper blue—held his attention as if it contained the shape of a future only he could see.
"The catalysts for my vengeance lie waiting," he said at last. "And for my claim."
Eldred blinked slowly, confusion rippling through his massive form.
"Catalysts…?"
The waters around them darkened further as Kaelen continued. Each word sank heavier than the pressure of the abyss.
"The Dàxīyáng Kingdom will soon be attacked," he said. "The Orca and Whale Kingdoms will begin a full-scale war."
Eldred's pupils narrowed.
"We need cores," Kaelen went on. "But we cannot yet step into territories ruled by evolved monsters without drawing attention. There are eyes everywhere. An expert might sense your presence… your colossal beast body… and then—"
His gaze sharpened.
"We would be enslaved by a sect. Or crushed by a power we cannot yet resist."
A silence settled between them, vast and suffocating.
"So tell me," Kaelen said quietly,
"what better place to evolve without exposing ourselves… than the Charnel Fray?"
A slow grin crept across Eldred's face.
"Master… that is a good idea," he admitted. "But who do we side with? The Merfolk… or the Orca and Whale Legion?"
Kaelen finally lowered his gaze.
"Why would we choose a side?"
Their momentum dimmed for a moment, as if even the sea paused to listen.
Eldred tilted his head. "Then… how do we join the war?"
Kaelen raised a single finger.
"Who said we are joining it?"
He leaned slightly forward, as though confiding in the abyss itself.
"Tell me—what do we need to evolve?"
Eldred hesitated.
"As a Colossal Beast, I refine the energy of what I consume… and Master consumes core essence in… a far more terrifying way."
"And what dominates," Kaelen asked calmly,
"on a battlefield soaked in slaughter?"
Eldred's eyes widened.
"…Ah."
Realization struck like lightning in the deep.
"The Master is wise…" he murmured, a razor-edged smile forming across his face. "Truly… wise."
Kaelen's expression did not change.
"To feast upon the leviathan," he said softly,
"one must first be willing to swim within the shadow of its jaw."
The ocean roared as their speed surged once more.
---
Seven Days Later
Five hundred miles from the Dàxīyáng Kingdom, Kaelen raised a hand.
Eldred halted instantly.
Not a ripple of soul sense was released. Kaelen relied only on sight and sound—his perception piercing miles of seawater as distant detonations echoed like thunder beneath the ocean's skin.
His expression darkened.
"Master?" Eldred asked cautiously. "What's wrong?"
"Not good."
Eldred tensed. "Why?! Are the Merfolk already losing?! Did we come all this way for nothing?!"
Kaelen frowned slightly.
"…No."
His jaw tightened.
"Human Evolvers are already looting the battlefield spoils."
A pause.
Eldred tilted his massive head. "Master… you might want to stop phrasing it like that. You sound like a corpse pervert."
Kaelen turned slightly.
"Are you tired of living?"
Silence.
Eldred said nothing more.
Kaelen returned his attention to the war in the distance.
"The Orca and Whale Legion are numerous," he said, "but before the Merfolk… they are lambs awaiting slaughter."
"What do you mean?"
"They haven't even breached the Merfolk barrier. Two Ninth-Rank Emperor Orcas and Whale Kings—both in human form—are fighting a single Merfolk of the same realm."
A faint scoff left Kaelen.
"And they are losing."
He paused.
"But that is irrelevant."
A storage ring flicked through the water and landed in Eldred's grasp.
"Within three hundred meters lie thousands of corpses. Collect what you can. Do not go deeper."
His voice lowered.
"Mortal-God Realm experts have not yet moved. If they sense you… you will die."
Eldred swallowed and nodded.
Then—
Kaelen vanished.
Not through motion, nor through speed.
He simply ceased to be where he was—like a shadow erased by a deeper darkness.
And plunged into the war.
---
Twenty Minutes Later
DING!
Very High Evolved Creature Devoured
[Devourer Core +6]
DING!
[Devourer Core +10]
[Evolution +3]
Bodies vanished without trace.
Blood dissolved into the ocean as though it had never existed.
