Deep Dive

The writhing branches flailed chaotically in midair for several seconds, as though they had some kind of sensory organ. Signals in the air passed through a complex nervous system and reached the thick tentacle.

It lifted as if it had a mind of its own, curling and twisting as it reached toward Kraft. The flute-shaped branches shrilled excitedly, contracting more frequently. Their vocal range was no less impressive than that of human vocal cords.

It had soft-bodied parts suited to functioning underwater, vocal organs that should belong to land animals, and branchlike mouthparts like a lamprey's, yet none of them had any obvious purpose.

It was a chaotic collection of things, a jumble of disordered organs and tissues cobbled together to form this creature.

Its frenzied shape seemed to scrape and claw directly at the soul. Merely witnessing it was an immense torment, wearing away what little reason its prey had left.

Kraft watched it, just as he did in every training session, never letting it out of his sight.

He felt as if he were walking through pain made tangible. It took tremendous willpower to overcome the resistance, keep himself upright, face the source of that pain, and approach it.

His mind worked at incredible speed. Without needing to divide his attention, he avoided the obstacles underfoot and at his sides, steadily advancing as he recorded and analyzed the information he gathered from the ghastly pale, viscous tentacle.

That information assailed his consciousness. It was no longer merely sound, color, and shape. It contained things even Kraft's unusual mind could hardly endure, an immense volume of information that could not fit even in a mind capable of clearly recording an entire lifetime.

The soul and body had been designed to store the information a normal human could obtain. They had never been meant to face such things.

He should not have looked at it. The act itself was a mistake. But it was too late. By the time the thought occurred to him, his mind was already deeply immersed. Every attempt to record or understand what he saw only pushed him further down the road to madness.

All that remained of his logic was the first, simplest thought: advance, swing the sword.

His mechanical steps broke through water stained with fluorescent slime, carrying him toward the target that had fixed its gaze on him through the oily White Light.

The photoreceptor cells in his retinas faithfully did their work, turning the image of the loathsome thing before him into electrochemical signals. But his brain had no capacity left to process them in detail, lost as it was in an irresistible madness and pain.

There was no room to change his attack or defend himself, nor did he have the ability to think through anything so complicated. There was only despair, and pure action.

The writhing pallor in his vision grew larger and larger. His charge had built up enough momentum. He swung his arms and brought down the long sword with all his strength, following through on the force of his movement.

He actually did it. Perhaps it had never expected its prey, which should have been incapable of moving, to pull off such a feat. Or perhaps it simply didn't care. Either way, Kraft completed the swing.

The sharp blade gave him an experience unlike anything he had felt before. There wasn't much resistance, but the cut didn't go smoothly. The tissue contained tough fascia, grainy teeth, and unknown substances that felt like coarse fibers.

The gash revealed a structure even more chaotic than the outer layer. Long bones were embedded in interwoven muscle fibers, rows of molars lined a deep cavity, and the passage led to digestive organs churning with acidic fluid.

Glands had grown so crammed into the gaps that their shapes were hard to make out. Tendrils from the Light Tumor had burrowed into them, drawing out some unknown substance.

None of these things should have been inside a tentacle. It didn't look as if it had evolved from a marine creature. It was more like something copied and borrowed from unrelated organisms, defying every law of Anatomy and mechanics. They had been crudely assembled to make the tentacle function, which was why it looked so stiff and unnatural.

These tissues gave Kraft a startling sense of familiarity. There was only one creature he knew, and there had always been only one. A dreadful suspicion surfaced beyond his control, filling him with an intense urge to investigate.

These familiar structures could actually function in such an absurd way. The haphazard stuffing, entirely contrary to the rules, had somehow achieved its purpose, overturning everything he had learned.

He desperately wanted to understand it. Sickening knowledge flooded his mind as he studied the things, yet he was still unsatisfied.

Kraft forgot where he was. All he could see were these dazzling discoveries. He tried to remember more, observe more, heedless of whether his mind could bear it, until he crossed some unknown threshold.

The impact on his consciousness and the turmoil of his emotions exceeded what he could endure. Touch, hearing, sight, smell, heat and cold, his sense of position... Every sensation faded away, vanishing amid the shock.

His body, instincts, and common sense were utterly shattered in the process, stripped of their power to restrain him.

What was ordered was thrown into disorder. What was layered was overturned. What had been sealed away was released, including the deepest and most tightly locked part of all.

At the very end, the only thing that remained was the sensation of falling.

Kraft heard the splash of water beside his ear. A cold, flowing sensation engulfed his entire body. Darkness filled his vision again, and the spreading White Light vanished without a trace. There was no longer any sign of the tentacle or the gash, as if it had all been a vivid hallucination.

