The Deep Sea Demonic Whale Territory lay where the deepest ocean trenches converged at the edge of the continental shelf. Its waters were a deep blue utterly unlike the shallows, like an ancient liquid that had settled again and again over countless ages.
The water pressure here could crush ordinary iron into thin sheets, and the temperature remained constantly near freezing throughout the year.
The currents here grew slow and steady, like the even rise and fall of breath within a slumbering behemoth's chest.
But on this day, everything unchanging was shattered in the same instant.
The first change appeared in the region at the heart of the Deep Sea Demonic Whale Territory occupied by the Deep Sea Demonic Whale King.
The waters there began to surge irregularly. Currents that had once flowed to a fixed rhythm were sliced apart and churned to pieces by layer upon layer of turbulence, becoming countless tangled vortices that collided in every direction.
The schools of deep-sea fish living at the territory's fringes had begun fleeing farther outward as soon as the vortices appeared. Their instincts sensed a danger awakening in those depths far beyond anything they could comprehend.
Then an immensely heavy heartbeat pierced the layers of water like an enormous drum struck again and again, making the sea for a hundred miles around tremble faintly.
The first heartbeat was followed by a second, then a third came at a shorter interval than the first two. Each beat was clearer and stronger than the last.
The Deep Sea Demonic Whale King hovered at the very center of those waters, his immense body like a mountain range buried deep beneath the sea. A pale golden sheen was emerging along the edges of the blue scales covering his body.
At first, that sheen flowed slowly