This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange - Chapter 847: 847: The Impassable Sea
Chapter 847: Chapter 847: The Impassable Sea
“You know it’s basically impossible to cross the ocean.”
Serena’s words landed flat, but heavy. She didn’t raise her voice or seem to be saying this to discourage Kain; she didn’t need to. It was a fact. Her eyes fixed on Kain’s, waiting for him to deny it. He didn’t.
Kain only nodded, solemn, as if the acknowledgment itself were an admission of defeat.
Because she was right.
The ocean wasn’t a simple stretch of water separating continents. It was the greatest natural barrier this world possessed—an aquatic hell wider and perhaps even more merciless than the Abyss itself. Anyone foolish enough to think of it as “just water” never returned to tell their story.
———————-
The first problem was the creatures.
The shallow coasts already teemed with predators, but the further one ventured out, the stranger and deadlier they became.
Leviathans larger than cities moved in silence beneath the waves, their shadows darkening the sea from horizon to horizon.
Behemoth squids with limbs like mountains rose without warning to drag the few ships that chance venturing a few extra miles off the coast down whole, their beaks snapping steel like kindling.
Whales existed too, but not the kind sung of in sailor’s songs and many coastal fishing villages admire—these bore barnacle forests on their backs and eyes filled with a dim, eerie intelligence, as though they had been watching humanity for millennia from beneath the surface.
And these were only the “known” giants. Some sailors swore they saw continents that turned out to be living creatures, island-like titans drifting on currents, lying in wait for prey to settle before plunging into the depths of the ocean.
Others whispered of predators that never breached, predators that swallowed ships from below with nothing left behind but a slick of blood and splintered wood.
———————-
Yet even these monsters were not the truest danger.
The storms were worse.
No map of the seas remained accurate for long, because the skies above them twisted into chaos without warning. Hurricanes rose from calm waters in minutes, tearing the air with shrieks that drowned out thought. Lightning storms rolled endlessly across the horizon, but the bolts weren’t natural: they twisted into spirals, shredding air itself before slamming into the ocean with explosions that created mile-wide craters of boiling steam. Even many high level tamers would die if struck directly.
And even if one was strong enough to withstand the storms, worse still were the geomagnetic distortions. Compasses spun, the very flow of spiritual energy bent and warped, sending ships careening off course even if they never strayed a hand’s width from their plotted line.
The storms weren’t content to break wood and steel—they broke orientation itself. What was east one hour became west the next. What was up felt like down. Entire fleets that had attempted to cross in the past had drifted until, unknowingly, they found themselves circling the same stretch of sea forever, as if the ocean itself wanted to trap them.
———————-
But even that was not the end. After all, if powerful creatures and storms alone were the obstacle, Abyssals would have long since crossed the oceans and corrupted those leviathans into part of their armies to help them safely cross.
That should have been their most direct path to expand. But even the Abyss, with all its hunger and ability to contaminate, dared not venture far from shore—the sea itself rejected them.
There was something deeper. Something unnatural. Almost as if the ocean itself had sentience.
Those who were more powerful and tried to cross from the sea or skies spoke of black holes that would suddenly appear if you got far enough, not the cosmic ones in the skies but smaller versions birthed in the water and air.
One moment a vessel would be sailing on rolling waves, the next it would be swallowed whole, vanishing into a perfectly round void that yawned open and snapped shut just as fast.
Or a flying spiritual creature will find itself flying steady one moment and then, with no storm or lightning to warn it, a perfect black sphere blossoms in the sky. The air bends, light warps, and with a sound like rushing water inverted, both beast and rider are yanked screaming into the void. In less than a heartbeat the hole collapses in on itself, leaving only silence, as if they had never existed at all.
Strangely, these anomalies never took fish, whales or others born from the sea. They only took what wasn’t meant to belong to the ocean—humans, beasts of land and sky, and even Abyssals who dared to test their luck.