He quickly hit bottom as he sank. Salt water flooded his nose and mouth, and the feeling of suffocation forced him to move. He braced his long sword against the floor for leverage and flailed his way back to the surface. Fortunately, the water wasn't deep. When he stood, he felt the waves hitting his waist. This wasn't a deep-water area.

Wide wooden boards stood slightly above the water around him: the tabletops of square tables. The water covered the chairs, and several poorly made ones had floated free.

Kraft realized he had fallen into another entrance hall, exactly like the previous one, except that the water had risen to his waist. The creature radiating White Light had disappeared, leaving not a trace.

Flecks of light still flickered in his vision, outlining the incomplete shape of the tumor. His muscles remained tense, and his fingers clenched the sword hilt wrapped in coarse cloth.

Horrifying, bizarre scenes flashed before his eyes, like film being rewound. The scene bathed in White Light overlapped with the dark, empty space around him. The image of that inhuman thing, driven in an unfamiliar way by familiar muscles and bones, still lingered before his eyes.

In a daze, Kraft saw those muscles and bones move again, compressing the digestive cavity and glands before spewing a mixture of acid from the tooth-lined passage.

His trained instincts made him raise his sword in front of him and stumble backward through the water.

Nothing happened. He was the only living thing in the silent, dark space. The images that had flashed before him were nothing but the imaginings of memories that felt too real: a phantom, terrifying shadow.

Physical pain and mental anguish churned inside his skull, while fragmented memories and thoughts lay scattered and tangled.

One moment, he was replaying what had just happened. The next, he had jumped to a memory of flipping through a book one day. A little later, he was back in physical training.

His mind was like a fragile-goods shop after a free-for-all: utterly wrecked. His consciousness tried to put everything back in order. The fragments it strung together had some connection, but not one that followed strict logic. Other details that seemed out of place were mixed in, too.

They seemed to be recordings from some sort of third-person perspective. That description didn't quite fit, but Kraft was willing to understand them that way, categorizing them as "images."

Yet these things were far more refined than images. They depicted three-dimensional space, even including the internal structure of objects, like models reconstructed in three dimensions from a scan.

His mind effortlessly connected these bizarre contents to the visual images from the same period, piecing them together and accepting that they had been recorded at the same time, even though Kraft had no subjective memory of them.

The process grew faster and faster. The hardest part of a jigsaw puzzle was always getting started; once part of it was complete, fitting the rest together became easier and easier. More "three-dimensional models" matched up with other sensory information from the corresponding moments.

If they stood alongside the other senses, then they could only be another sense: a new sense that had been suppressed all along by instinct and conscious will, allowing him to see the world from another perspective.

It was the embodiment of consciousness and spirit, an extension of consciousness set free to spread out and flow through space. Like any other sense, once you realized it was there, its meaning became self-evident.

This was the true "gift" he had received during that encounter he could not remember. In ancient times, fish evolved lungs when they made contact with land. When humans encountered higher, deeper layers, the stimulus had likewise driven a passive transformation, an "evolution" on another level to help them adapt.

The improvement in memory was merely an outward sign of the change. Through that contact, the mind itself had been elevated into another kind of organ, something made tangible.

The biological instincts of the human body rejected this thing that did not belong to it, locking it away in the deepest part of itself.

Now, a violent shock had briefly shattered common sense and instinct. It had been released and accepted by his conscious mind, and could no longer be hidden.

Kraft finally understood what those indescribable "smells" and "intuitions" were when he approached Anomalies. His tangible spirit had sensed information from another layer in the space around him, hijacking the signal pathways of his other sensory nerves and producing synesthesia.

He "felt" the space around him with his spirit. An invisible yet tangible force fed the information it gathered back to him. Air currents, wormholes in the floorboards, porous wood soaked with liquor—nothing inside or outside could limit this perspective.

His spirit could directly sense how this space differed. Before, he had only sensed the presence of something from another layer. Now, he was in another layer.

Thanks to his connection to something beyond the normal layer, that indescribable ghostly thing had noticed the difference in him. It had followed him from the Salt Tide District and used some unknown method to drag him into a seemingly real yet unreal Deep Layer. He could tentatively call it the "First Layer."

It seemed to be some kind of "reflection," a ghostly realm fashioned from the normal world, following its own set of rules and capable of producing things that made no sense, like that strange phone-like object or... a creature that was logically impossible.

The layer he had connected with was deeper still. Once both his instincts and will had been crushed, his resistance to it had disappeared, and he had been dragged down into the depths.

And so he had arrived here, in this place he could call the "Second Layer."

Kraft stood in the seawater up to his waist. His spirit sensed an even more intense feeling of "abnormality." The depth of the water was merely an obvious sign of how this place differed from the real world. At its core, that difference meant...

[Farther away]