Predation

Six hundred and thirty years of cultivation flowed steadily through his body. The deep-blue rings grew ever more profound, as though they had devoured every trace of light around them. Jingtian coiled within his nest, nourished by the gentle warmth of the Water-Condensing Pearl, yet the "gaze" with which his senses watched the outside world was colder and more focused than ever.

Having cleared away every potential threat, this stretch of sea was now entirely under his control. Yet what followed was not peace of mind, but an even deeper hunger—a supreme desire for strength, growth, and freedom from this body and even the shackles of fate.

Hunting, devouring, growing stronger—these had become his instinct and sole creed. As for ecological balance? Resource depletion? What did any of that have to do with him? The strong preyed on the weak; natural selection ruled all. That was the iron law of the Deep Sea. What he wanted was to become the "strong" at the very top of the food chain, not some shepherd preserving a fragile balance.

Cultivation was no longer simply a matter of absorbing Rift Aura and the Water-Condensing Pearl's energy. Jingtian began a systematic, efficient, and brutal sweep of every soul beast within his territory whose Soul Power exceeded fifty years.

He was no longer content with lurking in the shadows and assassinating prey. More often, he simply crushed them.

Disguising himself as a reef, he waited for schools of century-old Iron-Backed Swordfish to pass by before suddenly unleashing a wide cloud of multicolored poison mist. He watched them slaughter one another or sink into death amid hallucinations and paralysis, then calmly devoured the strongest among them.

He mimicked the scent of a wounded sea beast, luring several greedy Saw-Toothed Sea Wolves—each around one hundred and fifty years old—into a prepared venom trap and wiping them out in one stroke.

He even barged directly into the nests of smaller soul beast groups, sealing the exits with poison mist and harvesting them in extermination-like fashion.

His poison grew ever stranger and more unpredictable through frequent combat and the devouring of different kinds of soul beasts. Beyond basic nerve paralysis, corrosion, mental disruption, heavy sluggishness, and multicolored hallucinations, he began attempting to mimic the scent of prey to lure victims in, or inject venom into the seawater to form lasting Poison Domains, enclosing areas as his personal hunting grounds.

The efficiency was exceedingly high, and the gains were equally impressive.

Within his territory, the number of soul beasts visibly dwindled. What had once been a vibrant sea gradually became "clean"—those soul beasts with a certain level of cultivation, capable of providing substantial energy, had nearly all been hunted to extinction. Only small creatures with a few years or a few decades of cultivation remained, trembling as they barely clung to life, along with low-level beings of such poor intelligence and negligible Soul Power that they were not worth mentioning.

The upper and middle tiers of the ecosystem had been forcibly severed by Jingtian in the most violent manner possible.

At first, the Soul Power gained from this unrestrained hunting was substantial. His cultivation soared from six hundred and thirty years to nearly seven hundred. But as the number of "high-quality prey" available for devouring plummeted, his growth rate began to slow noticeably, until it nearly came to a halt.

Then the consequences began to emerge.

First came the decline in his own cultivation speed. The energy provided by the Water-Condensing Pearl and Rift Aura was stable but slow, nowhere near as rapid as devouring the essence of soul beasts. Having lost so many "living sources of energy," his growth seemed to have been bound in chains.

Second came the deterioration of the territorial environment. The disappearance of large numbers of mid- and high-level soul beasts caused certain low-level species they had once restrained—such as a kind of algae-eating worm and a hyper-fertile variant of krill—to multiply explosively. Though these lesser creatures possessed little individual Soul Power, their numbers were enormous. They frantically consumed seaweed and plankton, even beginning to erode the reefs, destroying the stability of the seabed vegetation and terrain and disrupting the entire sea region's flow of energy and cycle of matter.

The once relatively balanced energy field became thin and chaotic. Some rare minerals and plants that required specific energy environments to grow, and were somewhat beneficial to Jingtian's cultivation, also began to wither or decline in quality.

More troublesome still, this aura of "desolation" and "chaos" was like a beacon in the darkness, beginning to draw the attention of powerful beings from farther seas beyond his territory.

