Deep Dive

The dancing branches swayed chaotically in mid-air for a few seconds, as if possessing some sensory organ; signals from the air were transmitted through a complex nervous system to that thick, massive tentacle.

It rose as if it had an independent consciousness, curling and twisting as it reached toward Kraft. The flute-like branches hissed excitedly, contracting with increasing frequency, their rich vocal capabilities no less developed than human vocal cords.

It simultaneously possessed the soft body that should only function underwater, the vocal organs that should belong to a terrestrial animal, and lamprey-like branchial mouthparts for which no corresponding reasonable function could be found.

A chaotic collection, a hodgepodge of disordered organ tissues, piled together to form this creature.

Its frenzied form seemed to scrape and bite directly at the soul; merely witnessing it was a tremendous torture, eroding the little sanity the pursued had left.

Kraft observed it, just as he did in every training session, never letting the target leave his line of sight.

He felt as though he were walking through materialized pain, requiring immense willpower to overcome the resistance and sustain himself in facing and approaching that source of agony.

His consciousness operated at high speed, allowing him to avoid obstacles at his feet and sides without distraction, moving steadily forward while recording and analyzing the information obtained from the pale, viscous tentacle.

This information stimulated his consciousness—it was no longer merely sound, color, or shape, but contained certain things that even Kraft's special consciousness found difficult to accept, a load capacity so vast that even a mind capable of clearly recording a lifetime of information could not contain it.

The soul and shell, designed to store information accessible to normal humans, were never intended to face such existences.

He should not have observed it; that in itself was a mistake. But it was too late; by the time this thought occurred, his consciousness was already deep within it, and every attempt to record or understand was a deviation further down the path of madness.

In the final logic, only the simplest, most primal thought remained—advance, swing the sword.

Mechanical footsteps broke the water surface stained with fluorescent mucus, approaching the target pointed at him amidst the oil-slick white light.

The retinal photoreceptor cells functioned faithfully, projecting the loathsome, upright thing into electrochemical signals, yet his brain had no remaining capacity for fine processing, immersed in an irresistible madness and pain.

There was no room for changing moves or defense, nor the ability to engage in such complex thinking; there was only despair, pure action.

The writhing paleness in his field of vision grew ever larger; the charge had gathered sufficient speed for him, and he swung his longsword with both arms, following the momentum to strike down with maximum force.

He truly succeeded. Perhaps it had not expected that prey which should have lost its ability to act could perform such a feat, or perhaps it simply did not care, allowing Kraft to complete the strike.

The sharp blade delivered a bizarre experience unlike any before; the resistance was not great, yet the cutting was not smooth, as the tissue contained resilient fascia, gritty teeth, and unknown matter with the texture of coarse fibers.

Within the gaping incision lay a structure even more chaotic than the outer layer; long bones were inserted into the interwoven muscle fibers, and rows of molars were arranged in deep cavities, connecting to digestive organs churning with acidic liquid.

Hyperplastic glands were squeezed into unrecognizable shapes in the crevices, and roots from the luminous tumors were implanted within them, drawing out unknown components.

These things had no business appearing in a tentacle; they did not seem to have evolved from marine life, but rather appeared to have been plagiarized and borrowed from unrelated organisms. They violated all laws of anatomy and mechanics, crudely assembled to barely allow the tentacle to move, which was why it appeared stiff and unnatural.

These tissues gave Kraft an unexpectedly familiar feeling, and the only creature he was familiar with was one—there had always been only this one. A terrifying conjecture emerged uncontrollably, sparking a strong desire to investigate.

These familiar structures could actually function in such an irrational way; the completely illogical stuffing had ultimately achieved its purpose, subverting everything he had learned.

He urgently wanted to understand it; morbid knowledge flooded his mind as he observed these things, yet he remained unsatisfied.

Kraft forgot where he was, seeing only these dazzling discoveries before his eyes, attempting to remember more, to observe more, regardless of whether his consciousness could bear it, until he broke through a certain boundary.

His assaulted consciousness and boiling emotions exceeded the upper limit of what he could endure. Touch, hearing, sight, smell, cold and heat, position... all senses were receding, annihilating in the tremors.

His body, instincts, and common sense were completely shattered in this process, losing their binding force.

The ordered was disrupted, the layered was subverted, and the dust-sealed was released. Including the parts hidden deepest and locked most tightly.

At the very end of everything, the only thing remaining was the sensation of falling.

Kraft heard the sound of splashing water beside his ears; a cold, flowing sensation submerged his entire body, and darkness refilled his vision. The pervasive white light was swept away, and he could no longer see any tentacles or incisions, as if everything had been a vivid hallucination.

