A protective formation warded the Nine Peaks Range, one that triggered an alarm if any unauthorized being passed through the gateway. As the number of authorized individuals was exactly six, this operated with a high degree of precision. It was capable of triggering three separate, distinctive alarm tones throughout the sect compound, depending upon the nature of the incursion.

The most common outcome was an animal intruder, some large shark or whale pushing through the gateway by mistake. This happened rather rarely, but with some regularity. Amami Yoko could recall eight such alarms.

The second occasion was when a mortal or orthodox cultivator snuck through. This was very rare, and the only known cases where those who had attempted to desert the sect and, in one well-known event, later attempted to return. In Amami Yoko's life, that had been triggered a single time.

The third alarm, the one that rang out now in deep and sorrowful dirge tones, had never rung before at all, not merely in her life, but in the more than twenty-seven-hundred-year existence of the Great Waves Sect. Only the sect head, who had designed the formation, truly recognized the sound. That signal was unmistakable all the same, the sign of the great enemy penetrating into their hidden land.

An enemy most members of the sect had never seen. Amami Yoko was one of only five in the sect to have ever observed any sign of the great foe, having once spotted a ghoul walking across the ocean floor during a rare mission beyond the gateway. The rest of the sect's ninety-eight members and the nearly ten thousand mortals who resided in the land had never seen the plague or its minions. All, however, knew what that terrible sound portended.

Yet as horrible as the sound unleashed by the bells was, it was nothing compared to the assault that slammed into Amami Yoko through her qi sense. Four terrible stones, black and baleful meteors of hideous crimson power, dropped into the Nine Peaks Range. Each was awful, cold, and impossibly powerful. Ice wrapped around her heart in that moment as she detected, for the first time in over one hundred and fifty years of life, the horrific qi and devastating power that belonged only to the greatest of traitors.

Demonic cultivators, the doom of the world. Blighted beings who had rejected all life and ruined the land until humans could survive only in the sea.

Hands wrapped around her sword hilts and squeezed with all the strength she possessed. The resulting, white-knuckled grip would have shattered lesser implements. Fear, such as she'd never experienced, rose up in her, formless and terrible. Amami Yoko did not shirk battle. She had faced down every monster the depths could supply and willingly sparred with anyone, even the sect head. She did not fear death in defense of the sect. That had been her fate since becoming a cultivator.

Those presences, however, instilled a terrible hopelessness within her. She knew the power of the sect head, the immortal invincibility he possessed. These demonic cultivators, even sensed at a distance, were stronger, far stronger. This was an enemy she could not strike, could not even scratch; a foe against which she could do nothing but die piteously.

That wall of horrific power, the endless strength of the plague, smashed against her dao. Her weakness, laid bare before such an immense gulf, converted swiftly to helplessness.

For several long heartbeats she floated frozen, fingers wrapped around her swords. Lost in the spiraling contemplation of doom, she could not act. All things seemed pointless. To give battle was simply to be annihilated. So why fight?

She could simply swim about, giving herself to the sea, until doom descended in the course of the day. It felt as if this was the only course the universe left to her. There were no decisions left that mattered, and therefore no need to make any.

Words, booming through the deep, jolted her from this terrible despairing contemplation. "Great Waves Sect, gather at the rally point!" This command, simple orders empowered to carry a vast distance through the waters, came from Wave Sword, the one and only leader their sect had ever known. A trusted voice, one that sufficed to propel Amami Yoko back into sovereign service once more. Kicking her way about, she charged down to the rally point at all speed, making her among the first to arrive.

The butchering yard, being the largest open space within the sect's extremely compressed compound, had long been designated as the rallying point in case of crisis. Floored in bloodstained whale bone and smelling endlessly of death, it struck the hunter as a suitable place to face down the doom to come. She had no doubts as to the nature of their fate. Having passed through the crucible of hopelessness and despair to reach a point of acceptance regarding the battle to come, she had made the short swim to this place prepared to give her life however commanded.

