Cultivation begins in Qingfeng Market.

The passage was very long. After walking down several hundred feet and passing through several spiritual energy barriers, the view suddenly opened up before us.

A hollow cave is hidden deep within the reef.

The cave was not large, but it was arranged very compactly, with more than a dozen doorways in the stone walls leading to their respective quiet rooms.

In the center is a circular hall, in which sits a stone table with a bronze mirror on it, displaying a real-time view of the nearby sea.

An elderly-looking late-stage Core Formation cultivator walked over carrying an array plate.

The array plate is octagonal, with a transparent crystal embedded in the center.

He handed the array plate to Lin Zhao, and the crystal emitted a soft white light, scanning him from top to bottom.

The old man glanced at the array plate and nodded: "Human race."

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

The old man put away the array plate, and a smile appeared on his face: "Don't be offended. In this place, you can never have too many tricks up your sleeve. There are many talented demon beasts, and many camps have been destroyed by them."

Next, we introduced ourselves.

There were more than ten Core Formation cultivators in the camp, the lowest being mid-Core Formation and the majority being late-Core Formation.

They were divided into three teams, taking turns to patrol outside and stay behind.

There are two peak Core Formation stage cultivators in the camp.

One is Gu Hongling, the guardian of the camp.

The other one is surnamed Wei, Wei Chong, who is at the peak of the Core Formation stage. Although he is not a figure on the Wind and Cloud Ranking, his strength is not low.

He went out on patrol with a team and won't be back for a few days.

Lin Zhao also learned about the situation of the nearby camps.

The Black Sea camps regularly communicate with each other using special magical artifacts, informing each other of the beast tide's movements and the status of each camp.

There are three other camps nearby, and it takes more than half a month to fly to the nearest one, Camp 8.

Many of the guardians of each camp are figures on the leaderboard.

The old man who went out with us before was surnamed Han. People usually call him Old Han. He has been here for over a hundred years.

The young man's surname was Ji, and he had only been here a short time.

The young man surnamed Ji sized him up for a long time before finally asking, "Fellow Daoist Qinglian, how did you get here?"

Lin Zhao thought for a moment and said, "That's how we flew all the way here."

The young man surnamed Ji choked for a moment.

Old Han, who was next to him, chuckled and shook his head: "No wonder you have such a strong aura of menace. You must have had a tough journey."

Lin Zhao didn't say much.

A quiet room was assigned to him in the cave.

The quiet room was not large; two luminous pearls were embedded in the stone wall, along with a stone bed and a stone table.

Lin Zhao sat cross-legged on the stone bed, closing his eyes to regulate his breathing.

The stone wall provides excellent sound insulation, blocking out 90% of the outside noise, leaving only a very low hum.

This was his first safe haven deep in the Black Sea.

Lin Zhao rested for a few days.

A few days later, he followed Old Han to patrol the nearby sea area.

When Han Lao was young, he was also the patriarch of a local family. Unfortunately, when the beast tide came, his family was wiped out, and he was the only one who barely survived.

After recovering, he came to the Black Sea camp. Old Han was very familiar with the movements of the monsters in the nearby sea.

The two flew more than a thousand miles east from the camp, hovering above a place where undercurrents converged.

Elder Han took out a jade slip, probed it with his divine sense, and began recording information.

As Han Lao took notes, he said, "Intelligence also has different values. First and second-tier monsters are not worth recording. There are too many of them to remember, and there is no need to record them."

If you memorize the locations of 100,000 black-shelled crabs today, they will all be eaten by sea serpents tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow the sea serpents will be eaten by tidal giant shrimp.

The movements of the lower-level monsters are meaningless; they are food in the Black Sea.

He pointed to a dark patch of churning sea in the distance, "We usually record traces of third-tier demonic beasts, especially large numbers of them."

If it is at the peak of the third tier, it should be recorded separately, because it may advance to the fourth tier one day. Recording its abilities and methods now can provide intelligence support for the cultivators behind it.

If a peak third-tier demonic beast leads its pack towards the inland sea, it is usually followed by a massive horde of beasts.

Lin Zhao listened, his gaze sweeping across the sea.

He had already experienced the density of monsters in the Black Sea when he entered it, but when he followed Elder Han on his patrol, what he saw was not the monsters themselves, but the patterns behind them.

Old Han could identify the types of monsters that had appeared here from their corpses, and he could deduce what kind of monsters had passed by from the residual spiritual energy.

The color changes of the seawater indicate that a powerful monster is molting in the deep sea, and a drifting seaweed indicates that a new underwater volcano is erupting thousands of miles away.

He could even predict the direction of the beast tide by observing the frequency of blood battles between monsters. The more intense the blood battles, the more it indicated that the food chain in the depths of the Black Sea was changing, and the monsters at the bottom were being squeezed outwards.

"Hunting monsters in the Black Sea camp is not very meaningful."

Old Han glanced at Lin Zhao and said, "You've killed quite a few in the Inner Sea, so you should have noticed that after killing one batch, another batch comes. It's even worse in the Black Sea."

If you kill a Tier 3 monster today, the territory it vacates tomorrow will attract two more Tier 3 monsters to fight over.

The faster the monsters die, the faster new monsters grow.

The Black Sea is like this—spiritual energy is chaotic, blood energy permeates the air, and food is inexhaustible; the more you die, the more you are born.

Lin Zhao nodded.

Previously, in the Inner Sea, he had almost wiped out all the third-tier demonic beasts in a certain area.

However, he killed hundreds of third-tier demonic beasts along the way, without having any impact on the demonic beasts in the Black Sea.

Countless monsters have died, but countless more are rising.

Elder Han continued, "A Nascent Soul True Monarch can change the world, but only within a range of a few hundred miles, at most a thousand miles."

Moreover, it cannot last. The spiritual power of a Nascent Soul cultivator is not infinite. At most, it can only suppress a beast tide in a sea area for a few years.

At its peak, the Alliance of Ten Thousand Laws once established a large camp 500,000 miles deep in the Black Sea, and even dispatched a late-stage Nascent Soul cultivator to guard it.

But ultimately the pressure was too great, and he retired after less than a century.

"The Alliance of Ten Thousand Laws has hundreds of Nascent Soul cultivators, which sounds like a lot, but it's far from enough to face the endless sea of ​​demons."

The fourth-tier demonic beasts were so enormous, some over a thousand feet in size, that only the endless hordes of demonic beasts in the Black Sea could sustain them.

They generally don't leave the Black Sea because it provides the food they need, but once they do, it's a terrible disaster for countless islands.

Lin Zhao nodded in agreement with this viewpoint.

The Alliance of Myriad Laws has over a hundred Nascent Soul True Monarchs, making them extremely powerful, but they are still not enough to face the endless sea of ​​demonic beasts.

Of course, the failure of the Myriad Laws Alliance does not mean that the human forces in the Cangyuan cultivation world are ineffective.

At its peak, the human race once ventured into the deepest parts of the Black Sea, spanning millions of miles.

It wiped out countless demonic beast tribes, leaving rivers of blood in its wake, turning the Black Sea into a sea of ​​blood.

For over a thousand years, no high-level monsters have dared to appear in the inner sea.

Old Han sighed: "That was the most prosperous and peaceful time, but those powerful figures would not stay in the Endless Demon Sea for long; they would leave after they finished fighting."

Later, the demonic beasts ravaged the land again, and the cultivators of the endless demonic sea could only rebuild their alliances to resist them, as if it were a cycle repeating itself again and again.