Chapter 111
Chapter 111
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 111
Chapter Title: Southern Continent Expedition
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Long voyages were truly boring.
Assuming a two-day sea journey, the novelty of the ocean view lasted less than two hours.
The rest was nothing but a string of tedium.
The Southern Continent Expedition Team had, of course, prepared countermeasures against boredom.
The Granary Great Peng was fully equipped with recreational facilities.
A library, training ground, swimming pool, botanical garden, and more—somewhat compact in scale, but it had everything it needed.
Expedition members passed the time each in their own way.
Some indulged in hobbies, others chatted idly with fellow passengers or finished books they'd left unread.
Naturally, there were those cultivating or sleeping as well.
Seoran used the interval to train her command over her six senses.
She could manage them decently enough now, but she wanted to reach a more refined level.
The volume of her spherical sensory field, which had been steadily expanding, could now encompass the entire Granary Great Peng.
Seoran had gained the ability to perceive the Granary Great Peng's interior as clearly as the lines on her palm.
To protect the expedition members' privacy, she had consciously dulled the sharpness of her senses.
The passengers appeared as blurry forms, like low-resolution images, each bustling about in their own way.
Among them, one particularly tiny and frenetically busy silhouette stood out.
Judging by the pointy something sticking up from its head, it was Damcheong.
Damcheong roamed the Granary Great Peng's facilities from top to bottom, as if it were a cleaning robot.
It splashed around in the swimming pool before heading to the library.
It flipped through a few books there before losing interest and moving on to the training ground.
After kicking a ball around by itself for a bit, it entered the botanical garden.
There, it plucked at innocent petals and leaves before leaving the garden and marching straight toward Seoran's location.
Seoran halted her meditation and opened the door.
The guest, hand raised to knock, looked slightly flustered.
Damcheong's eyes went wide as saucers as it asked,
"By any chance, did you come out because you're bored?"
Its expression was laced with desperate hope that she would say yes.
It must have been terribly bored.
Seoran nodded and said,
"Yes, meditation's getting stale too. I feel like doing something fun. Or eating something delicious would be nice."
Damcheong grinned from ear to ear and said,
"Don't worry! I'm here, aren't I?"
Seoran and Damcheong amiably enjoyed the recreational facilities together.
The two headed first to the swimming pool for some water play.
Then they borrowed a plant encyclopedia from the library and compared the illustrations to the real specimens in the botanical garden.
Finally, they kicked a ball around together in the training ground.
Damcheong, with the ball tucked under its arm, said,
"Seoran, you really can't kick a ball."
"This isn't my true skill. It's just been too long since I last played. Want to see my real power?"
Damcheong shook its head vigorously.
Seoran put on a show of indignation and said,
"Let's do it one more time! It'll be different this round!"
"No way, you're too bad—it's no fun!"
Damcheong tossed the ball and fled the training ground.
Seoran swiftly gave chase.
Their game of tag went on for quite a while.
Having played their fill, the two naturally made their way to the cafeteria in the residential area.
Their mouths were parched, so they planned to have some honey tea.
Immortals didn't let food spoil anyway, and they'd brought heaps of it when they set out, so they could drink it freely.
Seoran, sipping her honey tea gracefully, said,
"Damcheong-nim, did you know? Honey can be applied to the face instead of eaten."
"Why do something so wasteful?"
"For skin care."
"Have you tried it?"
"No? I heard it from Agum."
Damcheong took a sip of honey tea and said,
"Mm, delicious. I can't imagine putting this on my face. Eating it is what counts."
"Right? Such a waste."
The two chuckled heartily as they tilted their teacups.
The honey tea was perfectly warm and, thanks to the generous amount of honey, incredibly sweet.
At that moment, a deafening roar shook the Granary Great Peng.
Thanks to it, Seoran and Damcheong were forced to unwittingly donate the honey tea they were drinking to their faces.
*****
The attackers were a yokai army that dominated the seas in this area.
Resembling sharks with noble features, they unleashed a barrage on the queen shark's command.
The scales fired from the shark horde pelted the Granary Great Peng's outer hull like a downpour and detonated on impact.
When Seoran had built the Granary Great Peng, she had deliberately omitted a dedicated barrier generation function for defense.
Enveloping such a colossal puppet in barriers would consume an astronomical amount of spiritual power.
