Chapter 1 A Strange Mist

A strange, dense fog shrouded the entire sea surface, dimming the sky to a near-twilight hue. Bizarre, scale-like waves surged around them in layers, restricting the movement of any ordinary man-made vessel. Even the water bubble they occupied was fixed in place by the broken waves, becoming a motionless platform of foam. Nangong Wuyue and Shakisra could only swim rapidly around the area, controlling the water within a certain range to prevent those strange waves from encroaching on their foothold.

A layer of electrical light crackled around Vivian as frost spread from her feet, gradually freezing the sea surface: "Be vigilant!"

Lily's ears twitched, and she keenly looked into the depths of the fog: "Someone's singing over there."

Hao Ren was also staring in that direction, one hand already retrieving a silver-white spear from his dimensional pocket: "It's a siren's song… Don't get distracted, or you'll be controlled by the sound. Something seems to be coming out from over there."

A huge shadow gradually emerged from the fog, and it was clearly moving closer to them. Soon, its details became clearer: tall masts, tattered sails, broken rigging, and a skewed bow ram. Lily tilted her head back and took a deep breath, letting out a long sigh of "Oh"—it was a ship, a huge, three-masted sailing ship that looked hundreds of years old. Its riddled silhouette approached through the fog, unnerving like a giant ghost drifting on the sea.

As the sailing ship drew closer, Lily saw the mottled, peeling wood and cracked windows. She saw a neatly arranged layer of squares on the side of the ship, with dark gunports visible in many of them. This style reminded her of old pirate ships from movies.

The ship was approaching along a slanting course. Hao Ren saw a huge line of words on its side, which were incredibly clear: North Sea Queen. Not any famous shipwreck from history.

"A ghost ship?!" Izhaks looked at the thing in front of him with interest. "This is the ghost ship you guys wrote about in your books? I didn't expect there to be such a thing. How is this thing formed?"

Elizabeth immediately raised her small awl: "Daddy, throw me up there!"

"Don't be silly, be vigilant. It might be the sirens' doing," Hao Ren casually pushed the little demon back. The tip of the silver-white spear in his other hand burst into a flame. "Shakisra, Sorma, do you know what this thing is?"

"She's warning us not to get close, saying that the vortex is about to open…" Shakisra frowned as she listened to the singing coming from the ghost ship. The song's tone was strange, and although it possessed the soft, charming quality unique to siren voices, the melody contained a sense of dissonance that drove people mad. "She keeps repeating these few sentences, and she doesn't sound very lucid."

Sorma opened her arms towards the ghost ship, her body lifted into the air by a surge of water. She opened her mouth and emitted a series of syllables that humans could hardly imitate, and layers of translucent ripples spread out in front of her and surged towards the ghost ship. She was communicating with the ship using the sirens' unique "secret language."

However, after a few seconds of silence, the ghost ship's response was not another string of singing, but an attack. With a loud creaking sound, the ship quickly adjusted its position, pointing its side at the ice floe platform where they stood. A large amount of water vapor emerged from those incomplete squares, and the dark gunports were pushed forward and quickly lit up!

"Shield!" Hao Ren turned his head and shouted loudly at Izhaks, then turned around and pointed the tip of the silver spear at the ghost ship. A cluster of silver-white flames then shot out into the distance with a thunderous roar.

A light green demon shield instantly enveloped the entire ice floe platform. Almost at the same time, dozens of azure, ghost-fire-like glows spewed out from the ghost ship's side gunports. With a series of "boom boom boom" explosions, those azure "cannonballs" hit the demon shield, exploding into large swathes of ice shards and water mist: they were not iron and fire, but ultra-low temperature ice.

A large amount of ultra-low temperature ice quickly froze the entire sea around them. In the rapid temperature change, Shakisra and Nangong Wuyue quickly lost control of the water. The "ground" beneath their feet became shaky, and the plasma shock released by Hao Ren's silver-white spear hit the ghost ship's bow at the same moment, blasting a large cloud of fire from the front of the ship!

However, what scattered in the explosion was not wood and steel from the ship's body, but large swathes of water.

The ghost ship seemed to be enraged by this counterattack. More ice cannons appeared out of thin air on its side, and cannonballs like hail poured down on them!