At the edge of his senses, Jingtian began frequently detecting unfamiliar, powerful Soul Power fluctuations roaming and probing around his territorial borders. Some were curious, some greedy, and some carried nakedly aggressive intent. They seemed to have caught the scent of this sea region's "weakness" and "lack of an owner"—or at least the absence of a powerful, stable ruling soul beast.

"Resources have been exhausted..." Jingtian coldly realized. It was not that he did not understand ecology; he had simply been driven by his desire for rapid strength and had no time to care—or rather, had disdained to care. But now, he was tasting the bitter fruit himself.

If he remained here, his cultivation speed would be greatly reduced, and he would have to constantly guard against those covetous outsiders. If those watchers joined forces, or drew the attention of some truly powerful being, then even if he won, it would be a pyrrhic victory, not worth the cost.

The Deep Sea was vast. If this place would not keep him, another would.

The thought of migration arose naturally.

He felt no attachment whatsoever. This nest and this territory he had managed for so long had lost their value now that their resources were depleted. The only things worth taking were the Water-Condensing Pearl and that ancient rift that seemed to conceal deeper secrets—but the rift could not be moved. He could only abandon it for now, perhaps returning to explore it once he was strong enough.

His goal was to find a new, richer hunting ground, preferably a sea region with abundant varieties of soul beasts, diverse cultivation levels, and no complete domination by any powerful being.

Jingtian began systematically shrinking his range of activity while extending his senses toward the outer edges of his territory, especially in directions away from Black Stone Forest, where the Silver-Veined Thunder Eel resided. He needed a new "map."

After several days of cautious scouting—mostly through long-range sensing and capturing vague memory Fragments from weak wandering soul beasts—he roughly identified several directions:

To the east lay what seemed to be a deeper, darker trench region. Its Soul Power fluctuations were obscure yet powerful, and it carried faint auras that made his heart tremble. He ruled it out for now.

To the south led warmer waters, where there seemed to be more varieties of soul beasts. However, his senses had detected more than one powerful Soul Power fluctuation, each at least no weaker than the Red-Armored Spike Turtle at its peak. A stable power structure might already have formed there, making intervention highly risky.

To the north, the Soul Power fluctuations he sensed were relatively peaceful and varied in level, ranging from a few decades to several hundred years. There appeared to be no particularly concentrated or overwhelmingly powerful ruling aura. Furthermore, according to certain Fragmentary information, that area seemed to contain several small Spirit Power Springs or special mineral sites that naturally gathered and released pure Soul Power, making them ideal places for soul beast cultivation.

The north seemed like a good choice.

Jingtian made his decision. He did not leave immediately, instead beginning one final "harvest." He sought out, hunted, and devoured every soul beast remaining in his territory that had survived by chance and possessed over one hundred and fifty years of Soul Power, no matter how deeply it hid. This was his final meal, as well as an energy reserve for the coming long-distance migration and any challenges he might encounter in his new territory.

After completing all of this, his cultivation barely rose to seven hundred and ten years.

Then, at a time when the seawater currents were relatively calm, Jingtian wrapped the Water-Condensing Pearl in special mucus and attached it to the inner side of one of his tentacles. After one final look at the nest he had maintained for years and the deep, shadowy rift, he turned and silently swam north without the slightest hesitation.

He did not conceal his aura. He even deliberately spread the pressure of a soul beast with over six hundred years of cultivation, along with that chillingly toxic presence. Along his path, whether they were low-level creatures proliferating because of ecological collapse or the few soul beasts that had wandered in from other regions without yet understanding the situation, all scattered in terror as though they had encountered a natural predator.

He was like a moving storm of death, carrying the desolation he had created as he swept toward a new and unknown hunting ground.

His old territory had been squeezed dry of all value, like a field ravaged by locusts. Now, he was going to become a new swarm of locusts and devastate somewhere else.

The Deep Sea was boundless, and the law of the strong preying upon the weak remained eternal. Jingtian, this Blue-Ringed Octopus from another world, was carrying that law to its utmost extreme. Behind him, he left silence and chaos; before him lay new prey and slaughter.

The deep-blue rings gradually faded into the dim seawater, like the cold, merciless eyes of an abyss opening.