In his perception, the bottom of the Red Tide... or more accurately, the entire lower half of the vast riverbed—
At this very moment, it was filled with dense, endless heaps of "Meat-food."
How could there be only tens of millions?
They were piled layer upon layer, like an underwater Great Wall built of internal organs and soft gel.
Even more bizarre was that these pieces of "Meat-food" were not whole.
For some reason, most of them had already reached a state of being shattered or burst open.
Massive amounts of red colloidal matter continuously seeped from their bodies, mixing and churning with the originally liquid Red Tide water.
This was gradually turning the entire flowing stream into a deep red gel with a density somewhere between a swamp and water.
Seeing this, a thought suddenly surfaced in Ren Yi's mind.
Perhaps—no, it was almost certain—that the original color of the Red Tide was not red at all.
The reason it was called the Red Tide was precisely because an unimaginable number of "Meat-food" were being crushed in massive swaths.
Their corpses flowed downstream, and the contents of their bodies leaked out, forcibly dyeing the entire great river a glaring, deep crimson!
For some reason, Ren Yi felt a sense of impending doom, like the wind before a mountain storm.
"L-Lords..."
Just then, Wu Erhun's voice, sounding like he was on the verge of tears, came from the front of the speedboat.
Ren Yi instantly retracted his vision and "looked" straight ahead.
At the edge of his perception, in the somewhat misty north, a "mountain" had appeared at some point.
A boundless, pitch-black shadow that completely cut off the sunlight on the horizon.
The wind in the air gradually began to howl.
It was no longer the light breeze from before, but had evolved into a violent atmospheric current roaring toward them!
Terrifyingly low pressure bore down from ahead, letting out a piercing wail.
Wu Erhun's two rows of flesh arms swung with all their might, but against the immense wind resistance and the viscous tide, the entire speedboat could barely move an inch!
Soon, they all realized that it was not an inorganic mountain composed of rock at all.
Ren Yi's perception was faster and reached further than his sight.
Therefore, he saw the true form of the gargantuan object pressing down with overwhelming force more clearly than anyone else.
It was a giant wave.
A super-massive flesh-and-blood tsunami, nearly a hundred meters high, stretching out to the left and right with no end in sight, composed of countless "Meat-food" huddled and stacked together!
"What... what is that?"
Wu Erhun's cross-shaped torso trembled violently at this moment, his fleshy facial features completely deforming out of extreme terror.
The sky-high flesh-and-blood wave pushed forward. A surviving section of the embankment on one side didn't even have time to make a cracking sound before it was completely swallowed by this torrent within seconds.
The wind howled, the sky grew dark, and a massive shadow enveloped them.
There was no way to run.
There was nowhere to hide.
...
In the next instant, facing this sun-blotting, hundred-meter-high giant wave, Ren Yi made a decision that perfectly aligned with a biological instinct to seek benefit and avoid harm.
With a sharp "whoosh," the clump of white mist that had been resting on Evans's shoulder instantly transformed into a streak of light, like an arrow shot toward the heavens.
Without even saying a word, it charged vertically toward the sky ten thousand meters up!
Leaving behind two helpless bystanders to be tossed about in the wind.
Evans was stunned for a moment, watching helplessly as that streak of white light rapidly shrank in his vision.
"What the hell?"
At the front of the speedboat, Wu Erhun directly broke down. The skin and flesh on the cross shook frantically as he let out a scream like a slaughtered pig.
"We've been abandoned by that marshmallow! He wants to hog all the loot we just divided for himself! He's not human, ahhhh!"
"Shut up! Stop shouting!"
Evans's eyelids twitched wildly. His sharp intuition made him realize something.
He gritted his teeth and dashed to the bow of the boat. With a squelch, he forcibly yanked Wu Erhun out of the speedboat!
"Holy crap, it hurts, hurts, hurts! Gentler! Lord, we're going to be drowned, ahhhh!"
With Wu Erhun losing control of the speedboat, the row of flesh oars instantly lost power, flopping on the water's surface like dead fish.
