Elsewhere.
The instant Si Si's submersible was swatted away by a tentacle as thick as a water barrel, the wildly swinging searchlight snapped out like a broken match and vanished with the vessel into the silent deep sea beyond.
"Si!"
Wei Ba cried out involuntarily, but her voice could not pass through the cumbersome diving helmet.
A full minute passed before a muffled rumble, like rolling thunder, came from afar.
The submersible seemed to have crashed into the support frame of a turbine generator, triggering a small collapse.
Watching the murky sediment churn through the darkness, Wei Ba was panicking like crazy, yet there was nothing she could do.
The communications channel was deathly silent, while the muddy water obscured the last faint sliver of light.
The entire stretch of water seemed to have returned to silence, a terrifying silence.
There was no light here.
No air.
And no sound.
There was only endless silence and darkness, along with occasional tremors and muffled noises drifting over with the bubbles, like the whispered murmurs of some indescribable thing in the abyss.
Controlling her breathing, Wei Ba carefully backed toward the ruins and curled up beneath a protruding metal support, trying her best to make herself look smaller.
The round spherical probe was not far from her left hand, still working quietly.
The cable connecting it to the submersible had already drifted far away with the current.
Wei Ba finally understood where the current that had blown the probe askew earlier had come from.
It might well have been that monster's "breath"!
Realizing that the monster was somewhere not far beneath her, Wei Ba felt her scalp go numb. Her gaze kept drifting toward the spherical probe clinging to the terminal beside her.
"Damn! How do you even know when this thing