Villain: Manipulating the Heroines into hating the Protagonist Chapter 1044: The Wrath of the Deep-Sea Beast Courts

Ten thousand feet beneath the tumultuous waves south of Black-Scale Strait, the light of the upper world had been extinguished since the dawn of the mortal plane. Here lay the Abyssal Trench Courts, a sprawling range of sunken volcanic calderas and glowing hydrothermal vents that had served for ten millennia as the sacred spawning grounds of the Deep-Sea Demon Beast Tribes.

For four hundred years, the deep currents flowing through these calderas had run clear and warm, nourished by the southern root-branches of the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein extending from the Dragon-Spine Trench.

Today, however, the ancient spawning waters were choking in filth.

Thick, viscous ribbons of dark crimson sludge drifted down like sunken fog from the human naval war raging two thousand fathoms overhead at Black-Scale Strait. It was the unrefined dregs of thirty-four shattered warships and six thousand slaughtered human cultivators—fermented by the corpse-rot spells of Blood-Bone True Monarch into a sinking tide of marrow-corroding poison. Worse still, because seventy percent of the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein had been diverted westward ten months prior, the hydrothermal vents along the caldera floor had cooled to a sluggish trickle, lacking the spiritual pressure required to flush the toxic human blood-sludge away from the nesting hollows.

Across three leagues of blackened coral shelves, tens of thousands of translucent eggs and newly hatched Grade 1 and Grade 2 Demon Beast fry floated belly-up in the stagnant, crimson-tinted water, their soft gills rotted away by the sinking human miasma.

At the center of the deepest caldera stood a circular palace constructed from the calcified skulls of ancient whales and pillars of dark abyssal iron.

Resting upon the central stone dais was a sovereign of the deep ocean: Shifting-Tide Patriarch, a Peak Grade 8 Eight-Armed Abyssal Kraken whose cultivation stood on par with a peak Mid-Stage Nascent Soul ancestor. Unlike lower-grade sea creatures, Shifting-Tide Patriarch had compressed his colossal, mountain-sized body into the form of a twelve-foot-tall humanoid sovereign from the waist up, with skin the color of dark indigo slate, a crown of jagged black coral horns, and eyes that burned like twin golden lanterns. Below his waist coiled eight muscular, thirty-foot tentacles lined with toothed bone-suckers that cracked the stone floor whenever they shifted.

Standing thirty paces below the dais, inspecting a handful of dead, rotted serpent fry with trembling fingers, was the second ruler of the southern abyss: Red-Scale Matriarch.

Having crossed into the Early Stage of Grade 8 three centuries ago, the Scarlet Flood-Serpent sovereign had shed her beastly husk to assume a human form of wild, breathtaking ferocity. She stood tall and statuesque, her porcelain skin flushed with a warm pink-gold hue and marked along her collarbones and outer thighs with delicate, shimmering patterns of ruby-red dragon scales. Waist-length hair the color of burning magma floated freely in the water around her bare shoulders. She wore only a battle-wrap of woven crimson sea-silk that struggled to contain the massive, heavy globes of her breasts and the wide, sinuous flare of her hips, while her vertical, golden-red slit pupils blazed with murderous fury.

Beside her stood a ten-foot-tall giant encased from head to toe in interlocking plates of dark-gold shell: Iron-Pincer General, an Early Grade 8 Demon Beast of the Deep-Sea Armored Crab Tribe, carrying a pair of crescent pincer-halberds that weighed eight thousand catties apiece.

"Forty-two nests in the third caldera have gone completely cold this morning!" Red-Scale Matriarch’s voice rang through the water like clashing bronze bells, her massive chest heaving against her crimson sea-silk wrap as she crushed the dead fry in her palm and let the gray ash drift toward the stone floor. "Three hundred of my Scarlet Flood-Serpent brood—offspring that took fifty years of my core essence to gestate—have choked to death on the rotting corpse-grease sinking down from Blood-Bone True Monarch’s ships! And the spiritual spring beneath my molting cavern has dried up to a muddy puddle!"

She spun around, her waist-length crimson hair whipping through the current as she glared up at the twelve-foot Kraken ruler on the dais.

"How much longer will you sit on that stone throne and count the currents, Shifting-Tide Patriarch?!" Red-Scale Matriarch demanded, baring two rows of sharp, pearlescent fangs. "First those two-legged human vermin stole the heart of the Dragon-Spine Spiritual Vein, and now their rotting ancestors treat our sacred spawning grounds as a cesspit for their butchered disciples! If we wait another three months, not a single Grade 3 juvenile in the southern sea will survive the winter!"

