The wind howled across the Southern River Shallows. It carried the sharp tang of ozone, copper, and churned river silt.
The nineteen leftover Blood-Hound Shock Beasts slowly recovered from the shock of seeing their pack leader hurled eighty feet across the river. Growling deep in their throats, the diseased beasts formed a crescent formation around the sandbar. Strings of skin-burning, flesh-burning spit sizzled against the cold gravel. Meanwhile, the copper-spiked collars on their necks pulsed with blinding, rhythmic bursts of crimson light.
Up on the shale bluff overlooking the river, the two demonic handlers had scrambled to their feet. The senior student raised the carved bone whistle to his lips, his face twisted in vicious rage.
FZZZZZZT!
A piercing, clashing blast cut through the gorge. It was the Blood Sea Sect’s “Frenzy Command,” a sonic trigger that overloaded the parasite needles embedded in the hounds’ brains, overriding all instinct for self-preservation and driving them into an unstoppable homicidal frenzy.
The hounds went berserk. Blood vessels in their eyes burst into pure crimson pools. Their spines arched, muscles swelling until their rib cages threatened to burst through their mangy hides. Howling with supernatural savagery, all nineteen beasts launched themselves forward in a timed together, starving lunge, their claws churning the shallows into a storm of bloody foam.
Behind Lin Xiao, the forty-two river otters clung to each other in sheer terror. The old chieftain tried to push himself up on one trembling elbow, his eyes filled with painful dread as he shouted: “Lord Xiao, beware! Their spit melts bone! Dive into the deep channel!”
Lin Xiao didn’t dive into the deep channel.
Instead, he swelled his body, swelling from a two-foot sphere into a massive, semi-clear azure dome ten feet in width. Dropping his underside directly into the deep river current running beside the sandbar, Lin Xiao opened his internal intake valves wide.
“Dao Spirit, prime the smooth-flowing chamber!” Lin Xiao commanded. “Pressure setting: eight hundred bars. Target: collar pins only. Let’s give these poor dogs a proper grooming.”
“Command acknowledged,” the Dao Spirit’s sweet-sounding voice rang through his mind. “Siphoning surrounding river volume... Internal squeezing chamber engaged. Dilatant fluid nozzle steadied at tiny sky-slit. Smooth-flowing flow focus: one hundred percent.”
SCHWOOOOOOOP!
In less than three-tenths of a second, Lin Xiao inhaled over two hundred barrels of rushing mountain river water. The huge volume vanished into the boundless folds of his Ancient Void Dantian without causing him to gain an ounce of weight. Within his core, the liquid was subjected to huge, controlled gravity squeezing. He condensed into an ultra-dense, high-pressure pool.
A slender, crystal-clear nozzle of hardened, non-Newtonian slime extended from Lin Xiao’s front surface.
The lead hound was barely five paces away. Its poisonous jaws snapping was wide enough to swallow a sheep whole.
FWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSHHHHHH!
What erupted from Lin Xiao was not a messy splash of water. It was a razor-thin, see-through needle of liquid speed. A clear beam of smooth-flowing water traveling at three times the speed of sound!
The hyper-high-pressure water jet sliced through the air with an ear-splitting, faster-than-sound whip-crack. Guided with tiny care by the Dao Spirit’s targeting matrix, the razor jet struck the charging hound’s thick neck.
PING!
The heavy copper collar—cast with iron rivets and demonic blood runes—was cleanly cut in two. The high-pressure water cut through the metal casing like a hot knife gliding through soft animal fat, without so much as grazing a single follicle of the beast’s skin beneath. The broken collar flew twenty feet into the air. Its cursed crimson runes flickered out into harmless grey sparks.
The hound tumbled across the gravel, its jaw snapping on empty air as the demonic feedback loop instantly collapsed.
Lin Xiao didn’t pause. Turning his fluid nozzle with lightning-fast agility, he swept the smooth-flowing cutting jet across the charging pack:
PING! PING! PING! PING! PING!
In less than two seconds, eighteen separate metal snaps rang out like rapid-fire firecrackers. Eighteen copper collars exploded into cut halves, tumbling into the gravel bed like broken junk. Deprived of the cursed parasite signals, the frenzied madness draining the hounds’ eyes faded away in an instant, replaced by dazed, whimpering confusion. Their swollen muscles collapsed back to normal size.
“And now for the rinse cycle!” Lin Xiao bubbled cheerfully.
Shifting his internal nozzle from a micro-thin cutting jet to a wide, cone-shaped hydro-blaster, Lin Xiao released the leftover one hundred and fifty barrels of high-pressure river water in a roaring, foaming torrent.
THUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!
