Joymount City was a steel fortress established on Joymount Island.

The enormous city walls, made from steel and stone, ringed the entire island and stood around forty meters tall. The walls had arrow towers and were wide enough for horses to gallop upon. Rock debris covered the base of the wall, carpeting the shore like caltrops.

Besides the city wall, there were also parapet walls, gate walls, inner walls, and many other defensive fortifications. From a historical point of view, such a fortress would be considered a famous stronghold.

For Immortals, all steel fortresses were simply the best that mortals could do, and only formations could be considered true high-class defenses. But even they would admit that, when paired with suitable weaponry, these “primitive” defenses could still be very useful.

Today, Joymount Island was besieged by fire and water.

Hundreds of sea fiends were attacking the city from all sides. Arrows cast shadows all across the ground, with the occasional spell art mixed in.

The western side of Joymount City was where the approach to the city was the flattest, a flat stretch all the way from the shore to the city walls. At high tide, the sea waters could even get to almost thirty meters of the walls.

As the area with the least defensible terrain, it was also the target of the fiercest attacks.

Several hundred fiends had come up to the shore to attack the walls.

This didn’t sound like a lot, but when they were all together, they exhibited a strength more shocking than an army of tens of thousands.

A massive Clawed Octopus stood right between the sea and the city, its huge appendages flailing like steel ropes, constantly hammering the walls. Occasionally, an arm would wrap around a human. The screaming human would be brought up to the octopus’s eyes and then be thrown into its mouth, where the screams would gradually die away as the octopus broke down its food.

An enormous sea turtle stood next to the walls, using its head like a battering ram, slamming it into the wall again and again. Its tough shell stopped the majority of attacks from above, allowing it to smoothly proceed with its demolition job.

A large deepsea shrimp would occasionally shoot water arrows at the walls. These water arrows seemed ordinary, but they were like high-pressure water hoses, able to pulverize a person’s organs if they hit.

A massive crab, red like it had been steamed in a pot, was flailing around its giant claws. One strike from these claws was enough to smash a boulder into powder.

In the center of the battlefield, the giant octopus was continuing to wreak havoc.

In this short amount of time, it had already seized three Joymount Island soldiers.

Thud!

A silver bolt was fired from a ballista atop the walls. Sharp and shining with a silver light, it howled into the octopus, and with a thud, it punched a large hole in its body.

Keee! The giant octopus let out a shriek of anger and terror.

Just when it was about to attack, two people flew from the horizon, charging respectively at the octopus and the turtle that was battering at the walls.

The sword beam aimed at the turtle arrived first, chopping at the turtle’s neck. But this turtle was quite clever, immediately drawing its head back into its shell and refusing to come out. That person paused for a moment, and then countless spell arts flew at them, forcing them to retreat to the city wall, cursing the cunning of that old turtle. The person who had missed out on this chance to kill the turtle and landed back on the wall turned out to be a woman in red.

Meanwhile, that other person arrived at the giant octopus’s wound. A moment later, the octopus stilled, and then it exploded into countless bloody pieces.

Cheers came from the walls as that person emerged from the explosion of gore and returned to the wall. This person was a young man with straight eyebrows and bright eyes.

At his side were several other young men and women, all dressed as cultivators.

Several people who appeared to be servants of the Yun Clan rather than local fishermen said in unison, “Young Master is mighty!”

The young man’s face suddenly paled, and he staggered and had to hold onto the wall to keep himself from falling. He said in a bitter tone, “These damned sea fiends… When will there be an end to them?”

After so many days of bitter fighting, the young man was gradually reaching his limit.

The defenses of Joymount City originally required Spirit Masters to work together with mortals. Mortals would use the walls for cover and fire specially-made bolts to weaken the sea fiends and create openings, while Spirit Masters would deliver the fatal blows and use the walls to recover.

For many years now, the Yun Clan had used this method to resist the attacks of sea fiends.

But the situation this time was clearly different.

The grave losses suffered by the Yun Clan’s Spirit Masters had robbed it of its primary strength, and the sea fiends refused to leave. These two factors combined to create a battle of unprecedented ferocity.

The sea fiends’ siege of the city had already gone on for many days, and Joymount Island had already killed nearly one thousand of them. But there seemed to be no end to them, and they continued to surge in from all sides.

The Yun Clan’s Spirit Masters, including the Yun Clan’s young master and the friends he had invited to assist him, could be said to have spat out their hearts and spilled their blood to protect Joymount Island, but even so, there were still no signs of the situation improving.

An enormous sea snake had moved to occupy the central position on the battlefield left vacant by the octopus. Raising up its long body, it stood several dozen meters high, enough for it to be level with the walls. With its large copper eyes, it stared at the walls. Even though the soldiers manning the walls had already been put through countless trials in this war between man and fiend, they were still scared out of their wits.

A soldier had just backed away one step when the sea snake suddenly lunged its head over and snapped them up. Several blades and arrows fell on its body, but they only left faint white marks. Only a special bolt from that ballista could pierce through its armored hide, but it was unable to go any farther, hanging on its body like a needle in a pincushion.

