The Dragon Wakes Beneath the Western Sea

"Dragons do not sleep. They wait. And when memory is restored, so too is their wrath."

— Western Sea Testament, Forbidden Scroll IV

🌊 The Shifting Tides of the West

Far from the Hollow Crown—across the Choked Sapphire Expanse—the Western Sea churned violently.

Storms writhed not from weather, but from time uncoiling.

Ships steered by sect mariners screamed as their compasses cracked. Whales cried beneath the waters as celestial veins pulsed in the deep. An entire archipelago vanished in the blink of a lightning strike.

At the eye of the maelstrom, a single word pulsed in the sea's depths:

"JIN."

And something opened its eyes.

🐚 The Pillar of the Abyss

Beneath the waves, resting for five thousand years, was the Pillar of the Abyss—a divine coral tower constructed not by hands but by will, built around the corpse of a sleeping dragon god: Muruk'an, the Tidal Devourer.

His coils circled the tower like a divine ouroboros.

And within his third eye, long shut and sealed, a ripple echoed.

A voice—burned into the sea from the destruction of the Blood Lotus Pact—now reached him.

"He walks again… the Sovereign Flame… Jin-Ra…"

The dragon stirred.

His coils scraped against seabed cities once protected by the Tideborne Sect, now reduced to ruins.

As Muruk'an awakened, water itself turned to vapor, and gravity rebelled—currents flowed skyward, and clouds reversed direction.

🐉 Muruk'an's Awakening

Muruk'an's eye opened.

It was not a physical act.

It was a spiritual quake that surged across the Realms like thunder through ley lines.

Fishermen in the Western coastal cities fell to their knees, blood leaking from their eyes.

Spiritual beasts began weeping.

The Tideborne Sect, long considered extinct, felt the bloodlines in their bones hum with ancestral memory.

🌫️ In the Hollow Crown

Jin staggered at the edge of the Hollow Crown's final chamber, clutching his chest as a tidal roar ripped through his cultivation core.

Lin Xue caught him.

"What's wrong?"

"Something ancient just… opened its eye. In the West."

"Another dragon?"

"No… not just any dragon. This one remembers who I was. And it's angry."

🐚 The Jade Warden's Return

In the storming sky above the Western Sea, a figure emerged—cloaked in a robe of fishbone thread and carrying a trident carved from kraken ivory.

His presence warped the rain.

He was The Jade Warden, a tidebound cultivator who once served as Muruk'an's emissary and had drowned thousands of sect elders during the Age of Severance.

He knelt in midair, facing the sea.

"Lord Muruk'an… your return is nigh. The Realms forget. We shall remind them."

Behind him, three sea-born sects began to re-emerge from hiding:

🌊 The Deep Pearl Sect

⚓ The Anchor-Fanged Disciples

🐚 The Shellbone Monastery

They had vanished centuries ago after Jin-Ra's first pact.

Now they returned, summoned by the reawakening dragon tides.

🗺️ Meanwhile, Across the Realms

The Eastern Lotus Empyrean prepared spiritual scrolls to counter the shifting balance.

The Northern Bladesaints began marching toward the borderlands.

The Southern Necro-Lotus Sect lit twelve thousand soul lanterns in preparation for war.

All forces converged upon one thought:

"The Hollow Realms are shifting again."

And in all of them, one name echoed.

Jin-Ra.

⚔️ Jin's Decision

In the Hollow Crown, Jin stood beneath the dissolving sigils of the Crown's memory gates.

He clenched his fist, now burning with the flame of severed pacts and resurrected truth.

Ash-Eye looked toward him.

"We're not ready for a dragon war."

"No," Jin said. "But it's coming anyway."

Lin Xue stepped beside him.

"Then we prepare. We gather the Sects. We awaken those who remember. We bring fire to the sea."

Jin raised his hand, summoning the Map of Unfolding War from the Crown's vault.

Each point on the map shimmered with conflict about to begin.

But one glowed brightest.

The Western Sea.

"We sail at dawn," Jin said.

"It's time I face what I buried."

🐉 Closing: The Sea Cracks

As the Hollow Crown trembled, far below, Muruk'an finished shedding his coil of memory.

He uncoiled himself from the Pillar of the Abyss.

The ocean parted.

The moon blinked.

And in a roar heard from the cloudpiercer peaks to the desert realms, the first of the Dragon Wars began.