The Orca King was far too relaxed. Its tail swished at an unhurried pace, like a cat playing with a half-dead mouse.
Two other ten-thousand-year Evil Spirit Orcas circled around from the flanks. While the Fire Soul Saint and their king were locked in combat, they spat out two dark-red water bombs. The blasts struck the left side of his Battle Armor and sent him flying sideways, skidding more than ten meters before he barely managed to steady himself.
A ten-thousand-year Evil Spirit Orca fixed its gaze on Lin Qingzhou.
It smacked its tail fin against the ice and leaped into the air. Its body arced through the sky before crashing down less than three meters in front of him. The ice caved into a shallow pit, and shards sprayed across his face.
It opened its mouth—not to spit a water bomb, but to bite him outright. Two rows of interlocking cone-shaped teeth gleamed an icy white in the night. Each tooth was as long as Lin Qingzhou's palm.
He twisted aside from the first bite. Its teeth scraped past his shoulder, tearing a slit in his jacket.
The orca didn't pull back after missing. It swung its whole body around, sweeping its tail fin at him.
The sweep packed even more force than its earlier bite. Lin Qingzhou couldn't dodge in time, so he could only brace his warhammer across his body and take the blow head-on.
With a muffled boom, he was sent flying. He rolled more than ten meters across the ice before managing to stop. His palms were numb from the impact, and the muscles in his arms kept spasming.
As he scrambled to his feet, he felt something stirring inside him. It wasn't anger. It was something deeper, something more ancient.
The power that had lain dormant in the depths of his dantian ever since he absorbed Na'er's bloodline was trembling faintly now, stirring with restless anticipation.
The sensation was familiar. He remembered: back in the Ruins of the Divine War, whenever the aftershocks of destruction crushed his body and he reformed it, he had felt just like this.
The Evil Spirit Orca pounced again, faster than before. Lin Qingzhou had no time to draw his gun or think. By instinct, he roused that power inside him.
Purple-gold demonic markings spread outward from his chest, following his collarbones, shoulders, and arms until they blazed across his fingertips.
They weren't patterns etched into his skin. His blood vessels and bones themselves were glowing.
A deep-purple phantom slowly rose behind him. Its outline was indistinct, and it had yet to fully take shape, but the moment its aura appeared—
The Evil Spirit Orcas within dozens of meters of the ice froze for an instant. This wasn't the suppressive force of Soul Power. It was something far deeper, an awe that rippled outward from the level of the universe's laws.
This power seemed to come not from his Martial Soul, but from the might of the Silver Dragon King Bloodline. After all, the Silver Dragon King Bloodline was quite effective against Soul Beasts.
The instant the phantom opened its eyes, a layer of dark-purple light wrapped around Lin Qingzhou's warhammer. He had no Soul Rings and no Soul Skills to call upon, yet that power naturally clung to the hammerhead.
He stepped forward and swung the warhammer in a wide arc.
This strike was on an entirely different level from the blows he had dealt the orca on the ice earlier. As the hammer fell, the air itself shrieked, and the ice cracked outward for seven or eight meters beneath his feet.
The blow caved in the orca's left side bone plate. Beneath it, the skin blistered into charred-black fissures, and purple light seeped inward along the cracks.
The orca let out a shrill scream and spasmed as it staggered backward.
Lin Qingzhou gave it no chance to retreat. He chased after it and struck again, this time hitting its lower jaw. Four teeth from its two interlocking rows snapped off and scattered across the ice with sprays of blood.
He hoisted the warhammer back onto his shoulder. His chest heaved violently, and he was gasping so hard he could barely stand upright. This was the first ten-thousand-year Evil Spirit Orca killed since the battle began.
A purple Soul Ring rose from the orca's corpse, its light especially glaring against the dim ice.
Lin Qingzhou's body shuddered. The purple-gold power inside him seemed to catch fire from the Soul Ring's aura, surging wildly. Every cell in his body clamored, yearning for more.
He didn't understand what was happening, but his body's instinct told him he could advance.
Before he could think it through, a dark-red water blade slashed in from the side, faster than any attack so far.
It was another ten-thousand-year orca's Orca Tooth-Shattering Slash.
Lin Qingzhou hurled himself to the left. The blade of ice skimmed past his back, cleaving a smooth, even trench where he had just been standing. Dark-red residual energy roiled along its bottom.
If he'd reacted even a fraction of a second slower, that slash would have cut through his spine.
He rolled across the ice and got back up, his fingers still numb around the warhammer's handle. Several of the nearby Soul Masters were already struggling. Their ammunition was running low, and their Soul Power was nearly spent. The civilians behind the ship's railing were shrinking back into the cabins. No one dared step forward.
He gritted his teeth and called out to Zero in his mind.
"Zero, can you teleport me? If not, I'll have to think of something else."
Zero's voice rang out in his mind, as flat and emotionless as ever. But what she said made him pause. "I have marked the enemy leader. I recommend that you do not retreat yet."
He opened his mouth to ask why, but before he could, the dark-red canopy of energy was suddenly torn apart.
Not smashed apart—torn apart.
A steel fist wreathed in white flames slammed down from directly above the Evil Orca King. Its force was beyond measure, driving the more than thirty-meter-long king and the dark-red energy coiling around it straight into the depths beneath the ice.
