The sea surface split open, and the colossal thing beneath the water had already reached the shallows. Chen Wuya tightened his grip on the short blade, its edge catching the dying sun at the horizon in a flash of cold light.
He planted his feet wide on the wet sand and raised both hands toward the sea. The Misaligned Practice Connects to Spirit system ran silently in his mind—no prompt, no warning. He knew he could not afford a mistake now, yet the pulling sensation in his meridians grew stronger and stronger, as if something were burrowing its way inside.
"Wave-Riding Art!" he shouted under his breath, sending true qi rushing into the seawater along the misaligned-force route.
It should have been a technique that raised a wave wall three zhang high, but his unstable true qi made it explode violently instead. It was as though the seabed had been set ablaze. With a boom, a hundred-meter wave rose straight from the ground and crashed toward the shore. The crest churned with shattered stones and broken timber as it bore down on them.
Mo Feng shouted, "Fall back!"
The merfolk warriors retreated one after another. Bai Zhi turned and charged straight toward Chen Wuya.
But Chen Wuya did not move. He stared at the towering wave, then suddenly smiled. The misaligned force had veered off course, but the system was still completing the pathway. He could feel that unruly power being sorted out anew.
"It's not about raising the wave..." he murmured. "It's about dismantling it."
He slammed both palms downward. Misaligned Force Reversal surged upstream and flooded into the wave's crest. The raging torrent halted for an instant, then began to split apart. Every drop of water sharpened, hanging densely in the air like ten thousand longswords planted upside