Depthless Hunger

Kai should not have been excited to see a wave of monsters flooding toward civilization, but truthfully he felt a thrill that was more than just hunger. This was why he'd started fighting in the first place: defending everyone against an undeniable menace. After the politicking within the Bloodcoral sect, he was glad to finally get out with them to battle against the ocean.

When he saw the cultivators start to fall out of formation, Kai leapt off his rock and smashed down into the surf. His arrival flattened one of the sea urchin monsters, since their spines couldn't pierce his skin, and he gripped one of them to use as a bludgeon against the others. In a heartbeat he had broken the assault and given the Bloodcoral cultivators time to regroup.

Instead of retreating immediately, Kai skimmed through the water to take out several more of the torso-sized urchins. During his fighting on the beaches, he'd discovered that he could use Sahagin's Soul if he was up to his knees in water, gliding across the battlefield easily, and he'd come to enjoy it.

Eventually, however, he had to leap back to his vantage point. If he fought fully he could have ended the attack himself and the outer sect cultivators wouldn't have gotten any training. The job he'd been sent out here for was to keep them alive, not to finish off the monsters himself. Since he'd already eaten enough of the local monsters to be certain they didn't have any powerful essence, he wouldn't go overboard.

Back on his rock, Kai considered their overall strategy and compared it to the Frontier. They definitely had more redundancy, presumably because the ocean monsters weren't as dangerous a threat as a monster incursion. Instead of all-out war, they tended to have competitions among factions within the sect, and some of the cultivators seemed to think that being sent out to fight monsters was a chore or punishment that just took time away from their cultivation.

During the past month, Kai had gained a strong grasp of the Bloodcoral sect's strength. The sect had a total of eight Earth Soul cultivators and several hundred at the Nascent Foundation stage, which meant they were mid-tier size for a sect. The truly powerful had at least one Sky Soul, but Earth Souls weren't exactly common on Cloudspire.

Which only made him realize how powerful the Brightwind sect was, to be able to send a whole squad of Earth Souls across the world to hunt Zae Zin Nim.

The Bloodcoral sect didn't patrol the entire western coast, instead jostling for territory with several other sects and a northern tribe that also managed sections. There was no treaty stopping sects from the interior from attacking them, but they seemed to consider the coastal sects more trouble than they were worth and just traded with the Bloodcoral cultivators and others for oceanic resources when necessary. Sects were sometimes wiped off the map, but it wasn't happening every day like he'd sometimes gotten the impression.

Just when Kai was beginning to wonder if he should just train on the battlefield, he heard cries of pain. He glanced across the waves, ignoring all of the relatively minor battles, and saw the source: several new monsters had emerged from the water. They weren't much larger than the other urchins, only about chest height, but they glistened an ominous purple.

Threat: VII (Eta)

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Kai recognized them as the "Spine Aura Urchins" they were supposed to hunt and evaluated them as Eta rank threats. Dangerous, but not dangerous enough to cause such cries. He saw the cultivators falling back and immediately understood the name: bloody cuts were appearing across their bodies as they fled the monsters. There was no visible aura, but everyone in a radius around the monsters was being dealt constant injuries.

On top of that, many of the cultivators were spitting up mouthfuls of blood. He still didn't understand the details, but that was something that just seemed to happen when cultivators were hit by powerful forces.

No time to waste, then. Kai leapt out toward the place where the cultivators' formation was buckling and landed on the urchin. This one was too tough to crush immediately, and to his surprise its aura actually cut through his defenses. Unfortunately for the monster, the shallow cuts were almost immediately healed by Behemoth's Heart.

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He slashed down with a single finger of a Tyrant's Claw, cleaving the urchin and its aura in half. Before the pieces could fall apart he lunged out, swallowing it all in a single Isulfr's Bite.

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"Hey, no!"

Kai recognized Cor Li Xan's voice and saw the man waving at him. Had his bite set them off somehow? He'd thought that the Savage Heart was enough to hide his monstrous nature, but if this went wrong...

"Get back! Let the horns take care of it!" Cor Li Xan pointed to the side, where their group's Nascent Foundation cultivators were holding large conch shells. Even as Kai watched, they began to blow, and qi radiated out with the sound.

"Sorry!" Kai leapt back to Cor Li Xan's rock and shook his head. "I was too focused on trying to take them out."

"No problem, you were just trying to save the other disciples. But we need to neutralize them so we can harvest the poison from the spines."

Of course that had been a lie. Kai hadn't forgotten about the horns at all, he just wanted to make sure he ate one of the rare monsters. It was moderately powerful, so he thought it was worth any friction with the Bloodcoral sect. Fortunately, his status as a barbarian gave him latitude for mistakes, or maybe that was just raw power.

