Xu Qing looked down at the ground.

Wherever the Spirit Breath Lamp had been pointing specifically, he knew it was underground. Huang Yan’s jade slip had gone into some detail about what was beneath the Merfolk islands.

For complicated cultural reasons, the Merfolk civilization was divided into an upper world and a lower world. The upper world was on the surface of their islands, and the buildings there were usually made of either skeletons or shells. Merfolk liked skeletons. It didn’t matter if they were the skeletons of fishes, animals, or other intelligent non-Merfolk species. The more sinister and evil-looking the skeletons were, the more they liked them. It was a cultural legacy that was passed down within the very souls of the individual Merfolk.

The second world was under the surface. It wasn’t a cave network. Rather, that world existed beneath the islands themselves, within the sea. All of the Merfolk...