"Vice City Lord, there's no need for concern—if anything, your reputation is excellent. Many won competed for this position; I only secured the spot through the advantages of my figure and constitution," Ouyang Yining replied swiftly.
She wasn't speaking out of flattery. Lin Hui's reputation among the Blood Ancestors was genuinely excellent. He had a taste for won but no tyrannical streak; his temperant was steady, and he showed no signs of dangerous side effects from his abilities. He spent most of his days cultivating and generally kept to himself.
Many Blood Ancestors hoped their descendants could stay by Lin Hui's side to cultivate a close bond with him.
That said, the most compelling factor was Lin Hui's seemingly exceptional aptitude. Coupled with the fact that Liu Xiao appeared unable to withstand his bloodline essence and had failed to conceive after all this ti, others had begun to see an opening. If they could seize the chance to acquire even a trace of his bloodline...
"Alright then. You know the exact location of the pantheon of gods' abnormal movents, right?" Lin Hui didn't ask further, cutting straight to the point.
"Yes. In the Jade Sea region, about forty thousand li northwest of Black Cloud, the Minglan pantheon of gods appears to have conducted so form of large-scale ritual. It turned thousands of li of surrounding sea black, the region now perated with red lightning and an oppressively dense mist that blots out all visibility," Ouyang Yining continued.
"According to reports from passing rchant fleets, the area has since transford into a dead zone of Black Mist—mist that no wind can disperse. An Elder was sent to probe it previously, but returned with nothing. Now the Black Mist's range appears set to expand further, and if left unchecked, it will eventually cut across the main shipping lane between Black Cloud and Tianchong City. The impact on trading fleets would be severe."
"We'll go take a look first," Lin Hui said with a nod. "Does the Extre Desire Heaven have a contingency plan?"
Every urban district maintained an Extre Desire Heaven and a Taisu Primal Disk. Since Mistborn City Lords generally didn't handle administrative affairs, the bulk of daily operations fell to these two institutions working in tandem. For an incident of this magnitude, the Extre Desire Heaven—as the administrative body—should have already exhausted several approaches. That was why he asked.
"The Extre Desire Heaven has attempted over a dozen ritual dispel thods, all to no effect. Through sampling, they eventually determined that this Black Mist contains a strange, unidentified power—not the divine force of a Mist God, but a bizarre power channeled through so variety of Night Mist. A short-term resolution will be extrely difficult. Their projections indicate that to fully disperse this Black Mist, one must either forcibly overwrite it with a stronger, more concentrated energy, or push deep inside and eliminate its core source," Ouyang Yining said, her voice grave.
"Have they tried eliminating the source?" Lin Hui asked.
"Nine tis. The teams that entered included experts up to the Palace Master level. None have returned," Ouyang Yining replied.
"One last question: what is your cultivation realm?"
"Your subordinate only recently advanced to Blood Ancestor and has not yet been assigned to the Extre Desire Heaven or the Taisu Primal Disk. My military rits from this mission will determine my placent," Ouyang Yining answered promptly.
"Then let's move out." Lin Hui inwardly sighed. Even a Blood Ancestor was serving as his assistant—a clear signal that this anomaly was an extraordinarily thorny problem.
The Black Army rose as one and fell into formation, marching to the Moon Tower's edge.
At the unfenced periter stood a flight of stairs leading downward. At their base sat a small, delicate white jade circular platform, and hovering high in the air just beyond it were massive Moth Carriages—pitch-black, draped in silver armor.
Each moth bore four wings with white eye-shaped markings at their centers, and their mouthparts were razor-sharp and serrated, lending them a ferocious aspect. A single Moth Carriage could accommodate ten Black Army soldiers. All eleven Moth Carriages boarded their personnel in turn, then swept swiftly out of the Relic's protective array, pressing into the fierce wind toward the anomalous sea region.
Lin Hui stood at the head of the largest Moth Carriage, gazing forward.
Above the sea of Mist, a brilliant golden sun hung in the distant sky.
Blue stretched overhead; grayish-white stretched below.
He looked down. Beneath their convoy, smaller Moth Carriages drifted past in loose formations. There were also clusters of Moth Carriages hauling great, resplendent miniature rchant ships as they navigated across the Mist sea.
This place was far more bustling than Tuyue City.