Shifting-Tide Patriarch slowly uncrossed his indigo arms. One of his thirty-foot tentacles rose from the dais floor, curling around a six-foot-long spiral horn carved from the tusk of an ancient Grade 9 narwhal—the Ancestral Abyssal Conch.

"This Seat waited only for the northern current-scouts to return from the Dragon-Spine Trench and Black-Scale Strait," Shifting-Tide Patriarch spoke, his deep voice vibrating at a low frequency that caused the whale-bone pillars of the palace to hum. "Three days ago, my shadow-octopi crept within five leagues of the Primal Dragon Grotto. The bronze dragon-lock was cleaved open by a human broadsword, the Grade 7 Abyssal Chimera-Wyrm was slain by human fire, and the root of the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein was pierced by star-iron stakes."

Iron-Pincer General clashed his two massive pincer-halberds together, sending a booming shockwave through the caldera. "Then there is nothing left to investigate! The Myriad Ocean Palace and the Holy Nether Sea Organization have broken the four-hundred-year seabed covenant! Let this general take the armored vanguard north tonight—I will shear the keels off their warships and drag Heavenly Tide True Monarch into the mud!"

"We will not merely sink a few ships at Black-Scale Strait," Shifting-Tide Patriarch said, rising to his full twelve-foot height as all eight of his colossal tentacles fanned out behind him, unleashing the crushing, oceanic pressure of a Peak Grade 8 Demon King. "Since the human sects have poisoned our nurseries and stolen our earth veins, we will wash their island chains clean of human footprints and drag their mountain veins down into the sea to replace what was taken!"

Shifting-Tide Patriarch raised the six-foot Ancestral Abyssal Conch to his lips and inhaled a vast torrent of deep-sea water-qi before blowing into the spiral mouthpiece.

WUUUUUUU—OOOOOOOM!

A primordial, bone-shaking horn blast erupted from the ten-thousand-foot caldera.

The sound did not dissipate in the water; carried by the deep-earth ley lines and the crushing bottom currents, the call of the Ancestral Abyssal Conch rolled across three thousand miles of the southern and eastern sea domains.

Along a hundred leagues of dark abyssal trenches, millions of pairs of glowing red, yellow, and azure eyes snapped open in the mud. Swarms of Grade 1 to Grade 4 barbed sharks, armored rays, and lightning-eels abandoned their hunting territories; hundreds of Grade 5 and Grade 6 horned sea-serpents, iron-back turtles, and bone-whales rose from their sunken caves; and thirty-six Grade 7 Demon Beast commanders marshaled their tribal packs beneath the banners of the three Grade 8 sovereigns.

The Grand Beast Tide—a calamity unseen in the Myriad Reefs Sea Region for six centuries—had begun.

Over the first two months following the sounding of the Ancestral Abyssal Conch, the southern frontier of the human sea domain turned into a drowning hell.

The Deep-Sea Demon Beast Tribes did not march directly into the main artillery line of the hundred human warships gathered at Black-Scale Strait. Instead, operating with cold, pack-hunting cunning under the direction of Shifting-Tide Patriarch, the beast legions swept wide across the eastern and southern flanks, targeting the fortified resource islands that supplied the Azure Wave Sword Sect and the Holy Nether Sea Organization with Spirit Stones, iron ore, and medicinal herbs.

On the eighteenth day of the second month, the morning mist surrounding Jade-Tide Island—the largest spirit-iron mining fortress of the Azure Wave Sword Sect, located four hundred miles south of Black-Scale Strait—suddenly turned the color of rust.

Atop the island’s central watchtower, Garrison Commander Daoist Lu, a Mid-Stage Core Formation elder of the Azure Wave Sword Sect, stared out over the battlements with white knuckles.

For ten miles in every direction around the island, the blue ocean surface had disappeared beneath a writhing, solid carpet of chitinous shells, dorsal fins, and spiked tails. Over eighty thousand Grade 1 to Grade 4 Demon Beasts—led by forty Grade 5 Saw-Tooth Manta Rays and eight Grade 6 Three-Horned Sea Wyrms—charged straight into the island’s outer Eight-Trigram Water-Repelling Barrier.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The lower-grade Demon Beasts did not care for their own lives. Driven by the sovereign bloodline command of the Ancestral Abyssal Conch, thousands of three-ton armored crabs and horned sharks slammed their bodies like living cannonballs against the glowing blue barrier dome, while the eight Grade 6 Three-Horned Sea Wyrms reared fifty feet out of the surf, spitting concentrated pillars of corrosive acid-brine onto the upper runic nodes of the formation!