The sea snake was enraged, and its head lunged out again, obliterating a ballista. Only then did it coil back to its central position to swallow the human it had bitten.

But this wasn’t even the scariest part.

Five hundred meters out from the shore, an enormous serpent more than three hundred meters in length was coiled up on the surface, exuding an intimidating and immense power.

Five hundred meters seemed like a long distance, but for this giant snake, it was the distance of a lunge.

Most frightening of all was that this serpent had no face. Its three-horned head was blank, with a single opening in the middle serving as a bizarre-looking mouth.

This was the tyrant of this region of the seas, a Faceless Serpent!

——————————

A small boat slowly approached the island.

Tang Jie saw the battle on the island, but his mind remained calm, and he simply dropped his head to think.

After a while, he asked, “How quickly does the Beast Garden start to strengthen fiend beasts?”

“What?” The rabbit fiend next to him was taken aback by the question. Looking around, it realized that Tang Jie was asking it a question, so it quickly replied, “Oh, that’s hard to say. It’s sometimes fast and sometimes slow.”

“What do you mean?”

The rabbit fiend scratched its head in frustration. “I’ve never been inside before, but I’ve heard Chang Mingxin say that the Beast Garden normally boosts fiend beasts in two ways. The first way is that the place is awash with fiend energy, which can slowly boost a fiend beast’s strength. The other way is that it can produce treasures.”

“‘Treasures’? There’s treasure in the Beast Garden?”

The rabbit fiend nodded. “The Beast Garden generates the treasures, but it needs fiends and sprites to die inside it, using their spiritual energy to create natural treasures that are only useful to fiends and sprites. Those things are what can truly boost a fiend beast’s strength. Normally, if a fiend beast is put in the Beast Garden, even if it stays there for a lifetime, it will get about 50% stronger. But if it eats a treasure, the only limit to how much stronger it can grow is how many of those treasures it can get and eat. Thus, when a fiend beast is placed in the Beast Garden, it will have to depend on its luck. But this sort of chance encounter is hard to come by, and it needs many fiends beasts to die. Even the Beast Refining Gate is unwilling to make such a large investment.”

“I see.” Tang Jie looked at the battle on the coast. “What do you think the death of all these sea fiends will do for the Beast Garden?”

“Huh?” The rabbit was startled. “You think that someone is driving these sea fiends here to die so that the number of natural treasures in the Beast Garden will increase?”

Tang Jie indifferently replied, “I don’t know, but I know that when sea fiends attack islands, they normally do so to plunder an island’s resources and also reduce the number of fiends, thus preventing a lack of resources from population imbalance. Thus, sea fiend invasions normally don’t last this long. But from what I heard from that old man, this sea fiend invasion has already been going on for a month, and still isn’t letting up. Such a protracted siege… it doesn’t make sense.”

“Then you mean…” The rabbit fiend clearly didn’t understand what he was getting at.

“The Beast Garden might be on the island. It is strengthening the beasts in the surrounding area, turning ordinary beasts into fiends and causing fiends to advance in level. At the same time, it is drawing them toward its location and using their deaths to enrich the Beast Garden… Three birds with one stone—an excellent plan.”

The rabbit fiend’s eyes bulged. “So you’re saying that losing the Beast Garden was part of someone’s plan?”

Tang Jie asked back, “Are you saying that you still don’t understand that?”

He ignored the rabbit fiend and said, “To prove my theory, we have to go onto the island and take a look.”

Just as he was about to move the boat, he suddenly sensed something, his eyes narrowing as he peered into the distance.

There was a flash of divine light from the center of his forehead.

Tang Jie snorted, and then he grabbed the rabbit and stuffed it back into its refined beast token. In the time it took to lower his head and raise it back up again, his face had turned into that of a yellow-faced, middle-aged man.

Standing on the boat, Tang Jie waved his sleeve, causing the boat to speed toward Joymount Island.

When it was about five kilometers out from the island, a figure flew from the walls: a cultivator with a purplish complexion and long whiskers.

This man flew toward Tang Jie while shouting, “Honored Master, from where do you come?”

Tang Jie loudly replied, “This one is Qiu Zheng from the Eight Poles Sect and is passing through the area. For what reason has your honorable self come out to see me?”

Disappointment appeared on that man’s face.

The Eight Poles Sect was a third-class minor sect of Endsea, its sect master only a peak Mortal Shedding Realm cultivator. It could even be considered weaker than the Yun Clan.

A disciple of this kind of sect would have very limited ability.

But he still squeezed out a smile and said, “This Shen Ningming greets Brother Qiu. As Senior Brother Qiu has probably already seen, the island is currently besieged by sea fiends. Ningming is lacking in ability and would like to seek Senior Brother’s assistance.”

Tang Jie glanced at the battle taking place on the island and casually said, “Isn’t Joymount Island the Yun Clan’s? How come the mighty Yun Clan is incapable of fending off these measly sea fiends? These sea fiends seem of mostly average strength to me.”

