Next on their hit-list: the green-armored crab.

The thing was colossal, wedged across the trench like a living dam—no way around it. Dumb as rock, soul-force paper-thin; its only tactic was brute rush.

Ye Liuyun didn’t burn a drop of his martial artists’ yuan qi. He simply opened his sea of consciousness and devoured the crab’s soul in one gulp. The shell he tossed to Qiong Qi and Tong Xin for refining.

After that it was just Ye Liuyun and his clone slogging deeper, fighting the weight of the abyss with every step. The farther they went, the heavier the water, the colder the dark.

Cold he could ignore; the pressure, though—if he dropped his guard—was perfect for tempering flesh.

By the time they reached the blue whale’s lair they were at the trench’s absolute bottom. The crush had bent Ye Liuyun’s spine; he couldn’t even straighten, let alone swing a fist. Luckily the last stretch was clear—his martial artists could handle anything that moved.

A final array barred the whale’s nest: nothing but the whale itself could pass. It was also the trench’s deadliest trap; if he called Qiong Qi to dismantle it, days would bleed away.

But he already saw the pattern. No patience left. Golden pupils flared white; beams lanced the array’s eyes and blew the whole thing apart.

The moment the formation collapsed a portal yawned open.

“Steel yourselves,” Ye Liuyun told the fighters. “Pets inside—nothing fierce. The whale’s lapdogs.”

He waved them through to mop up, then followed with his clone.

The beasts were few; most died in the first rush. He left the cleanup to them and headed straight for the grand hall—the whale’s human-form cultivation chamber and treasure vault.

No traps. Door after door swung wide, and even he sucked in a breath.

“The whale was busy.” 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

Every top-tier resource of the Desolate Sea world seemed piled here.

In the last vault only five items remained. One was an unremarkable energy sphere—looked like ordinary source—yet its purity stunned him.

He probed it: almost a hundred world-sources compressed inside, thick with primal breath and heaven-earth force.

“Compressed for its breakthrough,” he guessed.

The book demon in his sea of consciousness snorted. “Maybe for a breakthrough, but that whale was nowhere strong enough to cram so much into one orb.”

“Then where did it come from?”

“Born, not made.”

“Born? What world spits out source like this?”

“Check your own inner world,” the demon hinted.

Ye Liuyun sent a thread of awareness inward—he’d left the care of that place to Ye Ling and hadn’t looked in ages. What he saw jolted him: his world-source had swollen far beyond a single world’s share, as if many planets’ hearts had fused. It mirrored the orb, only weaker.

“A natural galaxy core?” he asked.

“Not necessarily someone’s personal world. This is a cultivated galaxy-source—deliberately grown. The orb in your hand is the distilled heart of a thousand-planet system.”

“Why haven’t I seen one before?”The book spirit chuckled. “That’s because your spatial power used to be too weak—you couldn’t jump far and hadn’t seen much. But I can tell it’s grown lately; it won’t be long before you’re hopping between galaxies and seeing the real vastness out there.”

Ye Liuyun knew it was simply a matter of strength; when he was strong enough, the wider universe would reveal itself. He tucked the galaxy’s core away as cultivation fuel.

The second item was a Soul-Seal Orb—he recognized it at once. This one held an unusually large space, locking up several hundred soul fragments at the Unity Seventh or Eighth Stage. Most were human martial cultivators; a minority were sea beasts. Probably captured by the blue whale to be slowly devoured later, powering up its third soul.

“If you absorb all that, your soul force will almost catch up to mine!” Even the book spirit sounded envious.

“Saves me a lot of running around.” Ye Liuyun shrugged; he usually devoured plenty of soul power on his own. This just sped things up—no more risky hunts.

The third object was a solidified blood clot, barely half a square zhang, yet distilled from the lifeblood of countless experts. Its aura made his own blood throb. His golden pupils swept over it: the mass had been refined with fire.

“How many cultivators did it take to condense a chunk this big?”

He did a quick tally—at least a few thousand elites, their blood extracted and purified like pills, before this slab could be formed.

The fourth item was familiar: a five-colored body-tempering stone, virtually identical in size to the one already in his spatial world—clearly for physical refinement.

The last was a golden pill. He couldn’t tell its purpose; the energy inside didn’t feel like a simple power supplement. While he was still wondering—and about to ask Lin Luoyi to analyze it—the book spirit laughed again.

“The whale prepared resources for true essence, soul, bloodline, and body. A Void-grade pill like this has to be the final compressor, crystallizing and condensing every kind of strength.”