Chapter 678: Storm over the Crimson Tide

Seeing the dense rain of crimson afterimages up ahead, Song Chi finally let out a small sigh of relief.

At least things weren’t all bad news. With the barrage from the secondary cannons blanketing the front, these blood-red creatures were still closing in, but the Frostlight Hailstorm Cannons and Moonwheel Shadow Cannons weren’t just for show. Their slowing effects had seriously cut the speed of those flying monsters.

The Moonwheel Shadow Cannon in particular, a black-grade secondary cannon now boosted to level 80, might still lag behind in raw power but the rate of fire was nothing to scoff at.

Add to that, now that the Heavenly Ruin had evolved into a Dreadnought, every secondary cannon loaded on her spawned 9,999 projected modules alongside the cannon itself. That meant the ship carried the power of ten thousand Moonwheel Shadow Cannons at once. With the ‘Triple Moon’s Embrace’ effect activated, each volley unleashed thirty thousand cold moons on the battlefield.

With that kind of firepower, covering the countless blood-red monsters charging in was almost effortless.

Seizing the window as the crimson monsters slowed, the Sky-Domain AI threw everything it had into firing the main and supercannons in a relentless assault. The secondary cannons could only ever support from the sidelines—true annihilation still relied on those oversized main and supercannons.

Unfortunately, no matter how mind-blowingly fast the AI’s calculations were, the Heavenly Ruin only had so many main and supercannons loaded.

Two supercannons.

Four main cannons.

Even with the heavy cooldown buffs from the Timepiece Chessboard, they still needed time to recharge. They could never attack as unrestricted as the secondary cannons.

When the rate of heavy blasts fell far short, the Sky-Domain AI quickly switched to Plan B.

Fsshh—

As the ship’s bay doors slid open, dozens of eighth-tier Flame Spirit Terracotta Soldiers and seventh-tier Void Shadow Assassin Warriors charged out in tight formation, flying straight for the tangled mass of blood shadows in the distance.

While these seventh and eighth-tier Terracotta Soldiers weren’t much threat to Sovereign-class behemoths, they were absolutely devastating against fourth, fifth, even sixth-tier enemies.

Each of these Terracotta Soldiers was also wrapped in a personal shield—none other than the plasma shield granted by the recently-upgraded eighth-tier Plasma Guardian module. With a whopping 240 billion real shield strength and a continuous three-hour runtime once triggered, these robots became literal harvesters of life on the battlefield.

With their support, the crimson monsters’ rapid advance was finally held back. But before Song Chi could breathe easy, a shrill alert blared in his ears, darkening his expression once more.

“Warning: Life energy signature count in the blood mist ahead is skyrocketing! Number now over 140,000… 150,000… 200,000…”

Though the alert came from the Sky-Domain AI, the real detection source was the Eyes of Heaven. Song Chi had zero doubts about the golden patrol radar’s readings—he could see, even with his dual pupils, that huge new swarms of blood-red monsters were pouring out of the distant blood mist.

After all this effort and full-force firepower, the enemy numbers weren’t dropping—they were rising. How could Song Chi feel any sense of accomplishment?

“Warning: The blood mist now holds over 200,000 life energy signatures…”

His eyes flashed sharply at the alert. Without disrupting the Sky-Domain AI’s piloting, Song Chi issued a new command.

“AI, activate the Divine Thunder Cannon’s ‘Ten-Thousand Sigil Violet Lightning Prison’ and aim it straight for that blood mist! Blast them!”

A rare AoE attack weapon aboard the Heavenly Ruin, the Ten-Thousand Sigil Violet Lightning Prison could launch ten thousand violet thunder sigils at once. Normally, its blasts were fierce enough to hit a million targets in one volley—but today was anything but normal.

Forget everything else—even the weakest monsters bursting out of that blood mist were fourth-tier. That was anything but ordinary. So at most, two hundred thousand was the limit.

Golden light flooded the ship’s control room as the Divine Thunder Cannon began charging. As power built, waves of spatial ripples formed around the distant mist, and then came the endless stream of purple energy sigils crackling with lightning.

BOOM!

Ten thousand bolts of violet thunder exploded in unison. For a heartbeat, the entire blood-filled world was a realm of lightning.

Inside the control room, Song Chi stared hard at the radar display before him.