Thus, the Granary Great Peng's standard combat method was to endure enemy attacks with its body and then recover.
The puppet core at its deepest center responded immediately.
It mobilized stored spiritual power to reinforce the puppet's durability and begin repairing the damage.
The blast scars etched into the outer hull vanished rapidly, as if time itself were rewinding.
The puppet core's next target was the extermination of the hostile forces.
The Granary Great Peng's massive beak parted wide.
Inside the hangar, which resembled a factory-style poultry farm, the Violet-Eyed Owl legion stirred to life.
Thanks to the puppet production line that had never rested, their numbers had swelled to hundreds of thousands.
The owl puppets ejected from the hangar flew up the Granary Great Peng's esophagus and poured out through the beak.
The sea was pitch-black, shrouded in inky clouds.
At a glance, it looked as if concave-eyed imps were spewing violet radiance from the owls' glowing eyes.
The owl legion commenced its assault.
Invisible destructive rays sliced through the shark horde.
Directed precisely by the mothership Granary Great Peng, not a single shot was wasted.
The yokai swarm collapsed like sandcastles.
A massive clash exceeding a million combatants on both sides combined.
In the skies, the owl legion rained down destructive beams; in the sea, the shark horde unleashed volleys of scales.
Yokai crumbled under the beam barrages, and owl puppets were shot down by antiair fire, ceasing function.
Yet they could never overcome Seoran's owl legion in a war of attrition.
Owls plummeting from blast aftershocks repaired their damaged thrusters with spiritual power supplied by the mothership.
Just before hitting the water's surface, they spread their wings wide and soared back into the sky.
Similar scenes unfolded across the battlefield.
It was a legion of the truly undying.
In the end, the queen shark issued a retreat order.
There was no path to victory, no matter how she looked at it.
The sharks dove beneath the waves at once.
Countless soldiers were sacrificed even in retreat, but the further they descended into the depths, the fewer casualties they suffered.
The water acted as a barrier, blocking the destructive rays.
The queen intended to lead her shark legion straight to the ocean floor's abyss.
High above, Damcheong was restraining Seoran from unleashing the Granary Great Peng's ultimate technique.
"Seoran, stop it."
"Why? They're fleeing to the deep sea. One ultimate shot could wipe them all out."
Damcheong, whose already fair skin now gleamed even more lustrously thanks to the impromptu honey mask, said,
"Wouldn't it be unfair if only you got to fight?"
"You're right, now that you mention it."
Damcheong exited through the Granary Great Peng's beak.
In one hand, it held the Ruyi Pearl, thickly shrouded in multicolored mist within.
Judging by the mist's brilliance and density, the pearl's completion was imminent.
Damcheong pointed to the sky with its free hand.
The Ruyi Pearl, resonating with draconic primal spiritual power, blazed with light.
The winds across the region compressed into a single tiny orb.
At that instant, the queen shark and her legion had successfully retreated to the ocean floor's abyss.
A pitch-black void where not even a sliver of light penetrated.
But they could not escape the dragon's sight.
Dragons possessed the ability to discern truth from falsehood.
And that power stemmed from the dragon's eyes.
Naturally, piercing the deep sea was trivial compared to the authority that cleaved black from white.
The routed queen and her legion, huddled in the abyss, had let their guard down, believing they had shaken off the enemy.
But Damcheong still stared straight at them.
The dragon's fury descended—an inescapable death.
The storm compressed to a single point raged forth.
A colossal vortex shot from the heavens into the sea.
Damcheong's draconic strike pierced from the surface like a hurled spear, through fathomless depths, through the entire ocean.
The queen shark and her legion, struck directly by the dragon's blow, were annihilated without ever understanding what happened.
*****
Having vented her spleen thoroughly, Damcheong asked,
"But are dangerous seas teeming with hordes of yokai like that?"
One of the think tank members replied,
"Yes. In ancient times, people dumped all the troublesome yokai corpses into the outer seas. New yokai spawned from the yin energy of the corpses, those yokai fought and piled up more corpses, and that cycle repeated for thousands of years."
Seoran asked,
"Then, was the great rift in the Eastern Continent part of an outer sea purification effort? To dispose of the ever-accumulating yokai remains into the underworld?"
"That's what we archaeologists presume."
Ocean waste disposal was indeed a grave matter.
Nine months after departure, the expedition team finally reached the Southern Continent after defeating countless yokai armies.