"So how do the horns work?" Kai asked as he watched the invisible auras battling. They seemed to be draining a lot of qi, judging from the exhaustion of the cultivators using them, but they suppressed the damaging auras around the urchins.

"The conch horns are an ancient weapon of the Bloodcoral sect," Cor Li Xan not-exactly-explained. "When a perfect shell is found, it can be treated with qi arts in order to hunt the Spine Aura Urchin. That's why the Bloodcoral sect is the only one that can extract the poison at the highest quality."

"I see," Kai said, though he didn't. That wasn't the first time he'd received an explanation that didn't give him any substantial information about something and he still wasn't sure whether they didn't know or just didn't trust him. Whatever the case, the horns seemed to be doing their job.

At least until the next of the urchins was taken down by a qi-filled spear. Those remaining suddenly began launching spines, some of which tore through the cultivators advancing on them and others tearing through the air. Kai easily knocked aside those coming in his direction, but he heard a cry of pain to his right.

Two of the cultivators using the conchs were down, pierced by spines, and the aura was faltering. Cor Li Xan stood bolt upright and then grabbed his arm.

"Go use that one, I'll get the other!"

Kai leapt to the nearest rock and grabbed the conch horn from the slumping cultivator's hands, but he wasn't sure what to do with it. This was where a proper explanation would have been helpful. Just blowing in the mouthpiece was unlikely to accomplish anything, but all the Bloodcoral artifacts from the medallions to their games involved pushing qi from the body, so presumably...

When he let out his breath, power flooded through the horn. The other horns let out melodious notes, while his was a powerful blaring that threatened to overwhelm the other sounds. It seemed to work, though, and the dark urchins fell back.

Combined with Cor Li Xan's note, they managed to suppress the monsters again until they were killed, then the harvesting began. Kai pulled the horn from his lips and was surprised to find himself a bit drained. Physically he was untouched, of course, but the horn demanded qi and nothing else. Despite all his power, the qi in his dantian wasn't as deep as his other stores of power.

Still, it seemed to have been a successful hunt, again thanks to him. Higher stage cultivators generally didn't dirty their hands, but Kai hopped off the rock to go pick up injured sect members and lift the spines. If he was viewed as a rough and strange foreigner, at least he could be a helpful one.

Part of him wanted to keep the conch horn, just to experiment with it, but he returned it to one of the Nascent Foundation cultivators who stored them in a special spatial necklace shaped like a conch. Something to think about later, perhaps.

"You've done more than enough," Cor Li Xan said as he came up beside him. "I would have needed to guide this entire hunt if you hadn't been here. Tradition dictates that an Earth Soul should always be present for the end, of course."

"It wasn't really dangerous until today," Kai said with a shrug. "But I guess you need to be careful in case there are unexpectedly powerful monsters."

"Yes, the average danger of the oceans is less threatening than its exceptions." Cor Li Xan shuffled closer to him and lowered his voice. "A word of advice: there is no need for you to dirty your hands with lesser tasks. Those are for outer disciples, not someone of your strength."

Kai looked back at him, keeping his expression completely neutral. "I just want to be humble. I still feel like I'm on the outside myself."

"Well, less so than before, after today."

"What do you mean?"

"This hunt has formally concluded. Here, let me take your medallion." Cor Li Xan took it from him and performed some strange ritual that made a third crystalline section emerge. "Thank you for your contributions. You're also due a payment from the sect, so speak to the officials if-"

"Could I have some of the poison?" Kai asked. "It looks like you can extract a lot of it, after all."

Cor Li Xan's eyes narrowed slightly. "Such poisons are tightly regulated. Why do you need it?"

"Not to use. I actually want to test it on myself, to try to build immunity."

"Yes, you do have impressive defenses. I'll see it arranged."

By the time they finished on the beach, Kai had been given a vial of pure urchin venom, which he put away in his spatial ring. The truth was that he was already basically immune, he just wanted it as a gift for Omilaena. An advancement gift for his wife was definitely worth more than a little money, since they had plenty and Omilaena could probably earn anything else they needed.

Other than that venom and monstrous essence, the main thing he'd earned from his long hunt was a third mark on his Bloodcoral medallion. That was progress, but slower than he wanted. Regardless of whether he liked the Bloodcoral sect, he didn't plan to spend months gradually earning their trust.

There might be a riskier way to earn them... or this might be enough. With the third mark, Kai had earned the right to access the sect's full archives. That would at minimum get him the new shroud he needed, and maybe far more.