The ocean felt different when Kuro rose from the trench.
It wasn't the pressure or the cold; those had always been constants.
It was the way the water moved around him — drawing closer, then pulling back, as if unsure whether to embrace him or flee.
Even the currents held their breath.
Something was wrong with his reflection.
He hovered before a wall of basalt, rough and scarred by time. In the faint shimmer of bioluminescence, he saw himself — or what he was becoming.
His mantle glowed with a new sigil.
Not carved. Not grown.
Branded.
A spiral of faint crimson light burned beneath his skin, pulsing with each heartbeat. The same color as the abyssal eye.
> [Warning… unknown energy detected. Integration 12%… 19%… 27%…]
The System's voice fractured like broken radio static.
Every percentage spike sent a shock through his nerves — not painful, but overwhelming, as if each pulse was engraving something deeper into him.
He tried to calm his breathing. But the water responded first.
A wave of pressure blasted outward from his body.
Pebbles lifted off the seafloor. Sediment spiraled upward.
Fish in the distance darted away in frantic clouds.
Kuro's eyes widened.
He hadn't meant to do that.
The mark pulsed again.
He felt something watching him — not the great eye, not the voice in the trench, but something closer.
Above him.
A shape drifted through the murk.
Slow. Heavy. Silent.
Kuro's chromatophores flared instinctively, colors shifting across his body in an instinctive warning display… but the creature didn't react.
It continued descending.
As it neared, its silhouette sharpened:
A massive predator — a deep-sea coelacanth, jaws jagged, body plated like stone. Its gills fluttered weakly, leaking thin trails of dark fluid into the water.
Wounded.
Badly.
Yet even in its dying state, it watched him with something like recognition.
Or fear.
Kuro drifted nearer, cautious.
The creature convulsed, twisting in the water. Its eyes rolled upward — not at him, but at the sigil burning on his flesh.
And then its body tore.
Not by fang. Not by force.
By pressure.
A single violent contraction — and its plating buckled inward. Bone snapped with a muffled crunch swallowed by seawater. A red haze blossomed, curling like smoke around its collapsing form.
Kuro recoiled.
He hadn't moved.
He hadn't attacked.
The mark glowed brighter.
> [Integration 41%… 56%…]
[WARNING: Abyssal Imprint is influencing local environment.]
Influencing?
No — claiming.
The water around the corpse warped, spiraling toward Kuro as though drawn by an unseen tide. Tendrils of red drifted into his reach. His body reacted on instinct, absorbing nutrients, sensing ancient enzymes, unraveling memories embedded in the creature's flesh.
He felt its last moments.
A crushing force.
A shadow overhead.
A call it tried to escape but couldn't.
The same call that now lived in him.
Kuro trembled, every tentacle tightening.
This wasn't hunger.
This was possession.
Something deep within him shifted — a new organ unfurling, a new sense awakening. He felt vibrations across kilometers, faint and trembling. Heartbeats of distant predators. Migration routes of prey. Murmurs of creatures too small to see.
The ocean was becoming… loud.
Then the new sense focused, pinpointing one presence above all others — a predator unlike any he'd encountered. Fast. Intelligent. Hunting.
And it was moving straight toward him.
The mark blazed crimson.
> They sense you now.
They smell the deeper blood.
Run or rise, little one — but choose quickly.
The voice wasn't the trench.
It wasn't the eye.
It was inside him, whispering with the same tone the abyss had used — but smaller, closer, like a seed germinating.
Kuro's tentacles flexed.
The water quaked.
The hunter approached.
And for the first time, Kuro felt something sharper than fear:
Dominance.