"Hold the array cores! Pour another ten chests of Mid-Grade Spirit Stones into the central altar!" Daoist Lu roared down toward the three hundred righteous disciples manning the cliff bastions.

Two leagues behind the island, aboard a swift logistics supply ship that had been unloading food rations at the rear pier when the sea turned red, Qiu Yun stood at the stern rail, her blue deaconess robes snapping in the gale.

Her hand rested inside her sleeve, gripping a pulsing warning talisman sent directly from Wang Jian’s relay tower two days prior—an order instructing her to keep her vessel outside the main island barrier and abandon the outpost the instant a Grade 8 aura appeared.

"Deaconess Qiu, Commander Lu is signaling our ship to bring our spare Spirit Stones ashore to reinforce the main altar!" her first mate shouted over the deafening roar of sixty thousand beasts battering the outer dome.

Qiu Yun looked past the thrashing horde of sharks and wyrms toward the southern horizon, where a hundred-foot-tall waterspout of boiling crimson steam was racing across the sea at terrifying speed.

"Cut the mooring cables and fire the emergency wind-sails at full overload!" Qiu Yun ordered, her voice sharp and brooking no disobedience. "That is not a Grade 6 pack leader coming from the south—it is a Grade 8 Demon King! If we stay moored to this pier for ten more breaths, not a single splinter of this ship will survive!"

Before the first mate could even question her, the hundred-foot crimson waterspout arrived five hundred yards in front of Jade-Tide Island’s main gate.

The boiling water parted, and Red-Scale Matriarch stepped out onto the crest of the waves in her tall, voluptuous human form.

Her waist-length crimson hair whipped around her bare, scale-marked shoulders like living tongues of fire, her massive breasts heaving beneath her soaked crimson sea-silk wrap as her golden-red slit eyes fixed upon the trembling blue dome of the human fortress.

"Human rats who drink our vein-marrow and dump your filth on my dead children!" Red-Scale Matriarch’s voice tore across the island, shattering every glass lantern in the watchtowers. "Swallow the wrath of the Scarlet Serpent Clan!"

She did not summon a human weapon. Raising her right arm, her porcelain forearm thickened slightly with glowing red scales as she swung her bare hand downward in a tearing claw strike!

"Scarlet Flood-Serpent Bloodline Art: Burning-Sea Fang!"

A hundred-and-fifty-foot crescent of condensed, boiling crimson blood-flame—backed by the vast, suffocating weight of an Early Grade 8 Nascent Soul Demon Beast—erupted from her fingernails and crashed squarely into the zenith of Jade-Tide Island’s Eight-Trigram Water-Repelling Barrier!

KRA-SHATTER!

The fortress-grade barrier, designed to withstand a siege by five Core Formation elders, did not even last two breaths against a furious Grade 8 sovereign. The blue runic dome split down the center like an eggshell struck by an iron sledgehammer, exploding into a million harmless sparks!

"The barrier is gone! Fly—!" Daoist Lu barely rose twenty feet off the watchtower roof on his flying sword before Red-Scale Matriarch blurred across the two-hundred-yard gap via Nascent Soul spatial movement.

Appearing directly above the Mid-Stage Core Formation elder in mid-air, Red-Scale Matriarch did not even bother weaving a spell. Her long, muscular right leg—bare from her wide, curvy hip down to her ankle and glistening with faint ruby scales—lashed out in a roundhouse kick that struck Daoist Lu’s crossed flying swords like a falling mountain ridge!

CLANG-CRACK!

Both Top-Grade Magic Tools snapped in half. Red-Scale Matriarch’s bare heel slammed straight into Daoist Lu’s chest, caving in his breastplate and sending his lifeless body shooting downward like a meteor through the roof of the central mine shaft!

Below her, eighty thousand furious Demon Beasts poured over the shattered breakwaters onto the beaches and cliff paths, tearing through the panicked garrison. Hovering above the burning fortress, Red-Scale Matriarch opened her rosy lips and inhaled a massive breath before exhaling a river of crimson serpent-fire down into the island’s central spirit-iron mine, melting the stone supports and collapsing the entire eastern half of Jade-Tide Island into the churning sea!

Five miles north, aboard the fleeing logistics cutter that had escaped just before the barrier fell, Qiu Yun stood at the stern rail, capturing the horrific sight of the sinking island inside a recording jade slip before crushing a long-range transmission talisman addressed to Abyssal Pearl City.

Within that same two-month span, three hundred miles further east, Iron-Pincer General marched his legion of forty thousand armored crabs ashore at Crimson-Tooth Reef—a major blood-refining fortress of the Blood Shark Hall—and used his eight-thousand-catty pincer-halberds to physically shear the island’s mountain peak in half, forcing Su Ning and Daoist Xue Li to retreat northward with the surviving blood-cruisers as six outer human islands were wiped off the sea charts in sixty days.

