Chapter 1339: The Crimson Vessel

The ocean ran deep, and in that depth a palace rested on the shadowed seafloor.

All around it, Thalvyr’s power had once been saturated into everything—pillars, doorframes, even the flowing seawater. Now it drew inward all at once...

and vanished without leaving a trace.

Thalvyr rose slowly.

He brushed at his sleeve, then opened his palm. A miniature Voruun floated above it—hazy and unreal, the way a soul looked when it had been peeled out of a body. A few half-transparent tentacles drooped weakly.

Thalvyr studied him for a moment and sighed.

"How are you this careless? I told you to take people with you. You go out... and you don’t come back. Honestly."

His dragon tail swept lightly across the doorframe. The current near the entrance shifted on command, and a massive octopus—shaped just like Voruun—was carried out by the water, drifting to a stop before Thalvyr.

The soul-Voruun above his palm was pulled toward it. When spirit touched flesh, the ghostly tentacles fused in first, then the head and torso. A few seconds later, the octopus’ skin regained its sheen, and one tentacle after another lifted.

A restored Voruun stood in the palace again.

Voruun froze for a beat. The moment he recognized Thalvyr, he tried to kneel—

and immediately failed.

He still hadn’t adapted to this body. His tentacles curled inward, his center of mass shifted wrong, and he simply... collapsed, flopping bonelessly onto the stone floor.

The shark whipped its tail and shot through the hole in the ice.

The mantis-shrimp gunner stayed flattened on its back, bucking with the current, but before they left he still twisted the muzzle toward Namyanna.

Another compressed air shot tore up through the water.

Namyanna’s fingers closed. The trident that had been embedded in the reef vanished and reappeared in her hand. She gripped the shaft, brought it up horizontally, and lined the central blade with the oncoming air mass.

Clink!

The air strike hit the trident. Metal rang, the vibration traveling through seawater and out into the distance. The weapon shuddered violently, the shock punching through the handle into Namyanna’s palm. Her fingers were forced open—she had no choice but to let the trident go.

It hung in the water for a moment, then the tip dipped and it started to sink toward the seabed.

The next instant, it was back in Namyanna’s grip again.

She didn’t chase the shark and the gunner. She only glanced at the fading spiral of disturbed air in the distance, then angled up and swam hard for the surface. The closer she got, the stronger the tremors became—huge shadows crossing and overlapping above, the roar of waves pounding down through the water like pressure.

When she broke the surface, she saw blood-colored Voruun in a full frenzy.

His thick tentacles slammed the sea again and again. Each strike hammered a crater-like depression into the surface before the water rebounded into towering walls of spray that crashed toward the people in the air.

Seraphina had already carried the others higher. Everyone stood on her broad dragon back, and every time they tried to launch an attack, the power they gathered got disrupted by the incoming waves. Droplets hammered their shields in a steady chain of dull thuds.

Voruun couldn’t reach them either.

His tentacles were long and the waves he raised were high—but Seraphina was higher. No matter how hard he extended, the tips still stopped far below their feet.

Who was he supposed to hook?

Namyanna rose out of the water, streams sliding down her body. She held the trident in one hand, spinning the shaft in her palm. Ice-blue light crawled along the weapon’s etched lines and concentrated at the tip. The surrounding seawater twisted into a small whirlpool.

When the rotation hit its peak, she stepped on the surface and lifted herself, then threw the trident with everything she had.

The moment it left her hand, the sea beneath her exploded outward.

The trident skimmed low over the surface for a short distance, then lifted its tip and shot up along an angled line toward Voruun. Sensing the threat, Voruun drew several tentacles inward, trying to block its path.

In the air, Ataneya seized the opening.

All of her fox tails flared outward—some sealing off above Voruun, some skimming the sea, others crossing from both sides. Every direction he could have escaped was plugged. Voruun tried to sink back down, but the tails closed beneath him and forced his huge body up, holding him on the surface.

