At that moment, somewhere off the southwestern coast of the Pacific, where the shallows met the deep sea.
A hideous creature with features of both an Eastern dragon and a Western lobster crouched amid a vast thicket of undersea coral atop an enormous rock.
It chewed its food with sharp teeth.
Its meal was a deep-sea ribbonfish some two meters long.
In these waters, because of that unidentified, terrifying predator.
Ocean fish over three meters long had all but vanished.
Thus, this two-meter ribbonfish, as broad as an ordinary person's calf, had been one of the overlords here!
Yet now, this ribbonfish, an overlord of the sea, was like a noodle.
Shrimp Tyrant swallowed it into his belly.
After finishing lunch, Shrimp Tyrant crawled out of the coral thicket again.
After several turns, he arrived inside a dark underwater cave.
The place was buried beneath layers of yellow sea sand, with a broken anchor that had fallen at some unknown time lying embedded in the seabed above it.
Originally, many shelled creatures had clung to this broken iron anchor, feeding on its rust.
These included shellfish and barnacles.
But after Shrimp Tyrant used four legs to clean them all away.
No fish would come here to forage for quite some time!
"Snap!"
His four armored claws came together in a bizarre posture.
Amid the surging deep-sea currents, beneath the faint light that reached the seabed after the blazing sun overhead shone upon the surface, Shrimp Tyrant devoutly used the language of souls to recite words of worship:
"Father of immortals, ancestor of spirits, primordial chief of formations and galaxies, may the rays of the universe spread through your body. Upon your magnificent purple form, may the stars continue to shine with dazzling light. May the Purple Thorn Flower once again