Shen Ningming’s face reddened. “Brother Qiu is not aware of the entire situation…”

He gave a rough summary of all the tragedies the Yun Clan had been through as of late, and then he said, “The length of this sea fiend attack is simply unheard of. But we’ve managed to kill many of the formidable sea fiends, and some of them fled back to the sea floor after being wounded. At present, both the sea fiends and my Yun Clan are at the end of our ropes, but for some reason, those sea fiends refuse to leave. If Brother Qiu is willing to help, our attack is certain to succeed, and my Yun Clan is certain to richly reward you!”

The meaning of those words was very clear: “My Yun Clan and the sea fiends have battled until we were both badly wounded, so please come and take advantage of us. If we can push back the sea fiends, you will gain in both rewards and reputation.”

If this had been said to anyone else, it really might have worked.

But how could Tang Jie not see what was happening?

In the past, sea fiends would have retreated after sustaining a certain level of damage, but this principle clearly no longer applied here. So long as all the fiends weren’t killed, they would continue to attack, so this island most likely contained some sort of treasure they craved, perhaps a treasure that could allow them to advance in level and become even stronger.

For this treasure, they could even die in battle and still refuse to retreat.

And the power radiated by the Beast Garden meant that the sea region would continue to produce more fiend beasts, and the production was far faster than the rabbit fiend had described. This most likely had to do with the missing suppressing stele.

In other words, unless the Beast Garden left, this area would be subjected to endless assaults.

But for Tang Jie, this sort of fierce offensive was exactly what he needed—beating up small mobs was the true path to fortune.

After hearing what Shen Ningming had to say, Tang Jie chuckled and said, “Since Brother Shen is being so magnanimous, I have no choice but to accept.”

He left the boat and began to walk on air, flying with Shen Ningming toward Joymount City.

As they flew along, Shen Ningming explained the current battlefield situation of Joymount Island.

Currently, the most endangered area of Joymount City was the western side. At present, the young master of the Yun Clan, Yun Danqi, was personally overseeing the battlefront. This person was a disciple of Horizon Ocean Pavilion, and when he learned that the Yun Clan was in trouble, in his capacity as a private person, he went to great expense to invite some of his colleagues to come and help.

The Yun Clan was doing everything it could to hire more Spirit Masters to fend off the sea fiends, and this injection of manpower managed to fill the gap, allowing Joymount Island to last until now. But as this sea fiend assault was particularly long, even they were starting to tire out.

When Tang Jie arrived, a bloody battle was taking place on the walls.

“Shuttlefish! Careful of the Shuttlefish!” Bitter screams resounded as a school of silver Shuttlefish flew over, piercing through the bodies of soldiers like sharp arrows. Their blood-stained silver scales flashed in the sun.

These Shuttlefish were none other than the past source of wealth for the Yun Clan, but now, they were dealing fatal wounds to the Yun Clan’s people.

They flew freely through the sky, and with each pass, they were like a storm of arrows, sharp and powerful. And because they could change direction so easily, they were difficult to defend against.

A cultivator was caught off guard, and ten-some Shuttlefish pierced through him. Blood gushed out of the wounds, and the cultivator collapsed and trembled a few times before closing his eyes, unable to say a word.

“Master Ming!” the Yun Clan’s young master cried out in grief.

From his expression, one could tell that this cultivator was probably a Spirit Master of the Yun Clan. He had managed to endure the battle for this long, but he had ultimately failed to survive.

As he was crying out in grief, a black spike flew through the air, aimed straight at his back.

“Watch out!” His fellow disciples from Horizon Ocean Pavilion called out, and that red-clothed girl lunged toward him, but she was a step too slow.

Just when that spike was about to strike Yun Danqi in the back, a hand came out and grabbed it. The black spike was stopped cold, vibrating in the grasp of that hand.

The Horizon Ocean Pavilion disciples were all stunned by this sight. As they had battled with the sea fiends for so long, they naturally knew what this was, and they also knew how powerful it was. They hadn’t expected someone to be able to grab it.

They looked at the owner of that hand and found it to be a stranger with a yellow face. This stranger sniffed the black spike and muttered, “What is this? Arrowtail Fish? Or a porcupine? But there shouldn’t be porcupines here.”

“It’s a sea urchin!” the red-clothed woman answered.

Tang Jie was startled and looked at the red-clothed woman.

Yun Danqi placed a fist in his hand and bowed. “Sir, thank you for saving me. How should I address Sir?”

On the side, Shen Ningming said, “This is Senior Brother Qiu Zheng of the Eight Poles Sect. He was passing by Joymount Island and chose to rise to the occasion and assist us.”

Everyone now understood what was going on.

But they still couldn’t help but sigh when they found out that he was alone.

One person was not able to alter the balance of battle.

As they were talking, there was a howl, and the people on the walls began to call out.

Someone shouted, “The Faceless Serpent is coming again!”

Turning their heads, everyone saw that enormous creature in the distance suddenly raise its body, appearing like a pillar rising out of the ocean. And then the serpent thrust its head at the wall like an unstoppable battering ram!

It seems like things aren’t looking very good for Joymount Island. Will “Qiu Zheng” shift the balance of power?