Volume 3: Global Vanguard & The Advanced Pinnacle
Chapter 291
Deep-Sea Sovereign Beast Emperor: Eight-Headed Water Python Sovereign Emerges
Deep in the Pacific Ocean, at a depth of eleven thousand meters within the Black Abyss Trench.
This was an eternal forbidden zone for humanity, a place where sunlight had not once touched for hundreds of millions of years. At the bottom of the abyssal trench, seawater pressure reached over a thousand atmospheres, powerful enough to crush any titanium-alloy block into a thin sheet of steel in the blink of an eye. By all rights, this should have been a dead world shrouded in pitch-black darkness and marrow-chilling cold.
Yet at this moment, the quiet order of the ocean floor shattered.
A muffled, heavy heartbeat—sounding like the battle drum of a primordial god of death—reverberated from deep within the lithospheric crust.
“Thump... thump!”
Infrasonic waves carrying destructive magic energy swept through the cold water layers, causing ancient, millennium-old coral reefs to shatter into fine powder. Schools of deep-sea bioluminescent fish had their internal organs burst instantly, turning into mottled streaks of blood within the black water.
Immediately following that monstrous heartbeat, a tectonic fault line over five hundred miles long at the bottom of the Mariana Trench violently ripped open!
Deep-sea mineral mud surged upward, and blazing red magma from the Earth’s interior erupted. However, before its heat could even disperse, it was completely swallowed by an endless, icy, malevolent source of energy. The seismic magic monitoring stations of international geological observatories located in East Asia—from the shores of Divine Continent to the frontline island chains—simultaneously registered skyrocketing numbers.
Level four... level six... level eight...
“CRACK!”
The needles on the mechanical magic-crystal dial gauges could no longer withstand the pressure, shattering into tiny fragments. A level-ten magic earthquake! An energy magnitude that had only ever appeared in mythological records of the chaotic era!
Fifteen minutes later, above the surface of the East China Sea.
The daytime sky suddenly plunged into darkness, as if a giant hand had drawn a black curtain across the sun. The howling gale instantly died away in a ghostly manner. The air grew thick and stifling, carrying an extreme, fishy stench of deep abyssal mineral mud and suffocating sulfur that pierced straight into the nasal cavities.
On the observation platform of Black Reef Island, Captain Chu Zhen and the soldiers who had survived the battle with the armored crab swarm had just finished bandaging their wounds. Before they could even catch their breath, they witnessed a sight that caused every single drop of blood in their veins to freeze solid.
“Look... look at the sea!” A sentry pointed out into the distance, his voice shrill.
The sea level was receding.
It was not the gradual retreat of ordinary tides, but an extreme, absurd mega-ebb!
Billions of cubic meters of seawater seemed to be sucked down into an invisible, giant funnel far out at sea. The waves steadily retreated, exposing muddy shoals, sharp, jagged reefs covered in barnacles, and the corpses of thousands of deep-sea fierce beasts wildly struggling in the black mud. The coastline of Black Reef Island, followed by the entire thousand-mile-long littoral belt of the Divine Continent, lay starkly exposed to the open air.
The seawater had retreated more than ten nautical miles in just a few short minutes!
“A mega-ebb...” Academician Sun Licheng collapsed onto the stone ground, his aged hands tearing into his skin, his eyes wide with horror as he stared into the giant vacuum where the ocean had just vanished: “For the seawater to recede this violently... this is the precursor to a world-destroying deluge! The ocean floor has been hollowed out... something... something is pushing the entire water volume of the oceanic trench up onto the surface!”
Lin Feng stood on the highest crag of the frontline island, his black robe with silver-trimmed edges snapping violently in the headwind that was frantically being sucked toward the fissure. His gaze was as cold as a newly unsheathed blade, staring fixedly at the intersection of the horizon and the billowing, deep-purple mist.
beside him, the Nether Gluttonous Battle Wolf no longer maintained its usual arrogant poise. The demonic wolf’s massive protective body lowered, its four claws digging so deep into the boulders that lightning sparks flew. The dragon scales along its spine stood completely on end, and its throat emitted deep, rumbling growls of extreme tension.
The primordial fierce beast bloodline within the Gluttonous Wolf was sensing an oppressive might that far surpassed ordinary creature rankings.
That was the breath of an absolute overlord of the seas.
“RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE——!”
Without giving humanity another second to steady their minds, the sea surface in the distant horizon exploded violently!
A pitch-black column of water with a diameter of over five thousand meters shot straight from the trench fissure up into the nine heavens, tearing apart all the dark clouds in the sky and forming a giant spatial tear leading straight to the stratosphere. The shockwave generated compressed-air shockwaves that swept across the shallow sea surface, grinding every single reef in its path into dust.
From within that destructive column of water, a pitch-black phantom rose.
At first, distant observers mistook it for a subterranean mountain range or a drifting island. But as the churning white sea foam and millennium-old mineral mud rained down in torrents, the true appearance of the giant beast gradually revealed itself beneath the jagged lightning splitting the sky.
Its body was as massive as a moving continent, thousands of meters long, tightly covered in thick, hexagonal scales of black mixed with a metallic azure sheen. Each scale was as large as a house, their surfaces covered in the fossilized white bones of ancient marine creatures and the scars of seabed magma forged through countless ice ages.
Yet what caused anyone who saw it to lose their wits was the upper body of the giant beast.
It possessed not just a single head.
Eight gigantic serpent necks, as massive as towering skyscrapers, reached straight up into the air. Each neck was hundreds of meters long, winding and slithering amidst the thunderous clouds. At the summit of each neck was a ferocious snake head bearing the likeness of a primordial vicious dragon, their gills throbbing with blood-soaked spikes. Sixteen gigantic, crimson eyes burned like sixteen blood-moons, coldly looking down upon the mortal world with the absolute contempt of an apex predator.
Deep-Sea Sovereign Beast Emperor: Eight-Headed Water Python!
Mid-Stage Sovereign Class!
The legendary entity that had ruled the East China Abyss for tens of thousands of years had now officially awakened, descending upon the mortal realm!
“ROAAAAAAROOOOOOO——!!!”
All eight snake heads simultaneously raised their necks and roared. The shrieking roar did not carry ordinary sound frequencies, but rather the resonance of deep-layer elemental magic energy that tore eardrums apart. All recording equipment on the coastal observation stations exploded into plumes of black smoke. The high-altitude clouds were swept by the shockwave and utterly obliterated, revealing a dark, bewitching sky stained with a shade as deep as fresh blood.
Even more terrifying was the energy churning atop its eight heads. Each head held a type of highly mutated, toxic magic energy within its jaws, representing the eight destructive calamities of the ocean:
The first head on the far left hissed, exhaling a breath carrying deep blue Ice Poison. The freezing sub-zero airflow caused moisture droplets in the air to instantly condense into sharp, indigo ice blades, while the surrounding environment froze into glowing, spine-chilling toxic crystals.
The second head carried Black Poison thick with deathly aura. The scales on its head rotted away in patches, and black venom oozing from between its teeth dripped down onto the shallow seabed, instantly corroding the granite and sending up billows of grey smoke, turning tens of thousands of marine creature corpses into pools of stinking yellow water in an instant.
The third head was shrouded in ferocious Thunder Poison. Crimson phantom lightning coiled around the single horn atop its crown, tearing the surrounding space into blood-hued cracks, while distorted magnetic fields caused gravel on the ground to float before exploding into powder.
The fourth head commanded the primordial Tide. Its mouth widened like an oceanic black hole, and the terrifying suction from its throat pulled thousands of tons of shallow seawater backward, accumulating into a densely compressed water-pressure sphere capable of crushing an armored fleet.
The fifth head bubbled with boiling Fluorescent Acid. Fluorescent green mucus streamed continuously from the corners of its mouth, each dripping drop emitting a terrifying sizzle as its corrosive temperature surpassed volcanic lava, powerful enough to turn high-level magic barriers into useless froth.
The sixth head was the embodiment of Storms. Three towering, pitch-black tornadoes formed around its neck, sweeping up thousands of razor-sharp wind blades spinning at supersonic speeds, howling as if intent on scraping away the earth’s crust.
The seventh head was submerged in a ghostly, Gloomy haze. The gaze of this head emitted purplish-black mental waves, distorting the vision of all living beings within a radius of hundreds of miles, sowing despair, madness, and suicidal impulses into people’s minds.
