After completing their business in the throne room, Zhang Chāo and Han Jianguo left the hub of Zhang Chāo’s authority and walked out toward the street entrance of the building.

  Zhang Chāo’s bodyguards kept a respectful distance from their leader as he moved. Fresh from his kill in the throne room, they seemed to recognize by their slight physical separation from the Heavenly King that he did not truly need protection. It had not been Zhang Chāo’s intention to make his guards feel superfluous, but that was what happened whenever he took up his sword.

  He hoped they would not take it personally.

  Zhang Chāo’s eyelids blinked rapidly open and shut as he stepped out into the sunlight. His eyes took a couple of seconds to adjust to the change in the environment.

  Well, it is the first time I’ve ventured outdoors today since I walked out onto my balcony this morning…

  There was a part of him that felt slightly frustrated by that. On some level, he missed the days of Orientation, when he had been fighting for his life every day and sleeping under the stars every night. Those had been good times.

  Now it felt as if ninety percent of his day was taken up with meetings.

  As his vision cleared, the outlines of his soldiers came into view. Thousands of them lined the streets outside of Zhang Chāo’s headquarters as far as the eye could see. Armored and robed, carrying swords, rifles, staffs, and assorted alternative weapons, they stood ready.

  The Heavenly King’s body semi-consciously relaxed. More than any of his other citizens, his soldiers were his people. Together, he and this ragtag military had mounted six expeditions into the Taiwanese mountains—Zhang Chāo’s country was one of the most mountainous regions in the world—and retaliated for monster attacks on the human-occupied areas of the island, until they taught the nonhuman occupants of the high places a lesson in respect for human spaces.

  Paradoxically, despite the seriousness of that task, those had been some of the most relaxing days for the Heavenly King since he returned from Orientation. And they were extremely productive too.

  As word of his success in this endeavor spread, both his army and his popular approval had grown until almost the whole population of the island had fallen under his command—and his personal army swelled to well over ten thousand.

  “Attention!” yelled Han Jianguo.

  The soldiers moved as one, postures straightening, bodies crackling with obvious tension as they awaited Zhang Chāo’s command.

  The Heavenly King stepped forward and began to speak.

  “Today, we take our first strides towards making the sea safe for our people to travel across,” Zhang Chāo’s voice boomed. “We march on the harbor, and we will challenge the Reef King!”

  The Reef King and his monsters were one of the main threats to Taiwanese shipping, along with the roving pirates in the Taiwan Strait. Unlike the pirates, the Reef King and his ilk were relatively easy to find. They had arrogantly made themselves at home in Tsoying Harbor—right at the edges of Zhang Chāo’s aura.

  It was an obvious, deliberate provocation directed at a fellow Ruler.

  Today was the day that Zhang Chāo would end the challenge the Reef King presented to the revitalization of the Taiwanese economy—and Zhang Chāo’s other long-cherished ambitions.

  The soldiers roared their approval. Thousands of weapons stabbed at the sky, as the armed men and women imagined that their enemies stood directly before them.

  Zhang Chāo marched down the center of the main street leading away from his headquarters, and the soldiers followed after him, falling into step as he passed their respective positions.

  The Heavenly King did not lead them directly to the harbor. Instead, he followed a ritual that he had established when he led his second expedition into the mountains to kill raiding monsters. He marched down to Lotus Pond.

  Every time he led troops into battle, Zhang Chāo went to one of the many temples built around the artificial lake, to try to show reverence for the heavenly beings that Orientation had confirmed existed.

  Zhang Chāo was not faithful to one temple or religion in particular; he had never been religious before the System, so that would have felt very artificial.

  But he thought the gesture was harmless at worst—and at best, it both honored the gods and heartened his troops, some of whom did still observe traditional religious practices.

  Today, he entered the Dragon Pagoda through the dragon statue’s mouth, spent some time appreciating the artwork—the seven story Dragon and Tiger Pagodas were full of moralistic illustrations, though Zhang Chāo had little personal love for art—and then he crossed into the Tiger Pagoda. He spent a briefer period there before finally exiting through the tiger’s mouth.

  Zhang Chāo tried to put on a contemplative expression, as if he had been enlightened by the historical, religious, and philosophical decor of the two towers, but in his heart, he felt more impatience than illumination from this side trip.

  Because as he emerged, the sun was almost setting.

  More time passed when I was inside than I realized, he thought. We must move quickly to the harbor if we want to accomplish this today.

  If he and his men waited until tomorrow, the Reef King and his forces might have moved on to some other part of the coast that would be less easily accessible, or even temporarily returned to the sea. Conversely, if he and his men had to fight in the dark, they might be at a disadvantage, because some of the Reef King’s minions had better night vision than the average human, even post-System.

