Chapter 1305 — The Howling

They opened their eyes and gazed at the shadowy Sentinel Towers on the distant horizon. In their other vision, the energy fields radiating around those towers were clearly visible... Wide-area energy field relay projection technology—a technique the primordial elves had brought here from the ancient continent of Kaldo in primeval times, patched and modified over tens of thousands of years until it was scarcely recognizable. In the Sentinels' eyes, it held no secrets at all.

That ancient high wall looked grand and imposing, but was in truth fragile beyond measure.

...

Colossal waves surged across the Boundless Sea. The immense energy erupting from the deep-blue pulse currents swept across the entire body of water almost instantly. So powerful was this force that a "elemental vacuum" was torn open in an instant deep within the Boundless Sea, which had remained unchanged since time immemorial. Hundreds of millions of tons of seawater vanished into nothing, leaving only the deep-blue pulse currents, on the verge of losing control, surging through that terrifying abyssal cavity—this dreadful spectacle lasted a full dozen seconds before the vast elemental power finally began to refill the "void" that had appeared in this world, which in turn triggered a new series of massive waves.

Even the water elementals dwelling in the Boundless Sea could not withstand such rampaging tidal waves.

At last, Gruguno, the sovereign who ruled the domain of water elementals, was stirred by the terrifying fluctuations in these waters. The elemental lord, like an incarnation of the ocean itself, descended amid the waves and saw the local elemental lord and the sirens trying to calm the sea. Only through the combined efforts of the sirens, the elemental lord, and Gruguno did the turmoil in the Boundless Sea finally begin to subside.

"I need to know what in the world happened here!" Gruguno's massive form stood upright in the Boundless Sea. An unending torrential rain poured down from the sky-like inverted sea surface above, washing over the giant's angry and bewildered face. "Great Absorber, when you established your outpost here, you never said anything like this could happen!"

"If we hadn't established an outpost here, I'm afraid you would never have known what danger this world faces until you perished along with the entire elemental world—and that was no mere tidal wave, gurgle-gurgle."

The voice of Pythia, Queen of the Sirens, came through the rainstorm. A whirlpool rose in the Boundless Sea, and the figure of the deep-sea sovereign floated up from the vortex to appear before Gruguno. The latter saw Pythia's current state, and the words he had meant to say caught in his throat—he saw that half of her body had vanished entirely, with only drifting currents endlessly repeating the process of disintegration and reintegration around her vanished form. Faint traces of blue light drifted out from around her head, spreading through the rainstorm of the Boundless Sea to form structures reminiscent of shattered, scattered wings. These "effusions" spread a full hundred meters through the air, and wherever they passed, the waves and rain alike altered their course.

Gruguno did not know much about the physiological rules of these strange "foreign water elementals" called sirens, but no matter how little he understood, he could tell at a glance that the deep-sea sovereign was in a bad way. Even the sirens' formidable regenerative ability could not restore her body—frankly speaking, in hundreds of thousands of years of war against this queen, he had never managed to wound her to such a degree.

"What did you do to yourself?" The elemental lord stared at Pythia, so stunned that he overlooked her earlier rude address of him as "gurgle-gurgle." "You look like you're about to be beaten to death..."

"You are not good at stifling laughter, gurgle-gurgle. Your tone is trembling from the effort—but I don't mind," Pythia said flatly, lifting her head to gaze at the giant vortex on the elemental lord's face that served as his eye. Her gravely wounded half was healing at an extremely slow rate; the erosion caused by the deep-blue magic was being forced out of her body bit by bit. "If you knew what a pack of mad cultists is doing in the Gondor wasteland under the guidance of an ancient mind, I believe you would soon stop laughing."

"The Gondor wasteland? Cultists? Ah, those human contraptions..." The elemental lord Gruguno made a disdainful sound. "I know you have been dealing with the races of the land recently, but are you not paying too much attention to those fleeting civilizations of the material plane? For millions of years, countless races have done countless things in the material world, yet the cornerstone of the elements has always stood firm..."

"Look at my current state and say again that the cornerstone of the elements can stand firm forever?" The currents drifting from Pythia's side slowly spread open, as if displaying a scar-ridden wing. "They have created something of tremendous power and buried it in the deep-blue netherways. It is not yet complete, but the power it has already displayed can, across half a planet and the barrier of the elemental domain, blast a massive elemental vacuum into your Boundless Sea—and now they have destroyed the coordinate and passage leading to the Loren continent. I just tried to contact my sisters stationed on Loren, only to find that all elemental passages pointing to that continent have been blocked by chaotic energy. And this is likely only one of the aftershocks of that great explosion..."

"...It seems you did not come merely to tell me these things," Gruguno said, his tone finally turning serious as he realized the powerful alien sovereign before him was not joking. "What do you want us to do? Let me say in advance—we are not like you. No matter what happens in the material world, we cannot intervene in the material plane on a large scale. We elemental beings are ourselves part of this planet's 'balance.' For the consequences of imbalance, you need only look at the 'rift-contaminated zones' of Tarlond today and those corrupted elementals. Frankly, if your ship had not crashed through the firmament and caused domain infiltration back then, we would never have fought that 'elemental war' in which neither side fared well..."

"Rest assured, I know you have little room to interfere in matters of the material world—but I need you to consider your own future," Pythia said slowly, her gaze turning to the depths of the Boundless Sea, to those deep-blue pulse currents that flowed surging onward, their inner nature already changed. "These 'surges' flowing at your doorstep are what you need to worry about."

"Then what about the situation in the material world?" Gruguno could not help asking. "You're just going to leave it be?"

"I will find a way to send an expeditionary force there from the material world, whether or not we make it in time. And... I trust my allies."

(End of Chapter)