Yue Yang took Liuye’s hand and circled the structure once. What looked from a distance like a natural underwater hill was nothing of the sort.

It was an enormous metal sphere, disguised as a hill.

His senses confirmed it: hollow inside.

At its midsection, two massive steel conduits — each easily ten meters in diameter — curved away in opposite directions, one reaching toward White River City, the other extending toward the seal point on the treasure map that Yue Yang and Liuye had come to investigate. Liuye didn’t need to think about it long. The mutant fishfolk of White River City had already discovered the secret of the nearby seal. They were likely working on breaking it open themselves.

Going to unseal it now was out of the question.

So what instead?

Liuye looked up at Yue Yang, as she always did, and waited for him to decide.

“We go inside and look around. Could be a bigger find than the seal.” Yue Yang had never been afraid of much. Whatever the fishfolk had or hadn’t done, if they’d already opened something and found ancient treasure, he could simply take it from them. In the Sky Realm, the largest fist decided ownership.

“All right.” Liuye’s nature was gentle, and playing treasure-thief wasn’t something she’d do on her own — she was a little nervous even now. But with him beside her, she had decided to rise to the occasion and show him what she’d been working on.

She called her life-guardian war beast without a sound.

The Barrier-Piercing Deer.

Through countless trials and battles, and through the careful cultivation Yue Yang had poured into her development, the Barrier-Piercing Deer had grown from its original Silver-rank tier two all the way to Platinum-rank tier five. Not a combat-type war beast — but for teleportation, for assisting her master in synchronized movement during a fight or an infiltration, it was exactly what was needed.

Which was the point: there was no such thing as a useless talent or a useless war beast, only an owner who didn’t know how to use them. In other hands, the Barrier-Piercing Deer might have been wasted. Under Yue Yang and Liuye’s cultivation, it had become a tool of decisive advantage.

As in their countless practice runs, the Barrier-Piercing Deer phased silently through the surface of the great metal sphere. In the instant it entered the interior space, Liuye transferred with it.

Synchronized transfer. This was the baseline Yue Yang had set for her training.

What was different from practice: this time, Liuye didn’t only transfer herself. She brought Yue Yang with her.

If they hadn’t been inside enemy territory, she would have let out an outright cheer.

Performing the synchronized transfer alone was something she could do anywhere, anytime, without difficulty. Bringing another person along was an entirely different matter — two distinct concepts, separated by a significant gap in difficulty. Under normal practice conditions, her success rate for bringing Yue Yang along simultaneously was roughly one in ten. She’d somehow done it perfectly on the first attempt, under real pressure, executing it cleaner than she ever had in practice.

She didn’t dare make a sound. But the excitement was impossible to hold inside, and she reached out before she could stop herself and pulled him into a hug.

The moment she realized what she’d done, she let go.

Her head dropped. Her face went completely red. She stood very still, looking exactly like a small quail trying to vanish into itself.

Yue Yang reached over and lightly touched her cheek — wordless praise. Then he gathered all the moisture on her skin and the traces of her breath and compressed them into the storage space, in case the enemy had sensory abilities sensitive enough to detect her. As for himself — short of someone at the Solar King’s level, no one could detect him without direct visual contact. The concealment ability needed no explanation, the Creation Domain even less, and beyond those, simply having advanced two full levels since his last serious confrontation — from tier three to tier five — meant that the Water Palace Master Cang Long’s class of opponent was now comfortably below his sight line.

They took stock of their immediate surroundings.

It wasn’t a hollow metal sphere. It was a small steel fortress concealed on the riverbed.

The room they’d entered was a rest chamber — four bunks, several standing cabinets, and a smell composed of old fish, accumulated sweat, and wine turned sour. Liuye converted the Moon Battle Armor’s attribute immediately to wind, activated an independent recirculating air barrier, and began breathing something considerably more tolerable.

Yue Yang moved toward the door, then stopped.

He made a gesture to Liuye: whatever happens, stay calm. Keep a steady mind.

Liuye nodded quickly, then reached over and took his hand with slightly tense fingers.

With him here, nothing could frighten her.

Yue Yang eased the door open by the smallest fraction. Through the Heart-Link resonance, Liuye immediately caught the voices on the other side — several of them, and one was a voice she knew well.

She understood at once why he’d asked her to stay calm.

Her. But what was she doing here?

Liuye listened more closely, and heard the familiar female voice say with unmistakable irritation: “I’ve said it more than enough times — those people are not our enemies. They came to White River City for commerce. We cannot move against them simply because we’re short on blood. They have the backing of a powerful reclusive clan. We cannot make enemies of people like that without cause.”

“You’ve completely gone over to their side.” A rough, slightly hoarse male voice answered with contempt. “Have you forgotten who you are? Fuping of White River City? Just because you put on a new identity doesn’t mean you can forget what you owe this city.”