Four demonic cultivators, each far greater in power than the sect leader. That was not an opponent they could overcome. All that remained was to receive the order that would decide how they should face this end. In that, she would defer absolutely to Wave Sword's guidance. His was the right and duty to decide how the Great Waves Sect died.

It was not something she envied.

At the present moment, a mere one hundred and three cultivators comprised the totality of the Great Waves Sect. All arrived within that large raft room reeking of death within minutes. Even that was distressingly slow, for the time they had was minimal. The sect compound was located on the opposite side of the hidden land from the gateway, but the enemy was advancing swiftly. Such trap formations as had been left in the way as defensive measures delayed them hardly at all, brushed aside as if they did not exist. Those protections had always been weak, no one had truly believed the enemy would ever come here.

Not that, Amami Yoko realized ruefully, even the fullest commitment would have made any difference in the end.

Wave Sword stood in the center of the chamber, floating slightly above the splashes of whale blood that coated the bone floor. His expression was terrible to behold, his blue and white face of sea foam, salt spray, and deep ocean blue twisted into a mighty tempest. "The end has come," he announced even as the sect's weaker members, the nearly seventy cultivators in the body refining realm, finished pouring into the yard. "We are beset by a foe we cannot defeat."

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Amami Yoko stood silent in recognition before the blue-bodied immortal. Wave Sword, a cultivator formed of sculpted waters and solidified sea foam, wore nothing more than a loincloth and the belt that strapped his single sword to his left hip. He had long ago discarded all other garments as unnecessary, not even keeping sandals. Instead, he perpetually displayed almost the entirety of his extremely masculine presence to all.

Three others stood closer to the sect leader than Amami Yoko. Itsuki Kazuto, the sect's only soul forging realm elder, and Minami and Hitomi Azushi, elders in the spirit tempering realm who came from the same abundant lineage and appeared as if they were sisters despite being born almost two centuries apart. Each of these elders wore paired swords at their belt in the same manner as Amami Yoko. Those weapons, viewed by hilt and scabbard alone, appeared nearly identical.

"As the strong, we must secure what can be saved for the weak," Wave Sword continued. "There are four foes, so we, the first four, will dive to the depths and lure them after us. Perhaps we may, if the Sages bless us, find a chance to escape in the dark. If not, so be it." Deep blue eyes turned to Amami Yoko, and then the immortal pronounced a most terrible order. "Amami Yoko, as the fifth you must lead the rest of the sect to escape. Plunge through the gateway and swim onward. Sages send that you find refuge elsewhere in the sea."

He did not take the time to say more, knowing it was not theirs to spend. "Go! Now!" He gave the last order with the force of a breaking wave.

To run, to flee, this was the last thing she had expected to be told, but there was no time to hesitate, no logic by which she could question that order. The frigid and icy pillars of qi that represented their attackers were already at the edge of the compound. Without pause, Wave Sword followed his command by diving through the moon pool and descending towards the bottom of the sea at incredible speed. The other three elders followed as fast as qi and movement techniques allowed.

Amami Yoko was left alone to command ninety-eight panicked and desperate sect members, all with no one save her to look toward for leadership. She must offer guidance in the final hour of the Great Waves Sect. Lacking time to think, she chose the first path instinct tossed into her mind. "Rise!" She ordered, thinking only to go in the opposite direction of the no diving enemy. "Rise high and then dive for the gateway. Swim now, take nothing. Only our lives remain!"

She did not dive into the moon pool. Instead sweeping her swords out before her, she slashed through the formation-bonded blanket of bone and hide that served as the walls of this chamber. Water, released from the bonds holding back its immense pressure, flooded inward in a tempestuous rush. The cultivators, however, were not swept up. Drawing on their movement skills, they dove into that surge and began to swim upward towards the sunlit realm.

