The Forbidden Depths

Gray-blue mist swirled around Lu Changsheng, breathing in and out with dark tides as if it possessed life. He gripped the Sea God Halberd tightly in his hand, and eerie blue runes along its shaft flared and dimmed in sequence, propping up a deep-blue light screen about ten feet across that kept all the gray fog, laden with the power of ancient restrictions, completely outside.

The deeper he slipped into the forbidden ground, the dimmer the surrounding light became. Even the faint blue phosphorescence common to the seabed vanished entirely, as if even light itself feared this ancient domain forgotten by the years.

This place was utterly different from the splendid prosperity of the Crystal Palace. There were no schools of Spirit Trout fry swimming about, no coral towers spilling with streaming color, only a silence and desolation that seemed almost primordial. On either side, seabed cliffs rose a thousand zhang high, their walls covered in holes eroded by seawater over hundreds of millions of years. Those holes were packed close together like the nests of some colossal beast, and now and then a nail-sized glimmer would flash and disappear within them—some ancient creature not even recorded in the Spirit Trout Race's texts was peering out.

Yet within this deathly stillness and barrenness was hidden another kind of suffocating magnificence.

Lu Changsheng's steps suddenly halted. The deep-blue halberd light illuminated an open seabed depression ahead. In that instant, even with his temperament, his pupils still contracted fiercely beyond his control.

"This is..."

On that depression, which covered dozens of mu, all manner of rare treasures that could never be seen in the outside world grew in scattered points like stars casually sown by the hand of a god. The first thing that entered his sight was a clump of seaweed