Chapter 50: Deep Dive

The wildly dancing branches swayed chaotically in midair for a few seconds, as if possessing sensory organs; signals from the air passed through a complex nervous system to that thick tentacle.

It lifted as if possessing independent consciousness, curling and twisting, reaching toward Kraft. The flute-like branches emitted excited hisses, contracting more frequently; their rich vocal capability was no less than human vocal cords.

Simultaneously possessing soft tissue that should only function normally underwater and vocal organs that land animals should have, the lamprey-like branch mouthparts completely lacked any corresponding reasonable function.

A chaotic collection, a jumble of disordered organs and tissues, piled up to form this creature.

Its mad form seemed to scrape and tear directly upon the soul; merely witnessing it was immense torment, eroding the pursuer's remaining sanity.

Kraft observed it, just as in every training session, never letting it leave his line of sight.

He felt he was walking through solidified pain, needing immense willpower to overcome resistance, supporting himself to face and approach the source of that pain.

His consciousness operated extremely quickly, allowing him to avoid obstacles beneath his feet and at his sides without distraction, advancing steadily while recording and analyzing information obtained from the ghastly, viscous tentacle.

This information stimulated his consciousness; it was no longer mere sound, color, and graphics, but contained things even Kraft's special consciousness found difficult to accept, a load vast enough to clearly record a lifetime of information yet still unable to contain it.

The soul and shell designed to store information obtainable by normal humans had never considered these existences that should not be faced.

He should not have observed it; this itself was an error. But it was too late; when this thought appeared, his consciousness was already deeply entrenched, and every attempt to record or understand was shifting him further onto the path of madness.

In the final logic, only the initial, simplest thought remained—advance, swing the sword.

Mechanical steps broke the water surface stained by fluorescent slime, approaching the target pointing at him amidst the oil-like Bai Guang.

Retinal photoreceptor cells operated faithfully, converting the projection of the upright abomination into electrochemical signals, yet the brain had no remaining capacity for fine processing, immersed in irresistible madness and pain.

There was no room for changing tactics or defense, nor the ability to perform such complex thinking; only desperate, pure action.

The writhing pallor in his field of vision constantly magnified; the charge had accumulated sufficient speed for him. His arms swung the long sword, following momentum, and struck down with maximum force.

He truly did it; perhaps it had not expected prey that should have lost the ability to move to perform such a feat, or perhaps it simply did not care at all, allowing Kraft to complete this strike.

The sharp blade transmitted an unprecedented strange experience; resistance was not great, yet the cutting was not smooth. The tissue contained resilient fascia, granular teeth, and an unknown substance with the texture of crude fibers.

Inside the gaping incision lay a structure even more chaotic than the outer layer; long bones inserted among interwoven muscle fibers, rows of molars arranged within deep cavities, connecting to digestive organs churning with acidic fluid.

Proliferating glands in the crevices were squeezed into unrecognizable shapes; roots from luminescent tumor bodies implanted within them, extracting unknown components.

These should not appear in a single tentacle at all; they did not seem evolved from marine life, but rather plagiarized and borrowed from unrelated creatures, violating all laws of anatomy and mechanics, crudely assembled to barely allow the tentacle to move, which is why it appeared stiff and unnatural.

These tissues gave Kraft an unexpected sense of familiarity, and the only creature he was familiar with was one, always only that one. A terrifying speculation arose uncontrollably, generating a strong desire for investigation within him.

These familiar structures operated in such an utterly unreasonable manner; completely irregular stuffing yet ultimately achieved the purpose, overturning the knowledge he had learned.

He urgently wanted to understand it; pathological knowledge flooded his mind while observing these things, yet he remained unsatisfied.

Kraft forgot where he was; before his eyes were only these dazzling discoveries. He tried to remember more, observe more, regardless of whether his consciousness could bear it, until he broke through a certain limit.

The shocked consciousness and boiling emotions exceeded his upper limit of endurance. Touch, hearing, sight, smell, cold and heat, position... all sensations were receding, annihilated in the vibration.

Body, instinct, and common sense were thoroughly shattered in this process, losing their binding force.

The ordered was disrupted, the layered was overturned, the sealed was released. Including the parts hidden deepest and locked most strictly within.

At the very end, the only thing remaining was the sensation of falling.

Kraft heard the sound of falling water ringing in his ears; cold, flowing sensation immersed his whole body. Darkness refilled his field of vision, the pervasive white light swept clean, and he could no longer see any tentacles or incisions, as if everything had been a vivid hallucination.

The body touched bottom quickly while sinking; saltwater gushed into his mouth and nose. The sensation of suffocation made him move; he used the long sword to brace against the bottom for leverage, flailing his arms and legs to swim upward. Fortunately, the water was not deep; after standing up, he could feel water waves striking his waist—it was no deep-water zone.

