The seawater washed over his feet, its chill creeping up his calves. Chen Wuya stared at the trail of light spreading from the seabed. Like a thin thread, it ran straight into a crack in the altar ruins. After the pearl sank, its glow did not vanish. Instead, it traced some kind of pattern beneath the water.
He suddenly remembered something Mo Feng had mentioned.
"A communication pearl... can understand the merfolk's language?"
The moment the words left his mouth, the leading merfolk across from him raised a hand, once more holding the pearl in his palm. Points of light flickered in an unsteady rhythm, as though repeating some signal.
Chen Wuya narrowed his eyes.
He had dealt with the merfolk once before. They had clearly understood human speech, yet the moment he said, "There's a ship to the east," they had suddenly flown into a rage. At the time, he had assumed it was a misunderstanding. But thinking back now, perhaps it was not that they could not understand him, but that—he had said it backward?
A thought flashed through his mind.
The Misaligned Practice Connects to Spirit System usually concerned itself only with martial arts, but it had never restricted one's way of thinking. All these years, he had walked crooked paths. Techniques had to be practiced in reverse, principles had to be thought through backward, and yet he had survived time and again.
Perhaps language was the same.
He drew a deep breath and shouted toward the sea, "The Sea God is hungry! He wants to eat fish!"
His voice was not loud, but it was clear enough.
Three seconds later, a muffled boom came from the seabed.
The reef beneath his feet began to tremble, and the seawater churned. A ring-shaped wave swelled from the formerly