  “We march onward!” Zhang Chāo shouted. “To Tsoying Harbor!”

  The soldiers pumped their weapons in the air eagerly, cheered, and rushed to follow after Zhang Chāo as he moved briskly toward the coast. Fortunately, it was not a long walk.

  As the army neared the coastline, Zhang Chāo spotted the Reef King. He was almost impossible to miss.

  A monster formed of hard coral that stood an imposing fifty feet tall, most of its body was bleached an eerie white color. That first look made it obvious that the Reef King had been on Earth prior to the System’s descent. The ugly figure, composed of many different species of coral that had amalgamated into one single, monstrous form, had some parts that reminded Zhang Chāo of a garden in full bloom. They practically glowed in bright yellows, oranges, fuschias, and pinks.

  But the overwhelming presence of the color white showed that the Reef King’s body was mainly composed of coral that had been discolored in the temperature-stressed waters of the Pacific Ocean.

  Zhang Chāo wondered how intelligent it was. He had slain many monsters, including three Rulers, in the past, but how self-aware they were seemed to be a matter of pure chance. The more powerful ones were more likely to be capable of reason, but even that was not a fixed rule. He had tried to reason with the Qilin Monarch, only for the creature to gore him while roaring like a lion.

  After that, Zhang Chāo was generally less interested in ascertaining how rational the nonhuman Rulers were.

  The Reef King turned its body, though, and Zhang Chāo saw the answer to the question he had been pondering. From somewhere around what appeared to be the center of its vast mass of non-uniform parts, the monster had two pairs of glowing eyes that stared out at Zhang Chāo.

  It was impossible to say for certain how he knew, but as the eyes locked onto Zhang Chāo, he sensed that the Reef King was a creature moved by intelligence, not mere instinct.

  Somehow, somewhere in the grotesque amalgamation process that had shaped its form from out of hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of different specimens of coral, the Reef King had acquired a mind.

  Window of the Soul!

  It was a Skill Zhang Chāo had acquired by fusing several ocular abilities and an empathy-related Skill.

  The Heavenly King’s and the Reef King’s eyes were locked in the key moment when Zhang Chāo activated the Skill. Then a series of sensations and images flooded through Zhang Chāo’s mind. All was confusion for a moment.

  Zhang Chāo had to exert his Will to keep from being overwhelmed by these core memories. There were feelings from before the Reef King became intelligent. Not pain, exactly. Almost none of the sensations that humans would understand well.

  But there was stress. Intense stress. That was when its body was bleached white, Zhang Chāo recognized.

  Then the System descended. The coral was still not conscious, but like most of the nonhumans Zhang Chāo had encountered, it interacted and entered default instructions through the System’s interface nevertheless, its movements toward each option slow and unconscious.

  There was a long period of slow growth. For almost the whole of Orientation, the component creatures that made up the Reef King had lain nearly inactive, as if magic had not come into the world. Then one of them reached a certain level and gained a Skill. All of the individual coral specimens had been slowly leveling simply by surviving and consuming their normal food sources. Each had gained Skills, mostly extremely common and ineffective ones.

  But by chance, this single special coral gained the Skill “Merger.”

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  It used the Skill immediately on its neighbor. That neighbor rejected the Merger attempt, but it seemed that the coral that initially acquired the Skill now had a default setting of continuously attempting Merger.

  The efforts succeeded.

  At first, some microorganisms fused with the first coral. Next, one of its neighbors joined with it. After that, the neighbor that had initially refused Merger accepted a renewed attempt. Apparently, either the decision had been random—none of these coral had more than a simple nerve net to make decisions with—or the fact of the prior successful Merger made the initial coral look like a more attractive partner.

  The central coral began to grow stronger at a prodigious rate.

  In the last days of Orientation, it continued slowly expanding beneath the surface of the water—beneath anyone’s notice—until the number of linked corals and other vaguely connected life forms gave the resultant creature a greater complexity.

  It slowly evolved a level of sapience, and there were accompanying System achievements.

  There was a sudden shift in the coral creature’s universe, and it found itself suddenly transported into a Dungeon. There it encountered a god with a strange, metal humanoid head, red hair, and a serpentine tail.

  The coral passively accepted a blessing.

  The god smiled and sent the coral back to Earth.

  And it grew wise.

  It grew wise, and at the same time, sublimely hateful of mankind.

  Zhang Chāo saw a vision of its goal. The ocean overtaking the land. Coral covering the entire surface of the Earth.

