Chapter 59: Chapter 54: One Rider Against a Thousand
’If I’m going to make a move, I might as well go all out.’
This was Luh Yao’s usual style.
Come to think of it, the Blood Knight had no real combat experience since his conversion. This was a good opportunity to test whether this Knight, who had been holed up in his castle for so long, could actually fight—and win.
The Blood Knight received his orders, grabbed his greatsword, and charged out of the castle, heading east. Upon reaching the docks, he boarded a galley and commanded the pixel-people to sail east across the sea.
The galley was fast, but the continent was some distance from the waters where the East Sea Clan was active. The ship sailed on, stopping at small islands for supplies along the way. It took nearly an hour to reach its destination.
The silhouettes of dugout canoes appeared on the blue and white pixelated ocean.
The East Sea Clan warriors were all women. They were very similar to the East River Tribe, each carrying a bow and wearing full-body soft leather armor.
Beside a few of the canoes, the lizard-like heads of Sea Monsters emerged from the water, eyeing their surroundings menacingly.
Luh Yao noticed that each canoe was accompanied by a Sea Monster. The lowest level among them was LV 8, while the highest reached LV 11.
Clearly, the East Sea Clan had deliberately strengthened its naval blockade.
Unlike last time, the Sea Monsters recognized the danger of the Blood Knight. They all veered away from the galley, keeping their distance. Fear had made them break free from the East Sea Clan’s control.
"Sea Monsters! Sea Monsters!"
"Attack! Attack!"
"Sea Monsters, why are you running away? The sea is your battlefield and your home!"
The people of the East Sea Clan shouted at the top of their lungs.
But the Sea Monsters didn’t turn back. One by one, they dove underwater and scattered, driven by instinct.
Although the Sea Monsters retreated without a fight, the people of the East Sea Clan remained fierce and brave.
"Warriors of the East Sea Clan!"
"Charge!"
"Drive out the enemy!"
"Ram and sink the Barbarians’ ship!"
"Defend the ocean!"
"For the East Sea Clan!"
Canoe after canoe launched a ferocious charge toward the galley!
Aboard the canoes, the female warriors of the East Sea Clan drew their bows and fired arrows.
Unfortunately, the arrows couldn’t do any damage to the tall galley.
Realizing this was futile, they began to use their canoes as weapons, accelerating to ram the galley directly.
However, the canoes themselves were crude. They had no rams and couldn’t build up enough speed to have any real impact. Instead, they shattered upon collision.
The scene looked like a swarm of small insects in the water, throwing themselves one after another at a large lizard attacking their nest, hoping to scare it away with sheer numbers.
Reinforcements from the East Sea Clan kept arriving, but they were all just more canoes. Their maritime technology had not progressed to more advanced ships.
The result, naturally, was like moths to a flame.
Luh Yao reviewed the East Sea Clan’s path of civilization in his mind.
The East Sea Clan was a seafaring people, so they had an advantage in their understanding of the ocean. Back when the Garlic Tribe hadn’t even learned shipbuilding, they were already roaming the seas, and their offshoot, the East River Tribe, could rule the rivers.
They controlled the Sea Monsters, a type of maritime Extraordinary Weapon, and had dominated the seas for a very long time.
But that was also where the problem lay.
Overly reliant on the Sea Monsters, the East Sea Clan could traverse the ocean with nothing but canoes, which put them in the exact same mold as the East River Tribe. They had no internal motivation to further develop their shipbuilding technology.
With the Sea Monsters as their naval force, the East Sea Clan didn’t need sharper arrows or better spears and shields. Escorted and aided by the Sea Monsters, even their canoes could rule the waves.
Their civilization’s development path strayed further and further off course, gradually falling into Stagnation.
If one had to pinpoint the root cause, the reason the East Sea Clan ended up this way was the Prayer God.
Luh Yao remembered. The deceased Yuyao had said that the East Sea Clan was a source of soldiers for the Prayer God, the entire clan used as a breeding ground for Sea Monsters.
The Prayer God had no intention of developing the East Sea Clan; his main base of operations wasn’t here.
He could use Totems, had once coerced Ghost City Saniluo, and the East River Tribe even said he had Apostles under his command...
