Chapter 115: Another Ocean

“What do you mean there’s no hole above?”

“Literal meaning.” Kraft touched the white rock wall in confusion; they were indeed standing in a tunnel two paces wide and high, and logically, the difference between this place and the real world shouldn’t be so great.

“All around that side is solid earth and stone—no gap at all.”

When he tried to rise upward, the rock occupied every inch of the corresponding space in the real world—solid, unified, unyielding stone, rejecting dimensional transfer in the simplest, most absolute way.

Kraft didn’t particularly want to add another human fossil mystery for third-rate publications to write about.

“So, originally, there should’ve been an identical hole ‘above.’ Wait—why say ‘above’?”

“It’s just a label. You could call our everyday world ‘outside the mirror’ too, if you like. Did you feel a sense of falling when we came through? If that was real distance, we’re no better off than if we’d been mixed into a rock salad.”

This wasn’t hard to grasp. Combined with the earlier, imperfect analogy, William roughly understood his meaning: “You mean the ‘outside of the mirror’ never got a hole matching the one ‘inside’—so we still can’t go back?”

“Actually, we still could—if you don’t mind being stuck like a frozen fish inside a block of rock.” Kraft corrected William’s view, indicating it wasn’t a problem with his personal technique. But the outcome was identical: they couldn’t return to the real world from here.

“Also, the mirror analogy doesn’t seem quite right anymore.” Kraft held up his torch, scanning the surroundings. “I think you should imagine them as two sheets of paper. When you write on the top one, the ink presses through to the bottom—but writing only on the bottom one barely affects the top.”

“So that means…” William’s palms grew clammy; he hesitated, unable to voice the possibility.

“Yes,” Kraft nodded, confirming the thought William hadn’t spoken aloud. “That thing is moving here too.”

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A little lateral thinking made the key obvious. If these tunnels were ink marks, then the existence of marks appearing only on the lower layer implied that something in this layer was also constructing tunnels.

The threat of being mixed into earth and stone had never faded.

Staying put was no longer a good idea. If they didn’t want to be caught by something replacing their faces, they had to keep moving.

“Let’s go. Maybe if we walk a bit farther, we’ll find a way out?” His knees ached, like ungreased mechanical joints, stiff and creaking as if they might snap at any second.

The pursued realized they had to keep going, rather than wait for those faces to catch up again.

They would emit that same long, horn-like wail like Old Gory, summoning the tunnel-builders to crush anything protruding from the walls.

He hadn’t acted on it immediately because he suspected human fragments weren’t what they wanted.

Those sharp, barbed, shadowy limbs might be skilled at peeling faces from skulls, but they weren’t dexterous enough to pick out mush from rubble and patiently reassemble it.

To avoid choosing between two fates, the untrained captain decided to make up for years of neglected exercise today.

Footsteps and firelight wove around their shifting shadows. William felt no relief from their temporary escape—his spirit grew tighter with every step. He needed to talk, to express something, to share the weight accumulating during this endless walk.

“I feel… we’re in the ocean.”

The remark itself was like a floating object rising from the sea—Kraft didn’t know where it came from or what it meant, but he noticed the trembling in William’s voice. “Why say that?”

“No, it’s worse. If I could get back to the sea, that would actually be a good thing.”

For sailors, believing in things beyond ordinary understanding was normal—but what they’d seen now wasn’t something the human mind could bear; it overturned everything they’d known.

At eleven, his elders first brought him aboard a ship; since then, he’d considered himself locked in struggle with the world’s broadest, most unpredictable domain.

The ocean—even the part known today—was many times larger than all the kings’ and nobles’ lands combined. Even Nors and the lands across the straits didn’t reach the distance marked on his chart from windward to the ice plains.

Depths beyond anchor reach, capricious weather, countless rumors drifting along routes and blank spaces—full of unknowns and challenges. Even the best divers could only know its surface.

Sailors who went mad at sea often developed similar symptoms: an unavoidable fear of the unknowable depths and distant horizons, imagining colossal creatures lurking there, interpreting shifting shadows as the outlines of giants, some refusing to set foot on the sea again for the rest of their lives.

His elders saw this as a shameful retreat; they’d seized wealth from the sea and passed down their contempt along with their coins to William.

The ship’s second owner mocked those men, unable to understand them—until today, when he discovered another kind of “ocean.”

It was so vast, so deep, that the ocean was merely a handful of water it carried.

Its waves could reach a thousand feet high—climbing the crest of one took months. Its width was incalculable. In its calmer stretches, entire civilizations had lived for centuries, building cities and towns like moss—tiny, yet convinced they were immense.

Likewise, people normally only moved on its surface, rarely descending below, and took it for granted. Worse still, no one had ever touched its bottom—unlike the ocean, which always had shallow places where anchors could grip.

Another “ocean,” ignored simply because the human body couldn’t swim or dive within it.

He had witnessed that thing—the thing that roamed through the earth’s depths, treating the ground as a “subterranean sea,” like the legendary eight-legged leviathan drifting in the deep ocean. The Face-Stealers moved along its path like fish trailing a predator’s leftovers.

And such caves existed by the thousands in the southern hills—varying in size, scattered everywhere, some large enough to hold entire houses.

The horrifying truth changed his perspective fundamentally. The solid ground no longer made this seasoned captain feel safe—he realized walking on land was more dangerous than sailing the sea.

The roles had reversed: he’d moved from the safety of water into an incomprehensible, infinitely deep realm of earth and stone. Each step piled on pressure and fear, just as those terrified of the sea suffered endless panic aboard ships, succumbing to hysteria.

If he could, he’d rather stay on the surface forever, never set foot on land again—at least he’d never seen such creatures in the water.

“I never thought of this—that land is a dangerous ocean.”

“Hm?” Kraft couldn’t untangle this muddled talk of ocean and land. “I don’t understand what you’re saying, but I strongly advise you not to think any further—things are getting complicated.”

The cave changed—its walls narrowed and twisted like intestinal lining.

The rock took on a “flexible” form, swelling like pus-filled blisters, invading the tunnel’s interior—as if the tunnel-builder’s body had passed through into another space, while the rest continued moving through.

Within a few dozen steps, the tunnel was completely sealed by rock—they had reached the end.