Chapter 279 - 275: The Horrified Awakening of the Japanese

Chapter 279: Chapter 275: The Horrified Awakening of the Japanese

RUMBLE...

The once-dark center of the thundercloud suddenly blazed with light.

More than a dozen arm-thick bolts of lightning converged on the vortex’s center simultaneously.

CRACK!~ ZAP!~ BOOM!~

The sounds of lightning striking various objects echoed without end.

A powerful electric current now coursed through the surrounding seawater.

The light was so intense that Qin Xiaoxia subconsciously narrowed his eyes.

"I... sa... la... mi..."

The Puppet Demon Spirit’s hoarse Magic Language drifted in and out, broken by the roar of thunder and waves.

High above, a smile touched Qin Xiaoxia’s lips. ’It needs to use the Magic Language to help gather its Magic Power. That means the power it’s managed to condense is already on the verge of dissipating under the lightning.’

This told him that while the Demon Spirit might have avoided the missile’s core blast zone, it hadn’t been far enough away. The damage it sustained was more severe than it let on.

BOOM~

Another volley of lightning crashed down, drowning out the Puppet Demon Spirit’s voice.

"So it does have a few tricks up its sleeve."

As Qin Xiaoxia murmured, the color of the vortex in his sight began to change. The clear seawater slowly grew turbid, then darkened, shifting steadily toward black.

This wasn’t a swarm of giant squids spewing ink, of course, but the rendering of the Demon Spirit’s own Magic Power.

The Demon Spirit was trying to use its Magic Power to forcefully slow the vortex, or at the very least, to stabilize its own body.

But the Demon Spirit had miscalculated. It might have seemed like Qin Xiaoxia had little Magic Power invested in the vortex, but he wasn’t controlling it with brute force. He was guiding it with finesse; the environment’s own response was the key.

The vortex, which appeared to be only a kilometer or two wide, was actually the focal point for the collective response of a vast volume of the surrounding sea.

BOOM~ SPLASH~ BOOM~

The boundless sea brought all its pressure to bear on the Demon Spirit. The Magic Power it had struggled to gather was instead dispersed by the vortex into the surrounding waters, where it was either eroded or devoured by Qin Xiaoxia’s terrifying Magic Power.

SIZZLE...

The dark, murky tinge of the Demon Spirit’s Magic Power began to fade. Doudou, Hanato, and the others who could perceive Magic Power felt their bodies go rigid, a tingling sensation crawling over their scalps.

Flames! As the black Magic Power was devoured, pale purple flames began to rise from the ocean’s surface.

This inflicted a horrifying, searing sensation upon the Puppet Demon Spirit and its power—an unbearable pain that felt as if its very soul was being scorched, causing it to weaken continuously.

This was a spontaneous manifestation of the Magic Power itself, an expression of emotion and vitality, eager to carry out its master’s will to annihilate his foe.

This was the slowest Doudou had ever eaten. He still hadn’t finished his bag of potato chips. He gulped, not even noticing when the bag slipped from his hand.

"Big Bro’s Magic Power... it’s terrifyingly alive..."

A torrential downpour finally began to fall. Due to the distance, however, the people on the coast could only see the darkness and flashes of lightning at the distant center of Dajing Bay.

RUMBLE~~

Another dazzling display of lightning ravaged the distant bay, and the onlookers could only pray that no ships were caught out at sea.

Pinned to the seabed by the vortex, the Puppet Demon Spirit was still not resigned to its fate. Countless strands of Puppet Magic Silk twisted together, transforming into black crystals that stabbed into the rock below. It was trying to drag its body downward, to phase directly through the rock layer and escape the crushing water.

A Demon Spirit’s ethereal nature allowed it to briefly pass through solid matter, but Qin Xiaoxia clearly had no intention of giving it the chance.

Lightning rained down as if it cost nothing. Some bolts were even imbued with his own Magic Power, striking like venomous, electric snakes that slithered across the Demon Spirit’s body to deliver a vicious bite.

’Heh, I thought you liked to play.’

The raging currents made it impossible for the Puppet Demon Spirit to use its trump-card puppet techniques; the conditions needed to construct puppets simply weren’t there. And in a direct clash of Magic Power, it was hopelessly outmatched.

Each lightning strike was like a single cut in a death by a thousand cuts—agonizing, but not fatal.

After each volley of attacks, he would give it just enough time to gather its Magic Power for defense, only to shatter it with the next assault.

"KADO YI FEN LI MAN!!"

’So it is a living creature with a survival instinct after all,’ Qin Xiaoxia thought. It had finally started begging for mercy in the Magic Language. ’And here I was thinking all Demon Spirits were psychopaths.’

He didn’t even hesitate, answering its plea with even more ferocious lightning.

Mercy was only for those you could control. For a creature like a Demon Spirit—a being born from malicious obsession—evil was an intrinsic part of its existence. If it were capable of change, it wouldn’t be a Demon Spirit; it might have become a type of Elf instead.

Its only use now was as an experiment for Qin Xiaoxia. Afterward, its corpse would be tossed into the Crystal Ore to catalyze the formation of Magic Energy Crystals, saving Mumu from having to shed so much of her own blood.

After hundreds of lightning strikes, Qin Xiaoxia had figured something out.

Electricity did affect Magic Creatures, but its primary function seemed to be forcing an ethereal Demon to temporarily become corporeal. He didn’t understand the principle behind it. ’Perhaps human scientists could come up with a bunch of jargon about colliding positive and negative ions,’ he mused.

As for the damage from the electricity itself, the ocean setting made the lightning difficult to control. The seawater dissipated most of the electrical energy, so at best, it just caused the Demon Spirit pain.