Sweeping his gaze across the sea of Mist, he could count no fewer than twenty sets of Moth Carriages and sky-ships entering or departing Black Cloud.
As ti passed, these sights gradually thinned until they vanished entirely. The boundless white sea of Mist settled back into silence.
"Vice City Lord, given the distance, we will need to briefly accelerate the Moth Carriages and use a Treasure Relic to enter a Void Well to save ti. Please be careful not to project your mind-spirit outward—at such extre speeds, an anomalous jump could tear and injure it," Ouyang Yining reminded him.
"Understood," Lin Hui nodded. "What is a Void Well?"
"Void Wells are special hollows generated by certain rare Treasure-grade Relics when activating the Super Divine Speed ability. They only appear when velocity reaches an absolute threshold, and their duration is vanishingly brief. Entering one of these hollows allows a straight-line crossing of ten thousand kiloters in a fixed direction within a very short span of ti—which is why they are typically used for ultra-long-distance voyages."
Ouyang Yining had studied Lin Hui's dossier beforehand. Knowing he ca from a small place like Tuyue City, she understood he would be unfamiliar with much of this place's common knowledge and explained with patience.
"I see. Can the Super Divine Speed of a Mistborn activate Void Wells as well?" Lin Hui asked.
"That... Your subordinate is only a newly advanced Blood Ancestor. I wouldn't know the answer to that. My apologies," Ouyang Yining said, visibly flustered.
Lin Hui nodded and let it go.
Before long, the Black Army's Moth Carriage convoy began to accelerate.
All eleven giant moths increased the tempo of their wing-beats.
Ouyang Yining produced a colorful, egg-shaped Relic and rubbed it ten tis.
Across every Moth Carriage in the convoy, the moths' wings caught fire, blazing with bright red flas. Fed by those flas, the carriages' speed climbed higher and higher.
In barely a minute, they had pushed to such an extre velocity that even Lin Hui could no longer make out his surroundings clearly. The violent high-altitude air currents were cut off entirely by the strange flas. For a mont, the world fell into perfect silence.
Lin Hui stood at the front of the carriage, watching everything on both sides blur into streaks of white, blue, and gold. Only the small patch of sky and sea directly ahead remained distinct.
Poof!
A fist-sized black hole tore open beside the head of the lead moth. It gradually solidified, darkened, and held. Then, with a wet squelch, the entire convoy shrank and plunged headfirst into the hole.
Darkness swallowed everything. It lasted a single second before snapping back. When Lin Hui's senses returned, the surrounding sky had grown markedly dimr.
The sun was still there. The sky was still there. The sea of mist was still there—but the ambient brightness had dropped considerably.
"From here, we fly a short distance further, and we'll reach the anomalous sea region. Roughly half an hour's journey remains," Ouyang Yining said beside him.
"Mm. Handle the march as you see fit—I only need to know when it's ti for
to act." Lin Hui gave a small nod. He knew little about commanding troops on the move; leaving professional matters to professionals was the sensible approach. An amateur issuing blind orders was a cardinal mistake.
"Thank you for your understanding, Your Excellency." Ouyang Yining exhaled quietly with relief. This Vice City Lord Lin Hui was even easier to work with than she had expected. It seed her painstaking efforts to secure this position hadn't been wasted.
What she did not know was that the Lin Hui she found so accommodating was quietly nursing a private worry.
The sea region lay smothered beneath the Black Mist anomaly—the danger would surely be imnse. The Jade Sea harbored many dangerous monsters. If he eliminated this Black Mist, would that count as saving the vast number of creatures trapped within?
And if so—would he harvest a massive flood of life's pulsation, completing the comprehension accumulation for the first layer in a single stroke?
Hard to say. But the possibility felt very high.
What concerned him was that the origin of that life pulsation might also interfere with his final comprehension efficiency. And beyond that—seemingly ever since his great battle with Tuyue—he had faintly sensed sothing was wrong with his body.
The power of the Wind Disaster appeared to be transforming him on an ever-deeper level. It no longer felt as though he were actively guiding and absorbing its power. It felt as though the Wind Disaster itself had grown impatient, forcibly pouring more power into him.
Finding his physical strength insufficient, the Wind Disaster had even thoughtfully thrown in a constitution-strengthening package.
