The summit of the Divine Wood was wide and flat, embedded with countless arrow stones jutting out in all directions, resembling a tree canopy from a distance. These were fossils of ancient marine creatures, flat and blunt-angled, etched with strange, shell-like patterns. They clearly were not placed there by human hands; rather, in the ancient ocean era, this place was the seabed, and numerous arrow stones, like barnacles clinging to a sea tree, clustered and adhered to the apex of the Divine Wood, forming today's rare arboreal spectacle.

Dragged down from the Divine Wood by Fatty, amid the gasps of the others, I felt a violent impact on my back, landing squarely on a protruding arrow stone. The stone acted like the umbrella of an old tree, cushioning our fall somewhat, but this fossil was a hundred times harder than genuine wood. The collision jarred me to the bone; a blinding pain shot through me, and I nearly blacked out.

But worse was yet to come. The arrow stones crowned the colossal Sky-Reaching Tree like an inverted canopy, creating hundreds of natural inclined platforms at the tip of the Jianmu. They looked like masses of colorful clouds solidified into the crowns of ancient pines. When the tide was high, Ghost Island would submerge, and seawater would rush in through the openings, scouring the canopy year after year. Though the arrow stones were deeply set into the wood, the water pressure still caused ripples and cracks to form, and some stones had already fractured and fallen away.

Fatty and I landed on one such cluster of arrow stones. Before we could even scramble up from the tilted surface, the crack beneath us suddenly widened and stretched. After a brief pause, it broke apart with a sharp crack. We, along with the stone, tumbled down further, breaking through three or four layers of arrow stones before our descent finally halted.

The thing Fatty feared most was falling from a height. All his usual bravado—the 'unmatched majesty of ten thousand foes' and 'heroic spirit soaring a thousand zhang'—had vanished. He clung tightly to my thigh, eyes squeezed shut on the slick, angled stone surface, screaming, "Commander Hu, for the sake of the Party and the State, quickly pull your brother up!"

I wasn't as thick-skinned and fleshy as Fatty. These few falls had left every joint in my body agonizingly painful. With Fatty clinging to my leg, I started sliding downward uncontrollably. Gritting my teeth, I drove my diving dagger into the trunk of the Divine Wood, temporarily securing myself, but the main tendon in my leg felt like it was about to snap from Fatty's grip. Looking down, I saw the Jiaomu from the seabed climbing upward, using the murky current to cling to the trunk. The arrow stones we had just smashed looked like iron plates and steel shards falling from the sky, embedding themselves into its body, causing blood to erupt in gushing spurts that stained the surrounding water.

If I slipped now, even if I miraculously avoided being swallowed by the Jiaomu, I would land on the half-submerged Bronze Slaves below, smashing my skull to pieces. The inherent ruthlessness within me flared up. Ignoring the bone-deep, piercing pain, I kept one hand anchored to the trunk with the dagger and hooked the edge of an arrow stone with the other, summoning every ounce of strength to slowly haul Fatty up. If we could just stand up on this slick surface, we could climb back onto the Divine Wood.

I managed to drag Fatty up by his leg, not even half a meter, when the resilience of the diving dagger finally reached its limit; the blade snapped clean off. Now, only my hand clutching the arrow stone was of any use, bearing the full force of my body. My fingers quickly went numb, and I felt myself on the verge of slipping, certain there was no hope left. I could only close my eyes and wait for death.

Just then, my arm was suddenly seized, and the downward pull on my legs instantly lessened. Opening my eyes, I saw that Shirley Yang, realizing our desperate situation, had rushed down with Gu Cai to help, hauling both Fatty and me off the arrow stone. The stone beneath us, unable to bear the weight of four people, immediately cracked and collapsed. We had already managed to pull ourselves back onto the main trunk before this, narrowly avoiding falling with it.

That piece of arrow stone was immense, likely weighing several hundred kilograms. Falling from such a height, its sheer momentum must have been no less than a thousand jin. The arrow stone, flat like a spearhead, spun end over end as it plummeted, striking the Jiaomu squarely on the head. Without slowing, it sliced clean through half of the great shark's fish-head before plunging into the water, sending blood spraying several meters high.