An hour passed.
DING!
[Devourer Core +20]
[Evolution +4]
Kaelen's aura surged violently—then collapsed inward, folding like a black hole devouring itself.
DING!
[Devourer Domain Updated]
THE SINGULARITY — 1%
Sanity Duration: 20s
DING!
[Undying One Upgraded]
Blood of the Eater → Absolute Revival
Kaelen clenched his fist. Faint veins of light pulsed beneath his skin.
"Twenty thousand Emperor cores…" he murmured,
"for two Evolutions."
A whisper escaped him.
"This war… came at the perfect time."
His eyes gleamed faintly.
"I could slaughter three realms above my current level."
Suddenly—
The water didn't just move; it curdled.
BOOM!
The Merfolk Kingdom's barrier, an ancient sanctum that had withstood the crushing depths of eons, did not just break—it shattered like a mirror struck by a god's hammer. Shards of crystalline mana hissed through the water, slicing through coral and stone alike.
The sea itself screamed. A primal, subsonic wail vibrated through the marrow of every living thing, as if the ocean floor were being torn from its foundations.
High above, silhouetted against the filtered light of the surface, the Orca King and Whale King rose from their massive, bone-carved thrones. Their shadows stretched long and monstrous across the ruins. Beside them, three cloaked figures materialized out of the void. They stood motionless, yet they radiated a pressure so absolute it felt like the weight of the entire world had been condensed into three points. Under their gaze, even Emperors—beings who could command the tides—felt their hearts seize, crushed like insects under a titan's heel.
Then—
A hurricane of killing intent swept across the battlefield. It wasn't a wind; it was a physical tide of malice that turned the water into a freezing slurry of ice and blood.
From the shattered heart of the Merfolk Kingdom, an old man ascended slowly.
He did not swim; he rose as if the laws of buoyancy had bowed to his will. His white beard drifted in the turbulent currents like frayed silk, and his eyes—eyes like collapsing stars—burned with a dark, gravitational light that seemed to swallow the very shadows around him.
In his arms, he cradled a lifeless girl. Her white hair flowed like a river of silver, dancing around a blue-and-white dress that was no longer pristine. It was soaked in a crimson so deep it looked black in the abyss.
The ocean fell silent. The screams of the dying, the clash of steel, the roar of the Kings—all of it vanished into a vacuum of absolute stillness.
"If only I knew…" the old man whispered. The words didn't travel through the water; they manifested inside the minds of everyone present, cold and sharp. "If only I had not been soft…"
His voice trembled, a hairline fracture in a mountain of stone.
"If only I had erased you traitors of the ocean…"
Tears fell from his eyes. They did not mix with the salt of the sea; they remained whole, like liquid diamonds, falling into the dark.
"My daughter… would still be alive."
He lifted his head.
And he looked up.
In that heartbeat, the world stopped. One hundred thousand Orcas and Whales—an army that could have conquered the continents—dropped lifeless. Their souls weren't just extinguished; they were snuffed out before fear could even be born, their bodies drifting like empty husks in a sudden, silent graveyard.
The Kings recoiled, their massive frames trembling with a terror they hadn't known existed.
"The intel was wrong!" they shouted, their voices cracking with the realization of their doom. "He is not Half-Step Mortal-God—he is beyond it!"
The old man stepped forward. The water beneath his feet solidified into invisible stairs. Each step he took erased another hundred thousand lives, the sheer ripples of his presence disintegrating anything that breathed.
Within a minute—
Only the Kings and the three cloaked figures remained in the red-stained void.
He flickered. A glitch in reality.
And appeared before them.
Rage burned quietly in his eyes—a slow, suffocating fire—as he held his daughter closer to his chest, shielding her from the monsters before him.
"Do you regret your choices now?"
The question was a death sentence.
"Do you feel despair?"
A slow, terrifying smile formed on his lips—a jagged line of white against the darkness of the deep.
"Good."
The sea trembled. Not from the tide, but from the arrival of a power that the world was never meant to hold.
———
TO BE CONTINUED