This inexplicable, unsettling acceleration carried none of the feedback of hard-earned cultivation. It felt like lying motionless on the ground while the earth itself dragged him forward.
Lin Hui felt a creeping unease.
Even if he simply lay still without cultivating a single day, he could still grow stronger at a rapid pace. And yet the more this happened, the more unsettled he beca.
Nothing in this world ca without a price. If sothing truly required no price—or only a negligible one—then that gain would be universal, common, utterly unremarkable.
But if you alone possessed this gain, and the cost of acquiring it was zero... then you had to ask what made you so special, or why—despite its apparent ease—no one else had obtained it. Were all others simply fools?
The one thing that gave him any comfort was that cultivating the Star Breath Sword Canon seed capable of suppressing these strange changes the Wind Disaster was forcing upon him.
What the Star Breath Sword Canon channeled seed to be a different kind of power entirely—vast, imnse, and ancient. It felt boundless, as though rooted in the native forces of this world itself, capable of resisting the Wind Disaster's erosion and infusion to so degree.
That was one of his core reasons for throwing himself into cultivating the Star Breath Sword Canon with such urgency.
After all, compared to when he had fought Tuyue, his physical strength had already grown by roughly another thirty percent. Any power he exerted now carried the Wind Disaster's natural force fused within it by default. He had to actively and consciously shed that fused force—peeling the Wind Disaster away—simply to pass as ordinary.
…
Above the Jade Sea.
Even in full daylight, the waters surged with violent swells, their jade-green color long drowned in black. Dense Black Mist smothered thousands of li of sea in every direction, turning the entire region into an enormous dark sphere. Fierce winds shrieked like wailing ghosts. A carpet of skeletal remains bobbed at the Black Mist's outer edge, and the stench of rot and strong acid hung thick in the air—a suffocating, foul reek.
Passing black rchant ships pitched and rolled through the towering waves, grinding forward with great effort. They were all enclosed designs. Not one person stood on deck; everyone had retreated into the hulls.
Inside one of the ships.
Weiwei, Mingde, Mingxiu, and Mingchen sat in the simple black tunics of slave laborers, staring in silence at the churning blackish-green waves beyond the porthole.
They were surrounded by other slaves. The dead air was thick with the mingled stench of vomit, feces, urine, and sweat. Several people had already died in the corners; no one had dealt with the bodies, and the corpses had begun to draw maggots.
There was no Corruption here. The slave laborers on this vessel simply wouldn't live long enough for that—they would be dead within ten years.
The four of them, bound together as fellow disciples, looked out for one another and managed to hold on to a bare minimum of livable conditions.
"This weather again. Three days of sailing and we still haven't cleared this sea of Black Mist. Was the range always this large?" Mingde muttered, sighing.
"No, it wasn't. Sothing might genuinely be wrong this ti," Mingxiu said, tugging wearily at his long-untrimd beard.
Mingchen sat apart, knees pulled to his chest, saying nothing.
The three n had been swindled one after another and sold into slave labor by their so-called friends in the Python Clan. Weiwei had been the last to arrive. The mont she realized she had been deceived, she bolted—only to be beaten and dragged back, one leg broken. It had only recently healed.
She had believed she had found love. She never imagined the other party was a Python Clan slave trader who specialized in luring ignorant young won.
As it happened, sheer luck had spared her the worst of it: the Python Clan's aesthetic sensibilities and human ones diverged so drastically that they had no interest in her. Otherwise, a piece of "goods" like Weiwei would have been imdiately consud and kept as a breeding vessel.
Since then, the four of them had shuttled endlessly back and forth across the vast Jade Sea, running the route between Tianchong City and Black Cloud City as the ship owner's private property—managing cargo, scrubbing cabins, and shouldering the bulk of the servants' work.
They had thought about escaping. But every single crew mber aboard possessed at least High-Tier Call level strength.
Any vessel capable of crossing the Jade Sea needed substantial power to move cargo safely. And this ship was a rchant vessel in na only; in truth, it was a pirate ship. The owner's strength was unplumbed—rumored to be an expert at the Palace Master level, at minimum.
Yet for all their desperation, the four had never let go of hope. They still watched for any opening, waited for any chance to run. They simply hadn't managed to put their plan into motion before the Black Mist swallowed the sea around them, trapping them in this new peril.
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