Sea of Origin

The silence around his ears shattered, replaced by the clamorous rush of the sea.

When he woke from the dream, Xilian found himself in a dark, boundless sea, surrounded by shadowy figures wrapped in cocoons.

The figures wavered in the gloom.

Xilian gazed at the countless shadows. He could just make out one distinct face after another.

Each shadow held a soul, a mortal still alive in the waking world.

They slept within the Soul Dream, one among the countless living souls drifting with the currents of the Origin Sea. They knew peace, but they had no control over their own fates.

Now Xilian had broken free of his cocoon and taken his first step toward becoming a supernatural being.

"Next, I need to rise to the surface and find the so-called Sourcebinding Long Stair."

Xilian looked up. A faint light filtered down from above, cut into fragments by the countless shadows until it resembled a shattered, glittering night sky.

Stepping on cocoons that seemed caught between substance and illusion, Xilian used them as stairs and climbed toward the surface.

"It's not as dangerous as the teacher made it sound."

The thought came to Xilian after he had climbed for a while.

Aside from the difficulty of waking from the Soul Dream, Xilian had encountered no danger so far. There was only the monotonous deep sea and a surface that still seemed impossibly far away.

Suddenly, a bone-deep chill spread across Xilian's back. He seemed to have drifted, without realizing it, into an unknown current.

A burning pain spread through Xilian's left palm.

He raised his hand. The Ouroboros Mark that had appeared on Wilderness Night had surfaced again, glowing molten gold.

Hiss—

Before Xilian could work out what had caused these strange changes, a shrill, rasping sound dragged across his eardrums like a knife.

The pain made Xilian clench his teeth. Years of training kept him calm even under such strain, and he made no sound.

Splash.

The water churned above Xilian's head as a vast shadow slowly covered him.

Xilian instinctively held his breath, though he had no need to breathe in this surreal sea that held the sum of all souls and power.

Slowly, he looked up. And saw it.

An enormous moray eel.

Jagged vertebrae pierced its gelatinous skin. Bulging tumors covered its body, but on closer inspection, they were translucent egg sacs. Inside each floated a deformed, vaguely human body.

The moray eel was so close that Xilian could make out every detail of those bodies.

Swollen skulls pressed against the membranes. Hundreds of mismatched eyes stared down, while malformed fingers scratched blasphemous trails through the slime.

Whenever the eel shifted, egg sacs burst. Pus and blood ran through the grooves between its tumors, spilling deformed bodies into the water.

They made no movement, sinking like corpses into the endless darkness below.

One body fell beside Xilian. It did not notice him, but he saw it clearly.

Its hideous form matched the monsters in Xilian's memory exactly—Demons.

"Since the Noonday Calamity, the Sea of Source has been filled with chaotic power. The sea boils, and fierce winds and towering waves rage without end."

Nuen's words echoed in Xilian's ears.

Only now did Xilian realize that the enormous moray eel was a colossal chaos creature—one of the many dangers lurking in the Origin Sea.

Xilian went rigid, afraid the slightest movement would draw its attention.

Nuen had never described anything so terrifying in detail. That made sense. Nuen had become a supernatural being in the Silent River, the last untainted refuge in the Origin Sea. Protected by the Secret-Speech Sage, it remained untouched by chaos. Nuen would never have seen a horror like this.

"No... no!"

A woman's scream suddenly reached Xilian.

The eel grew restless. Like a shark scenting blood, it writhed frantically, and the countless appendages on its body thrashed with it.

They were not appendages at all, but countless half-dissolved human bodies. Pale pink mist sprayed from opening and closing gills—bloodwater thick with scraps of flesh.

The Demons swam toward one spot in a frenzy. The eel opened its maw too, its head splitting lengthwise to reveal layer upon layer of long, curved fangs like ribs.

The woman's cries vanished into the sea, and silence returned.

Xilian's pupils shrank to pinpoints. He knew what had just happened.

Some unlucky woman had woken from the Soul Dream. Before she could reach the surface, the chaos creatures had noticed her and torn her apart.

Where her voice had vanished, a strange vortex appeared from nowhere. It swallowed vast quantities of seawater and the Demons that had failed to escape, leaving a void behind.

Somewhere in the real world, the woman they had torn apart would become a Demon. The Demons swallowed by the vortex would use her as an anchor to manifest there and invade reality.

Xilian swallowed, though there was no saliva to swallow, and stayed silent until the eel swam away.

