Chapter 237: Ancient Guardian Entities

The air didn’t taste like charcoal grease anymore. The moment the boat drifted over the coordinate line, a cold, heavy pressure dropped from the sky, smelling of ancient sea depths, wet limestone, and the deep, hollow chill of a vault that had been submerged since the world first cracked.

Jun-ho stood at the very tip of the wooden bow, his fingers hooked loosely under the fresh, coarse black fiber wrapped around his sword’s hilt. He had thrown a heavy, faded canvas coat over his shoulders to shield against the biting ocean spray, but his gaze remained fixed entirely on the vortex churning directly beneath the hull. The water wasn’t just spinning; it was thick, shimmering with a dark, oily crimson hue that seemed to pulse in time with the deep hum vibrating through the bones of his chest.

Behind his back, the cabin hatch remained shut, cutting off the close, suffocating heat of the engine room. The girls weren’t crowding his shoulders this time. The sheer weight of the approaching Tier 5 gate had forced a tense, quiet truce.

Eun-bi sat on an overturned wooden crate by the bait station, her fingers tracing the faded ink of the manual paper charts spread across her knees. Her knuckles were white, her lips pressed into a thin, tight line as she glanced between the crimson eye of the whirlpool and the silhouette of the two women standing near the stern rail. The regular, sarcastic bite was gone from her face, replaced by the raw, focused calculation of a paramedic who knew exactly how deep the water was about to get.

Rea stood leaning against the high iron crane structure, the wind whipping the hem of her dark silk tunic wildly against her knees. She wasn’t smiling her usual lazy smile. Her unique eyes, flashing with an intense golden-blue light under the bruised sky, were focused entirely on the horizon line behind them.

"The tracking pulse from the city harbor didn’t fade out, Jun-ho," Rea called out, her voice losing its soft, playful purr and turning sharp, clipped by the salt wind. "The regional directors didn’t wait for the morning report to clear the registers. They’ve redirected the naval cutters’ long-range radar loops straight toward this shelf. We have less than seven minutes before their forward hulls break the mist."

"Let them break it," Jun-ho said. His voice was rougher than usual, carrying the heavy, solid resonance of a man whose physical stats had completely outgrown the unranked zones.

A sudden, sharp shadow cut through the gray fog from the opposite side of the deck. Lilith stepped over the heavy mooring cables, her long ink-black hair pinned back with a rough leather strap to keep the salt spray out of her face. The tight leather of her outfit was covered in a dull layer of sea crust, her dark crimson eyes fixed onto the black ledger tucked into the canvas sack between his feet.

She stopped two paces away, not pushing her weight against his side this time. There was an intense, serious gravity in her posture that belonged to a purebred rogue who smelled a real deployment.

"The gate logic down there isn’t filtered, big guy," Lilith murmured, her full lips twisting into a hard, serious line as she pointed her obsidian blade toward the center of the vortex. "The legacy guilds call it an anchor room. Five winters ago, the Ministry tried to drop a heavy electronic barrier down the center to seal the core, but the primal current tore the alloy plates to pieces. If we dive without the shields locked, the pressure will rip the timber hull right off its rivets."

"Tae-woo," Jun-ho called out without turning his head.

The five elite vanguards rose from the cargo hatch in unison, their massive frames casting long, heavy shadows across the wet deck boards. They didn’t shout, and they didn’t waste time with a standard defensive block. They hoisted the wide, jagged slabs of basin rock they had hauled from the forge floor, locking the stone edges together over the bow rail to form a single, unbroken wall of dark mountain stone that completely covered the front of the lugger.

Jun-ho reached down his left hand, his fingers closing around the cold brass lock of The Monarch’s Ledger beneath the canvas flap. He didn’t pull the book out into the salt rain, but his thoughts directed the Phase 4 domain straight through the blood-red eye of the sea.

[The Monarch’s Ledger Active.]

[Target Sector: Unranked Primitive Gate ’The Sea King’s Vault’.]

[Applying 10x Area Multiplier to Drop Tables...]

[Mana Cost: 1000. Current Mana: 2200/9000.]

The crimson whirlpool beneath the keel didn’t expand. It turned into a solid, unmoving column of dark ink-black glass, the thin blue mana threads inside the water twisting and locking together like frozen iron wires. The entire twelve-ton oak hull of the lugger hit the frozen surface with a massive, hollow roar, the heavy timbers sliding straight down the sloped ice walls of the vortex like a sled hitting a mountain siding.

They didn’t sink. They broke through the lower crust of the sea shelf, dropping straight through a ceiling of wet basalt stone and landing heavily in a giant, circular roundhouse chamber thirty meters beneath the ocean floor.

The room inside was ancient, shaped like an old underground rail turntable pit, its walls built from massive blocks of grey mountain granite that were slippery with dark sea mold. In the center of the floor, anchored to four heavy iron chains that were thick as tree trunks, floated the Primal Core. It was a massive, three-meter sphere of solid black crystal, its center burning with a raw, white-hot fire that cast no light but radiated a heavy, suffocating weight through the dark.

[Primitive Sector Clear Mode Active.]

[Targets Detected: Ancient Guardian Entities (Tier 5 Primal Variant).]

[Warning: A trailing Ministry patrol cutter has crossed the portal line behind your stern.]

Jun-ho stepped off the frozen bow rail, his boots hitting the granite floor blocks with a dull, solid thud that echoed off the high vault. He unbuttoned his canvas coat, letting it drop to the stones, exposing the raw, unpolished stone slabs of his armor plates as his fingers tightened around the black hemp handle of his sword.

The three-way battle for the sea core was officially open, and the city rules were completely dead.