Archipelago

On the edge of the Deep Red Continent lies the Clotho Archipelago.

Deep into the night, the sea and sky were as black as ink.

Gales and torrential rain lashed against the reefs, and waves slammed into the coast with a relentless, heavy roar.

At the port of one of the larger islands in the archipelago, fishing boats were moored, their hulls tossing and turning with the surging tide.

Not far from the harbor stood a warehouse, a dim, yellow light flickering within.

Between the fishing boats and the warehouse, a dozen figures clad in raincoats braved the storm. They were moving crates covered in waterproof tarps from the warehouse, struggling to transport them to the fishing boats.

The heavy boxes dragged deep ruts into the muddy ground, which were quickly filled by the pouring rain.

"Move faster! Get everything loaded while it's still dark. In this hellish weather, we can't let the cargo get soaked," a man with a round face and a thick beard bellowed, his voice breaking in the wind.

"Got it, boss!" someone called back.

In the intervals between moving cargo, the bored workers chatted in snatches.

"This rain is unnatural, and the wind is too. It's fiercer than when the Sea Widow passed through last time," a younger man said, wiping rain from his face and spitting.

"When it comes to the sea, what isn't unnatural?" another replied, his voice raspy.

"I remember in my grandfather's time, they cast a net once and hauled up a lump of iron. It was covered in patterns no one recognized and was terrifyingly heavy. Later, a passing merchant bought it for a fortune."

"That's nothing," someone else chimed in, lowering their voice.

"I heard that a ship hauled up a piece of bone last year. It wasn't a fish's, and it wasn't a human's. It looked like the rib of something massive, and it felt freezing to the touch. That very night, everyone on the ship went mad and committed mass suicide by jumping into the sea. No one knows where that bone went."

For those who made their living from the sea, any mention of the ocean's bizarre legends made them fierce and passionate, as if they had forgotten the world around them.

A youth said with conviction, "My grandfather saw a mermaid."

"When he went out to sea fifty years ago, he heard a woman's song near a reef. He almost steered the boat right into it. Luckily, the old helmsman on board slapped him awake."

"A mermaid? More like a man-eating siren," someone scoffed.

"I've heard of giant sea monsters. Thirty years ago, a cruise ship vanished without a trace, people and all. In the end, only a single plank drifted back in the western waters. It had three claw marks on it, deep enough to bury half a fist! What kind of fish has claws like that?"

"Hey, hey, it's the middle of the night. Stop talking about such things, or you'll attract something foul," the round-faced bearded man warned.

The group laughed it off but took his advice, immediately switching the topic to the typhoon from a few days ago.

"The wind a few days back was terrifying. It felt like the sky was being torn open. Did you guys notice? When the wind was at its peak, it looked like something fell from the sky."

"You saw it too?" someone immediately agreed. "It was over in the east. I don't know what it was, but it hit the ground with a massive boom."

"Yeah, a few brave souls on the island already went to check it out. They said it left a really deep crater."

"Was there any treasure in the pit?" the youth's eyes sparkled.

"Treasure, my ass," a middle-aged man grunted. "There was nothing but mud and rocks. It was clean as a whistle—just a hole."

Someone voiced a bold idea: "Could it have been... a living thing? Swept up into the sky by the typhoon and then dropped back down?"

"Maybe it was an injured sea monster or something. It fell but didn't die, then crawled back into the ocean."

"Who knows? As long as it didn't hit anyone, it's fine. Anyway, that pit has nothing in it now but rainwater."

The bearded man urged them again: "Hurry up and move. Once this load is done, you can go back and rest."

Amidst the sound of wind and rain, the workers pretended to speed up, though they actually had no motivation left.

Working through the night in this heavy rain—then give us a damn raise!

...

At this time, on the eastern side of the Clotho Archipelago, about two kilometers from the coastline, lay a leeward slope.

A massive impact crater was clearly visible. Turbid rainwater had accumulated inside, forming a small pond. Leaves and weeds blown down by the wind floated on the surface.

The driving rain beat against the water, kicking up countless splashes.

Amidst the noisy storm, a slight spatial fluctuation that was almost imperceptible quietly spread like an undercurrent deep beneath the water, perfectly masked by the violent weather.

The spatial fluctuation originated from beneath the water at the bottom of the pit, where there was an entrance to an extra-dimensional space.

The entrance seemed unstable.

Inside the extra-dimensional space, there was a chaotic silence.

Several spectral mirrors hovered in mid-air, emitting a cold, faint light that illuminated the scene within the space.

Yue Shi lay quietly on the ground, his eyes closed and his long hair disheveled, looking like an exquisite doll that had lost its life.