A huge wall of white water erupted from Lin Xiao’s front. It spread across thirty paces like a tidal wave crashing against a breakwater. The nineteen confused hounds were swept off their paws as if struck by a falling waterfall. Howling in indignity rather than pain, the massive beasts were caught in the foamy, churning surge and tumbled downstream like hairy wooden barrels caught in a flash flood.
Around the river bend, heavy footsteps shook the gorge.
“HOLD THE NETS, BOYS!” Tie Shan’s thunderous roar echoed off the cliffs.
Standing knee-deep in the downstream shallows, Tie Shan and twelve earth-bear smiths raised three huge holding nets woven from refined mountain-hemp rope and iron wire. The surging water carried the tumbling, water-logged hounds straight into the wide mouth of the nets.
With a loud laugh, Tie Shan yanked the release cord, hoisting the massive net into the air. The nineteen hounds hung suspended above the riverbank like a huge catch of giant, dripping carp, coughing up harmless river foam and whimpering softly as the bear smiths secured the boundary knots.
Tie Shan hoisted his hammer onto his shoulder, peering into the wriggling net with a wide grin. “Look at that! Not a single broken rib, and they’re cleaner than they’ve been in years! Good catch, Sovereign!”
On the sandbar, total silence dropped. It was broken only by the gentle lap of river water against the pebbles.
Within Lin Xiao’s spiritual sea, the system manifest finalized the engagement:
Lin Xiao wobbled slightly, letting out a soft burp of clear water vapor. “That worked even better than expected. In my past life, we used high-pressure water jets to strip rust off intermodal shipping containers. Severing copper collars without hurting the animal underneath is basically the same thing, just with better aim.”
Up on the shale bluff, the two demonic handlers were frozen in total, soul-shattering terror.
The bone whistle slipped from the senior student’s numb fingers, clattering against the rocks. His knees gave out beneath him, dumping him onto the dirt.
“He... He used water,” the student gasped, his voice trembling so wildly he could barely articulate words. “He sliced twenty Grade-3 Blood-Sealing Collars with pure spring water... Without spilling a single drop of beast blood! Even the Grand Elders of the Seven Great Sects can’t manipulate sword-qi with such horrifying care! That thing... That blue monstrosity isn’t a beast! It’s an ancient Water-God avatar!”
“Senior Brother... Run!” the younger handler whimpered.
Before they could turn around, a thirty-meter shadow fell over the bluff.
Xiao Long rose from the deep channel behind them, his massive sapphire-scaled serpent head hovering twenty feet above their heads. The sky horned wyrm exhaled a chilling puff of frosty mist that froze their robes to the shale, his golden eyes narrowing in cold draconic disdain.
“Going somewhere, little worms?” a ringing, rumbling telepathic voice shook in their skulls.
The two handlers fainted on the spot.
Down on the sandbar, the forty-two river otters sat in the mud. He stared at Lin Xiao with wide, moist eyes.
The old chieftain pushed himself up onto his knees. His gaze moved from the empty shallows to the massive bear smiths holding the disarmed hounds, then to the majestic horned serpent guarding the bluff, and finally settled upon the semi-clear blue sphere resting peacefully on the pebbles before him.
The old otter’s heart hammered against his ribs—not with fear, but with an overwhelming, transcendent respect.
For decades, the nomadic tribes of the southern rivers had been hunted like wild game. Royal lords trapped them for their waterproof fur. Demonic fighters captured them to refine blood pills. Rogue beasts drove them from their fishing pools. They had known nothing but flight, hunger, and terror.
And now, a sovereign of heaven and earth—a creature of pure, sky water—had dropped from the mountains to stand between them and death.
The old chieftain lowered his head, pressing his forehead into the wet gravel until the river pebbles bit into his skin. Behind him, all forty-one clan members—mothers, warriors, elders, and fuzzy little pups—followed suit, bowing deeply before the blue sphere with quiet, respectful weeping.
“Great Sovereign of the Waters...” the chieftain whispered, his voice trembling with deep emotion. “The Silver-Stream Clan offers its eternal service. We have no gold, no spirit pearls, no immortal treasures... But our blood, our claws, and our lives belong to your mountain forever.”
Lin Xiao bounced forward, nudging the old chieftain’s shoulder with a soft, warm slime arm.
“Keep your blood and your lives, grandfather,” Lin Xiao said with a gentle laugh. “I don’t need servants. But if your clan knows how to swim, catch fish, and build wooden water channels, we have plenty of empty houses, warm stew. A whole mountain that needs good neighbors.”
The old otter looked up, his moist amber eyes shining with wonder, his heart lighter than a dried reed floating on a summer breeze.