Evans ignored him, staring fixedly at the high wall that seemed ready to crush the world.
That giant wave was simply too enormous.
However, precisely because its volume was so terrifying, there was still a small window of reaction time between seeing it and the moment it truly struck.
And in this brief moment, Ren Yi had already successfully reached a high altitude that the giant wave could never reach.
However, as soon as he cleared the crest of the wave, he noticed something was wrong.
The convective winds at this altitude were extremely violent.
The moment Ren Yi showed his head, he was blown into several spins by the fierce high-altitude currents.
Hiss... there's a speed limit up here.
Ren Yi finally managed to steady himself.
But standing high indeed allowed him to see far.
From this perspective, which almost overlooked half of the Wilderness, his field of vision completely opened up.
But because of this, he saw the scalp-numbing scene behind the giant wave.
Behind that hundred-meter-high wavefront, as far as the eye could see, there were countless equally magnificent shadows stacked layer upon layer.
They were like living mountain ranges of flesh, rising and falling, surging forward wave after wave with a momentum that would destroy everything!
"Hiss..."
Ren Yi silently sucked in a breath of cold air in his heart.
At this moment, he finally gained a tangible understanding of those few words recorded by the riddle-talkers of the Sky Eye Organization in their documents: "intense geological activity."
You call this geological activity? This is a geological rampage!
The hundred-meter wave below was already close at hand, and the gale had even begun to tear at the corners of Evans's clothes.
Ren Yi sighed and muttered "Consider this my debt to you" in his heart. Then, from the depths of the white mist, he pulled out a shriveled, withered claw.
The Anomaly "Withered Claw."
Ren Yi looked down from his high vantage point and instantly locked onto Evans, who was currently lugging a cross below.
A second before the giant wave crashed down, poised to flatten the two of them along with that Lovecraftian speedboat into meat paste, the Withered Claw activated!
The invisible void warped for a moment, and Evans and Wu Erhun vanished into thin air.
"Ahhhhhhh! Mommy, help! I don't want to die, ahhhh!"
Wu Erhun's scream suddenly rang out at high altitude. The eyeballs on the wooden stake were squeezed shut as he cursed loudly.
"You heartless Anomaly! You left us behind... eh?"
Midway through his curse, Wu Erhun suddenly felt that although the sound of the wind in his ears was loud...
It didn't seem like he had the dull pain of being crushed by a flesh-and-blood tsunami.
He tremblingly opened his only eye and found that he and Evans were suspended ten thousand meters in the air, with the rolling blood-colored tide passing beneath their feet.
Evans, on the other hand, appeared relatively calm.
After all, back in the land ship of the City of the Sky Lake, although his consciousness had been somewhat blurry, he had vaguely seen Ren Yi using this Withered Claw to grab people.
Moreover, when they were dividing the loot earlier, the two of them had already calculated their respective contributions clearly, which included the credit of this Withered Claw.
"Thanks, fell—"
Evans was just about to offer his thanks.
However, an extremely awkward thing happened.
Snap.
That withered claw, without any warning, suddenly let go.
In Evans's suddenly stiffening gaze—
He and Wu Erhun's cross, the moment the Withered Claw released them, once again turned into two free-falling weights, crashing straight down toward the giant tsunami wave below!
And in the high sky, while that unreliable Withered Claw released the two of them, it backhandedly and accurately snatched a large clump of flocculent mist from Ren Yi's true form.
Ren Yi: 【...】
A solid claw naturally couldn't hold onto gaseous things. The strand of white mist that had been snatched away swirled in the Withered Claw's hand before returning to Ren Yi's body.
There was nothing he could do. The Withered Claw had its own mechanism; it seemed its robber-like nature could not be changed.
However, this was a bitter blow for the other two guys still in the air.
And so, an extremely rhythmic scream rang out in the sky once more:
"Ahhhhhhh—I'll screw your ancestors, ahhhhhhh!"
Rate on N.U.
