The transition was not a splash, but a collision.
When I hit the surface of the Styx, the black mercury did not yield like water; it struck me with the force of a mountain collapsing.
It was a liquid wall of solidified regrets, dense and freezing, that instantly sought to shatter the fragile architecture of my soul.
The silence of the shore was replaced by a sound that defied description—a roar of millions of drowning voices vibrating through my very essence.
Then, the pain came.
It was not a physical sting, but a fulgurant, white-hot agony that bypassed the senses to strike directly at the core of my being.
It felt as though a thousand frozen blades were being driven into my memories, flaying away the layers of who I was with surgical cruelty.
The Styx did not just want to drown me; it wanted to dissolve the very concept of "I."
The Styx was not a liquid; it was a universal solvent for the spirit.
It seeped into the smallest cracks of my consciousness, seeking to unbind everything that decades of living had woven together.
I was not just losing my form; I was losing the very substance of my existence.
I felt my childhood memories liquefy, becoming a shapeless sludge of dull colors and muffled sounds.
My mother's name, the taste of bread, the sensation of wind against my face—all of it was devoured by the river's black acid.
Each current that struck me tore away a fragment of my history, leaving me lighter, emptier, more transparent.
The Styx did not merely drown me; it erased the evidence that I had ever breathed.
It was a silent agony, an accelerated erosion where every second equaled an eternity of decay.
I was no longer a man swimming; I was an idea flickering out.
My very will began to dilute, dissolving into a lethargic acceptance of the end.
The blackness of the river was becoming my own blackness—a terrifying fusion of the predator and the prey.
In the heart of that suffocating dark, where my name had almost vanished, a spark ignited.
It was a needle of heat in a universe of ice.
The red lycoris did not merely appear; it tore through the black mercury like a jagged blade.
This time, it did not just flicker. It burned.
The petals unfurled with a violence that made the surrounding waters hiss, their blood-red hue turning into a blinding, incandescent white.
A roar of defiance erupted from the center of my being, a sound that the Styx could not swallow.
My will to survive ceased to be a desire and became a physical force—an infernal pressure rising from the depths of my soul.
The river tried to crush me, but the fire within me pushed back, carving a hollow of light in the crushing weight of the abyss.
The agony was still there, but it had changed; it was no longer the pain of being erased, but the pain of being forged.
I felt my essence hardening, turning from a liquid shadow into something solid, sharp, and volcanic.
I was no longer drifting. I was a weapon being tempered in the blackest forge of the universe.
The Lycoris was my heart now, pumping a searing rage through my veins, demanding that I endure.
I would not be consumed. I would be the fire that consumes the dark.
The fire of the lycoris met the cold acid of the river, and in the collision, something new was born.
As the Styx attempted to dissolve my essence, my burning will began to calcify the very waters that tried to kill me.
The black mercury did not just wash over me anymore; it began to bond with my spirit, hardening under the extreme heat of my defiance.
I felt the liquid shadows thicken around my limbs, turning from fluid to solid, from sludge to stone.
Layer by layer, a new shell was forged—a physique born of compressed regrets and volcanic rage.
My skin became a polished surface of midnight, a cage of unbreakable obsidian that mirrored the void around it.
It was a body of dark glass, edges sharper than any blade, heavy enough to sink to the roots of the world and strong enough to shatter the gates of heaven.
The pain of the transformation was absolute, the feeling of my soul being poured into a mold of jagged crystal.
Every joint, every vein, every fiber of this new form was a scream turned into substance.
I was no longer a shadow, a mere sketch of a man to be erased by the tides.
I was a statue of living stone, a black monolith pulse-beating with a red, infernal light.
The Styx had tried to unmake me, but instead, it had given me armor.
I reached out with fingers of glass and felt the weight of the current. For the first time, I did not drift.
I anchored.