  The Heavenly King shook his head, frowned, and focused fully on the present.

  “Be on your guard, everyone!” he barked loudly, turning his head to look back at his eager army. “This will not be a simple beast hunt. These creatures are intelligent.”

  Han Jianguo repeated the instructions, as did the squad commanders to their subordinates.

  “Despite how they look,” Zhang Chāo added under his breath.

  Only now that he had finished trying to understand the Reef King’s mentality did he fully take in the Reef King’s army. It was a motley crew of ugly mutant creatures. A hammerhead shark with humanoid eyes and limbs, a misshapen giant starfish, a big crab monster, more of the walking coral creatures like the Reef King itself, a squid with a hundred tentacles, several bloated drowned men whose bodies had eyes missing—and Zhang Chāo thought he saw a flicker of strange life behind those empty eye sockets.

  There were only a thousand of them that Zhang Chāo could see, a much smaller force than his own, but they made an ominous picture.

  All of the enemy were crusted with sea salt. Most of them stood upright in the shallow water close to shore, though Zhang Chāo guessed that there were other enemies in the dark depths just out of his view. The visible members of the Reef King’s force averaged roughly the same height and size as typical adult human beings.

  We will have to exterminate every one of them, Zhang Chāo thought uneasily. That god that blessed the Reef King sparked the development of a deeper malevolence than I would have guessed possible in such a simple creature. If I had imagined there might be some way of reasoning with it, that notion seems foolish now…

  His eyes played over the bloated bodies of the drowned men that stood, ready to fight alongside the rest of the Reef King’s small army. Zhang Chāo guessed that the Reef King might be piloting the bodies of the drowned men directly.

  At least none of them are people I recognize.

  Zhang Chāo had his forces line up on the water’s edge—the space that also marked the border of his aura, since it now bumped up against that of the Reef King—and they began preparing their ranged attacks and weapons for firing.

  After a minute of aiming and preparing, Zhang Chāo ordered his army to loose their attacks. Bullets, arrows, javelins, fireballs, bolts of lightning, and a myriad of other projectiles flew from the shore into the massed bodies of the enemy.

  As the attacks launched, the Reef King’s force sprang into motion. They dodged to the extent that they could—some of them, including the drowned men, were too slow to dodge effectively—and just as importantly, they counter attacked.

  They threw old rusty tools dredged up from the sea floor, heavy rocks, streams of highly pressurized water, and in the case of the starfish creatures and squid monsters, their own severed limbs, which struck human targets and tried to choke them to death as if the tentacles were still attached to the owners’ bodies.

  Zhang Chāo leaped into the harbor itself as the battle commenced. His most effective attacks were close range ones. He did not order the main body of his army to advance alongside him. He did not have to. Most of the soldiers he led were also much more effective at close combat than using ranged weaponry. Though the Heavenly King was only barely conscious of it, they took the plunge alongside him and took some of the heat off of him as most of the Reef King’s army headed straight for Zhang Chāo, the leader of their opposition.

  “Damn it!” Han Jianguo swore loudly.

  Then Zhang Chāo heard the splash of him leaping into the water too.

  Zhang Chāo was not even sure the big man could swim, but then Han Jianguo was there fighting alongside Zhang Chāo again, taking all the same blows as him, as usual.

  The two men cut their way forward, advancing through the ranks of the Reef King’s army. While the rest of Zhang Chāo’s force struggled to move forward against the opponents arrayed against them, Han Jianguo and Zhang Chāo left a path of dismembered sea creatures in their wake. Everywhere Zhang Chāo slashed with the Mandate of Heaven, he sliced and diced whatever it touched so quickly and smoothly that the monsters hardly had a moment to realize they were dead. Each creature struck with Han Jianguo’s hatchet fell instantly, never to rise again.

  Then the two men stepped forward into what looked, as Zhang Chāo set his foot down, like a suspiciously thick patch of kelp. Then thousands of volts of electricity flooded their bodies. Zhang Chāo was stunned as the unseen monsters shocked him and his second in command again and again. He had no room to even activate a Skill. His brain did not seem to work properly.

  Zhang Chāo was dimly aware that armored men swept in from his sides. He wanted to call out a warning.

  Stay away, you idiots! This was a trap…

  But his body was paralyzed for the moment, and the soldiers advanced despite his unspoken reservations.

  Fortunately, the soldiers seemed to recognize that there was a trap in the area where Zhang Chāo and Han Jianguo stood writhing with the electricity. They stood just barely close enough to grab their leaders and began dragging them away.

