Chapter 176: Resurrection and Undying Body

"What... what the hell is going on?!" Hu Jie cried out.

Sprawled on the ground, Mu Qing forced her head up. Blood blurred her vision. She looked toward the sea, now enveloped in swirling blue and cyan light, and suddenly smiled. Her teeth were stained red, but her grin was radiant, a strange brilliance shining in her eyes.

"Five minutes... are up."

"What five minutes?! What the hell are you talking about?" Hu Jie stared at her in shock. Of everyone present, he was the most terrified, because no one understood the Sea God's power better than he did.

A god had entered the ocean and was clashing with the Sea God.

A battle between gods was something he didn't even dare imagine. Entities like that could probably annihilate the entire Sea Kingdom with a single glance.

Mu Qing flashed him a cold smile. "Your time to die... has come too."

With that, as if drained of her last ounce of strength, her head slumped to the side and she fell unconscious.

Hu Jie's eyes widened in sheer panic. Her words sparked a violent surge of unease in his chest.

Deep in the ocean.

Blue and cyan light had already completely enveloped Su Mu's corpse. Like two beasts fighting for territory, the colors clashed fiercely, neither yielding an inch.

But this was merely the outward manifestation. The truly violent battle was taking place in his dream.

In his dreamscape, beside the colossal Divine Statue of the Celestial Sovereign of Longevity that supported the heavens, another monster equally ten thousand zhang tall had silently appeared. Its body was vaguely humanoid, but its head resembled an octopus, writhing with thick black tentacles. These incredibly massive appendages were embedded with countless crimson eyes.

Dense green scales armored its body, its four limbs ended in massive claws, and a pair of gigantic, bat-like wings stretched from its back.

It was exceptionally deformed; its unnatural appearance constantly provoked the limits of human comprehension.

At that moment, hundreds of millions of translucent tentacles erupted from beneath the Celestial Sovereign of Longevity's wide robes, furiously lashing out to entangle the Sea God.

The Sea God naturally refused to be outdone, its black flesh-tentacles surging in size.

The scene instantly became bizarre in the extreme. Hundreds of millions of translucent tentacles and black flesh-tentacles intertwined, frantically tearing and constricting each other.

From afar, it looked as though the two gods were trying to devour and merge with one another.

Su Mu stared intently. Two entirely different sources of ravings wildly battered at his sanity, yet he only grew more thrilled. "What a beautiful sight!"

He was just short of clapping and cheering from the sidelines.

It was still impossible to tell which of the two gods was stronger, but Su Mu felt the Celestial Sovereign of Longevity likely had the edge. After all, the power it was wielding came solely from the statue in the Longevity Daoist Temple.

The Sea God, on the other hand, was this entire ocean. It was difficult for mortals to intuitively grasp such levels of power, leaving scale as the only metric. The Celestial Sovereign was just a statue, while the Sea God was the entire sea. Yet here they were at a stalemate, making it blatantly obvious who held the upper hand.

"It seems the Sea God's true body isn't here." Su Mu's eyes gleamed. He didn't know what form the Sea God truly took, but he knew the entity before him definitely wasn't it.

If every ocean in the Nightmare World was the Sea God, then this sea could only be considered a fragment of it.

He had anticipated this. If the Sea God's true body were actually here, there wouldn't be a single living soul left in the Sea Kingdom. In other words, the scale of this nightmare couldn't possibly contain a true god.

That was exactly why Su Mu had chosen to kill himself. If the Sea God's true body had been present, he never would have taken his own life, because doing so would have meant certain death. No matter how strong the Celestial Sovereign of Longevity was, it would be impossible to fight a complete god using just the Divinity attached to a statue.

By now, the Celestial Sovereign of Longevity and the Sea God were completely smothered in tentacles and fleshy appendages, obscuring their original forms. Their stalemate continued.

Su Mu smiled silently. This was the best possible outcome for him. If either god won, he would die permanently. Mutual deadlock was ideal.

Of course, he knew this deadlock wouldn't last forever. Like two strongmen arm wrestling, one would eventually exhaust its strength and lose.

However, while they were deadlocked, Su Mu was perfectly free to take care of a few things.

Snap!

In the endless depths of the ocean, Su Mu's corpse abruptly opened its eyes!

He was alive, but not entirely alive.

To be exact, his current state was similar to an undead siren. His body had been affected by the Sea God's power, transforming into an Undying Body.

This was the origin of the undead sirens: drowning in the sea, having their souls reaped by the Sea God, and their bodies turning into undead sirens driven by its will.

He had gone through all the steps. His dead body had been affected by the Sea God's power, so naturally, he would turn into an undead siren. He had done his part, but unfortunately for the Sea God, it hadn't done its part—it hadn't managed to claim his soul. As a result, Su Mu still retained his human consciousness.

He was now an undead siren with a human mind—the exact state Hu Jie had desperately dreamed of achieving.

Furthermore, because the Sea God's power was actively within his soul, the amount of Sea God Divinity he possessed vastly exceeded that of Hu Jie, a mere sea god's familiar.

On the shore.

Hu Jie and the others stared at the ocean, still shaken. The waters had calmed, looking as though nothing had ever happened.

"Old Hu, what on earth just happened? Is the Sea God furious?" Pang Yang asked, his voice trembling slightly.

Hu Jie's eyes flickered, and he played along. "Exactly! The Sea God must be furious! It's blaming us for not killing Su Mu yet. Everyone, listen up! We have to find and kill Su Mu before the Sea God unleashes its full wrath!"

A chill ran through the crowd. A crushing sense of urgency seized them, and they immediately prepared to move out.

But right then, someone in the crowd suddenly shrieked. "Ah! Sea monsters... the sea monsters are coming!"

Shock swept through the group as they quickly looked toward the sea. The sight instantly made their scalps go numb!

Out in the boundless ocean, countless heads bobbed on the surface!

A dense blanket of heads floated in the water, rising higher and higher to reveal their full bodies.

They were rotting corpses with hollow eye sockets and squirming black tentacles—the undead sirens.

An endless horde of undead sirens. Chad looked on in terror; it felt as though the entire ocean had been overrun by them. Further out in the deep water, colossal monstrosities hundreds of meters tall slowly rose like mountain peaks breaching the surface.

"What... what's going on?! Didn't the Sea God give us three days to kill Su Mu? Time isn't up yet!"

"Are... are they going to completely destroy the Sea Kingdom?"

"Old Hu! Old Hu! Aren't you able to contact the sea god's familiar? Hurry up and explain things to him!" Pang Yang shook Hu Jie, his face pale with terror.

But Hu Jie acted as if he hadn't heard a word. His eyes widened in sheer panic as he stared at the pitch-black army of sea monsters, his mind trembling violently.

'Go back! Go back! Who told you to come out!'

He desperately screamed the commands in his mind, trying to control the undead sirens like he always did. But not a single one from the vast army listened. Instead, they continued their relentless advance toward the shore.

"Old Hu! Say something, damn it!"

"I..." Hu Jie's stomach was churning. He had absolutely no idea what was happening.

Suddenly, he saw an enormous sea beast slowly raise a massive tentacle high above the tens of thousands of advancing sea monsters. And standing right at the very tip of that tentacle was a tall, slender figure.