By the fourth month of the Grand Beast Tide, the chaos in the eastern and southern seas had reached a fever pitch. While the main human armadas hastily pulled back from Black-Scale Strait to defend their crumbling inner island rings, the independent bounty-hunting squads roaming the southern border grew even more desperate to claim the one-hundred-thousand High-Grade Spirit Stone bounty on Ye Fan before the beast tide swallowed the southern waters completely.

Fourteen hundred miles south of Abyssal Pearl City lay the Sunken Bone Archipelago—a treacherous maze of jagged volcanic rocks, whirlpools, and the bleached skeletons of prehistoric sea monsters that formed the lawless buffer zone between human territory and the deep beast trenches.

At dusk on the twelfth day of the fourth month, a howling thunderstorm lashed the archipelago. Towering forty-foot waves crashed against a narrow, half-submerged ridge of petrified whale ribs known as Broken-Rib Reef.

At the center of the slick, rain-swept bone ridge stood Ye Fan.

After four months of relentless flight and twenty-two bloody skirmishes from the Dragon-Spine Trench down to the southern border, the young Mid-Stage Core Formation cultivator looked like a cornered lone wolf. His salt-stained leather mercenary armor had been replaced by a sleeveless coat of dark blue shark-hide stitched over chainmail, leaving his scarred, muscular forearms bare to the freezing rain. Across his back hung the five-element bone scabbard, and in his calloused hands he gripped his four-inch-wide heavy black broadsword.

Surrounding Ye Fan in a tight thirty-yard triangle atop the surrounding bone spires stood three gaunt, identical brothers wearing soaked scarlet cloaks and holding curved, three-pronged iron grappling hooks attached to fifty-foot chains of blood-tempered steel.

They were the Three Blood-Ghosts of Black Reef—Daoist Wu, Daoist Ma, and Daoist Liu—a notorious trio of Late-Stage Core Formation bounty hunters who practiced a linked mind-and-qi cultivation art, allowing them to fight with the seamless coordination of a single three-headed monster.

Hovering ten feet above Ye Fan’s head, held taut by the chains in the three brothers’ left hands, was a glowing red web of barbed metal wires: the Three-Talon Blood-Locking Net, a combined Magic Treasure that sealed the surrounding thirty yards of air to prevent wind-escape techniques.

"Stop wasting your True Essence trying to cut the net from below, Ye Fan!" Daoist Wu, the eldest brother standing on the northern bone spire, rasped over the howling wind as he swung the three-pronged iron hook in his right hand in a tight circle. "We tracked the lingering scent of your golden flame across four hundred miles of reef! Your left thigh is bleeding from my third brother’s hook, and you’ve been fighting our Three-Talon Blood-Locking Net for an hour! Drop the heavy black broadsword and hand over the remaining herbs from the Primal Dragon Grotto, and we’ll leave your corpse intact before handing your head to the Myriad Ocean Palace!"

Ye Fan did not waste breath replying. In the pouring rain, his breathing was deep, slow, and measured. Blood trickled from a three-inch tear in his left thigh-guard, mixing with the rainwater pooling around his boots on the slippery petrified bone, yet his dark eyes were cold and steady.

He had no room for stray thoughts during life-or-death combat—only the exact distance to the three bone spires, the tension on the three iron chains, and the rhythmic, booming vibration rising through the soles of his boots from the five-hundred-foot abyssal chasm directly beneath Broken-Rib Reef.

"He’s trying to stall until his Golden Core recovers a mouthful of Qi! Take his right arm off!" Daoist Ma snarled from the eastern spire.

WHIRRRR—CLANG!

All three Late-Stage Core Formation brothers moved in the same heartbeat.

Daoist Wu pulled his left-hand chain taut, dropping the Three-Talon Blood-Locking Net three feet lower to force Ye Fan into a crouch, while Daoist Ma and Daoist Liu launched their right-hand three-pronged iron hooks horizontally from the east and west—one hook aimed at Ye Fan’s right wrist, the other aimed at the back of his left knee!

Ye Fan sank his hips low, his boots gripping a grooved ridge in the wet whale-bone.

Instead of retreating, he pivoted ninety degrees to his right, swinging his heavy black broadsword in a low, sweeping arc shrouded in deep-blue glacial fire.

KRA-CLANG!

The flat spine of the four-inch-wide broadsword slammed squarely into Daoist Liu’s incoming iron hook, knocking the three-pronged claw downward into the bone reef where its barbs wedged three inches deep into the petrified bon