And the eighth head—located at the center, the largest and most ferocious—bore the Void attribute! Around this head, space constantly shattered and mended itself, with pitch-black cracks spreading like spiderwebs. Where it exhaled, there was no sound, no light, only the annihilating stillness of the void, swallowing all matter and magic!
“Sovereign... Mid-Stage Sovereign...”
At the Divine Continent Coastal Military Command hundreds of miles from the shore, General Du Hongyuan of the Operations Command stood frozen in front of the newly restored magic satellite remote-sensing screen.
The entire underground command room, located fifty meters below ground, fell into a dead silence. Generals, operations staff officers, and seasoned Super-tier mages who had walked through life and death across desert and jungle battlefields... at this moment, their faces were drained of all color.
On the three-dimensional electronic map, the warning energy level of the newly appeared creature had shattered all standard military scales:
[Extreme Warning: Mid-Stage Deep-Sea Sovereign Magic Energy Target Detected!]
[Classification: Primordial Venomous Python Deified Form.]
[Affected Oppressive Range: The entire East China Sea and 1,200 km of coastline!]
[Hazard Level: NATION-DESTROYING!]
“HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO——!”
The magic air-raid sirens of twelve coastal provinces of the Divine Continent simultaneously and automatically activated.
This was neither the yellow alert of Warrior Class, nor the orange alert of Commander Class, nor even the S-class Blood-Red alert of Early-Stage Sovereign.
It was the SSS-Class Blood-Red Death!
The piercing, shrill, ear-piercing alarms echoed throughout the night sky, reverberating through bustling cities of tens of millions of people, penetrating every alley, every high-rise, and every military encampment. Red warning lights dyed the entire coastal dome crimson. Millions of ordinary citizens caught off guard suddenly raised their heads, their extreme confusion quickly turning into terrified chaos as military loudspeakers broadcasted the highest emergency command:
“All coastal civilians must immediately evacuate to the deepest magic-proof bomb shelters! Repeat, all civilians must immediately evacuate! This is not a drill! An SSS-class disaster has descended!”
At the same time, stretching endlessly along the coastline, the Divine Continent Sea-镇ing Grand Barrier—a defensive engineering project that had consumed tens of thousands of tons of top-grade magic crystals and the efforts of thousands of array mages over half a century—began to react to the pressure of the Eight-Headed Water Python.
Hundreds-meter-tall energy pillars embedded deep along the shore simultaneously blazed with brilliant light, shooting beams of golden light into the sky that wove together into a giant wall of light separating the ocean and the land.
Yet this sturdy wall of light, which had withstood countless beast tides, now shook violently upon merely touching the distant pressure of the Eight-Headed Water Python.
“CRACK... CRACK!”
Giant, spiderweb-like cracks tore across the flat surface of the golden barrier. Under the pressure of a Mid-Stage Sovereign beast hundreds of nautical miles away, the defensive space of an entire nation began to groan, emitting popping sounds as if on the verge of shattering!
At the frontline defense outposts, thousands of Elementary and Intermediate mages, unable to withstand the terrifying mental pressure from the Gloomy head, clutched their heads and writhed on the ground, fresh blood oozing from the corners of their eyes and ears. Even Advanced mages had to bite their teeth shut, circulating all the magic energy within their star nebulae to erect protective shields, yet their knees still trembled and their bones clicked beneath the invisible magic pressure.
Despair, thick as the night, enveloped the entire battle line.
Faced with a world-destroying entity of this stature, human strength seemed far too insignificant. A single strike from it was enough to turn a city of millions into a flattened plain, burying all civilization at the bottom of the deep sea.
On Black Reef Island, the point closest to the beast.
The earth and rocks beneath Chu Zhen’s feet continually collapsed, and massive chunks of the island’s sheer cliffs plunged into the shallow sea. The courageous captain of the military district could only lean his back against the cracked rock wall, his eyes bloodshot as he stared at the giant monster offshore, his hand gripping the hilt of his sword trembling violently:
“Mid-Stage Sovereign... Is this the power of ancient deities? What on earth... do we have to stop it?”
Academician Sun Licheng and the researchers collapsed onto the ground, their breathing ragged as the toxic gas in the air grew dense. Even standing dozens of miles away, the aura of death from the eight snake heads still acted like invisible hooks choking their windpipes.
Amidst this desolate, apocalyptic canvas, only a single figure remained standing as straight as a spear driven deep into the earth.
Lin Feng.