It was obvious, then, that the Prayer God was a player from the Crawling Area in the Divine Hall of the Gods.
In other words, just like the Skinner and the Whistleblower, he couldn’t enter this Fragment World. He could only exert some influence when the Forest God fell, and perhaps he had left a one-way Teleportation Gate here as well.
The East Sea Clan had been neutered, turned into a deformed, isolated island for manufacturing Sea Monsters. Of course it couldn’t develop.
Witnessing the East Sea Clan’s current state, Luh Yao told himself to take it as a cautionary tale.
He had always refrained from merging the group with Extraordinary Power, led by his Apostles, with the tribal pixel-people precisely because of this concern.
The two were like two different financial products.
The pixel-people of the Garlic Tribe were like a fixed-term deposit: the short-term returns were low, but it was stable and paid off in the long run. As long as they were given enough time, they would develop bit by bit. The best strategy was not to meddle.
The Extraordinary Group led by Isabel and the Blood Knight was like a portfolio of stocks: high investment, high returns, and requiring frequent management. Of course, there was also the risk of a massive loss.
Luh Yao’s attention drifted for a moment, and when he looked back, he saw the situation on the battlefield had changed drastically.
The galley was sinking.
’What’s going on?’
He took a closer look. It turned out the canoe ramming hadn’t worked after all. Instead, the East Sea Clan had launched a suicidal boarding action.
The Blood Knight swung his greatsword, felling an East Sea Clan member with every strike. It was truly like a tiger among sheep, cutting them down with ease.
However, the female warriors’ target wasn’t him, but the galley itself. They were sacrificing their lives to tie down the Blood Knight while sending others to destroy the ship.
The Garlic Tribe’s people had been in the ship’s hold, rowing the whole time. As the ship took on water and began to sink, they started abandoning it one by one, jumping into the sea to escape.
On the sinking ship, the Blood Knight continued his massacre, bodies piling up at his feet. But the water was gradually swallowing him, creating a sense of tragic heroism, like the Overlord of Western Chu making his last stand at the river’s edge.
"Victory is ours!"
"The ship is sinking!"
"We’ve won!"
"For the East Sea Clan!"
The surviving female warriors on the canoes cheered.
Luh Yao watched and scratched his head.
’I was careless.’
’I didn’t expect the women of the East Sea Clan to be so tough. Their will to fight is much stronger than the Sea Monsters’.’
’The Blood Knight isn’t afraid of water, is he?’
’A mighty level 60 expert drowning to death? I can’t accept that...’
’If worst comes to worst, I’ll have him hijack a canoe.’
Luh Yao was about to take manual control of the Blood Knight, but the next scene made him pause.
The Blood Knight, Necied, sank beneath the waves, obscured by the blue and white pixels of the sea, with only his name visible. The number -1 slowly appeared above his head, once every second, indicating that his Life Value was continuously decreasing.
He was walking on the seafloor, step by step, approaching the target Luh Yao had assigned him: the main island of the East Sea Clan.
Luh Yao pinched the bridge of his nose.
’You’re something else.’
’I guess this is a case of "you have tactics, I have divine power"...’
’As expected of a level 60 Apostle.’
Luh Yao couldn’t help but think.
’It’s a good thing the Blood Knight wasn’t in his right mind before. Plagued by continuous Chaos and Weakness, he was constantly creating Corrupters and building his legion, all while being sealed in the castle by Rule Power. If he had been free to move about, he would have been a walking natural disaster for the tribal people.’
About ten minutes later, the Blood Knight walked out of the water onto the coast, the black-armored Knight reappearing in the world. He had walked all the way from the seabed to make landfall on the large island where the East Sea Clan lived.
By this point, the Blood Knight’s Life Value had dropped by about 1,000 points, leaving him with 2,800.
His appearance sent the surrounding members of the East Sea Clan into a panic.
"Didn’t he die? Is he unkillable?"
"He should have sunk to the bottom of the sea!"
"A terrifying Undying Knight!"
"A monster! It’s a monster!"
The Blood Knight carried out Luh Yao’s orders.
He mechanically swung his greatsword, cutting down the people around him one by one.
The pixel-people of the East Sea Clan scattered and fled.
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