‘Eighty thousand left… wiped out more than half in one go, not bad at all…’

That lightning strike had left only 80,000 life signatures on the radar. In less than a minute, more than 120,000 crimson monsters had been obliterated.

Given those numbers, Song Chi was more than a little satisfied.

“Still, what a shame…”

He clicked open the Warship Evolution Quest panel and shook his head, resigned.

“Warship Evolution Quest (Heavenly Ruin)”

“Current evolution success rate: 76.001% (Base: 0.001% + Bathed in Eighth-Tier Abyssal Nine-Headed Hydra Blood: 15% + Bathed in Seventh-Tier Eight-Armed Serpent Demon Blood: 3% + Ninefold Spirit Fruit: 10% + Top-tier Energy Crystal: 10% + Seventh-Tier Dominion Source Blood: 12% + Eighth-Tier Standard Sovereign Blood: 1% + Special Resource Recipe: 10% + Sky Serpent Blood Crystal: 8% + Law of Light Comprehension: 5% + Law of Space Comprehension: 2%)”

“Special Resource Formula for Promotion (3/3): Spatial Fragment *1, Singular Stone *1, Silver Star Bangle-Core *1”

“Extra Evolution Materials: Level-7 Dominion Source Blood, Standard Eighth-Tier Sovereign Blood, Ninefold Spirit Fruit, Sky Serpent Blood Crystal”

“Bathed in Alien Blood: Eighth-Tier Abyssal Nine-Headed Hydra (15%), Seventh-Tier Eight-Armed Serpent Demon (3%)”

No matter how many crimson monsters he had destroyed, the Heavenly Ruin’s chance of promotion hadn’t gone up a hair.

If he had to guess, Song Chi figured these blood-red monsters didn’t count as normal Sea of Stars lifeforms. Otherwise, after blasting apart so many fifth and sixth-tier monsters just now, he should have seen at least a little progress.

There was no benefit to promotion at all. Song Chi still couldn’t figure out just what ‘extra reward’ the Greedwolf Hall Master claimed would be here.

He’d even had some enslaved creatures drag in several of the crimson monsters’ corpses. After examining them, he found you couldn’t even extract source blood from these things. Their bodies were basically worthless.

Taken together, Song Chi honestly couldn’t see any potential value in these unknown creatures.

‘Is this just supposed to help me gain combat experience?’

Drawing a blank, Song Chi didn’t waste anymore energy dwelling on it.

He figured, the Greedwolf Hall Master had deliberately told him to kill as many of these monsters as possible. Given that one’s status, there was probably a good reason, so Song Chi’s approach was simple: give it everything he had.

Maybe it was that burst of lightning from the Violet Lightning Prison that did it, but after losing over half their numbers in an instant, the blood mist up ahead began pulsing like a giant heart.

Thump!

Thump!

Thump!

Each pulse was like a thunderclap splitting the silent sky, echoing through the blood-red void.

If Song Chi hadn’t been inside the Heavenly Ruin, with the Dreadnought’s hull blocking all sound, the noise would have been deafening.

Then Song Chi’s eyes widened in confusion—after every pulse, the blood mist expanded outward. Some dozen nearby Terracotta Soldiers didn’t react in time and were swallowed whole by the spreading crimson, even with his first-thought telepathic recall, he couldn’t bring them back.

Once engulfed by the mist, all those seventh and eighth-tier Terracotta Soldiers might as well have sunk to the bottom of the ocean—gone, no response at all.

Back on the Heavenly Ruin, he saw both the Flame Spirit Terracotta Tree and the Void Shadowslayer Soldier-Tree modules had lost a handful of soldiers each.

Before he could look into it further, after three heavy pulses, a fresh surge of life energy signatures erupted from the deep core of the now vastly expanded mist.

This time, the numbers were wilder than ever. The count still sat at 200,000, but now there were no more fourth-tiers. The weakest monsters were now all fifth-tier, sixth-tiers alone numbered in the tens of thousands, and the presence of seventh-tier Sovereigns had doubled to dozens.

Staring at this result, Song Chi could only feel a heavy weight sink in his gut.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!

Once again, torrents of crimson afterimages fanned out of the blood mist. Even with the slowing effect of the secondary cannons, these monsters were closing in much faster this time.

With their ranks now packed with higher tiers, the blood monsters were showing way more resistance to slowing and freezing effects.

