Vast Ruins

As the Ashen continued its deep dive, plunging madly downward, the depth indicator on the main control console began climbing at an utterly terrifying pace.

Ten thousand meters... eleven thousand meters... twelve thousand meters!

At this depth, they had utterly surpassed the limits of what ordinary human technology could detect. It was an absolute dead zone where even ordinary fish-men could not survive with their bare bodies. The crushing pressure of ten thousand meters of seawater pressed against the reinforced Obsidian viewing windows of the Ashen, forming layer after layer of strange, nearly viscous dark-blue ripples outside.

Yet, at the bottom of this deep-sea trench—deemed by every modern geographer to be devoid of life, containing nothing but barren rubble—the instant the Ashen's gravity searchlights forcibly tore through the darkness, a majestic shadow abruptly revealed itself to the entire crew, enough to overturn their understanding of the world.

It was a deep-sea cliff ruin so enormous it defied imagination, forged as a whole from some unknown ancient steel and crustal crystals.

At the heart of the ruins stood the remains of several ancient floating defense towers, each a thousand meters tall. Though they had slept beneath the sea for centuries, covered in thick glowing abyssal moss and the white bones of all manner of mutated sea monsters, their rigid mechanical lines and the savage cuts where some unimaginable supreme force or extreme heat had melted them apart still spoke to the new age of their former glory and tragedy.

"Oh... my God... This is... this is a miracle!!"

At that moment, the door to the special-care ward was violently flung open. Vegapunk's main body, seated in a specially made scientific wheelchair, was pushed by Lilith and Atlas as he nearly lunged madly toward the massive reinforced viewing window.

The sea's smartest