Chapter 95: Chapter 95
Day twenty-seven since Ma Xianyang’s neck went crooked.
Dawn.
The sky was black as ink.
Thick fog pressed down on the lake’s surface. Beyond ten paces, not a figure could be made out.
Three li west of Yunyi Island.
A small black-canopied boat hung like a ghost on the vast, misty water, rocking gently with the swells.
Shen Xiuhan stood at the prow, still as carved stone, feet planted on the wet, slippery bow. Waves slapped the gunwale, and he didn’t budge a hair.
His left hand rested behind his back. Between the index and middle fingers of his right, he pinched an ordinary black thread.
The thread trailed silently over the side and vanished into the turbulent water below, descending into the dark reef caves.
A strange ripple spread from his fingertips along the thread, sinking without a sound into the lightless depths.
Thousand Lakes Fishing!
In the next instant, his fingers dipped.
The swaying line snapped taut. A massive, savage downward drag surged up from the thread through his fingers and straight into his spine, tilting the boat.
“Got one!”
Shen Xiuhan’s eyes blazed. “Big brute — this one’s got some weight!”
An ordinary fisherman would have been yanked into the water in the blink of an eye and devoured.
But Shen Xiuhan’s Surge Vessel qi-blood erupted. The Blood Sea inside him opened its floodgates, pumping power in an endless torrent.
Relaxed muscles locked tight as rock, swelling visibly. His legs drove downward, pressing until the deck groaned beneath him.
With a tremendous SPLASH, the force of his stance levered the bow clear out of the water by several feet.
At the same time, veins like tiny serpents erupted along his right arm, tracing from shoulder blade to fingertip.
Shen Xiuhan exhaled with a shout and heaved upward, his voice a cold, muffled bark.
“Up!”
The source of the black thread burst from the lake like a sea-dragon.
In an instant it tore through the calm surface, dragging with it a massive blue-green blur.
SPLASH!
Spray erupted in every direction.
Through the morning fog, a fish half as long as a man — its entire body armored in scales as black as iron — was wrenched from the deep reef and hauled into the air.
A second-tier treasure fish — the Ink-Bone Green Fish!
Out of the water, the creature sensed its doom at once.
Its broad, fan-like tail thrashed wildly, every slap against the air cracking like a whip. Wind buffeted Shen Xiuhan’s face as the fish fought to break the thin black thread and dive back to the lakebed.
Its scales gleamed with a dark luster. Between its gaping jaws, rows of bone-white fangs flashed — clearly no gentle creature.
“Think you’re getting away?”
A grin tugged at Shen Xiuhan’s lips. Five fingers curled with lightning speed, their tips trailing a razor wind that parted mist.
Heavenly Vulture Twisting-Wind Hand — Heavenly Vulture Throat Lock!
Iron-hard fingers clamped down on the gaping gills with surgical precision, sinking deep into the slits.
The thrashing behemoth went rigid in an instant, as though its lifeline had been seized. Its whole body went slack.
Shen Xiuhan hefted the beast one-handed — sixty or seventy jin of dead weight — and felt the furnace-hot qi-blood pulsing beneath its skin. He clicked his tongue in wonder.
“Judging by this size, you’ve been growing for twenty or thirty years at least… A few more years at the bottom of this lake and you might have molted into a third-tier Black-Scale Bone Fish.”
Shen Xiuhan let the remark pass.
With a flick of his right hand, he popped open the oversized iron fish-basket he had purchased specifically for the occasion and stuffed the treasure fish inside.
He tossed the basket back into the water to keep the catch alive, and secured the rope.
This Ink-Bone Green Fish was larger by far than any treasure fish he had caught before.
If he brought it back to Mei Hall for his master to refine, it would yield a considerable haul of qi-blood pills.
But that was for later tonight. Right now, there was something more important to attend to.
Shen Xiuhan drew a deep breath and slowly lifted a bead from around his neck.
No larger than a fingernail, perfectly translucent and lustrous, a deep blue shimmer rippling within like flowing water — alive with spiritual energy.
