The Heavenly Devil Ship continued on unimpeded. On the other Heavenly Devil Ships ahead, many Devil Cultivators noticed this vessel approaching and quickly understood it was the one where the Eerie had broken out.
“Pull back! Quickly!”
Countless Devil Cultivators on each ship started shouting. But it was too late.
“Boom!”
Bai Sha directly controlled her ship to ram into one of the opposing vessels. Due to the formations encasing both ships, she couldn’t make physical contact, but she could bring them close enough to be stopped only by an invisible barrier. This distance was sufficient.
The black Heavenly Devil Ship, a moving island, crashed forward. Even with the protective formation barrier, the impact made the other ship rock violently. Many Devil Cultivators on its deck were thrown off their feet, struggling to keep their balance as they stared at Bai Sha’s ship with terror in their eyes.
“The Eerie! The Eerie is coming!”
“Everyone, don’t panic! There’s still some distance between us. The Eerie can’t just jump across so easily. Don’t lose your heads!”
“Steward? Where’s the Steward? Make our ship retreat!”
“I see a Great White Shark! That shark is controlling the Eerie ship!”
Many Devil Cultivators screamed, the scene descending into chaos. Bai Sha glanced at the state of the ship beside her, then turned her attention back to the token and pressed on, charging toward the other ships. She moved fast and quickly collided with a second Heavenly Devil Ship. The formations of the two vessels scraped against each other, producing blinding sparks. The force of the recoil shook both ships violently, nearly capsizing them and sending the Devil Cultivators on board tumbling like ragdolls.
In this manner, Bai Sha struck one ship after another—a third, a fourth… Before long, she had collided with over a dozen ships, sowing massive chaos across this region of the sea. With so many enormous ships clustered together, once chaos erupted, it was even harder to pull away. Their sheer size meant a single misstep could lead to more collisions.
Suddenly, Bai Sha felt a chill in her heart. “This is…”
Holding the controlling token, she could see everything on her own ship. Under her observation, one face after another began to appear all across the Heavenly Devil Ship. In the cabins, on the doors, on the deck… everywhere, eerie faces emerged. Bai Sha looked beside her. Rows and rows of eerie faces had surfaced on the deck planks. As she looked at them, the eyes on those faces stared right back at her.
“I’m in so much pain… Why am I in so much pain?”
“Why are you fine? Why are you still fine? Come down and keep me company.”
“You’ll end up just like me, you know… hehehe.”
One face after another looked at Bai Sha as they spoke. A chill ran down her spine, because she recognized many of these faces. The Hundred-Leaf Seahorse. The Diamond Turtle. The Star River Tortoise. Yu Zi’an…
Just then, more cries of alarm rang out. Bai Sha followed the sound and saw a neighboring Heavenly Devil Ship. On its surfaces, faces were also sprouting up, babbling strange and mad things, sending the Devil Cultivators on board into a screaming panic.
Bai Sha refocused on the token, using the ship’s functions to extend her vision to the other vessels further away. She saw that every ship she had approached was now manifesting the Eerie.
“How will you handle the Eerie? You dared to blockade the Eastern Sea, you have designs on the Wailing Abyss… surely you can’t be completely helpless against it?” Bai Sha murmured to herself. The Eerie was unsolvable to her, so she truly wanted to know if there was even a way to deal with it. She had spread it with the ship precisely to see how the Devil Cultivators of the Heavenly Devil Palace would respond.
But would she actually see a method? If the Eerie was so easy to handle, how had the ship she was on fallen to this state? Bai Sha wasn’t sure she should hold out much hope.
The Eerie was spreading. On the ships Bai Sha had infected, the Eerie immediately began to propagate further. It didn’t take long for almost every Heavenly Devil Ship in this area to be contaminated. Sensing this through the token, Bai Sha knew she didn’t need to do anything else.
She stayed on the deck of her ship, ignoring the faces that were continuously popping out of the deck and gunwales around her, and continued observing the other ships through the token’s power. Time passed. The Eerie worked relentlessly. One Devil Cultivator after another lost their life. Those who didn’t die often had their minds break under the pressure of the shifting horrors around them, making every scene look like a catastrophe. And all of this happened within a single hour.
“Is the Eerie intensifying?” Bai Sha murmured.
Before, for a long time, the Eerie had only triggered once per hour. But now, it triggered who knows how many times in that same span—dozens of times? A hundred? Once it began to spread, its danger clearly skyrocketed.
As Bai Sha was pondering this, a voice thick with barely suppressed rage reached her ears: “Are you ready to die?”
It was Di Tian. Bai Sha checked the token clutched in her fin, but the sound hadn’t come from it. She looked up and saw a figure standing nearby, having appeared at some unknown moment. It was a young man with long, ash-gray hair and a cold, stern face. A lingering, uncontrollable madness lurked in the depths of his eyes. Dressed entirely in black, his silhouette was tall and slender. He walked slowly through the void.
It was the Devil Son, Di Tian!
Di Tian stared fixedly at Bai Sha, having already detected her Foundation Establishment (Mid) cultivation level. He had never imagined that a mere mid-stage Foundation Establishment Demon Cultivator could inflict such massive damage on the Heavenly Devil Palace. All the ships here, and the Devil Cultivators on them, belonged to his organization, the Heavenly Devil Palace. The losses were so great that even he found them unacceptable.
Bai Sha looked at him calmly. “So, you can’t solve the Eerie after all? Since you can’t solve it, why did you dare to harbor the ambition of refining the Eastern Sea? If you can’t even resolve the Eerie out here, what makes you think you can solve the Wailing Abyss?”
Di Tian halted his steps, a flicker of surprise on his face. It seemed Bai Sha knew a great deal. But how did she know all this? Glancing at the token held in her pectoral fin, Di Tian’s expression eased. He figured that since she had taken control of this ship, it wasn’t too strange that she knew these things. A Heavenly Devil Ship contained a vast amount of information.
