The darkness ahead remained thick, but as Amon rapidly approached the target location, a strange hue suddenly pierced the eternal gloom without warning.
It was a faint yet exceptionally warm red glow, like a drop of blood spreading across black velvet—bewitching and striking.
With a slight flick of his dragon tail, he hovered beside the Dead Servant that had sent the information. Not far away, the seabed abruptly split apart. An enormous rift, vast enough to make one's heart tremble, stretched before him. Its jagged edges resembled a wound in the earth's crust, brutally torn open by some unimaginable force and cutting deep into an unknown abyss.
The warm red light was seeping up from that bottomless fissure. There was no distinct source of illumination; it seemed to ooze from the rift itself, staining the surrounding seawater with a hazy, eerie glow.
Even more unbelievable was the sight within the rift. At a depth of more than seven thousand meters, this should have been a lightless, high-pressure, frigid wasteland utterly barren of nutrients—a forbidden zone for life.
Yet the seawater before him shimmered in dreamlike sunset hues. Thousands upon thousands of fish drifted and swam through it, forming a living, flowing galaxy.
Some spiraled upward, tracing graceful arcs of light; others plunged deeper like tornadoes. Their bodies were white as fresh snow or nearly transparent as crystal, and many gave off a faint blue-green phosphorescence.
Everything was vast and magnificent, carrying a fantastical beauty that defied the logic of reality. The sunset-colored seawater and the strange creatures swimming through it created an instant illusion, as though this were not the seafloor, but the twilight sky of some divine kingdom.
No, calling it a god's kingdom would not be wrong. That great Dragon King might well deserve such a title.
Amon