The SSS class adventurer is a divine cleric

She dropped beside him, half-kneeling. "We lost the rear ships. The Eastern Star... struck reef mid-breach. Qi seals ruptured. The core stone shattered." She shook her head. "It shouldn't have happened. The ship was reinforced."

Lianfeng didn't respond immediately. He was staring out to sea.

Not far from the wreckage, the water was still rising not in waves, but like an invisible force pushed it upward, as if the ocean was folding in reverse. The sea pulsed. It glowed briefly with silver veins, then sank again.

The land behind him rumbled.

He turned slowly, and finally took in the island.

Not tropical. Not barren. It was wrong.

The trees were twisted, massive and sinewy, with bark like scar tissue. The leaves glowed faintly under shadow. Rocks hummed faintly with heat. Everything here had Qi, but it didn't feel natural.

It felt... Feral.

The. He noticed more movement. Down the shoreline, Huo Mingtai, the burly martial brawler was dragging a sailor up the slope with one arm. His knuckles were bloody, his shoulder torn. Behind him, Zhao Shun limped forward with a blade in hand, silent, eyes flicking everywhere like a predator still mid-fight.

Of the full expedition, only a dozen survived.

Some elite soldiers, some cultivators. The rest... broken corpses on the sand.

Meng Nian, the scholar, was alive but catatonic. He kept muttering about leyline inversion and celestial bleeding. No one could understand him.

Wei Lianfeng stood fully now. Despite the pain, he breathed slowly, guiding the threads of his Qi into his ribs, knitting fractures tight enough to hold.

He looked at the wreckage.

He looked at the jungle.

And he understood.

"We're not lost."

His voice was quiet.

"We were brought here."

Yueyin's jaw tightened. "Do you think it was your brother?"

He shook his head.

"He sent me west to die. But this... this place is no execution ground. It's a trap. An ancient one. We weren't the first and we won't be the last."

"Then what do we do?" Huo Mingtai asked, spitting blood.

Wei Lianfeng looked at the broken ship, the looming jungle, the pulsing ocean.

"We survive."

He reached down and lifted a splintered mast pole. The wood groaned in his grip, but held.

"And when we rise, we do not crawl back. We take this land by the throat and make it answer."

The air smelled of salt, blood, and scorched rope.

The survivors moved in silence.

No orders had been given, not formally, but they all understood. The living clung to movement. The dead... waited.

Wei Lianfeng walked among the wreckage, barefoot on black sand. His outer robe was torn at the shoulder, his left forearm bandaged with a strip of sailcloth. The dull ache of internal bruising throbbed with each breath, but he gave it no attention.

"Gather everything of use," he said without raising his voice. "Wood, herbs, rope, cloth, spiritstones if any survived."

Zhao Shun nodded once and vanished toward the broken hull. Huo Mingtai and Yueyin followed without a word, dragging what they could, broken weapon shafts, split barrels, half-shattered Qi containers. Even shattered shards of formation plates were valuable now.

By midday, they had recovered ten bodies. Another three had drifted beyond reach. A few were half-crushed beneath wreckage too large to move without tools.

No one cried.

Martial cultivators were not strangers to death. But this was different.

These weren't men who died fighting. They died fleeing, betrayed by their own sky and sea.

Wei Lianfeng stood at the center of the makeshift burial site. The sand here had been cleared and leveled. A crude marker, a single upright mastpole was driven deep at the center, wrapped with torn crimson sailcloth, the imperial crest stitched into it still visible: a coiled dragon clutching a sunwheel.

Each body was laid in a line, wrapped in what clean cloth they could spare. Bai Yueyin knelt beside one of them, her junior, a girl named Lin Yu. She placed the girl's shattered shortblade across her chest.

Meng Nian, still pale and shaking, began murmuring low funeral rites from the Book of River Paths. His voice cracked twice but held.

When the sand began to fall, covering faces, chests, weapons, no one looked away.

Lianfeng was the last to step forward.

He stood over the line of graves, eyes narrowed against the wind, jaw set.

Then he raised a hand, and bowed once deep and slow.

"You were not weak. You were not forgotten. The heavens may turn their backs, but we will not."

"You fell in a place without a name. I promise you, when this land is mapped, your names will be carved into its bones."

He let the silence hold.

Then turned.

"Enough mourning. We are not done yet."

The lower decks had been crushed between reef teeth, but the forward storage hold, by some divine absurdity, remained intact, wedged between rock outcroppings.

It took three hours, half a dozen ropes, and Huo Mingtai's brute force to rip open a narrow passage.

What they found inside was no treasure, but it was survival, enough to feed the dozen or so men for months and each one of them had their own storage ring so food and clothing was not the problem here but surviving the unknown wild was.

Dried rations (salt-pickled lotus and ashroot)

Dried meat

A cracked spiritual forge (damaged, but repairable)

Four Qi-reinforced barrels of fresh water

Three intact formation tags for emergency healing

Two broken spirit bone spears, one of which Yueyin claimed

Zhao Shun even managed to retrieve Lianfeng's secondary blade: a folded Windsteel saber with its edge still perfect.

"Your main sword?" Yueyin asked, glancing at Lianfeng's empty sheath.

"Lost," he said.

"We'll find it," she replied, like it was a matter of fact, not faith.

They built the fire higher than normal. The beasts of the jungle hadn't attacked yet, but their Qi signatures lingered in the dark, like ghosts at the edge of vision.

Wei Lianfeng sat cross-legged at the fire's edge, slowly guiding his breath into a deeper rhythm. He could feel the cracks inside his meridians. Minor but manageable and the storm had pushed his Core Body Realm to its limits.

He would recover. But he'd need time.

The others sat in a loose circle.

Only thirteen of them remained.

As the wind howled through the trees and the surf dragged against the reef, Wei Lianfeng opened his eyes and stared into the fire.

"We are not dead," he said quietly. "We may be the first flame on this cursed isle."

"Let it be known that my royal brother had sent me to death and the sea had tried to devour me."

"Then I shall devour this land instead."