When the Jiaomu's head emerged from the turbulent water, we finally got a clear look at its face. Its body dwarfed the Great Giant Salamander many times over; only the long-extinct Pliosaur of millions of years ago could compare. Its shark-like body was wrapped in placental scales, its head resembled that of a Feng fish, and hundreds of beard-like tendrils, stretching over ten meters long, sprouted from its gills. Dozens of pairs of fins lined its lower body, and the tips of its backward-slanting teeth resembled vine hooks and thorns, emitting a foul stench with every opening and closing of its maw.

It had been clinging to the giant tree amidst the surging water, taking half its head off from the falling arrow stone, yet it didn't die instantly. Instead, it stared with its eyes—huge as globes and hard as grey crystal—fixed on the starlight filtering down from the dome above, its expression one of extreme, wild sorrow. Despite the grievous wound, it stubbornly refused to sink back into the depths.

A Great Blue Shark trapped in the chaos thrashed blindly and slammed near the Divine Wood. The Jiaomu's probing tendrils snatched it up, swallowing the entire creature, head to tail, instantly churning the waves into a bloody froth. The Jiaomu, heedless of its own profusely bleeding wounds, writhed its mangled body, using its fins to aid its climb up the Divine Wood. Seeing this bloody sea monster devour the shark effortlessly filled us with overwhelming dread. We dared not look further, and in desperation, we scrambled toward the summit of the Divine Wood, the only direction with no retreat.

At that moment, the condensed sea vapor in the cavern layer, shaped like a whale's belly, began to dissipate. The Yin Fire abruptly lost its ghastly white glow. In the darkness, all we heard was the chaotic water surging as if boiling, accompanied by the booming sound of the mountain cracking, as if the heavens themselves were collapsing. The surging water submerged the ruins of the ancient city, then churned into a violent whirlpool beneath the Divine Wood, shaking us on the arrow stones at the summit until our bones felt like jelly. We dared not move an inch.

The Bronze Slaves—the countless bronze chains binding the base of the Jianmu—were battered by the seawater, knocking against each other and threatening to topple. A few chains, unable to withstand the intense current, snapped into sections, sending fragments flying. The Sky-Reaching, Sea-Diving Divine Wood, immense and leaning precariously in the sea, was constantly battered by the ocean surges. These chains normally served to tether and bind the giant tree, preventing it from breaking. Now, without their restraint, the billion-year-old ancient wood seemed poised to crash down in the tempest at any second.

Duo Ling, frail and possessing far less mental fortitude than the others, was paralyzed by the thunderous tremors sweeping through the mountains and seas. Just then, a sound like a thunderclap split the sky. Amid the massive explosion of noise, the arrow stones shuddered. Her limbs weakened, and she slipped from the stone platform.

Shirley Yang and I reached out immediately, trying to catch her mid-fall as she tumbled from the treetop, but the Divine Wood swayed relentlessly. Our grasp closed on empty air. In the blink of an eye, Duo Ling fell into the churning seawater. In the dark water, only the monstrous form of the Jiaomu floated—there was no sign of Duo Ling. She must have been swallowed the instant she hit the water.

Gu Cai, seeing Duo Ling perish, his eyes bloodshot, started to jump into the water after her. I quickly grabbed the belt around his waist and physically dragged him back. Anyone who fell in was already doomed; diving in now would just be a second sacrifice. But the raging torrents and the earth-shattering collapse had drowned out all sound; the waves crashed so violently it hurt our eardrums, making it impossible to hear one another. Unable to speak to Gu Cai, I could only press him down forcefully to prevent him from drowning.

Suddenly, a cool wind rushed past my face. I looked up to see giant, water-dragon-like torrents pouring down from the dozens of sea-eyes formed by the condensed sea vapor in the Guixu dome. The Dragon Fire sea-air in the rock strata vanished, reforming into massive sea caves that sucked in water. This time, however, it might be the last manifestation of sea caves in the Coral Spiral. The cracking of the Dragon Fire rock layer connected several sea caves into a winding water dragon. The ten million tons of falling seawater seemed to erect a water wall within the Guixu.

The tensile force from the fracturing seabed caused the highest point in the Guixu—the exposed Ghost Island—to split open from the Celestial Gate Cave at its peak. A massive gorge appeared in the sea, with waterfalls cascading down a hundred-meter drop on either side, roaring like thunder. Although the mechanisms of the Zhen hexagram were ancient burial rites, no one expected them to trigger the rupture of the Guixu a millennium later. The impact of this Southern Dragon quake rippled across the vast expanse of the Coral Spiral, far exceeding a hundred li. Among the many trigrams in the I Ching, selecting the sequence of 'Tremor above, Tremor below' as the path to death and the underworld—did the hexagrams already foretell the ruin and subsidence of this Sun-Shooting, Moon-Chasing Nation, and the drastic changes occurring in the Guixu millennia later?

