The mark still burned beneath his skin.
It wasn't pain; it was a vibration — steady, rhythmic, alive. Each pulse sent ripples of heat through the cold around him, as if the ocean's heartbeat had been grafted into his own flesh.
Kuro drifted downward. The current no longer resisted him; it guided him, parting like a living corridor. He had the sense that he wasn't moving through water anymore, but through thought itself.
> [Memory Synchronization — Initiated.]
[Warning: Cognitive integrity unstable.]
The whisper slid through his mind, patient and clinical. He should have felt panic. Instead, an eerie calm dulled the emotion before it could form.
Then the voices began.
At first they were faint — murmurings woven into the hum of the sea. But with every meter he sank, the sound thickened until it became a chorus: hundreds of tones, layered in impossible harmony. Male and female, human and not. Crying, praying, singing in languages that had never touched air.
> Kuro… Kuro… return… descend…
He tried to block them out, but each attempt only amplified their clarity. Every word carved itself into the pressure around him, echoing against his mantle.
> "Who are you?" he projected through the resonance, a ripple of mana carried by instinct.
The answer didn't come as words.
It came as music.
A low drone reverberated through the trench, vibrating through his shell. Shapes of light unfurled in the darkness — golden, green, red — forming silhouettes of colossal beings. They looked like whales carved from starlight, serpents made of current and memory.
> ≋We are the ones who remember.≋
≋We sang the world into water.≋
Their voices overlapped, ancient and cold.
Kuro's mind bent beneath the weight of their meaning; he glimpsed flashes of an age before biology, when sound alone shaped matter. The Choir's hymn was creation — and every note now sought to rewrite him.
He struggled to stay coherent. Images burst behind his eyelids: his human body floating in a submersible, alarms screaming; his hands clawing at a cracked viewport. The flood of water. The darkness. Then nothing.
He had died once already. He could not die again.
> "I am not your instrument."
The Choir's song faltered — a discordant tremor that shook the deep.
> ≋All become chorus.≋
≋Even gods.≋
The pressure spiked. His tentacles split open at the tips, bleeding glowing threads that coiled around him like strings of a harp. Every nerve screamed as the resonance forced its way deeper, trying to align his pulse with theirs.
> [Emergency Mutation Triggered.]
[Adaptive Response — Neural Insulation.]
His body convulsed. A translucent membrane formed along his mantle, dampening the vibrations. The Choir's influence weakened, their voices becoming distant once more.
Silence returned — but not complete. One voice remained, soft and singular, whispering from the ruins below.
> ≋If you will not sing, then listen.≋
≋Hear what the Abyss remembers.≋
The world shifted.
The black around him twisted into colorless light, revealing a vision of the past.
A city sprawled across the ocean floor — coral towers spiraling upward, bridges woven from living bone. Thousands of beings swam between them: humanoid, elegant, their skin etched with runes that glowed like constellations. The Old Sea Race.
They chanted, their songs resonating with the same tone as the Choir's. Above them, a vast shape coiled — a leviathan with eyes like moons. The Sea God. Their worship made it real, sustained it. Their song bound reality together.
Then, slowly, the hymn shifted. Greed. Fear. A single discordant note. The Sea God turned on its singers, devouring them one by one until only silence remained. The Choir was born from their remnants — an echo that refused to die.
The vision faded. Kuro was alone again, trembling.
> So the Abyss itself… remembers through them.
He finally understood: the voices were not his enemies, but fragments of history, trapped in endless repetition. Yet they wanted to absorb him, to make him part of the cycle — another note in the eternal song.
> No. I'll learn the melody… but I'll play it my way.
He extended his tentacles, releasing a pulse of his own — a sharp, imperfect resonance. The water vibrated with defiance, a new frequency that split the silence. For the first time, the Choir didn't drown it out.
They listened.
And somewhere far beneath, something vast stirred — pleased, or perhaps amused.
> [New Skill Acquired: Resonant Dominion.]
[You have altered the Abyssal Song.]
Kuro felt his consciousness stabilize, his mind clearer than ever. The pressure eased, replaced by a calm certainty.
The Choir had tested him — and he had survived without surrender.
But the last whisper that reached him carried no malice, only warning.
> ≋You changed the song, little echo.≋
≋Now the Abyss will change you.≋