His body quickly hit the bottom while sinking; saltwater poured into his nose and mouth, and the sensation of suffocation forced him to move. He used his longsword to push against the bottom for leverage, flailing his limbs to swim upward. Fortunately, the water was not deep; after standing up, he could feel the ripples hitting his waist—it was not a deep-water area.

Surrounding him were wide wooden boards protruding slightly above the water—it was the tabletop of a square table. The water surface submerged the chairs, and several of poor material floated.

Kraft realized he had fallen into another anteroom, identical to the last, only the water had risen to waist depth, and the bioluminescent creature had vanished, leaving not a trace behind.

Residual light spots were still flickering; he could make out the incomplete outline of the tumors, his muscles still tense, his fingers gripping the sword hilt wrapped in coarse cloth.

Horrifying and bizarre images flashed before his eyes repeatedly, like a film rewinding. The scene rendered by white light overlapped with the dark, empty space before him—the alien thing, driven by familiar muscles and bones in an unfamiliar way; the image of that form remained before his eyes.

In a trance, Kraft saw those muscles and bones begin to move again, squeezing the digestive cavities and glands, spraying mixed acidic liquid from the tooth-filled ducts.

Training instinct made him raise his sword to block his face, stumbling backward in the water.

Nothing happened; he was the only living thing in the silent, dark space. What flashed by was merely the imaginative play of overly realistic memory images, an illusory and terrifying shadow.

Physiological pain and mental agony flowed within his skull, and fragmented memories and thoughts were scattered and mixed.

One second he was replaying the scene he had just experienced, the next he jumped to the memory of reading a book on some day, and a moment later he was pulled into physical training.

The state of his mind was like a shop of fragile goods that had been looted; it was unrecognizable. His consciousness was attempting to tidy up the shattered pieces; the connected fragments possessed some sort of association, but it was not logically rigorous, and some content that looked "wrong" was mixed in.

They seemed to be something recorded from a third-person perspective, though describing it that way was not quite accurate; one could only say that Kraft was willing to understand it this way, classifying them as "images."

But this content was far more exquisite than images, depicting the form of three-dimensional space, even including the internal structure of objects, similar to a three-dimensional reconstructed model after a scan.

His consciousness linked this bizarre content with the visual images of the same period without obstruction, piecing them together, acknowledging that they had long been recorded synchronously, even though Kraft had subjectively had no impression of them.

This piecing speed became faster and faster; the hardest part of a jigsaw puzzle is always the beginning, but after completing a portion, the subsequent assembly became easier and easier, as more "three-dimensional models" corresponded with other sensory content from the same period.

Parallel to other senses, that could only be another sense—a new sense that had always been blocked by instinct and subjective will, viewing the world from another perspective.

It was the materialization of consciousness and spirit, formed by the extension of liberated consciousness, spreading to the surroundings, flowing and traveling through space. Just like other senses, as long as you discovered its existence, it was self-evident, and you grasped its meaning.

This was the true "gift" obtained during that unrecallable contact. In ancient times, fish evolved lungs during the process of contacting land, while humans, when contacting higher and deeper levels, experienced stimulation that promoted passive transformation, undergoing "evolution" on another level to adapt.

Memory ability was merely the appearance of change; his spiritual will had been thoroughly promoted during the contact into another organ, a materialized thing.

Human biological instinct rejected this thing that did not belong to it, locking it in the deepest depths.

To this day, the violent impact had briefly shattered common sense and instinct; it had been released, accepted by subjective consciousness, and could no longer be hidden.

Kraft finally understood what those indescribable "scents" and "intuitions" were when approaching anomalous entities. It was synesthesia, produced when materialized spirit perceived information from another dimension in the surrounding space, hijacking the signal pathways of other sensory nerves.

He "stroked" his surroundings with his spirit, and an invisible yet tangible force fed the gathered information back to him. Air currents, the wormholes in the floorboards, the porous wood soaked through with liquor—neither inside nor outside could restrict this perspective.

His spirit could intuitively feel the difference in this space. If he had previously only sensed an aura from another dimension, he was now existing within that very dimension.

Thanks to his connection with an existence outside the normal plane, that indescribable monstrosity had sensed his difference, pursued him from the Salt Tide District, and used unknown means to drag him into a distorted, deep world—let us call it the First Layer.

It seemed to be some kind of "reflection," a ghost realm adapted from the normal world that followed its own set of rules and could form things that defied all logic. For instance, that strange, phone-like object, or... biologically impossible creatures.

Yet the plane that had established a connection with him was even deeper; when instinct and will were both shattered, the rejection of it vanished, and he was dragged down into an even deeper descent.

And so, he had arrived at this place now: the Second Layer.

Kraft stood in waist-deep seawater, his spirit sensing an even more intense feeling of "abnormality." The depth of the seawater was merely an intuitive manifestation of the difference from the real world; the essence of this discrepancy indicated that...

[It is further away]