Sorma was hit by a ball of ice and fell clumsily from the air. While helping Shakisra and Wuyue regain control of the water, she shouted: "Attack the middle of the ship! Below the second mast! She's insane!"

A strange firefight quickly broke out and escalated. Countless bizarre attacks flew from the ice floe platform to the ghost ship: hunter's giant crossbow bolts, Izhaks's molten boulders, Hao Ren's plasma blasts, as well as Vivian's ultra-large lightning chains and bat strikes. The ghost ship felt a great danger from this frenzied attack, and its gunports immediately tilted upwards, beginning to counterattack those deadly attacks in a manner unbefitting the ship's battle style. Countless huge explosions and flashes of light erupted above and on the ghost ship, and large swathes of ice shards and water exploded. The air echoed with dull explosions and the siren's shrill, bizarre singing. The surrounding ocean also began to churn in an instant. Huge waves crashed against the ghost ship, and each impact smoothed out the damage the ship had suffered, while even larger tsunamis crushed the ice floe platform from all directions like inverted mountains.

The Data Terminal showed that a super-huge cyclone was forming in the nearby sea area. Once it closed, it would probably be one of the largest storms ever recorded in human history.

The momentum in this instant was like a natural disaster descending. Hao Ren had once had doubts about the sirens' combat power, but now he finally realized that these gentle and harmless creatures could be terrifying when they went crazy: on the ocean, the storm that a siren could stir up was no different from a natural disaster!

The best way to stop the storm was to destroy the ghost ship before it took shape.

Shakisra shouted as hard as she could while trying to control the waters around them: "Who did we offend! Who did we offend!"

Lily quickly became manic in this fighting atmosphere. She had no other long-range attack methods, so she wielded her ice and fire blades and cut off huge, multi-ton blocks of ice from the edge of the ice floe platform. Like the giants of ancient times who threw boulders to attack Asgard, she roared and hurled these giant ice blocks at the ghost ship. The power of each throw was no less than that of a heavy cannon firing!

With a loud "boom," the ghost ship's second mast was hit squarely by a giant ice block. With a creaking, strange sound, the mast dragged down a large mass of old, tangled ropes and sails, collapsing and exploding into a cloud of water mist in mid-air.

Nangong Sanba shouted in this chaos: "Don't tear down the platform under our feet!"

Lily: "Huh?"

Without a word, Nangong Wuyue rushed to Lily's side, freezing huge ice balls from the seawater: "Here's your ammunition! I can control enough water for you to smash!"

The next second, countless ice balls weighing more than ten tons crashed towards the ghost ship with subsonic whistling sounds, like dumplings being thrown into a pot.

The attacks of this group of inhuman creatures were so frenzied that, despite the ghost ship's advantage of occupying the entire ocean, it quickly fell into a disadvantage. After only a few minutes of frantic bombardment, the waves' repair of the ship could not keep up with the speed at which it was damaged. The tsunamis from all directions also weakened as the ghost ship continued to disintegrate into water. Finally, with a white flame surging along the waves onto the ship, the entire ship was quickly enveloped in a soaring fire.

In the blazing white flames, the fog on the sea dissipated, the wind stopped, the waves calmed, and the sun shone down on the people again.

Nangong Wuyue quickly jumped into the water and did not surface until after a long time. She had a mermaid woman coiled around her tail, who looked as if she had fainted.

Shakisra and Sorma stretched out their tails and helped bring the unconscious mermaid onto the ice floe platform. The group surrounded the latter in a wary semi-circle. Only the "Roll," who had been cowardly just now, approached rashly. She sniffed around the mermaid's tail for a long time before raising her head and asking: "You're not going to hit me, are you? You…"

Hao Ren casually pulled the silly cat aside and stepped forward to lift the hair from the stranger's forehead: "Do you guys know her?"

After seeing the mermaid's appearance, Shakisra exclaimed subconsciously: "It's General Vanessa!"

Of course, Hao Ren didn't know who this was: "General Vanessa? Who?"

"She's the commander of the Queen's Guard, the Queen's bodyguard," Sorma said quickly. "How could she… become like this? And shouldn't she always be stationed in Nasaton?"

(A new month, please give me some monthly tickets to calm my nerves. By the way, let’s commemorate the long-gone Children's Day =.=)