  Zhang Chāo felt his body yanked back, and gratitude surged through him as the electricity flowed out. Movement immediately began to return to his limbs. His fingers twitched. His eyes rolled.

  Then he heard a bellow, and he saw a great white creature moving from the corner of his eyes.

  It was the Reef King. The great monster rushed toward Zhang Chāo and his soldiers on makeshift limbs that had probably never been forced to walk in such shallow water. It had apparently decided that this was its best opportunity to finish off its primary threat.

  Remote Detonation!

  Zhang Chāo’s Skill threw a glob of Mana at the Reef King and then exploded it point blank on the creature’s body. It did not even slow down in its headlong rush toward the humans.

  Remote Detonation. Zhang Chāo tried again, this time aiming carefully at the Reef King’s visible, glowing yellow eyes.

  The Reef King took the blow and lurched forward, ignoring whatever pain it might be experiencing. And Zhang Chāo saw that the injuries from the first explosion were rapidly healing.

  He flexed his right bicep.

  I think I have recovered enough.

  “Put me down,” he ordered.

  “Sir,” one of the soldiers began.

  “Let me go!” Zhang Chāo said. “Release me, or we will all die.”

  “Do as he says,” Han Jianguo said, groaning.

  The men obeyed.

  Zhang Chāo drew the Mandate of Heaven from his side. Not recognizing the threat that Zhang Chāo’s ultimate weapon posed, the Reef King continued to lunge toward him, long tentacles and hard claws extending toward what must have seemed the Heavenly King’s vulnerable body.

  The sword flashed, and the Reef King’s extended limbs tumbled into the sea.

  The creature did not hesitate but simply reached out with more of its parts. Zhang Chāo continued slicing and dicing for several minutes, the Reef King relentless and patient, until the monster started to recognize that it was running out of limbs.

  One of the Mandate of Heaven’s properties was hampering regenerative abilities.

  The Reef King started to pull back. Everywhere around Zhang Chāo, the battle raged on, but the tide seemed to turn for the others at the same time that it did so for their Ruler.

  Zhang Chāo pursued the Reef King into the slightly deeper water that its slowed, wounded body had managed to reach.

  He used his Remote Detonation Skill again, this time throwing his exploding Mana behind the Reef King. Although Zhang Chāo used a large chunk of what remained in his Mana reserves, the massive size of the monster meant that the explosion only hurled it a foot in Zhang Chāo’s direction.

  But with Zhang Chāo also closing the distance on foot, that was enough.

  I’m guessing that your most important organs are somewhere near these eyes, he thought. If not, I will keep cutting until I find what makes you tick and destroy it.

  Zhang Chāo raised the Mandate of Heaven over his head, he prepared to swing down—and a massive sound shook the air around them. The Heavenly King automatically shifted from an offensive to a defensive stance and took a step back.

  What was that? he wondered. That could not be a Skill of the Reef King’s, could it?

  Then the ground shook beneath his feet.

  Earthquake… but what was that noise?

  As Zhang Chāo struggled to maintain his footing, he saw the Reef King take its opportunity. Moving with a fluidity that he could only guess was because of its nature as a sea creature, it slipped into deeper water and quickly submerged itself, then rushed away, moving even faster than it had when it pursued Zhang Chāo toward the shore.

  No, damn it!

  In the difficult visibility of the twilight, Zhang Chāo lost sight of the creature almost immediately.

  As his footing steadied, he and the rest of his army trudged back to shore and assessed the aftermath. They had taken few casualties, far fewer than the enemy. The bodies of the sea monsters littered the beach. More pieces would wash up on shore over the next several days.

  But the question would plague him.

  What happened? What was that sound? That force that shook the Earth?

  When he returned to his headquarters, one of his advisors had the answer.

  “A massive earthquake,” said Lin Yìchén. “It set off all the seismometers. I assumed you would want to know about this, so I gathered all available data.”

  What caused the earthquake? the Ruler wanted to ask. He had heard a tremendous noise before he felt anything. That was not normal.

  “Are we safe?” Zhang Chāo asked instead.

  “We should alert the public to the possibility of a tsunami,” Lin Yìchén replied immediately.

  “We weren’t the epicenter,” Zhang Chāo said, a question implied in his tone.

  Lin Yìchén shook his head.

  “No, sire,” he said carefully. “It is hard to be certain, so please do not take this as a definite statement. But from the readings, it seems as if the world may have lost Japan.”

  Amazon and/or (though the third one is not available to be purchased or reviewed yet). The score for book 1 could especially use a boost right now. The performance of the series on and is important to my ability to continue delivering on the story I have promised thus far, and good ratings tend to help draw in new readers.