His condition was extremely dire.

Right in the center of his chest, an arrow was lodged!

The shaft was ancient, neither metal nor wood, dark in color yet faintly flowing with golden light.

The arrowhead was buried deep in his chest. No blood flowed from the wound, but his skin was covered in fine cracks, like shattered, exquisite porcelain.

These cracks spread from the arrow wound on his chest, crawling across his neck, cheeks, and arms, covering almost his entire body. He looked like a glass statue on the verge of crumbling into pieces.

A sinister and evil aura constantly emanated from him, echoing repeatedly within the extra-dimensional space.

The little snow leopard was curled up quietly by his side, its head resting on its forepaws and its eyes closed. It seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep as well, its breathing faint.

An unknown amount of time passed.

Yue Shi, who had looked like a corpse, suddenly twitched an eyelid.

Then, he slowly opened his eyes.

They had no focus and were devoid of spirit, showing only a hollow darkness.

Yet deep within that darkness, a spiteful, ghostly light that seemed to condense all the malice in the world flashed by.

Yue Shi was awake.

But he didn't move. He remained still as a corpse, merely opening his eyes.

His consciousness returned, painstakingly piecing together the last fragments of memory before he had lost consciousness.

Cultivators from the Bureau headquarters' special action team had set up an array to trap him.

But to Yue Shi, fighting them was like walking a dog.

However, an arrow had suddenly come flying. He seemed to be locked on; no matter what means he used, he couldn't dodge it.

He was hit by the arrow and destroyed the city as he fell.

Things didn't end there.

When the city was being destroyed, a gaze had pierced through the chaos of the scene and stared firmly at him.

A "person" had appeared in Yue Shi's vision.

It was impossible to accurately describe their appearance with language because every time he looked, the details changed.

Sometimes it was a blurred old man, sometimes a slender figure of indiscernible gender, and sometimes it seemed to be just a humanoid current of air.

The other party called himself a True Immortal and spoke with grand arrogance the moment he opened his mouth.

“Using you as the wick, suspended in the heavens, through the cycles of the moon, you shall anchor the fortune of the eight directions.”

“The night of Zhongzhou must have a bright moon hanging high.”

Translated into plain speech, he wanted to capture Yue Shi and hang him in the night sky of Zhongzhou.

It had been a long time since Yue Shi had heard such a nonsensical and outrageous claim.

But this fellow calling himself a True Immortal was truly bizarre.

Yue Shi had activated Destiny's Curse, trying to find a future where he killed the True Immortal.

However, among the countless futures he could see, the True Immortal was nowhere to be found.

Furthermore, the arrow lodged in his chest was also something that could not be glimpsed through Destiny's Curse.

Was it that the level of Destiny's Curse was not high enough to see the True Immortal and that arrow?

Or... had the True Immortal and that arrow jumped out of the laws of fate and causality!

After assessing the situation, Yue Shi immediately made a decision: flight was the best option.

At the same time, the True Immortal had already made his move.

Fortunately, Yue Shi still had a trump card. He was able to interfere with time and then fled in a random direction.

He ran all the way to the edge of the Deep Red Continent and, before completely losing consciousness, fell onto this island and barely managed to hide in an extra-dimensional space.

Malice grew wildly in his heart.

Tsk~. I've suffered a major loss.

But it doesn't matter. It's not like I haven't before.

“Anyone who dares to make me unhappy for a moment, I will make them unhappy for a lifetime...”

After a long time, Yue Shi's hollow eyes finally regained a flicker of their original spirit.

The snow leopard woke up at the same time as him.

He very slowly tried to move his right hand.

A dull pain spread from the arrow wound on his chest, traveling through the cracks to his entire body.

Yue Shi immediately stopped moving. After resting for a while, he painstakingly checked his body.

The most serious injury was, without a doubt, in his chest.

That arrow was very strange and specifically targeted him.

If he had been shot straight through at that time, he might have "died" on the spot.

While the moon was immortal and Absolute Evil was imperishable, Yue Shi could die.

After his death, the authority would re-activate one day in the future and give birth to a completely new personality, but that wouldn't be Yue Shi.

Fortunately, he had reacted quickly enough.

Yue Shi slowly raised his hand, moving it inch by inch to tear open the clothing over his chest.

He saw that before the arrow had truly pierced his chest, it had first passed through something else.

A mooncake.

A piece of what looked like a perfectly ordinary Five-Kernel Mooncake. The arrowhead had pierced through it before further stabbing into Yue Shi's body.