Icy cold qi exploded below them as the first of the demonic cultivators arrived. Amami Yoko dared not look back, but she felt the bursts of power unleashed in the form of crystalline barbs of ice. Launched outward on wings of spinning, ornate qi, they speared through one cultivator after another, claiming in less than a minute the lives many of the body refining realm cultivators in the sect, those too slow to evade.

Lives winked out at hideous, devastating speed, men and women she had known and often taught for many years. That loss, terrible as it was, was nothing compared to what followed those murders. Qi redirected, streams of power, of the water-shaped essence that comprised the core of the fallen members of the Great Waves Sect, moved and shifted.

Rather than dissipating back into the embrace of the ocean, it transformed from the cool and welcoming touch of universal waters into a crimson, alien essence that matched that of the demonic cultivator's core cultivation. A qi that Amami Yoko belatedly realized came from the demon plague. This altered, violated qi was pulled into the vessel of the murderous demonic cultivator, binding up within her core. Her cultivation, having drained these others, expanded in response. The progress the fallen sect members had made on the path to the heavens was subsumed into the immortal's own.

An infinitesimal gain, a half-dozen body refiners, most in the very first layer, compared to an immortal in the fifth layer of the celestial ascendancy realm, but it remained a monstrous, blasphemous thing to witness all the same. This, Amami Yoko realized, was the power that destroyed the old world. The method of seizing cultivation that defied the heaves and severed growth from enlightenment. A predatory form of cultivation born beyond the infinite dao.

A thing that should never have existed.

And the fate of any who failed to escape. "Swim!" she called, spurring all others to even greater speed, using all the qi she possessed to lead the survivors onward.

Twenty died to the icy missiles launched by the hideous first enemy. Even those who, in desperation, turned and threw attacks at their murderer accomplished nothing. The red-tinged and hooded ice woman did not bother to evade; she just let the flickers of qi wash over her and stood completely unharmed while cutting down the initiates mercilessly. Swords and spears simply shattered against frozen skin to the maddening laughter of the slender traitor.

Another ten fell when the second demonic cultivator, a hulking monster of a being who might well out-mass the whale Amami Yoko had killed only a few hours ago, arrived and tore through the back ranks with massive sweeps of his huge claws.

Further deaths were forestalled not by flight, but by the actions of Wave Sword. The sect leader unleashed a massive stroke from his sword, one that, by pushing out through the immense pressures of the depths, expanded as it rose. A watery pulse the size of a blue whale slammed into the side of the compound. Hide screens tore, bone braces shattered, and reinforcement formations evaporated. Water rushed in, unleashing a compounding, progressive catastrophe that tore the entire buoyed compound apart in under a minute. The remnants of the structure collapsed and began to sink into the abyss.

Ten thousand mortals drowned. Buffeted by jets of water and smashed into unconsciousness by striking swirling debris, many perished instantly. Death took the children and elderly first and then spread to the healthy adults thereafter.

Amami Yoko mourned, her heart a stone in her chest, but she knew this was inevitable. The mortals could not be saved. Even had they somehow evacuated, they would have died in moments after crossing the gateway. Water, cruel and endless as it could be, was a preferable end to becoming a ghoul.

The demonic cultivators, it seemed, did not agree. Four nexuses of immense power raced through the wreckage of the compound. Bursts of qi discharge offered evidence of mighty attacks unleashed at great speed, swift surges of power used to snuff out dozens of dying mortals at a stroke. Killing the helpless to drain their qi before it could return to the waves, such was the greed of these monsters that they would not ignore even that tiny reservoir of qi placed before them in their hunger to expand their cultivation.

It did not last, but those few minutes of wretched death bought the surviving members of the sect critical time to swim toward the gateway unpursued. When, after the last mortal expired, the four demonic cultivators dove down to face the elders amid the seamount slopes, Amami Yoko dared to believe she might lead the sixty-odd cultivators still following her to the gateway alive.

That hope, and that alone, sufficed to keep her swimming through the tide of sorrow that threatened to submerge them all forever.

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