The rhythmic, warbling whistle echoed up the canyon once more, sharper and more desperate than before. It was a three-tone call. He rose in pitch like the cry of a wounded waterfowl. He carried across the water with haunting clarity.
Tie Shan froze, his massive claw hovering over the winch lever. The bear elder’s ears swiveled toward the south, his heavy brow knitting into a deep scowl.
“That’s a river-clan alarm call,” Tie Shan rumbled, his deep voice dropping an octave. “The water tribes along the Southern Shallows use that whistle when their nurseries are surrounded by shoreline hunting beasts. But those tribes usually stay far downstream in the reed marshes. What are they doing up in the rocky shallows?”
Beside him, Lin Xiao bobbed upright on a mossy boulder, his sense outer edge flaring outward. Through the misty canyon draft, his senses caught the distinct, rancid odor of burning copper and rotten marrow—the matching stench of the Blood Sea Sect’s leech-like foul fog.
The bronze chime of the Dao Spirit chimed in his mind, prompt and precise:
“Forty-two water folk,” Lin Xiao murmured, his voice hardening as his semi-clear azure body shifted from a relaxed oval into a taut, streamlined teardrop. “And twenty demonic shock hounds hunting them. Tie Shan, bring the apprentices with the holding nets! Xiao Long, take the riverbed at full speed!”
“On it, Sovereign!” Tie Shan bellowed, grabbing his five-hundred-jin hammer with both hands and charging along the gorge trail like an armored boulder.
Xiao Long plunged into the rapids with a thunderous splash, his thirty-meter form transforming into an azure streak beneath the churning foam.
Lin Xiao didn’t take the rocky path. He had a far faster highway right in front of him: the river.
Leaping from the boulder, Lin Xiao dropped onto the surface of the rushing water. His elastic underside struck the water’s skin of the river. Then, he engaged his impact-hardening dilatant property. His mass hardened into an ultra-smooth, friction-free skipping disc. With an explosive high-pressure kick from his rear margin, Lin Xiao launched himself across the water.
THWIP! THWIP! THWIP!
Lin Xiao skimmed over the rapids like a sky skipping stone, rebounding off the water surface every hundred paces, his speed multiplying with every bounce. The wind howled past his ball-shaped outer edge. It tore through the gorge at breathtaking speed as he covered four miles in less than a minute.
Four miles downstream, the narrow canyon gave way to the Southern River Shallows. There, the river broadened into a sprawling gravel bed dotted with sandbars, exposed boulders, and thickets of wild willow brush.
Cornered against a steep mud sandbar was a nomadic tribe of river otter beastfolk.
There were forty-two of them in total. In the center of the muddy bank, several woven reed rafts were clustered together, bearing six elderly, frail otters wrapped in ragged reed cloaks. Surrounding the rafts, a dozen adult female otters huddled tightly, shielding sixteen shivering, squeaking pups. The little otter cubs, their fuzzy brown fur soaked and trembling, buried their tiny faces into their mothers’ chests, scared by the snarling beasts circling their refuge.
Enclosing the sandbar were twenty massive Blood-Hound Shock Beasts.
Each demonic hound was the size of a mountain pony, its hide covered in patchy, diseased crimson bristles and weeping sores. Their long, snake-like muzzles dripped thick strings of skin-burning, acidic spit that hissed as it struck the wet river stones. Around each beast’s thick neck was clamped a heavy, copper-spiked collar pulsing with evil crimson runes—the demonic mind-control artifacts used by the Blood Sea Sect to burn away animal intellect and induce psychotic, flesh-craving mania.
Standing knee-deep in the muddy shallows before the nursery rafts was the otter chieftain.
He was an old, grizzled beastman with a stooped back, grey-tipped whiskers, and ragged brown fur scarred by decades of surviving in the harsh southern rivers. In his trembling webbed paws, he wielded a charred wooden pike fashioned from river-driftwood, its tip hardened in hearth coals. Beside him stood his eldest son, a younger otter warrior armed with a notched stone harpoon.
“Stay behind the rafts, children!” the old chieftain wheezed, his breath rattling in his chest. His webbed feet slipped on the wet silt as three hounds paced back and forth barely ten paces away. “Don’t look into their eyes! If they break the line, dive into the deep channel and swim north! Head for the spirit willow mountain!”