The 【Five-Metal Mooncake】 possessed the trait of being indestructible; even the decomposition machine could do nothing to it.

It was originally a very useless supernatural object, but he hadn't expected it to actually come in handy in such an emergency.

Indeed, everything has its use.

However, the indestructible Five-Metal Mooncake had actually been shot through by this arrow.

This arrow must be quite a treasure!

Fortunately, the mooncake still acted as a critical buffer. Part of the arrow's power had been consumed as it pierced through.

Otherwise...

He had to pull this arrow out as soon as possible.

He could clearly feel that the power on the arrow was still continuously destroying his body; the cracks all over him were proof of that.

With every extra second it remained, his condition grew a fraction worse.

But pulling the arrow was no easy task.

This arrow wouldn't come out so easily. Acting rashly could lead to an even worse outcome.

He needed to prepare and recover a bit of strength first.

Before that, Yue Shi thought of another matter.

He had been in such a hurry to escape that he had left the Ghost behind in Forging City.

Was he still alive?

An information lifeform shouldn't be that easy to kill.

He just feared that the True Immortal might have dragged the Ghost out.

He needed to contact the Ghost to understand the current situation in Zhongzhou.

Thinking this, Yue Shi turned his eyes to look at the snow leopard beside him.

The snow leopard stood up and brought over a phone in its mouth.

It was an old phone brought from the book world.

The snow leopard used its paw pad to unlock the screen and pressed a string of numbers.

Soon, a voice came from the phone.

It was the Ghost.

They were in contact, and the Ghost's response speed was incredibly fast.

Yue Shi briefly asked about the Ghost's recent situation.

The Ghost said, "When the earthquake happened in Forging City, I sensed something was wrong. I immediately used the network to jump through multiple anonymous points, left Zhongzhou, and finally hid inside the laptop of some random passerby in the South Continent."

To put it simply, he had run away, and he had done so decisively and without hesitation.

He was an information lifeform with extremely strong analytical and calculation abilities, and he was fast.

Yue Shi then asked what the reaction from the Bureau was after Forging City was destroyed.

The Ghost knew what he wanted to ask and replied, "Zhongzhou officials have unified their story, claiming an earthquake occurred in Forging City. All mainstream media and network platforms are synchronizing this information under regulation. Videos, pictures, and discussions related to abnormal phenomena have been purged and blocked on a large scale."

"While there are scattered rumors among the people, they haven't formed any effective spread. Currently, Zhongzhou's social order is gradually recovering within the framework of earthquake relief."

A very standard operating procedure.

The Ghost continued, "As for the movements of the Zhongzhou Bureau, I'm not sure."

"I retreated too early, and you were out of contact. For safety's sake, I didn't take any extra actions, including gathering intelligence."

Yue Shi fell silent. The Ghost was still as cautious as ever.

But his caution was correct. In that situation, staying for even one more second could have led to capture.

A living piece of information would certainly be very valuable.

Deeply versed in the way of survival, the Ghost remained particularly quiet when his golden thigh was not around.

After a few more brief exchanges, the Ghost said he wanted to come and regroup with Yue Shi.

"Without you, I really have no sense of security."

But Yue Shi refused him: "No need."

"If you come, I will have no sense of security."

"Stay hidden where you are and maintain silence. Without further instructions from me, do not actively connect to any network nodes, and do not attempt to locate or approach my coordinates. Above all, do not perform any data activities that might attract attention."

"I will contact you again in a while."

The Ghost was silent for a moment before finally saying, "Okey-dokey."

Yue Shi said nothing more and cut the connection directly.

He didn't need the Ghost to come over.

The effect of the Feedback was failing; he couldn't trust the Ghost in this state.

To be more precise, he didn't trust anyone. In his most vulnerable moment, any existence that could bring variables should not appear.

The extra-dimensional space fell back into silence, and the snow leopard took the phone away.

Yue Shi closed his eyes to recover his strength.

Before long, he fell into a deep sleep.

And he even had a rare dream.

The dream was filled with brightness, and it seemed as if many people were looking at him, some with concern and others with loathing.

He saw a figure in rainbow-colored raiment with wide sleeves under a tree, their hair piled high, cradling a blurry, cute creature in their arms.

A bit further away was a person holding a longbow, their face hidden behind a veil, with a hound crouching at their feet.

Even further away, a burly figure held a sandglass in one hand.

And there were more, many more.

A person surrounded by countless silver disks, each one reflecting his face from a different angle.

A hunched old woman sat by a spinning wheel, the spindle wound with silver-gray threads that she was weaving into a web with no beginning or end.

Everyone's gaze was focused on him.