Depthless Hunger

Kai should not have been excited to see a wave of monsters flooding toward civilization, but truthfully he felt a thrill that was more than just hunger. This was why he'd started fighting in the first place: defending everyone against an undeniable menace. After the politicking within the Bloodcoral sect, he was glad to finally get out with them to battle against the ocean.

When he saw the cultivators start to fall out of formation, Kai leapt off his rock and smashed down into the surf. His arrival flattened one of the sea urchin monsters, since their spines couldn't pierce his skin, and he gripped one of them to use as a bludgeon against the others. In a heartbeat he had broken the assault and given the Bloodcoral cultivators time to regroup.

Instead of retreating immediately, Kai skimmed through the water to take out several more of the torso-sized urchins. During his fighting on the beaches, he'd discovered that he could use Sahagin's Soul if he was up to his knees in water, gliding across the battlefield easily, and he'd come to enjoy it.

Eventually, however, he had to leap back to his vantage point. If he fought fully he could have ended the attack himself and the outer sect cultivators wouldn't have gotten any training. The job he'd been sent out here for was to keep them alive, not to finish off the monsters himself. Since he'd already eaten enough of the local monsters to be certain they didn't have any powerful essence, he wouldn't go overboard.

Back on his rock, Kai considered their overall strategy and compared it to the Frontier. They definitely had more redundancy, presumably because the ocean monsters weren't as dangerous a threat as a monster incursion. Instead of all-out war, they tended to have competitions among factions within the sect, and some of the cultivators seemed to think that being sent out to fight monsters was a chore or punishment that just took time away from their cultivation.

During the past month, Kai had gained a strong grasp of the Bloodcoral sect's strength. The sect had a total of eight Earth Soul cultivators and several hundred at the Nascent Foundation stage, which meant they were mid-tier size for a sect. The truly powerful had at least one Sky Soul, but Earth Souls weren't exactly common on Cloudspire.

Which only made him realize how powerful the Brightwind sect was, to be able to send a whole squad of Earth Souls across the world to hunt Zae Zin Nim.

The Bloodcoral sect didn't patrol the entire western coast, instead jostling for territory with several other sects and a northern tribe that also managed sections. There was no treaty stopping sects from the interior from attacking them, but they seemed to consider the coastal sects more trouble than they were worth and just traded with the Bloodcoral cultivators and others for oceanic resources when necessary. Sects were sometimes wiped off the map, but it wasn't happening every day like he'd sometimes gotten the impression.

Just when Kai was beginning to wonder if he should just train on the battlefield, he heard cries of pain. He glanced across the waves, ignoring all of the relatively minor battles, and saw the source: several new monsters had emerged from the water. They weren't much larger than the other urchins, only about chest height, but they glistened an ominous purple.