Chapter 748 — Challenging the Ocean

The greatest courage a mortal can possess is to challenge the sky and the sea.

A faintly briny sea wind blew in from the east, sweeping across the long coastline of the eastern shore, past harbor houses with black-sloped roofs and ancient spired towers. The banner of the black crown and shield snapped and streamed above the main keep of the port city of Möbius, facing the endless ocean, where the morning sun was just rising.

Count Owen Dyson—short black hair, deep blue eyes, a long black double-breasted coat—stood at a window facing the sea. From this highest point of the castle, he quietly overlooked the thriving city below and the calm, glinting expanse of ocean in the distance.

This was Möbius Harbor, the largest seaport on the eastern coast of the Typhon Empire, and the necessary first stop for humanity in the east when venturing out to sea.

Once, it had been.

The Dyson family had ruled this land for several hundred years. Count Owen's forebears had led the first settlers here, hacking a foothold out of the wilds, and had reshaped this stretch of the Empire's eastern coast into something sturdy with great stone and magic. Seven hundred years ago, this had been a city of exceptional prosperity; Typhon, barely founded, had used this harbor to knock upon the door to the sea and had opened important colonies on several islands to the east. The first settlers mined ore and grew spices on those islands, pouring a steady stream of precious resources into the newborn nation, while the thriving East-Continent routes kept the flow of goods moving through the Empire's southeast and northeast. Möbius Harbor, the hub of it all, had for a time stood peerless.

But that prosperity lasted only a very short while.

The corruption of the three dark cults forfeited humanity's right to challenge the ocean. With the departure of the Child of Storms, humans could no longer sense the storms and magical turbulence over the Endless Sea, nor could they calm the ocean's fury. The waters safe for navigation shrank to a mere dozen or so miles hugging the land, and even these "safe routes" were broken and intermittent, impossible to link into a whole.

At first, brave captains and scholars still tried to maintain those routes through experience, courage, and substitute transcendent spells, but the exorbitant cost, together with the straitened national strength of Typhon in its early years, ultimately drove those bold challengers to give up. The colonial islands in the far sea were abandoned, the ore, plants, and marine produce of the ocean were cut off, and this briefly prosperous Möbius Harbor sank into hardship over the centuries that followed.

From a bustling port city it became a gathering point for coastal fishermen and a rest stop for nearby merchants and travelers, sustained to this day by lackluster inshore catches and transit tolls.

And then, until today—it had unexpectedly flourished once again.

Count Owen's gaze swept the city's edge, past the towers rising near the coastline and the faint columns of dust lifting into the air.

Those were the firestone mines.

No one had expected that what would finally bring Möbius Harbor back from the dead was those gray-white stones once deemed utterly useless, worth less than silt.

Firestone was everywhere along the coastline. Those stones were the raw material for producing Dust of Abundance and crystal matrix, and the advent of new techniques had turned them from worthless to red-hot. As the largest city on the eastern coast, Möbius Harbor had been miraculously revived overnight—within just a few short years, it had become prosperous again.

And what was changing as swiftly as Möbius Harbor was the entire Typhon Empire.

His Majesty the great Luoyan Augustus had brought prosperity and change to the Empire. Though many of these "changes" greatly displeased certain stubborn, old-fashioned nobles, Count Owen Dyson, lord of Möbius, was not among them. To this frontier count who had witnessed the great transformation from hardship to wealth, what His Majesty Luoyan had brought was an absolute turn for the better.

What quickened this frontier count's spirit even more—stirred him, even—was that the brilliant and ambitious Emperor, having made the Empire rich and strong, had at last turned his gaze once again toward that endless ocean.

The glinting sea rose and fell faintly in the distance, the morning sun scattering flecks of phosphorescence across its surface. Count Owen knew that this seemingly calm ocean was in truth exceedingly perilous: beyond a dozen or so miles, the chaotic storms and magical turbulence would bury even the mightiest transcendents in the deep, and those currents and storms had chopped the once-intact coastal routes into scattered fragments. Hundreds of years ago, the young and frail Kingdom of Typhon had failed to reclaim those routes, but today, the reborn Typhon Empire might already have the strength to challenge the ocean once more.

A sound of footsteps, near then nearer, roused Owen Dyson from his reverie. He heard his attendant's voice from behind: "My lord, that creature has awakened."

Count Owen turned his head. "I know. Lead the way."

"Yes, my lord."

Owen Dyson left the room that faced the sea. Accompanied by his attendant, he passed down the castle's long corridors, into the deep, shadowed passages, and came to the innermost depths of the family castle. There, in a sealed chamber inscribed with numerous runes and reinforced with vast quantities of holy and magical materials, he met "that creature" of which the attendant had spoken.

Wrapped in a somewhat tattered black robe, it lay quietly on the stone bed at the center of the chamber, bound in place by a great many runic chains and holy amulets that suppressed whatever transcendent power it might possess.

In truth, Owen could tell at a glance that this should be a human—only it had been mutated beyond all recognition.

The "human"'s exposed arms, face, and neck were covered in fine, pale-cyan scales that made the skin crawl; its eyes were golden and slit-pupiled, like a serpent's; its hair had fallen away entirely, replaced by a layer of greasy, leathery growths like seaweed covering its scalp; its palms were twisted and elongated, with webbing stretched between the fingers. And more horrifying still were its legs—

The flesh of those legs had blurred together like some product of chaos, no longer distinguishable one from the other; they were fused, joints bent, skin adhering, scales sprouting all over.

It looked like some unfinished transformation spell—or rather... an intermediate state of mutation from human toward some bizarre, aberrant form.

The "monster" had already awakened. As Count Owen drew near, he saw its eyeballs shift, those dreadful golden slits sweeping toward him, while its body remained quietly on the stone bed, only its chest rising and falling slightly.

Count Owen frowned. Beside him, a mage in a moon-patterned robe stepped forward.

"My lord, I have stabilized its mental state with calming spells and an infusion of moonrest grass. The monster is temporarily safe."

Owen Dyson nodded and looked toward another figure not far away—a knight, of medium build, with a thick beard and sunken eye sockets.

"Tell me again the details of when you found this 'creature.'" he said to the knight.

"Yes, my lord," the knight nodded. "We found him to the south, near the desert. The locals reported unusual wind and rain in that area, with constant howling over the sea. We feared magical turbulence was spilling onto land, so we went to investigate—and found this 'monster' on the rocky beach by the shore.

"There was nothing around him like wreckage from a ship, nor did we find any vessel run aground nearby. I doubt he came by boat—he may have swum here...