In just over a dozen seconds, the gap between them and the Heavenly Ruin had halved. At this rate, tens of thousands of monsters would soon crash head-on into the hull. Even if he trusted his ship’s defenses above all others, Song Chi absolutely did not want these monsters anywhere near his ship.

He’d have to be crazy to let over a hundred thousand fifth-tiers, more than ten thousand sixth-tiers and dozens of seventh-tier Sovereigns get in close. The risk of losing the Heavenly Ruin was simply too high, no matter how tough its armor was.

With that thought, the Heavenly Ruin’s bay creaked open once again. Under the precise control of ten thousand Sky-Domain AIs, five thousand Hellfire Mechs and five thousand fifth-tier Mara Void Mechas marched out in perfect formation.

The moment they cleared the bay, those mini-bots started growing rapidly. In a blink, the Hellfire Mechs swelled to a hundred meters tall. The Mara Void Mechas were even more impressive, ballooning to a titanic ten thousand meters—the size of a normal fifth-tier monster.

Only after this transformation were both types able to unleash their full combat strength.

The Sky-Domain AI’s immense calculation power kept those ten thousand machines operating at lightning efficiency.

The five thousand Hellfire Mechs, packing the firepower of a peak fourth-tier, fanned out to both sides of the Heavenly Ruin and unleashed nuclear ray cannon barrages in long-range support.

Meanwhile, five thousand Mara Void Mechas, each boasting the power of a fifth-tier and true stealth movement, slipped into the void. They raced through the shadow side of the Void Sea, hunting the fifth-tier blood monsters with uncanny, knife-in-the-dark precision.

The effect from the launch of all five thousand Mara Void Mechas was instant and obvious.

The crimson tide charging forward began falling from the sky like bloody meteors.

The bodies of those fifth-tier monsters, shorn down by the Mara Void Mechas, lost all lift and plummeted fast under the pull of gravity.

Yet all of those bodies were only fifth-tiers. Against sixth-tier monsters, the mechas couldn’t inflict mortal wounds, let alone threaten the Sovereign-class monsters.

Fortunately, Song Chi didn’t have to worry. The Sky-Domain AI’s autonomous judgment ensured their targets stayed on fifth-tiers. Against sixth-tiers, they’d just avoid direct confrontation.

Now that the Plasma Guardian had reached legendary grade, its plasma shields could cover even huge units. That meant the Mara Void Mechas at the leading edge also carried shields; even if marked by sixth-tiers or Sovereigns, they could survive long enough to escape.

The ones bringing up the rear could just dodge the bigger threats entirely.

With this approach, the loss rate among the five thousand Mara Void Mechas was shockingly low, even as their kill count skyrocketed—the very thing Song Chi was happiest about.

Just because the ship now fielded five thousand of them at once didn’t mean the Mara Void Mechas were mass produced. Far from it.

After centuries of R&D, the Song Family’s science division had finally cracked every technical hurdle and could now build and assemble Mara Void Mechas independently. But having only recently solved those production problems, they still had very few lines running, so new units came out painfully slow.

Song Chi had those five thousand only because his family threw its full support behind him—he basically cornered every Mara Void Mecha made on Dragon-Spine Continent to date.

Otherwise, why would he still be clinging to those five thousand Hellfire Mechs?

Compared to the Heavenly Ruin’s current firepower, the fourth-tier Hellfire Mechs were already falling behind. Once the ship evolved into a Star-Annihilator-class, even the Mara Void Mechas would soon be obsolete.

Interception of the fifth-tiers was easing the pressure on the battleship, but nothing could really stop the sixth-tiers. Even with the Sky-Domain AI retargeting all main and supercannons for maximum damage, thousands of sixth-tier monsters were still barreling right for the hull.

Song Chi even noticed several seventh-tier monsters among them, waves of violent crimson energy smashing in like a tidal flood. Even before they touched the hull, the energy shield was already flickering with ripples from the sheer force.

“Warning: External invasive anomalous energy detected. Ship’s energy shield compromised. Remaining shield at 98.85%…”

“Damage detected. Neutron‑Star Core Pulse and Yin‑Yang Regeneration skills have been triggered. Energy shield restored to 100%…”

After the Saintlight Shield shattered, the yin-yang counterforce shield managed to keep the balance—until more than a dozen seventh-tier blood monsters showed up at once. Faced with that torrent of Dominion Power, repairs simply couldn’t keep up with the rate of shield depletion.