After about an hour and a half, at around 9:30, He Ao spotted a small platform floating on the ocean's surface, and three yachts were drawing nearer.
The platform bobbed along with the waves while He Ao's gaze turned to the distance.
At the edge of his vision, several ships resembling military vessels were patrolling.
"Those must be ships from the Western Lands,"
The Speech Master pulled out a monocular from nowhere, extending it to look into the distance.
The Western Lands lay to the west of Central Earth, a subcontinent approximately two-thirds the size of Central Earth, dotted with dozens of countries, all fragmented and warring against each other.
Traveling from the Eastern Lands to the Western Lands by land would entail crossing a vast desert.
When He Ao was very young, he thought that if there was a Central Earth and a Western Lands, there must surely be a Southern Lands and Northern Lands, as well as an Eastern Lands.