Arranged around him were wide wooden boards protruding slightly above the water surface, the tabletops of square tables. The water submerged the chairs; several of poor material floated up.

Kraft realized he had fallen into another antechamber, identical, except the water had risen to waist depth. The Bai Guang-emitting creatures had vanished, leaving not a single trace.

Residual light spots still flickered; the incomplete outline of the tumor bodies could be seen. Muscle tension had not yet subsided; fingers gripped tightly the sword hilt wrapped in rough cloth strips.

Thrilling and bizarre images flashed constantly before his eyes, like film rewinding. Scenes rendered by Bai Guang overlapped with the dark, empty space before him. Alien things, driven by familiar muscles and bones in unfamiliar ways; the image of that form remained before his eyes.

In a trance, Kraft saw those muscles and bones move again, compressing digestive cavities and glands, spraying mixed acidic fluid from the tooth-lined channels.

Training instinct made him raise the sword to block before his eyes, stumbling backward in the water.

Nothing happened. In the silent, dark space, he was the only living creature. What flashed by were merely the imagination's overly realistic memory images, a phantom and terrifying shadow.

Physical pain and spiritual suffering flowed within his skull; fragmented memories and thoughts scattered and mingled.

One second he was replaying the scene just experienced; the next, he jumped to a memory of flipping through a book on a certain day; a moment later, he was pulled back to physical training.

The state of his mind was like a Fragile items store that had been zero-dollar shopped, unrecognizable. His consciousness attempted to tidy up the shattered everything; the connected fragments possessed some correlation, yet not one conforming to strict logic, with some content that looked somewhat off mixed in.

They seemed to be something recorded from a third-person perspective; describing it thus was not entirely accurate. One could only say Kraft was willing to understand them this way, classifying them as "images."

But these contents were far more exquisite than images, depicting forms in three-dimensional space, even including the internal structure of objects, similar to models reconstructed in three dimensions after scanning.

His consciousness seamlessly connected these bizarre contents with visual images from the same period, piecing them together, acknowledging they had been recorded synchronously long ago, while Kraft had no subjective impression of them whatsoever.

This piecing-together speed grew faster and faster. The hardest part of a puzzle game is always the beginning; after completing a portion, the subsequent assembly became simpler and simpler. More "3D models" were matched with corresponding sensory content from the same period.

Standing alongside the other senses, it could only be another sense, a new sense that had always been blocked by instinct and subjective will, viewing the world from another perspective.

It was the materialization of consciousness and spirit, formed by the liberated extension of consciousness, spreading outward, flowing and weaving through space. Just like other senses, once you discover its existence, it is self-evident, and you grasp its meaning.

This was the true "gift" obtained during that contact which could not be recalled. In ancient times, fish evolved lungs during the process of contacting land, and when humans contacted higher and deeper levels, stimulation promoted passive transformation, triggering another level of "evolution" to adapt.

Memory ability was merely the surface manifestation of the change; spiritual will was thoroughly elevated into another organ during the contact, a materialized thing.

Human biological instincts rejected this thing that did not belong to them, sealing it in the deepest recesses.

To this day, a violent impact briefly shattered common sense and instinct; it was released, accepted by subjective consciousness, and could no longer be hidden.

Kraft finally understood what the indescribable "smell" and "intuition" were when approaching aberrant things. It was materialized spirit perceiving information from another level in the surrounding space, seizing other sensory nerve signal pathways, thereby producing synesthesia.

He "touched" the surroundings with his spirit; an invisible yet truly existing force fed the obtained information back to him. Air currents, wormholes within the floorboards, loose wood permeated by wine liquid; the inside and outside could not limit this perspective.

His spirit could intuitively feel the difference in this space. If before he merely felt the aura from another level, now he was situated within another level.

Thanks to his connection with existences outside the normal level, that indescribable ghost thing noticed his difference, chased him from the Salt Tide Zone, and used unknown means to pull him into a superficially similar but actually different deep world, which he would tentatively call the "First Layer."

It seemed to be some kind of "reflection," a ghost realm adapted from the normal world, following its own set of rules, capable of forming utterly unreasonable things. Like that strange mobile phone-like object, or... creatures that were logically impossible.

And the level that established a connection with him was deeper than that. When instinct and will were shattered together, the rejection toward it vanished, and he was pulled downward into even deeper layers.

Thus, he had now arrived at this place, the "Second Layer."

Kraft stood in waist-deep seawater. His spirit felt an even more intense sense of "abnormality." The depth of the seawater was merely the intuitive manifestation of the difference from the real world; this difference essentially indicated...

【Further away】