Edward watched them disappear, but hesitation crept into his heart. He had originally thought he was merely fulfilling his promise to the Evernight Goddess, while also coming to the Chaos Sea to uncover the "truth" for himself. Yet that truth seemed far more complicated than he had imagined.
The Chaos Sea was hidden in the Abyss, and it was also connected to the Shadow World and the River of Eternal Darkness.
That implicated three Sefirah at once.
At this thought, Edward could not help marveling inwardly. Well, well, well. No wonder the Evernight Goddess and Adam refused to come themselves. Even with one being a god and the other a King of Angel, they wouldn't dare face three Sefirah at once so lightly.
If I'd known it would be this much trouble, I should have asked them for more benefits!
Despite those thoughts, Edward soon made his decision: he would press on.
He continued along the dark, rotten, muddy ocean. From then on, he encountered no more living creatures. The farther he ventured, the more corpses filled the ocean, and the more obvious the signs of the Mother Tree of Desire's corruption became on those corpses.
No wonder no devils from the Abyss had appeared in the outside world for all these millions of years. Perhaps it was not that they did not want to leave or could not get out. They had simply all died.
After he had traveled an unknown distance, the ocean ahead suddenly broke off like a cliff. Below lay a pitch-black, bottomless "abyss." Seawater filled with countless bobbing devil corpses flowed upward out of the "abyss" and into the ocean, as though gravity had ceased to function here.
Hovering above the "abyss," he saw indistinct black shadows below, layered upon one another, seemingly real and