The moon set and the stars sank, while fish-belly white spread where sea met sky. Han Li returned silently to the spirit vessel Wavebreaker, his expression unchanged. The cultivators aboard treated him with ever greater awe, and Captain Tie reported every detail of their inspection duties. For more than a year afterward, Han Li used the remote Black Sand Islands as his base. Under the pretext of patrols, he relied on his Golden Core Early Stage cultivation and divine sense far superior to that of his peers to thoroughly survey tens of thousands of li of surrounding waters.
He no longer intervened lightly, leaving most troubles to Captain Tie and the others while he slipped like a ghost through dangerous places such as Storm Cape, Undercurrent Gorge, and Shipwreck Reef. The Dao's path was perilous and hard; every step led to another heaven. Cultivation knew no passage of time, and in the blink of an eye, nearly two years had passed. Through arduous practice and the aid of pills, Han Li's cultivation advanced steadily, and his understanding of the Azure Water True Art deepened. Yet he still could not touch the bottleneck of the Golden Core Middle Stage. The Tidal Heart remained nowhere to be found, and he had uncovered no definite lead on the abnormal fluctuations in water spirit resonance mentioned in Yuan Yao's jade slip.
One day, the spirit vessel's routine patrol brought it to a strange stretch of water called the Ghost-Crying Sea. Gray mist shrouded it year-round, deadly whirlpools riddled its surface, and jagged submerged reefs formed a labyrinth below. Space here was extremely unstable, and strange winds often howled like ten thousand wailing ghosts. According to the nautical charts, it had been a graveyard for ships since ancient times, a place ordinary cultivators never ventured.