“Shuiyuan — what exactly are you implying? This is nothing but jealousy, plain and simple. You sent me in as a spy. Now you’re accusing me of collusion. It’s outrageous. Everyone in the clan knows we only marry within our own — how could I possibly become entangled with outsiders? Everything I did was intelligence work. And Shuiyuan, keep your personal grievances separate from duty. You have no right to suspect me simply because I’m engaged to your brother. I stand straight — your slander means nothing.”

“It’s not suspicion. It’s your behavior raising questions. Why did you stop me from killing them? Only because you find them attractive. Don’t tell me your heart didn’t move.”

“Where is your evidence? This is absurd. You’re trying to convict me on nothing but personal speculation. Shuiyuan — I know exactly why you’re doing this. Your parents asked for my hand once, and I refused. Then your brother claimed what you wanted for yourself, and you’ve carried the resentment ever since. You are nothing like your brother. In ability, in standing, in every quality — you are the mud under his feet. I said it plainly. You’re so consumed by insecurity that you haven’t dared leave White River City in years. This patch of water is your shield for your own cowardice. This is the only place where you feel like anything at all. You are a well-frog, Shuiyuan. You don’t have the nerve to step into the wider Sky Realm and face what’s out there. You can’t compete with your brother openly, so you attack from behind. That’s why you’d smear me like this. That’s why you use suspicion and fabrication as weapons. I see through you entirely — you are petty, born small, a mongrel in a wet coat—”

“Shut your mouth, or I’ll kill you—”

“Enough. Both of you.” A third voice, carrying authority — and oddly, Liuye thought she recognized it faintly, though she couldn’t place it immediately. “What I need is intelligence. Not the sound of the two of you fighting. The slave merchant’s schedule has been disrupted by the Hidden Fog. The live subjects haven’t arrived. We need large quantities of human blood. That is the problem we need to solve.”

“Cut down the pale-faced outsiders and use them to tide us over. Their blood, plus what we can draw from within the city, should last until the live shipment arrives.” Shuiyuan offered this as his suggestion.

“That creates powerful enemies for us. I oppose it.” The female voice was firm.

“We wait three more days. If nothing changes, we have no choice but to use their blood. Fuping — I understand your objection. But reviving our forefather must take priority over all else. If you have a better solution, bring it to me. If not, cooperate with Shuiyuan. When three days are up, bring them here. Outsiders cannot be trusted, whatever their faces look like. You must hold this truth: we are the defectors. We are cursed by divine will. No human being will ever genuinely accept a fishfolk as anything but an enemy — whether they’re from the Sky Tower or from the Sky Realm at large. No one feels warmth toward us. You would do well to stop this line of thinking entirely. And you, Shuiyuan — you’ve gone too far. Attend to your own duties and keep your attention off your clanspeople. Both of you leave. I don’t want to hear this quarrel again. I trust I’ve been clear.”

The authoritative voice delivered its judgment and closed the matter. Neither Shuiyuan nor the woman had anything to say against it. Both departed in resentful silence.

Liuye was stunned.

She hadn’t expected anything like this.

Neither, quite honestly, had Yue Yang — the specific variety of surprise that arrives when you’ve been searching hard for something and then stumble into exactly the information you needed while looking for something else entirely. The world had a way of working like that.

The owner of the authoritative voice seemed to sense something.

The movement that followed was faster than lightning.

A direct lunge at the small room where Yue Yang and Liuye were standing.

The door was kicked open. He scanned for enemies, ready to strike at full force — and found absolutely nothing.

No unusual air movement. No new scent beyond the existing stench. Most critically, no anomalous energy signature whatsoever.

Had his senses misled him?

He didn’t know there was such a thing as a Barrier-Piercing Deer, or the synchronized transfer technique it enabled. The instant he’d lunged for the room, Liuye had already brought Yue Yang with her and transferred them both to the spot where he’d been standing. Yue Yang, testing her, had kept his hands entirely out of it and let her handle everything. Under genuine enemy pressure, she had again exceeded herself — using the Barrier-Piercing Deer to silently swap their position with his, without a ripple.

The suspicious figure searched the rest room with painstaking thoroughness anyway, then kicked open every other room in the corridor and searched those too.

When he finally left, only then did Liuye transfer them back to the original room.

Ten seconds later, something made her move again — she grabbed Yue Yang and transferred them both to a room at the far end of the corridor. The timing was not a moment too soon. The suspicious figure had turned around and come back. If Liuye had been a half-second slower, they’d have been caught.

Even coming back empty-handed twice over, the man couldn’t quite convince himself his instincts were simply wrong. He stood in the corridor for a long moment before concluding, reluctantly, that he’d been fooled by a trick of his own perception.

He left. This time he stayed gone.

Liuye transferred them back a third time. Now they were genuinely safe.

She let out a quiet breath, and when she saw Yue Yang give her a slow thumbs-up, she couldn’t quite resist: she stuck her tongue out at him.