As soon as the surface of the Styx closed above me, the world of the dead disappeared. The cries of the souls on the shore, the creaking of Charon's boat, the whistling of the ash wind... everything was instantly annihilated.
I fell into Silence.
But it wasn't the absence of sound; it was a solid silence, an acoustic pressure so powerful that it seemed to want to crush my thoughts before they were even formed. In this mercury darkness, time no longer existed. I was just a particle of rebellion sinking into the bowels of a liquid and hateful deity.
The river water seeped in everywhere. It didn't just surround me, it invaded me. I felt the heavy liquid, tasting of iron and forgotten centuries, rush into my throat, filling what remained of my lungs. Each forced breath was agony. It wasn't air I was looking for, but a way out, and the Styx responded by pouring its black venom into my spiritual veins. Darkness filled my being, suffocating the spark of my consciousness, seeking to dissolve the last fibers of my identity and turn me into mere sediment at the bottom of the abyss.
The pressure became unbearable. I felt as if entire mountains had been placed on my shoulders. My limbs, once light as shadows, now weighed tons. The river was trying to crush me, to reduce me to nothingness under its colossal weight. My rib cage—or what was left of it—cracked under the assault of the mercury. I could no longer scream, for my voice had turned to lead.
Then, just as my mind was about to give way, just as total oblivion opened its arms to me, the pain changed.
It no longer came from outside. It came from within.
The image of the red lycoris in my head did not fade under the water. On the contrary, it crystallized. The heat I felt became a volcanic burn. The crime of my existence, this refusal to die according to the rules, began to react with the essence of the river. The Styx wanted to dissolve me? Very well. I would be the poison that refused to be digested.
I felt a strange texture invade my skin. It was no longer flesh, nor ether. Something hard, cold, and sharp began to grow from my pores, spreading across my arms, chest, and face. It was a shell darker than the river itself, a stone born of crime and pressure: obsidian.
My fingers turned into mineral claws. My joints crackled like stones being crushed. I no longer sank like a victim; I descended like an anchor. The river no longer suffocated me, it armed me. My transformation had begun, and with it, the end of the man I had been.
The Anomaly was no longer a soul. It had become a weapon of stone.