The farther forward I went, the lighter the blackness ahead became.
Gradually, I had already been swimming for five minutes.
I was still swimming through this black water. An ordinary person would have choked to death in it long ago.
Yet I kept moving forward, and quickly at that.
I felt like I was about to find the surface, because that sense of bobbing up and down that only appeared underwater had returned.
Even if I stopped swimming, my body would unconsciously float upward.
That's right. This direction must lead to the surface...
I thought to myself.
I swam forward for another two minutes. Finally, as I swam upward, one hand broke through the surface.
Then my entire head emerged from the black water.
The instant I surfaced, I felt completely liberated and took a huge breath.
I splashed the pool water and looked around.
I discovered that I was now in a relatively wide pool, at least five times larger than the one I had entered from.
But black water surrounded me, dark as ink.
Waves of white mist drifted around the pool. Mixed with the fishy, salty smell of seawater, the mist continuously sank into the black pool.
It was as though the pool were endlessly absorbing that fishy, salty white mist.
It was completely the opposite of the pool I had come through.
This place drew it in, while the outer pool expelled it.
Not only that, there were several withered, strange old trees along the edge of the pool.
The trees had no leaves. They were pitch-black, twisted, and gnarled.
They looked like the eerie forest where a witch lived in the cartoons I had watched as a child.
They were almost exactly the same as the reflections we had seen in the outer pool.
A