The fissures appearing on the sea surface looked like wounds on the ocean, about one to two hundred meters deep and seventy to eighty meters wide. Their outlines and contours were perfectly symmetrical, as if the sea surface had been violently ripped open by a massive rift. The tip of the Jianmu we were clinging to lay right in the middle of this great trench, surrounded and beneath us by pouring, churning water. The sound of the water was earth-shattering, yet the sliver of sky visible above was unnaturally still. The bright moon hung overhead, and the glittering stars were like fine quicksand spread across the azure vault. Gazing at the surging fangs in the ocean and the dreamily tranquil starry sky above, for a moment, one felt disoriented, thinking the night sky was merely an illusory dream.

The Jiaomu was also immobilized by the water, but upon seeing the starlight, it clung even more desperately to the Divine Wood. The seawater, mixing with the subterranean currents, quickly began to fill the rifted Guixu. However, the subsidence of the underground flow still formed a sea cave several li in diameter, centered where the Divine Wood sank. The swirling, hidden currents poured into it ceaselessly, seemingly destined never to fill the bottomless pit of the Mother of Pearls Sea. The Guixu, frequently mentioned in ancient texts, finally revealed its true form: besides the ghost cavern of the ancient Jingjue Kingdom, there truly existed unfathomable abysses in the world, and the Guixu was one of them.

Now that the Guixu beneath the Jianmu was blasted open by the underground flow, it generated a powerful force field, continuously sucking in seawater. The giant wood, leaning precariously in the sea, had been hollowed out for a thousand years, creating a passage for souls to transcend. In such violent currents, the trunk was fracturing layer by layer, and the thousands of Bronze Slaves that secured it were also being swept away into the deep sea, scattered and lost. The disturbance in the water raised waves mountains high. As the split sea began to close, we could only gaze out from the arrow stones on the canopy, filled with despair. The Jianmu, an ancient relic in the sea, couldn't truly reach the heavens or chase the moon. The tip of the Divine Wood was still lower than the sea surface—a gap too wide for human power to bridge. Only with wings could one escape now.

As the fissures on the sea surface gradually vanished, the sounds of the collapsing heaven and earth in the Guixu were drowned underwater. Only the sea-eye beneath the upper half of the Jianmu maintained its terrifying currents. Our spirits and strength utterly spent, our faces blank against the water, we clung to the arrow stones, closed our eyes, and awaited death. Just then, the tip of the wood shook violently and suddenly pitched toward the sea. It turned out the Jiaomu below, though mortally wounded by the arrow stone, had not died instantly due to its savage vitality. It was still stubbornly clinging to the Divine Wood, trying to devour the moonlight. The fierce currents in the sea cave, combined with its thrashing of the tree trunk, caused a section of the Jianmu over ten meters long to snap off.

The Jianmu, covered in canopy-like arrow stones, possessed great buoyancy in the turbulent waves and, being lodged at an angle in the seabed, was not immediately sucked into the depths. Instead, it floated to the surface with the rapidly rising tide. Almost simultaneously, the seawater completely closed, concealing the turbulence below. The Jiaomu, still clutching the broken end of the tree, floated up with it but quickly died, its huge, greyish eyes wide open in eternal regret, leaving a trail of dark blood as it drifted on the sea, having bled out.

Having escaped death, being carried to the surface by the Jiaomu, we were all somewhat dumbfounded. Seeing the cold starlight shining on the calm sea, it felt unreal that we had survived the Guixu. But before we could celebrate our survival, we noticed the corpse of the whale-sized Jiaomu was still tightly entwined with that section of the Jianmu. The fifteen-meter remnant could not support the monster's heavy carcass; it merely bobbed for a moment before being dragged down into the depths.

The Jianmu hadn't even drifted clear of the submerged Ghost Island when a faint clockwise vortex formed on the sea surface, created by the sucking force of the Guixu below. The wood floated up fast, but sank even faster, submerged two-thirds of the way in less than a blink. A thought flashed through my mind: How can we leave the Coral Spiral without a boat? This thick, broken section of the Jianmu—isn't this an ocean raft? With this, we still have a chance to drift out of this demonic sea.

