Chapter 3015: Chapter 3015
The pirate flotilla dropped from the sky-ships and formed ranks, touching down on the Desolate Sea world.
Li Qingyang led the vanguard—five hundred pirates—followed by five hundred expedition scouts, then Chang Yuxing and the other heavy hitters, with another five hundred pirates bringing up the rear.
Liu Yan’s squad—Ye Liuyun included—marched at the very tail, one last band of pirates behind them.
The column stretched so long it looked like a dragon, rolling into the Desolate Sea in all its swagger. The show of force alone kept weaker cultivators from even thinking of ambush, and warned off the sea-beasts below.
Had they stayed aboard the sky-ships, giant monsters would have singled them out, and their strength would have stayed invisible.
Ye Liuyun used the lull to size up the big guns: thirty-odd in plain sight, ten of them true aces. He guessed more were tucked away in private pocket-worlds; First-Star Pirates couldn’t be this thin.
Then he swept his gaze outward. The Desolate Sea lived up to its name—an endless, primeval ocean. Even with his golden pupils he couldn’t see the bottom.
Black waves heaved under a sky the color of wet iron, as though a storm might break any second.
The moment they crossed into the world, the salt-stink of the sea hit them. Thunderous crashes—*boom, boom*—made every heart skip; one surge could swallow the whole column whole.
Thousands strong, they still looked like ants on this vast water. Everyone flew high, giving the surface a wide berth, spirit-sense probing the depths for sudden jaws.
*BOOM!*
A fish whose head outsized its body breached, needle teeth glinting, eyes popping, mouth gaping straight at the scouts. That maw could have taken half the squad in one bite. Luckily the thing was slow; the scouts scattered skyward. The jaws snapped shut on nothing and the creature flopped back, *whump*, into the swell. None of the heavies bothered to strike.
“Unity Six,” Ye Liuyun murmured—his golden pupils had pegged the beast’s tier.
The false alarm tightened every nerve.
Li Qingyang’s voice rang in every ear:
“Stay sharp. Out here that was a *small* one. Keep your guard up or you’re fish-food.”
He lifted the formation even higher, buying a heartbeat of reaction time—cold comfort if something truly colossal charged from a hundred *li* away.
They hadn’t gone far before the next wave struck: dozens of the same big-headed fish, ranks three to six, erupting at different heights, all hungry.
Blades, spells, and fists answered. The aces joined in, detonating fish mid-air; mangled carcasses rained back, dyeing the sea scarlet. Ye Liuyun’s group downed two Unity-Four specimens.
The moment blood slicked the water, the surviving fish wheeled and devoured their own, forgetting the humans.
Li Qingyang barked, “Accelerate—blood draws worse!”
They’d barely picked up speed when he ordered a full vertical sprint.
Ye Liuyun’s golden eyes had already picked out thirty black fins knifing toward them—triangle sails the size of warship prows.
Tiger-sharks. Each a titan, Unity Five–Six, bigger than any he’d seen—living dreadnoughts. Even without cultivation their bulk could crush steel.
The humans shot skyward. The sharks ignored them, racing for the bleeding fish. From on high the pirates watched the titans tear through the school—one bite shredding several fish, a tail-swat flinging others like kindling—before the red foam swallowed the scene.Those freak fish were just as savage—instead of fleeing, they swarmed the two lowest-realm tiger sharks in a suicidal frenzy.
The surface exploded into chaos: true essence, seawater, and beast-blood sprayed in every direction, the roar of impacts never ceasing. Weight of numbers paid off; the fish tore the two sharks down to bone until the giants finally went still.
Moments later the same school was devoured clean by the remaining tiger sharks—not a scale left.
The sharks didn’t linger. The instant they finished feeding they shot away at full speed, abandoning their own dead. Some of the pirates were still blinking in confusion when someone spotted a second wave—black sharks—charging from the distance, easily twice the tiger-shark count.
The newcomers circled once, picked the two half-stripped carcasses clean, then drifted slowly off.
The sea-beast brawl had burned one lesson into every pirate: finish fights fast and run faster. Power and savagery out here couldn’t be measured by cultivation alone; a tiger shark two whole realms below you could still kill with a single bite.
“Move!”
Li Qingyang barked the order and led the group at top speed.
Only when the sea below had calmed did they drop lower. Veterans of the Desolate Sea like Li Qingyang needed surface references—markers that lay beneath the waves. Without Ye Liuyun’s golden pupils, flying too high meant seeing nothing.