The shock wave blasted the ice apart, raising a three- or four-meter-high surge of ice that swept outward. Within a hundred meters, the ice sheet shattered in an instant into little chunks that floated on the water.
A column of water dozens of meters high erupted from the sea. Steam billowed as heat and freezing currents churned together, and the whole stretch of ocean boiled.
When the mist cleared, everyone on deck finally saw the figure high above them.
It was a mecha, deep red from head to toe. It wasn't painted that way; the mecha's material itself was red.
Dense and heavy, it was like a steel billet hammered countless times and left with the color it took on after quenching.
Every joint in the mecha was embedded with Soul Guidance arrays so precise their seams were almost invisible. Four luminous wings hovered behind it.
They weren't solid wings, but flowing feathers formed purely from Soul Power. Each beat left a trail of burning white light in the air.
Inside the mecha, a figure floated within the core cockpit. The glow of Four-Character Battle Armor could faintly be seen flowing beneath his skin.
One crewman dropped to his knees. He wasn't frightened; his legs had gone weak with excitement. The middle-aged crewman clung tightly to the railing. His lips trembled for a long moment before he managed to force out a few words.
"A god-class mecha... Four-Character Battle Armor... That's the combat strength of a Limit Douluo..."
Lin Qingzhou clearly started at those words. He glanced at the crewman beside him in surprise. He hadn't expected them to know so much.
The mecha's hatch opened, and the man inside walked out. He stepped into the air and stood above the surging waves.
He wore a white chef's uniform, with grease stains on his apron and sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing a pair of thick forearms.
He looked to be around forty. His face was square, his features not handsome but rugged, and stubble sprouted along his chin.
If not for the fact that he stood on empty air with a ball of burning white flame in his hand, he could have passed for a cook who'd just finished tossing food in a wok in the back kitchen.
Mu Ye. Sect Master of the Body Sect, titled "Body," a level-ninety-four Power Attack System Titled Douluo, and the only person on the continent who was both a Four-Word Battle Armor Master and a Red-Grade Mecha Master.
He was also Zhen Hua's "personal chef."
Lin Qingzhou stood on the shattered ice and gazed up at him without blinking. Since arriving in this world, this was the first true powerhouse at the pinnacle of the continent's strength that he had seen with his own eyes.
Mu Ye's first impression was exactly what Lin Qingzhou remembered from the novel.
Lazy and casual, unkempt—at a glance, he looked like a cook.
But whenever those half-lidded eyes swept over him, Lin Qingzhou's back instinctively tensed. Something razor-sharp lay hidden in that gaze, like a blade held beneath the eyelid.
Mu Ye's gaze rested on him for less than half a second before shifting to the ten-thousand-year Evil Orca King as it rose again from the depths.
"Little Red, wrap it up."
Little Red, the mecha, responded to its owner's command. Its luminous wings abruptly spread wider, multiplying from four to eight, and the temperature of the white flames surged to more than twice its previous intensity.
Mu Ye's right hand opened slightly. The glow of his Four-Character Battle Armor shone through his skin, forming a link with the mecha's Soul Guidance arrays. The two layers of enhancement stacked over his palm.
His original secret technique, "Armor Stacking," unified his Martial Soul, Battle Armor, and mecha to enhance him as one.
As his palm came down, the sea first sank into a hand-shaped hollow dozens of meters wide, then exploded.
Seawater, ice shards, and fragments of the orca's bone spikes were all blasted into the sky.
The ten-thousand-year Evil Orca King's final struggle was to spit out a dark-red water column more than five meters in diameter.
That column was powerful enough to blast a frigate in half, but when it struck Mu Ye's palm force, it didn't last even a second before being driven back.
When the water column exploded, the whole sea shook. The people on deck were sent staggering by the aftershock, and several crewmen gripping the railing were lifted off their feet and swept sideways through the air for several seconds before landing.
Once the mist cleared, the Evil Orca King floated on the sea, its gray-white belly turned upward. A gaping wound ran from the top of its head down its back, and dark-red blood gurgled from it, soon staining a vast stretch of sea crimson.
Its tail fin twitched once, then it went completely still.
The remaining ten-thousand-year Evil Spirit Orcas shrieked mournfully, their tail fins beating the sea in a frenzy. But this time, they weren't attacking. They were fleeing.
More than a dozen orcas turned and dove into the depths all at once, not even stopping to retrieve their companions' bodies.
Within a few breaths, only churning blood and shattered ice drifted slowly away on the waves.
Mu Ye remained suspended in the air, making no move to pursue them.
He glanced down at the orca king's body floating on the sea and reached out with his right hand. Its crimson Hundred Thousand Year Soul Ring rose from the corpse, spinning and shrinking until it obediently settled into his palm.
With another unknown technique, he also collected a Soul Bone shimmering with a dark red glow. The whole process was smooth and effortless, like a well-practiced chore he'd performed countless times.
Lin Qingzhou stood on a piece of shattered ice, soaked through, still gripping his warhammer. The hammerhead was stained with the blood of the ten-thousand-year orca.
Like everyone on deck, he looked up at the man in chef's clothes, floating in the air, and said nothing.
This was what he would have to surpass in the future. Now, at last, he had seen for himself just how high the ceiling of this world truly was.
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