Realizing this, I didn't dare hesitate. I called out to Fatty to hurry, snatched the Dragon Arc Bronze Saber from Gu Cai, and frantically began hacking at the Jiaomu's corpse entangling the broken wood. Gu Cai seemed bewitched, his eyes vacant and unfocused, muttering incoherently, "Senior Sister is dead too..."

Though we felt immense sympathy for him, at this moment of life and death, we couldn't spare the time to console him. Fatty, Shirley Yang, and I worked against the clock, chopping the Jiaomu's corpse to pieces. Uncle Ming also crawled over as if insane, gnawing at the shark scales snagging the arrow stones. Amidst the unique, foul stench of the sea, flecks of blood splattered onto the water. But the Jiaomu's body was enormous, and its old flesh and grotesque scales were incredibly thick. We only had the short knives and short swords meant for underwater use. We could only watch helplessly as the broken wood spun in the surface vortex and continued to sink.

I was frantic, my mind racing. Seeing no other way out, I knew if I didn't jump into the water to escape now, I would be dragged down with the Jianmu and the corpse into the depths. But how much courage did it take to leap into the shark-infested Coral Spiral? Facing death in the sea either way, I figured being drowned in the sea-eye was preferable to being savaged by sharks.

As I hesitated, wondering whether to jump, the surface of the vortex suddenly churned, and numerous huge boulders erupted from the water, lifting the thick Jianmu and the dead Jiaomu corpse. After a series of lurches and wobbles, they slowly began moving westward.

The sea surface shimmered under the starlight and moonlight. But under the cold moonlight, it was impossible to tell why this mass of dark reefs was moving. Everyone stopped what they were doing, confused about what was happening. I knew Uncle Ming had experienced much at sea; this old rogue was an "academic authority of reaction" concerning maritime affairs. I quickly asked him what these clusters of reefs appearing on the sea meant—were they good or bad signs?

Uncle Ming, terrified of slipping into the sea, clung tightly to an arrow stone and shouted, "Hu Zai, it's because your Uncle Ming has done too much good in life and accumulated great virtue that the auspicious ones are protected by heaven! You brat, by sticking with me this time, you've managed to cling to life! This is the blessing of the Fishery Master Ancestors and the Goddess Mazu; it's a 'Dragon Troop Crossing' at sea."

I had heard tales in Fujian about the "Dragon Troop Crossing" in the South China Sea, a rare spectacle like sea mirages (Haishi) and sea-glows (Haizi). It referred to vast schools of whales or sea turtles gathering, their backs and shells rising above the water, creating a magnificent sight from afar. Fishermen believed the signs accompanying a "Dragon Troop Crossing" varied: crossings of whales or turtles were good omens, while a mass crossing of common fish signaled poor catches and impending disaster.

In reality, the "Dragon Troop Crossing" phenomenon is caused by drastic underwater shifts that trigger mass migrations of aquatic life. It’s likely that the disappearance of the sea-vapor Dragon Fire in the Guixu caused the turtle herds to flee to the surface, coincidentally lifting the Divine Wood we were depending on. Fatty and I had once seen vast fields of turtle shells beneath the ground at the Hundred-Eye Cave between the grasslands and the desert. The sea-vapor changes there created a phantom market, resulting in an expanse of grey ruins. Now I realized that the bizarre, shifting scenes in the ghost market of the Hundred-Eye Cave were the ancient tombs within the Guixu. Long ago, the Coral Spiral sea region must have witnessed several such "Dragon Troop Crossing" turtle migrations, but the sea turtles that escaped the Guixu had long since been buried in the turtle sleeping grounds of the Yellow Springs of a Hundred Eyes.

Uncle Ming urged everyone to seize the moment and resume hacking at the Jiaomu's corpse. Seeing a turn of events, I thought of the lives of Ruan Hei and Duo Ling, both lost at the terminal end of this Southern Dragon tributary. A wave of despondency washed over me, and I suddenly felt completely weak, unable to stand steadily. I sank down onto the wood, and as my hand touched the Jianmu, the embedded arrow stones tumbled into the water one after another. I looked down and saw the cracks in the trunk deepening and expanding. A chill shot through me: "It's bad. This section of the ancient wood, battered by seawater under Ghost Island, is extremely fragile. It looks like it's about to shatter. Disaster is imminent." Before I could warn the others, the floating Jianmu began to disintegrate.