The Sea-Overturning Pearl!
He closed the bead tight in his fist. His gaze, sharp as a falcon’s, turned cold as it swept westward across the lake.
Three to five li through the mist in that direction lay the stronghold whose infamy echoed across all of Cangzhou —
Dongyi Island!
And the pale golden light that marked the inheritance of Diaohailou’s true-transmission disciple pulsed softly from that very direction — a silent enticement that tugged at him day and night.
Before now, Shen Xiuhan’s cultivation had been too shallow. Facing a lair packed with thousands of water bandits, he had been in no position to act rashly.
But now he had broken through to Sinew Tempering, and the Sea-Overturning Pearl was in his hands.
The pearl not only allowed its bearer to move through water as freely as on land — it could also mask a living person’s presence.
Unless the enemy had cultivated the Divine Eye, detection was all but impossible.
“It’s time to take a look.”
Shen Xiuhan licked his lips, paddled the black-canopied boat to a secluded reed marsh nearby and hid it away, then launched himself from the gunwale.
SPLASH!
The moment he hit the water, the Sea-Overturning Pearl in his hand blossomed with a soft, azure glow.
The radiance expanded rapidly, forming a crystal-clear bubble that enclosed Shen Xiuhan entirely.
Inside the bubble, the air was crisp and dry, clean and fresh. He could see every rock, every blade of watergrass, every darting fish and grain of sand on the murky lakebed with perfect clarity.
‘Westward.’
A thought stirred in Shen Xiuhan’s mind.
The azure bubble responded to his will, gliding through the current like a fish — silent, frictionless — leaving only a faint trail of blue light in its wake, dispersed by the undertow in an instant.
“Truly worthy of a spirit artifact…”
A spark of delight crossed Shen Xiuhan’s gaze.
By now, he had seen enough of the world to understand something about its weapons and tools.
Any implement that bore the word “spirit” was no ordinary thing.
Implements were divided into treasure-grade and spirit-grade.
Treasure-grade weapons, though sharp, largely lacked spiritual awareness. They came in upper, middle, and lower tiers.
Yet even a lower-tier treasure weapon commanded a steep price, could slice through metal and split jade, and far surpassed any so-called “hundred-times-forged” blade.
According to Second Senior Brother Xu Chuan, Master Mei Shuangfeng herself possessed a treasure weapon.
It was a set of claw gauntlets, called Face-Ripper.
Several years ago, she had commissioned a master artificer in the prefectural city to forge them — at a cost of hundreds of taels of silver plus a piece of spirit ore — into an upper-tier treasure weapon.
It was the fearsome reputation of Face-Ripper that had allowed Mei Shuangfeng, an outsider, to plant her flag in Changyun County’s inner city and establish her own hall.
Spirit-grade artifacts, however, stood in a class far above treasure weapons.
Xu Chuan had never seen one himself — only read descriptions in old texts. According to those records, spirit artifacts possessed a nascent spiritual awareness and could commune with their master’s intent.
And this Sea-Overturning Pearl matched that description perfectly — a system-verified spirit artifact, no less.
Shen Xiuhan guided the bubble through the underwater world for roughly a quarter of an hour.
The currents around him gradually slowed. Light and shadow grew complex. Among the silt on the lakebed, shards of broken pottery and the wreckage of sunken boats appeared — relics from who knew how many years past.
He drifted upward, letting the azure bubble rise until only the top of his head broke the surface. His eyes swept forward in a rapid scan.
Before him stretched a colossal landmass.
Broad terrain, rolling hills, a scale that dwarfed Yunyi Island a hundred times over and more.
This was Dongyi Island.
In the distance, pavilions and towers rose in dense ranks. Dark brick and grey tile flickered in and out of the morning mist. Row upon row of bamboo buildings spread outward in terraced layers. He could even make out vast tracts of farmland and vegetable plots within the island’s interior, fruit trees growing thick and heavy — for all the world a fortified water-town bristling with defenses.