NOVEL NEXT chapter 88
The naval battle raged on, the thunder of cannons echoing without pause.
The Nyxstar’s cannons fired from both sides, blasting at the swarm of living icebergs around it!
Yang Yi had never imagined that his first sea battle in life wouldn’t be against people—but against a horde of grotesque, worm-like tentacle monsters.
They fought fiercely until dawn, when Yang Yi finally wiped them all out.
Thirty-one in total, all dead, floating across the sea’s surface.
The white fluids spilling from their bodies ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) even bleached the surrounding seawater.
“Phew~ What a damn satisfying battle!”
Yang Yi wiped nonexistent sweat from his forehead.
Halfway through the fight, worried about running out of stamina, he’d even gone below deck to drink a bottle of Vitality Coconut Delight.
After all, those worms couldn’t catch up to him anyway.
By the end of the battle, he had come to better understand the soaked cannon’s peculiar properties.
It didn’t just fire cannonballs—it could also shoot out various kinds of fish.
From long-legged sardines to human-faced octopi, even hammerhead devil sharks—it was all possible.
At one point, he even fired out an unbelievably cute seal.
That shot was devastating—it blew away half an iceberg in one go.
However, fish that he hadn’t previously caught never appeared, which must be some hidden rule of the cannon.
If he could catch stronger fish in the future, then whatever this cannon launched next would be something truly worth anticipating…
Standing at the bow, Yang Yi took a few moments to calm his excitement, then approached the ship’s edge to dismantle the massive bobbit worm’s head.
It was this thing that had drawn the living icebergs to them in the first place.
He climbed down to inspect it.
The giant worm’s head was mangled beyond recognition, its shell riddled with bite marks.
If it had any juices left, they’d long been sucked dry by other worms.
Unfortunately, all that remained inside were bits of hardened bone.
Yang Yi stepped on it—the hardened plates fell away, leaving only two intact mandibles; the other two had already snapped off.
He checked the ship’s equipment stats:
[Name: Broken Head of the Giant Bobbit Worm]
[Type: Ship Equipment]
[Quality: Fine]
[Description: The shattered head of a giant bobbit worm. It no longer has any defensive function, but its two remaining mandibles are still razor-sharp.
Can be mounted on the ship’s bow to cut through obstacles ahead.]
The attributes had weakened—no more durability boost, and half the mandibles gone.
But the good news: it would no longer attract dangerous creatures. He didn’t even need to remove it anymore.
Just as Yang Yi was about to climb back up, he heard that sound again—the one that made his hair stand on end.
He knew that noise even in his dreams—the sound of a worm sucking.
Instantly alert, he drew the Sea Serpent’s Fang and scanned his surroundings.
Sliiirp. Sliiirp.
He saw nothing—only that strange, faint sound echoing nearby.
Switching to his Three Eyes vision didn’t help either—still nothing.
Sliiirp. Sliiirp.
Then he realized—the sound was coming from below!
Slowly, he climbed down and found, in the shadow beneath the bobbit worm’s head, a tiny creature.
It was a chunk of ice no bigger than a basketball, from which protruded a single, thumb-thick tentacle—hanging from the worm’s head.
No wonder his Three Eyes hadn’t spotted it; it was too small, completely hidden behind the head.
“Wait, there’s one this small?” Yang Yi chuckled in disbelief.
Earlier…
The moment the Nyxstar broke free from the worms’ grasp—
Suna had stopped the ship and was preparing to use a grappling claw to pull Yang Yi aboard.
But then she saw several worm tentacles lunging for him, and he hadn’t noticed at all.
Even shouting a warning wouldn’t have been fast enough.
The worms’ gaping maws were already about to swallow the momentarily distracted Yang Yi—
In desperation, Suna used the only spell she knew—Twisting Grasp—targeting the mass of worms surging toward him.
In her vision, the writhing worms began to twist and curl, the force not enough to tear them apart, but enough to distort their trajectory—
causing them to tangle with one another, knotting into a writhing, immobile mass.
The moment she cast it, her magic was completely drained.
A pounding headache hit her, robbing her of all strength.
She collapsed beside the helm—
and remained there until Yang Yi came to her rescue.
Now.
Suna awoke in a warm bed, her head throbbing painfully.
“Where… am I…?”
Moments later, her memories surged back—she understood what had happened.
Yang Yi must’ve carried her inside, throwing a random sweater over her.
She hadn’t been unconscious at first—just too dazed from the headache to move.
Taking a deep breath, Suna frowned and looked at the pile of damp clothes scattered across the floor.
All the garments soaked by seawater had just been tossed aside carelessly.
“Ah-choo!”
She sneezed hard, nose stuffy, two lines of snot dribbling down.
She immediately checked her status.
[Status: Common Cold]
Her brows furrowed deeper.
“Ah-choo!”
Another sneeze.
A few minutes later, the door burst open roughly.
Yang Yi stepped in, holding a ball of ice.
“Hey, look! I caught a living worm larva—wanna—”
The air froze.
“You ever heard of knocking?” Suna’s voice turned icy.
“Next time, definitely!”
Yang Yi shut the door in a hurry and stood frozen for several seconds.
Then he made a firm decision—to completely erase that scene from memory.
He lifted the pale worm larva again.
When he’d first caught it, he hadn’t killed it.
He’d smashed open the ice around it with a few kicks, pulled out the body,
then subdued it with a couple of punches—
which revealed its data.
[Name: Pale Worm Larva]
[Description: A giant soft-bodied creature living in cold seas.
Its body is pliable, and its tentacles are highly extendable.
It shelters itself in thick layers of ice, usually curled up within.
Feeds through worm-like tentacles that suck prey,
moves by inhaling and expelling seawater,
and attacks passing ships.]
Yang Yi set the larva in front of Suna’s door and ordered a Skeletal Arm to hold it still—so it wouldn’t crawl away.
Then he began cleaning the deck.
He drank a bottle of Appetite Potion, downed three sticks of black bread and sausage, restoring his stamina while filling his stomach.
With the skeletal arm’s help, he collected all the scattered worm limbs across the deck.
Unlike the larva, these adult worms could be used for gacha extraction.
And there were still plenty of pale worm corpses floating at sea—thirty-one in total.
He decided to keep one for photos and dissection; the rest could all be used for gacha.
Yang Yi, unable to resist the lure of the gacha, began his rolling right there on deck among the corpses, wasting no time in seeking out his digital rewards.
He fed in three tentacles. The bodies on deck immediately thinned—
since many of those tentacles came from the same creature, feeding one would consume the entire corresponding corpse.
Yang Yi spun the gacha wheel.
Gululu—
Three capsules rolled out.
Yang Yi picked them up one by one and opened them.