The sky above Black-Scale Strait hung low and bruised, choked with drifting banks of crimson mist and freezing salt spray. Eight hundred miles east of Coral Cloud Island, the narrow oceanic passage had once served as the richest spiritual crossroads in the eastern sea sector, fed by three secondary branches of the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Vein originating from the Dragon-Spine Trench.
Now, seven months after Wang Jian's six Abyssal Star-Iron Siphon Stakes had begun diverting seventy percent of the trench's root essence westward toward Abyssal Pearl City, the waters of Black-Scale Strait had grown barren and thin.