The Demon Spirit even started actively diverting the electricity into the water through its puppet silks.

His silver-streaked black hair whipped wildly in the gale, the silvery-white strands gradually turning a solid purple.

A violent flame of Magic Power ignited around Qin Xiaoxia’s body.

Countless specks of purple light ignited within his once-clear eyes, until the entire iris glowed a brilliant violet.

The rotational force of the vortex suddenly intensified. The water around the Demon Spirit receded, exposing a patch of the seabed.

But it already understood—it was too late to run. There was no escape.

Its dark, twisted body looked up, its two ghastly white eyes staring at the being in the sky radiating terrifying purple Magic Power. This power was far more sinister than its own, like a living, starving beast...

Even Qin Xiaoxia himself hadn’t expected that a Puppet Demon Spirit, in its final moments, would manage to see a part of his Magic Power’s true nature—something even he didn’t fully comprehend.

’This world is about to be turned upside down,’ it thought. ’What a shame I won’t be around to see the fun.’

The vortex collapsed. From within the curtain of a billion tons of water, a gigantic maw formed of seawater and purple flame emerged and completely engulfed the severely weakened Puppet Demon Spirit.

Over the next ten minutes or so, the sea’s surface gradually calmed. The wind and waves subsided, and the thundercloud in the sky slowly dissipated.

Qin Xiaoxia took a deep breath, his face tilted toward the sky and his eyes slightly closed, as if basking in the sunlight after a storm.

The Magic Power in the sea flowed back to its master, like watching a shower in reverse. A portion of it, however, continued to burn, compressing a dark substance within it.

’Why did its eyes seem so... happy... right before it died?’

Unable to figure it out, Qin Xiaoxia simply attributed it to the fact that all Demon Spirits were psychopaths.

...

"Lord Doudou, you dropped your potato chips..."

Hanato Doichi felt as if he’d only just started breathing again. He and his two comrades panted heavily as he bent down to pick up the chip bag Doudou had dropped. It was a small gesture of courtesy, a way to calm his own nerves.

Many of the ordinary citizens, however, had already left. Lacking enhanced vision or Perception, they had watched the distant storm over the bay for a while, taken some videos, and, content with their new conversation topic, had mostly dispersed.

Meanwhile, by a taxi on the road near the coast, Harano Shihi was struggling to breathe. Xiangnai and the others, though faring better, had ice-cold hands and feet, their bodies numb.

That suffocating, terrifying pressure was still palpable from dozens of kilometers away, enough to make one tremble.

Didn’t a battle of this magnitude also mean that the Demon was so powerful that it required a mysterious expert to unleash such force?

’And we actually thought we could take on that Demon?’

Even less calm, however, were Japan’s government and its special incident division of the police department.

The US Military had astutely connected the thunderstorm’s appearance to the Dawn Association, but the government of Japan had no such insight. They only knew that this change was by no means a simple natural phenomenon.

Military equipment had recorded the entire vortex and lightning phenomenon, and had even picked up strange noises amidst the roar of the waves.

Honestly, the title of the emergency news special that had just aired—Sea God’s Fury—seemed bizarrely appropriate to Japan’s military and political leaders.

The US Military’s reaction was also baffling to the Japanese. If it was truly a natural phenomenon, shouldn’t they have been moving their aircraft into hangars for safety? Why scramble them to enforce a blockade and warn away news station drones?

A little over half an hour after Dajing Bay fell silent, a phone call from General Kalons, the commander of US forces stationed in Japan, finally jolted the Japanese government into reality. The call set off a political and military tsunami every bit as massive as the "Sea God’s Fury" event itself.

After all, it was up to the Japanese government to manage public opinion in Japan.

...

"Viewers, our station was the first to report on this morning’s ’Sea God’s Fury’ in Dajing Bay. We’ve been tracking the details, and we now have a scientific explanation..."

"According to our sources, a rare terrestrial-lunar effect combined with shifting ocean currents was the cause of this unique natural phenomenon."

"Experts have pointed out that last night, the Earth-Moon orbital relationship entered a newly discovered computational cycle. This effect caused warm and cold currents from outside Dajing Bay to converge within the bay.

Furthermore, Dajing Bay has a unique underwater mountain range on its floor, an extension of the continental shelf. This, combined with the bay’s unique topography and a small waterspout created by air currents, ultimately formed this once-in-a-century natural phenomenon.

The large vortex some witnesses reported seeing through telescopes was a direct result of these converging currents being affected by the underwater mountain terrain. It is not, as some on the internet have stirred up, a matter of theological debate. Please do not fall for any fraudulent schemes using this event as a pretext."

"Similar phenomena typically occur in the deep sea, such as the 1998 Nis Storm in the central Pacific Ocean, or the 2004 event in the North Atlantic... This is the first time such an event has been recorded in a coastal bay..."

"This rare natural phenomenon also had a certain impact on the citizens along the coast of East Great Capital..."

The screen then showed a montage of images: crowds soaked by the wind and rain, a close-up of a strong gust lifting a girl’s skirt, and a shot of a group of scantily-clad people fleeing in disarray from a private yacht.

CLICK~ The news broadcast vanished.

"What a load of crap!"

Doudou turned off the TV, then picked up the room service phone and started ordering food. His was the only voice jabbering away, but since he didn’t speak Japanese, Hanato Doichi ultimately had to translate for him.

Xiangnai and the others sat tensely on the sofa, not daring to utter a single word. They watched the mysterious man resting with his eyes closed, afraid to even breathe too loudly.

PS: Chapter 2 for Monday.