The howling gale whipped against his face, carrying droplets of seawater laden with burning acidic toxins, but before they could touch his skin, an invisible layer of lightning-fire vaporized them completely. His dark eyes held not a single trace of fear or hesitation. Instead, deep within the abyss of his pupils, sparks of magic energy were silently condensing and spinning at a dizzying speed.
He was observing.
He saw through every magic meridian, every murky circulating energy current within the Eight-Headed Water Python’s massive body. The eight heads represented eight extreme elements, seemingly flawless without a single flaw, yet precisely because it fused eight conflicting sources of magic energy, a region of extremely subtle magic energy turbulence existed at the intersections of its cervical vertebrae!
“Such a majestic momentum.” Lin Feng spoke, his voice low yet resounding, cutting through the howling storm to reach Chu Zhen’s ears: “Suppressing the ocean floor for ten thousand years, the moment you emerge you want to swallow the entire Divine Continent?”
Chu Zhen tremblingly raised his head to look at Lin Feng’s solitary back: “Mr... Mr. Lin! You must leave! You have a Half-Step Sovereign summon beast; if you use your full strength to break space and fly back to the mainland, you still have a chance of survival! Staying here... means certain death!”
“Run away?”
Lin Feng chuckled coldly, the corners of his lips curling in arrogance:
“Behind me lies the territory of the Divine Continent, home to hundreds of millions of kindred. If I retreat one step, the deep sea advances a mile. Where do you expect me to run?”
He slowly raised his right arm.
At that very moment, deep within Lin Feng’s star nebula, four magic systems simultaneously roared to awaken!
No longer cautious probing, no longer single isolated attacks. The Summoning Constellation, Lightning Constellation, Fire Constellation, and Spatial Constellation intertwined, forming an unprecedentedly ferocious surge of magic pressure erupting from deep within his veins.
The brilliant purple-gold aura shot straight from Lin Feng’s body into the sky, condensing into a divine pillar of light that directly confronted the pitch-black oppressive might of the Eight-Headed Water Python!
Beneath his feet, the Nether Gluttonous Battle Wolf sensed its master’s surging fighting spirit, and the tension in its eyes instantly vanished, replaced by the ferocity and bloodlust of an archaic fierce beast. The demonic wolf raised its head and emitted a roar that tore the night apart, the nether flames on its back blazing dozens of yards high, while deep purple lightning intertwined into a lightning net that enveloped the entire Black Reef Island, protecting the tiny humans below from the suffocating magic pressure!
Seeming to sense the provocation from a tiny ant on a distant rocky outcrop, the eight giant heads of the Eight-Headed Water Python abruptly stopped roaring.
Sixteen blood-red eyes slowly lowered, locking onto the black-robed figure atop Black Reef Island!
Boundless killing intent condensed into substance, pressing down and cracking the space surrounding the island into pitch-black fragments. The Eight-Headed Water Python was enraged. A Mid-Stage Sovereign creature that absolutely dominated the open sea would never allow any mortal to dare look it straight in the eye!
“ROAR——!”
The Tide head roared first, pulling billions of cubic meters of seawater from behind it to rise into a wall of torrential water over three hundred meters tall, standing erect between heaven and earth. Behind it, the remaining seven heads simultaneously opened their crimson jaws lined with rows of sharp fangs.
Ice poison, Black poison, Thunder poison, Tide, Acid, Storm, Gloomy haze, Void!
Eight destructive magic energy spheres in eight eerie colors began to condense at a terrifying speed before the teeth of the eight snake heads. The light from the eight energy spheres illuminated the pitch-black night sea with a terrifying, deathly glow, distorting all surrounding spatial rules.
A world-destroying joint attack from a Mid-Stage Deep-Sea Sovereign was taking shape!
The three-hundred-meter tsunami wall crashed down with the force to crush an entire continent. The eight destructive magic energy sources were about to fire, aiming straight at Black Reef Island and the entire Divine Continent defense line behind it!
Life and death in a split second, hanging by a thread.
Lin Feng stood towering amidst the eye of the storm, his black hair whipping backward in the gale, his eyes flashing with the divine light of intertwined lightning and space. His momentum did not retreat in the slightest; his finger pointed straight at the giant beast’s eight heads amidst the clouds, his voice echoing across the entire realm of heaven and earth:
“Come on!”