Even Sui Xiong had not expected that in this great war, not only would the underground races join the fray, but even the mermen of the sea would come to stir things up.
The mermen were a nearshore race. Because their nature was chaotic and evil, the Goddess of the Sea Volpocus had once absorbed a great deal of faith from them, causing her alignment to drift continuously. In the end, she turned from neutral to evil, from orderly to chaotic, becoming a somewhat deranged evil deity. She changed from the "Mermaid Princess" into the "Female Tyrant of the Sea."
Later, Volpocus fell, and Ariel, the newly born Goddess of the Sea, refused to accept the faith of the mermen. To avoid being tainted by that faith, she even completely gave up expanding into the nearshore regions and focused instead on establishing herself in the open sea.
For a newly born deity, this was naturally an extremely difficult choice. But it was undoubtedly a wise one, minimizing the danger of being polluted by faith—eating a little less was still better than swallowing a poison-laced feast.
But for the mermen, losing their deity not only meant that their souls would have nowhere to go after death, it also meant losing the protection of powerful warriors. The mermen had never been a strong race to begin with. Though they possessed astonishing reproductive ability, there were almost no worthy experts among them. Generally speaking, a merman who could grow to the intermediate level could already be called an "unparalleled powerhouse."
Such a race was utterly insignificant, whether compared to the humans on land or the Magic Beasts in the sea.
Thus, in the years since the Goddess of the Sea changed hands, the mermen had lived difficult lives, caught between two fires. But