Five Years Later, Divine Arts Mastered

Time flew. In the blink of an eye, five years had passed.

The Fifth War Zone had fought no major battles in those five years. Its 260,000 regular troops and nearly a million militia had focused on farming, while sweeping the surrounding seas for remnants of the Aquatic Clan and rooting out or absorbing scattered tribes that refused to submit or leave.

Over those five years, Yang Wenqing's Allied Army had built a complete system of Monitoring Formations and Communication Formations along the front, bringing waters thousands of kilometers across under surveillance. With relay towers built on the seabed, the Staff Advisory Group had planned more than a hundred fixed patrol routes.

The New Continent had never stopped sending reinforcements. In five years, the Allied Army had encountered them head-on dozens of times, from a few fast boats slipping through to entire formations forcing a passage.

The enemy was clever. They struck small patrols and left; the moment they spotted the Allied Army's main fleet, they turned north toward the icefield, using its rugged fringes and perpetual spiritual turbulence to conceal their movements.

More troublesome were their teleportation formations. In the past five years, the Monitoring Formations had detected more than two thousand uses of them by the New Continent. Each teleportation meant fresh supplies, troops, or intelligence had reached the Jade Whale Sect.

The Energy Stones and rune materials consumed by more than two thousand teleportations would have funded a medium-scale battle. That the New Continent kept pouring resources into this effort showed its support for the Jade Whale Sect remained firm.

So the Allied Army had gained another task: besides its routine patrols and interceptions, it had to search for hidden underwater teleportation relay formations and destroy them. It had demolished more than a dozen over the years,