The battle raged on, with the roar of cannons echoing endlessly.
The Nightmare Star’s cannons fired alternately on both sides, locked in a fierce battle with this swarm of living icebergs!
Yang Yi never imagined that his first naval battle in life wouldn’t be against humans, but a group of grotesque worm-tentacle monsters.
The battle raged on until dawn, when Yang Yi finally annihilated the entire horde of creatures.
A total of 31 monsters, all dead, floated on the sea’s surface.
White fluid had even dyed the waters of the area a pale color.
“Whew~ What a thrilling and satisfying battle!” Yang Yi wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead.
Midway through the fight, to prevent himself from running out of stamina, he even went into the cabin to drink a bottle of Vitality Coconut Water.
The worms couldn’t catch up to him anyway.
After the naval battle, Yang Yi gained a better understanding of the special characteristics of the submerged cannons.
In addition to firing cannonballs, they could also launch various types of fish. At one point, Yang Yi even fired an explosively cute seal. (1)
That shot was incredibly powerful, blasting away half of an iceberg in a single hit.
However, it seemed that such rare occurrences only happened when certain types of fish were caught — likely a hidden mechanism of the cannon.
If he could catch more powerful fish in the future, the things fired by the cannon would be worth looking forwards to...
After standing at the bow for a while to calm his excitement, Yang Yi walked to the ship’s edge, preparing to dismantle the giant bobbit worm head.
It was that very object that had attracted the swarm of living icebergs.
Yang Yi climbed down to inspect it.
He found that the giant bobbit worm head was unrecognisable, its shell riddled with countless holes. If there had been any juices inside, they had to have been completely drained by the worms.
And so, there wasn’t anything left inside — just some hard bones.
Yang Yi stepped on it, causing the shell to crumble away, leaving only two sharp mandibles intact, while the other two had already broken.
He checked the ship's equipment's properties.
【Name: Shattered Giant Bobbit Worm Head】
【Type: Ship Equipment】【Quality: Fine】【Description: The shattered head of a giant bobbit worm is devoid of protective capabilities, but the two remaining mandibles are still sharp. Can be installed at the ship's bow to cut through objects ahead.】Its attributes had weakened, no longer providing durability, and two of the mandibles were gone.
On the bright side, it would no longer attract dangerous creatures, and there wasn’t an urgent need to dismantle it either.
Just as Yang Yi was about to climb back up, he heard a chillingly familiar sound.
Slurp! Slurp!
The sound sent shivers down his spine — it was the unmistakable noise of worms sucking.
Instantly on high alert, Yang Yi drew his Sea Serpent Fang and scanned his surroundings warily.
Slurp! Slurp!
Yang Yi looked around but couldn’t see anything. The strange sound persisted, faint but distinct.
Switching to his three-eyed vision yielded nothing either.
Slurp! Slurp!
This time, Yang Yi pinpointed the source — it was coming from below!
He carefully climbed down and found a tiny creature in the shadow beneath the giant bobbit worm head.
It was a small chunk of floating ice, no larger than a basketball, with a single thumb-thick tentacle dangling from it and attached to the worm head.
The reason even his three-eyed vision hadn’t detected it was because it was small and obscured by the worm head.
“Uhh?” Yang Yi suddenly found himself chuckling at the absurdity of it all.
…
Time rewinds to the moment when the Nightmare Star had just escaped the entanglement of the worms.
Suna stopped the ship, preparing to use the grappling hook to pull Yang Yi back on board, as planned.
However, she saw several worm tentacles reaching for Yang Yi, who was completely unaware of the danger.
Even if she shouted to warn him, it would likely be too late — because the worms had already opened their grotesque maws, attempting to suck in Yang Yi…
At that critical moment, Suna used the only spell she knew: Curled Touch. Her target was the swarm of worms squeezing together and lunging towards her captain.
In Suna’s eyes, the mass of worms began to curl and twist. While her spell wasn’t strong enough to destroy them, it was sufficient to alter their trajectory, causing the worms to tangle with one another and form a dead knot.
After casting Curled Touch, Suna’s magic reserves were completely drained. Overwhelmed by a splitting headache, she lost the ability to move and collapsed beside the ship’s helm until Yang Yi came to rescue her.
…
Back to the present.
Suna woke up in a warm bed, feeling dizzy and groggy.
“Where…am I?”
The memories of what had happened earlier came rushing back like a tide. She quickly pieced together her current situation.
Yang Yi had carried her into a room and haphazardly dressed her in a sweater.
She hadn’t completely lost consciousness at the time — she had been too overcome with a headache to respond.
Taking a deep breath, Suna furrowed her brows as she looked at the pile of messy clothes on the floor.
Those were the clothes she had been wearing earlier, soaked by seawater and now tossed carelessly on the ground.
“Achoo!”
She sneezed, feeling her nose stuff up as two trails of mucus dripped down.
She checked her status.
【Status: Cold】
Suna frowned even more deeply.
“Achoo!”
She sneezed again.
A few minutes later, her door was flung open abruptly. Yang Yi entered, holding an ice sphere.
“Look, I caught a live worm larva! Do you want to—”
The air froze for a few seconds.
“Don’t you know how to knock?” Suna said coldly.
“Next time, I promise!”
Yang Yi quickly shut the door, stood outside for a moment, and then made up his mind to forget the scene he had just witnessed entirely.
He lifted the pale worm larva he had captured.
When Yang Yi had caught it earlier, he hadn’t killed it. Instead, he broke through the ice layer with a few kicks and extracted the worm’s body from inside.
After subduing it with a couple of punches, Yang Yi obtained information about the creature.
【Name: Pale Worm Larva】
【Description: A type of giant soft-bodied organism that lives in cold marine environments. Their bodies are flexible, and their tentacles have extensibility. They use thick layers of ice for protection and typically curl up inside the ice. They feed on marine organisms with their worm-like tentacles and move by expelling seawater. They are known to attack passing ships.】
Yang Yi placed the worm larva at Suna’s door, securing it with a skeletal hand to prevent it from escaping, and then began cleaning up the battlefield.
First, he drank a bottle of Appetite-Stimulating Potion, ate three black breadsticks and sausages to fully recover his status and fill his stomach in the process.
Then, with the help of the skeletal hand, he collected all the worm limbs scattered across the deck.
Unlike the larva, the adult specimens could be used in the vending machine.
In addition, the sea was littered with the corpses of 31 pale worms.
Yang Yi decided to keep one intact for photography and dissection purposes.
Unable to resist, Yang Yi started using the corpses on the deck for the vending machine before even salvaging those in the sea.
He fed three tentacles into the machine, which instantly consumed half of the corpses on the deck.
Since many of the tentacles came from the same individual worm, feeding even one caused the entire corresponding body to be processed.
Yang Yi turned the wheel to begin the vending.
Rumble, rumble!
Three capsules rolled out, and Yang Yi opened them one by one.