It was a Demon Beast.
A Demon Beast whose size he could not accurately describe even if he exhausted every word he knew.
Its head slowly rose from beneath the sea.
That head alone was larger than any mountain Ji Yuan had ever seen.
It was shaped like a dragon's head—broad across the brow, long in the snout, with a gnarled horn slanting backward from either side. Mottled patterns left by the passage of ages covered both horns.
Dragon whiskers hung from either side of its mouth. Each looked like a black river suspended in the air, drifting slowly in the sea breeze.
But its body was not a dragon's.
Baxia!
At the sight, Ji Yuan could not help thinking of another old friend: Long Ba!
He, too, was an unusual Baxia.
The Baxia before him bore a turtle shell on its back.
The shell rose high, its surface crisscrossed with ravines and covered in patterns worn into it by untold ages of wind and frost. Every line was a mountain range; every plate, a plateau.
Around the shell's edges, countless floating mountains and clusters of stone seemed to circle slowly, as though drawn into orbit by its gravity.
And at the very center of that shell rested something Ji Yuan knew all too well—the Star Abyss.
That deadly forbidden ground, where he had nearly died and even countless Spirit Transformation experts dared not venture deep, was merely something carried on this Demon Beast's back.
The beast lay in the sea north of the Martial God Continent, its four limbs submerged. Around it, the water formed a vast whirlpool whose diameter stretched for who knew how many tens of thousands of miles.
Endless white waves churned at the whirlpool's edge, forming a natural barrier between the beast and the Martial