They attacked only those who had awakened from the Soul Dream. To them, the people still wrapped in cocoons might as well not exist; the creatures simply passed them by.

Praying his luck would hold, Xilian slowly shifted position, hiding behind cocoons that flickered between solid and insubstantial.

The eel gradually disappeared from view, though its blurred silhouette lingered for a long while.

Xilian let out a breath and looked up. A cluster of hideous faces floated directly overhead.

The current surged, pushing aside the few cocoons that still concealed him. Xilian was fully exposed to the Demons.

Hiss—

The piercing shriek sounded again. The eel turned like a great serpent crossing the mortal world, its dreadful maw splitting open as it lunged at Xilian.

For all Xilian's composure, his mind went blank for an instant. In that instant, his body began to turn.

He was not moving on his own. The water was churning, sweeping up Xilian, the nearby Demons, and the cocoons alike.

They were helpless in the current.

Something unimaginably huge had to be racing through the deep to cause such a disturbance.

Xilian saw it.

Just as the eel's immense shadow swallowed him whole, a mountain rose from the black seabed and pierced straight through the eel.

The eel twisted in agony, its head and tail tangling into a massive knot.

Within the spreading cloud of blood, a horrific tentacle appeared inside the eel. It bored through the creature at will, thousands of suckers contracting across its surface. A dense chorus of tearing sounds arose, as though hundreds of mouths were chewing stone.

The eel had no chance to resist. With a light sweep of the tentacle, its enormous body broke into great chunks of flesh. The remains plunged toward the dark seabed alongside the shattered limbs of countless Demons.

After clearing the surrounding waters, the tentacle slowly sank back into the darkness.

That brief glimpse was enough for Xilian to be certain: the tentacle, at least a thousand meters long, belonged to another terrifying chaos creature. What unsettled him even more was the thought of its body. If a single tentacle was that huge, how large was the rest?

Ten thousand meters, perhaps. As vast as a mountain range.

Xilian had not even fully entered the supernatural world, yet he had already brushed against death. Looking around the Origin Sea now, he could hardly see it as a sacred birthplace of all souls and power.

Compared with hell, it lacked only fire and lava.

Xilian gripped a nearby cocoon and climbed toward the surface.

After what he had just seen, he moved much faster. All he wanted was to reach the stairs and return to reality.

"Hm?"

Xilian swam upward, but his body remained in place.

He looked down. A tentacle had wrapped around his lower body, its far end disappearing into the darkness below.

"Holy Mother Ava, are you kidding me?"

As Xilian cursed, the tentacle yanked him down into the dark.

He sank rapidly, and the pressure around him mounted.

Forces pressing in from every side brought Xilian's mind close to collapse. Hallucinations erupted through his thoughts.

In a daze, he saw countless wraiths rushing toward him. As he fell deeper, their outlines grew clearer.

Their bitter shrieks pierced his ears. Salt and blood filled his nose, mingled with the sour stink of sulfurous pus.

Through his blurred vision, Xilian saw cities sunken beneath the sea—cities that still breathed. Veinlike coral covered the spires. Swollen eyeballs floated behind every shattered stained-glass window. City gates assembled from gears and whale bones opened and closed with the tide, spewing black currents laden with gold coins and human teeth.

Schools of deformed fish passed by. Unknown giants lurked in distant shadows. Deeper still lay carcasses spanning the seafloor. A head the size of a mountain was giving birth amid the coral, tender tentacles like infants' fingers emerging from its split skull...

What made Xilian tremble most was the sand itself.

Every grain was a worn, corroded shard of bone. It lay in heaps and stretched without end.

Xilian screamed, his mind racing toward collapse under the rising pressure and corruption. Still the tentacle dragged him down.

This was nowhere near the seabed.

"Bastard..."

Xilian clung to a shred of clarity. His eyes took on the same molten-gold glow as the Ouroboros Mark.

He clenched his left hand into a fist, raised it high, then brought it down hard.

Xilian roared.

"Let go of me!"

His feeble punch struck the tentacle.

A miracle happened.

The tentacle released Xilian and sank into the darkness as though all strength had left it.

A howl of unwilling rage rose from below. It bypassed his senses and erupted directly inside his mind, a storm of madness that shattered his memories and understanding, mashed them together, then crudely forced them back into shape.

Before his consciousness faded, Xilian heard the thunder of countless chains pulling taut on the seabed.