It was as if the sea itself had a blessing, a cruel preference for its children. Aquatic life endured the chaos; sharks, eels, dolphins, even ordinary fish slipped through storms and distortions unharmed, as though wrapped in invisible protection. But anything else was rejected—violently, absolutely. Even if contracted to one of the “ocean’s darlings”
That was why Abyssals had not yet poured over the ocean in droves. Not because they couldn’t fight the leviathans. Not because they feared storms. But because the very fabric of the sea spat them back. If they contaminated the ocean lords and their kin, if they could twist that blessing into their own, the balance would shatter overnight. The Abyss would march across in a tide of endless spawn.
Until then, the sea remained the Central Continent’s only true defense.
———————-
And it was a defence no ordinary human could cross.
Only the strongest tamers—nine-star demi-gods—could brute-force their way across by shielding themselves and their allies from the ocean’s wrath.
It wasn’t a journey measured in days or weeks, but in survival against a thousand different kinds of annihilation. Those who succeeded were counted by name, etched into history. They were so few that even the empires celebrated each one like a miracle.
Teleportation? That was no solution either.
Theoretically, one could bypass the sea by simply warping from continent to continent. But theory and reality diverged under the weight of the ocean’s “curse.” The storms and geomagnetic distortions didn’t stop at the surface—they twisted space itself. Even short jumps were unstable. The longer the distance, the more energy demanded. A single safe transfer between continents required resources that could bankrupt small nations. The royal family hoarded such methods like treasures, deploying them only when an empire’s survival was at stake.
And even then, the chances of stability were slim. Entire squads had been lost in broken transmissions, never arriving anywhere, their essence scattered between dimensions.
This was also why Kain was certain most civilians in the Eastern Continent had been abandoned.
Only the wealthiest and most powerful families could afford to escape by rare teleportation methods. The strongest beast tamers and nobility may have fled to another continent with their retainers, but the ordinary people—the weak, the poor, even many lower and mid‑level tamers, perhaps even some high‑level ones—were left behind. The expense of crossing was simply too great, and no empire would waste such resources on non‑assets. Millions had likely been left to hide like rats in ruined cities, terrified and hopeless.
Which was exactly why Kain was so eager to go against the grain and instead ENTER the seemingly doomed continent.
Unfortunately, Kain, for all his power, all his mastery, knew he couldn’t brute-force it. Even if he could scrape together the wealth of ten noble houses, even if he could drain every vault the organization had, it wouldn’t be enough for two-way transport. Perhaps not even for one.
And even then, he lacked the fundamental infrastructure to do so. He didn’t have a top-grade teleportation array. He didn’t have the stockpile of stabilized space crystals that only empires possessed. He didn’t even have a proper link to triangulate coordinates across the ocean.
Serena’s words had been brutally simple, but they carried the truth of the world in them.
It was impossible.
Kain could chase glory and strength. He could fight against Abyssals and defy the Empire. But the ocean? The ocean was a wall. A wall as deliberate as if the gods themselves had carved it.
Only nine-stars could cross. Only demigods.
And Kain was not one of them. Yet.
———————-
Kain sat in silence long after Serena’s words, his mind churning like storm-tossed waters. The reality was undeniable: the ocean was an unbreakable wall, a barrier designed to halt even the Abyss in its march. No fleet, no ordinary tamer, not even most emperors could dream of crossing it.
But then—
His eyes flickered with sudden light. An idea, fragile and reckless, clawed its way up from memory.
The trial relic.
Kain had been through many trials at Dark Moon College, but one stood above the rest: the time when, without warning, the College’s relic had pulled him—and Serena—beyond anything familiar. One moment, he was inside a controlled test being conducted by the College. The next, he was cast into another world entirely, facing an inheritance trial with a very real risk of death that gathered chosen figures from every continent.
He remembered it vividly. The wrenching sensation of his body being ripped across space, the nausea of the longest teleportation he had ever endured. He remembered stumbling into a chamber that didn’t belong to Dark Moon, where strangers had already gathered: Cassian Lysander; the Holy Son from the Church in the West; the girl (bitch) from the Eyera family; three people from the Eastern Continent, including Bai Lian, the woman who would one day become the steward of his World Tree in Pangea.
That moment had proven something. The inheritance trial wasn’t bound to one continent. It was connected to all of them. It had anchors—roots reaching across the world like veins.
