The trench yawned beneath him like the mouth of a sleeping titan.
Kuro hovered at its edge, the water colder here, thick enough to taste. Light from the upper layers struggled to penetrate this depth; what little reached him trembled like dying embers.
The voice had gone quiet, but the silence it left behind was worse.
A hollow, waiting silence — as if the entire abyss was holding its breath.
> [Core Pressure Stable. Descent possible.]
A lie. His mantle quivered. Even without the System's reassurance, he felt the pressure like invisible hands gripping his skin.
Still… he descended.
Each meter deeper stripped more color from the world. Shadows bled into each other until shape and space dissolved into a single consuming dark. Only the faint bioluminescence along his own limbs marked his presence — soft pulses of blue and violet, fluttering like heartbeat signals.
Then the trench exhaled.
A vast wave of cold surged upward, carrying particles that drifted like ash. Something massive had moved below, displacing water in a way no natural creature could.
> Kuro…
The voice wasn't spoken. It cut through him, a vibration in bone he no longer had.
His tentacles stiffened. He scanned the depths.
Nothing.
And yet everything felt watched.
As he pushed further, a shape materialized — not an object, but a boundary. Walls of stone curved inward, forming a spiraling descent path. Massive claw-marks gouged the rock, each ridge large enough to shelter an entire whale.
The scent of old blood seeped from them. Not fresh. Ancient.
But still potent.
Kuro drifted closer. The moment his tentacle brushed the stone, visions stabbed into his mind — glimpses of a colossal form dragging itself along this narrow passage, leaving oceans shuddering in its wake. He recoiled, ink instinctively spilling into the water behind him, curling like a dark veil.
The trench inhaled again.
A low hum rose from below.
Not hostile.
Not welcoming.
Simply… summoning.
And then he heard it — a distant impact, like something enormous shifting its weight. Pebbles of broken shell lifted from the seafloor around him, trembling in the current.
> Come.
His heart — whatever organ now served in its place — throbbed once.
He descended.
Pressure tightened like ropes, coiling around his body. The walls narrowed. A faint reddish glow pulsed at the trench floor, revealing shapes half-buried in sediment: rib-like arcs of fossilized bone, larger than any creature he'd seen. Some bent inward as though crushed by an impossible force.
The glow brightened. No… it blinked.
A single eye opened in the abyss.
Huge. Circular. Black iris ringed with crimson light, each ripple of its pupil warping the water around it. Kuro froze, every instinct in his being screaming flee.
But he couldn't move.
The eye held him as effortlessly as the tide holds a leaf.
A heartbeat later, something slithered from the shadows behind the eye — not a body, not fully. More like tendrils of darkness woven into the shape of limbs, too large to comprehend. They scraped the rock, leaving fresh grooves alongside the ancient ones.
The force of its presence pressed against his mind, peeling at his thoughts like pages.
> Child of the Shallow Dawn,
why do you rise?
Kuro's breath hitched. He didn't understand the words, and yet he did — meaning bypassing language, entering him raw.
He tried to speak — to think — but the abyss answered him first.
> Feed. Grow. Descend.
Your hunger is the proof that you belong to Us.
A cold shock raced through him.
Us.
Plural.
This was not a solitary entity. It was part of something larger — a hierarchy of ancient beings, deep below the seabed, waiting, dreaming.
One of the shadow-limbs lifted, unfolding slowly. Something clung to it — a corpse. Elongated, skeletal, half-rotted, drifting like a broken banner. The massive limb released it, letting it drift toward Kuro.
A test.
A gift.
Or an order.
He didn't know.
But the scent — metallic, potent, tinged with ancient power — hit him like a storm.
His tentacles moved without thought.
He seized the offering.
And as he consumed it, the abyssal eye narrowed with something like satisfaction.
> Good.
You will come to understand.
The vision around him distorted, pressure spiking. Darkness swarmed his senses like a flood. When it cleared, the eye had closed.
The trench was silent once more.
But Kuro felt it now — something new twisting inside him, burning through his veins like molten metal. A mark. A seed.
A call he could no longer ignore.