In the Extreme North Ice Sea, deep beneath the sea, within Merfolk City, the gentle light that once illuminated the entire city had dimmed. The occasional whale song drifted over from afar, but it sounded low and mournful.
At a glance, throughout the vast Merfolk City, the shell houses no longer held beautiful mermaid girls blushing as they discussed which male mermaid was the most handsome. Children no longer played hide-and-seek among the floating seaweed. The only ones present were a small number of solemn-faced, emotionally repressed mermaid guards, silently swimming about as they patrolled for anything unusual outside the city.
If the various Soul Beast clans of the Extreme North Ice Sea had all suffered losses, then the Mermaid Clan, as the ruling clan, had suffered even more devastating losses.
The Mermaid Clan, which had numbered fewer than twenty thousand to begin with, had lost as many as ten thousand clanspeople in battle because of the Abyss Invasion.
Their population had been halved, and most of those who had died were adult clanspeople with cultivation. The blow was immense. What was even more heartbreaking was that the fallen mermaids had not even left behind bodies; they had all been devoured by those vicious Abyssal Creatures.
At that moment, Sea God Plaza on the northern side of Merfolk City was densely packed with countless mermaids. Their tails came in all sorts of colors, but the grief on their faces was astonishingly uniform.
No one spoke. Everything was utterly silent.
The place where the Sea God Statue had once stood no longer held a statue. In its place was the Mermaid Hero Hall, built by order of the Sea Princess.
Though it was called a Hero Hall, it was actually an open-air structure made from special coral. It covered a vast