Elowen raised both hands at the same time.

Cold surged up around Voruun. Seawater condensed under the drop in temperature, and tall ice walls burst up from the sea. The walls linked together, sealing every gap Ataneya left behind. Worse, something flowed inside that ice—something that could destroy a soul—leaving Voruun no room to regroup and come back again.

Voruun’s tentacles had nowhere left to retreat.

The trident slipped through a gap between them and drove straight into his body. Tough flesh didn’t stop it. The impact dented inward, then the weapon punched all the way through. Blood surged from the wound, and before it could even disperse in the water, the trident burst out the far side.

It didn’t stop.

It arced in midair, looped back from another angle, and stabbed into Voruun again. It pierced his flank, carving a line of blood, then rose and fell from a third direction.

Once.

Again.

Every time it passed through him, the trident changed its attack angle and returned along a new line. Voruun snapped tentacles at it, trying to catch it, but the shaft always shifted direction right before they could close.

After several passes, his massive body was riddled with holes. Blood streamed off his skin into the sea, staining the spray a deep, dirty red.

The trident finished its last penetration, spinning back into Namyanna’s hand.

The cold in her palm flared again. Water surged up beneath her feet, lifting into a rising column and carrying her to Voruun’s height.

Namyanna aimed her palm at him and released the stored frost. An ice-blue fog-stream crossed the gap and washed over Voruun’s torn flesh. The first wound it touched crystallized with rime. Then the white ice spread across his skin, creeping outward and gradually locking down the motion of his tentacles.

Queen Elowen closed her hands tighter.

The ice walls around Voruun pushed inward. As they moved, their bases scraped the surface into rings of ice shavings, and the sealed space shrank fast. Every time Voruun backed up, his back hit the hard, freezing wall. When he tried to break out sideways, Ataneya’s tails shoved him right back in.

Voruun—already half-mad—looked around, and fear finally surfaced in his eyes.

The ice walls were still closing.

The cold was already crawling into his body through the wounds.

His tentacles began to slam even more violently, blasting ice chips and spray into the air. He clenched down hard on something hidden in his mouth—a blood-colored bead. The hard sphere cracked faintly between his teeth...

then shattered completely.

A thick, reeking tide of blood-qi burst out of his mouth.

The blood mist surged up over his head and spread outward. The light around them turned dark red, and the sea itself seemed pressed down under it. Voruun’s tentacles tightened again inside that blood fog, hammering into the ice walls and Ataneya’s tails. Heavy impacts made the entire containment zone tremble.

On Seraphina’s back, Ethan watched with a grim expression.

What put him on edge wasn’t Voruun’s sudden power spike.

After the blood mist spread, he heard a mess of chaotic sound—fine, dense, coming from all directions, tangled between waves and collisions. Then he felt it: dozens upon dozens of living presences around them.

But as far as the eye could see, there was no crowd. Just them... and Voruun.

Ethan already had an energy sphere formed in his palm, yet he didn’t throw it. He kept scanning the shapes rising and falling inside the blood fog until Elowen’s voice came from beside him.

"Souls."

Her eyes were fixed on the roiling blood around Voruun, her tone colder than the ice itself.

"Lots of them. That blood-qi is made of souls—souls that were tortured before they died. Their resentment became this mist, and Voruun is the vessel carrying them."

As she spoke, the tiny outlines inside the fog sharpened. They were packed around Voruun, tumbling with every sweep of his tentacles—none of them able to truly break free of his body.

Ethan nodded. The energy ball in his palm, already complete, slowly dissipated.

Elira, though, stared down at Voruun with pure disappointment.

With that many souls mixed in, that big octopus clearly wasn’t edible anymore.

Back in the deep-sea palace, Voruun—still in his new body—lay sprawled weakly on the floor. He looked up at Thalvyr by the throne, shifting a few tentacles for a long time before he managed to prop his head up.

"Your Majesty, I..."