“Father, there are too many!” the young otter cried out, his voice cracking. A hound snapped its jaws, spraying acid that melted the reed reeds at his feet. “They cut off the deep channel! They’re herding us like sheep!”
On the high river bluff overlooking the shallows, two demonic handlers in crimson robes laughed with cruel amusement. One of them held an ivory bone whistle between his lips, blowing a short, shrill blast.
At the sound of the whistle, the spiked collars flared with blinding red light.
The lead blood hound, a huge brute with one eye milky with clouded eye rot and scars crossing its snout, let out an ear-splitting howl. It lunged forward across the shallow water, its massive clawed paws kicking up sheets of muddy spray.
The old chieftain gritted his teeth, stepped forward, and thrust his driftwood pike straight at the charging hound’s chest.
CRACK!
The hardened wooden pike shattered against the hound’s thick, bone-plated shoulder like a dry twig. The driving force of the two-ton beast slammed into the old otter. It knocked him flat on his back into the freezing mud. Before he could scramble upright, the hound planted a heavy, taloned paw squarely onto his chest, its razor claws digging through his ragged fur.
The old chieftain looked up into the hound’s maw. Rows of jagged, yellowed teeth dripping with acid-burning venom opened wide, aiming straight for his unprotected throat.
The nursery raft erupted in shrill, painful screams. The little pups wailed in terror, and the chieftain’s son lunged forward with his stone harpoon. But he was far too slow.
The old otter closed his eyes. He had spent his entire life fleeing from hunters, royal trappers, and demonic patrols, seeking only a quiet river bend where his grandchildren could catch minnows in peace. Now, it was ending here, in the cold mud of an unknown shallows.
I’m sorry, little ones, he thought, awaiting the tearing of his flesh. Grandfather couldn’t find the safe waters.
Instead of blood and darkness, what came was a sudden, roaring blast of mountain wind.
BOOOOOOOOOOOM!
A blinding azure blur dropped from the upstream channel at faster-than-sound speed, skipping off the river surface with an explosive rooster-tail of white water. Lin Xiao struck the lead blood hound directly in the ribs with the striking force of a solid bronze battering ram!
Lin Xiao’s dynamic, impact-hardening mass hardened into iron-hard metal at the moment of impact. The two-ton demonic hound didn’t even have time to whimper. With a bone-shaking blast wave that blasted the surrounding mud into a thirty-foot spray ring, the massive hound was launched horizontally through the air like a discarded stone, tumbling eighty feet across the river shallows before crashing wildly into the opposite granite bank!
The hound hit the stone cliff with a dull thud, collapsed into the brush, and lay there fully stunned, its demonic collar sparking and smoking from the sheer bone-shaking force.
The leftover nineteen blood hounds stopped dead in their tracks. It skidded across the wet silt with wild yelps of confusion.
The old otter chieftain opened his eyes, sputtering river mud from his whiskers. He was still alive. His chest ached from the hound’s heavy paw, but his throat was untouched.
Resting on the muddy sandbar directly in front of him was a semi-clear sapphire-blue sphere, roughly two feet wide. The creature wobbled slightly, shedding droplets of clear river water, before turning two large, gentle white crescent eyes toward the shivering old otter.
“You have remarkable courage, grandfather,” a clear, warm voice echoed pleasantly in the chieftain’s mind, carrying the calm power of an immortal sovereign wrapped in the gentleness of a spring breeze. “Defending your grandchildren with a broken stick against demonic beasts takes real heart. But from now on, you don’t need to fight alone.”
The old chieftain stared, his whiskers twitching in total, stunned confusion. He had lived for eighty winters. But never in all his days had he seen a talking blue sphere of spring water fall out of the sky to save a family of humble river otters.
“W-Who... What god are you?” the old otter croaked, his webbed paws trembling against the silt.
Lin Xiao bounced gently in place. He extended a soft, semi-clear slime arm to pat the old chieftain’s mud-stained shoulder.
“I’m Lin Xiao. Welcome to the Myriad Spirit Safe hall,” Lin Xiao said warmly.
Then, Lin Xiao turned around, facing the nineteen snarling blood hounds. The warmth in his voice vanished, replaced by an icy, focused resolve that caused the water surface beneath him to freeze into tiny crystal-clear ripples.
“Now then,” Lin Xiao murmured, his azure body expanding as he drew in the river current. “Let’s wash the demonic filth off these overgrown puppies.”