"Huh... no! That isn't a plank!"
Lin Yi's eyes widened. Beneath the scattered points of light, something cold seemed to drift over its surface. Compared to a plank, it looked much more like some kind of rough, hard, yellowish-brown block of stone.
"A stone?"
"That... kind of stone?!"
Lin Yi was no stranger to this kind of stone. It was unmistakably the same large, yellowish-brown stone used in the Art Building's stairwell!
The square, yellowish-brown blocks, each half a person's size, were stacked at the bottom of the pool. Who knew how long they had been there?
This place seemed to have formed after some passage had flooded. Some sort of abstract symbols and writing appeared to have been carved into its stone walls, but growing moss now covered them. The moss was like a thick green carpet, as though it had covered history itself.
Yet the sound of chains had not vanished because of that. That eerie figure still existed deep within the dark passage. It had to be moving; otherwise, how could it drag those chains that sounded so incredibly heavy?
They had to be thick chains, like... the kind attached to a ship's anchor!
[Lin Yi...]
[Come here...]
[Come here...]
The voice drifted out of the darkness below like a bubble, accompanied by bubbling sounds, like the final call of someone about to drown.
Lin Yi shook his head violently.
A voice inside him said, Visual hallucinations! They're all visual hallucinations! This is just a pool! Just a pool!
He swam upward, passing through the layer filled with shimmering light, drawing closer and closer to the surface.
He seemed to see lights above the water. Swaying in the ripples like the shattered reflection of the moon, they seemed to be calling to him.
Just as he approached