Chapter 50

The writhing branches flailed erratically in midair for several seconds, as if possessing sensory organs, transmitting signals through a complex nervous system to the thick tentacle.

It lifted as if possessing independent will, curling and twisting toward Kraft, its pipe-like branches hissing in excitement, contracting more frequently, its vocal capacity rivaling human vocal cords.

It possessed soft tissues meant for underwater life and vocal organs suited only for terrestrial animals; its lamprey-like oral branches revealed no plausible biological function.

This creature was a chaotic amalgamation, a haphazard fusion of disordered organ tissues.

Its deranged form scraped and gnawed directly upon the soul; merely witnessing it inflicted immense torment, eroding the last remnants of the pursued’s sanity.

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

He felt as though walking through solidified agony, requiring immense willpower to overcome resistance and force himself toward the source of that pain.

His mind processed at lightning speed, allowing him to avoid obstacles beneath and beside him without distraction, advancing steadily while recording and analyzing information from the pale, viscous tentacle.

These stimuli agitated his consciousness—not merely sounds, colors, or shapes, but elements even Kraft’s unique awareness struggled to accept, a volume of data so vast it could not be contained even by a mind capable of recording an entire lifetime.

The soul and body, designed to store information accessible to normal humans, were never built to handle such entities.

He should not have observed it; that act alone was a mistake. But it was too late—by the time the thought arose, his consciousness was already submerged, each attempt to record or comprehend pulling him further down the path to madness.

In the final logic, only the simplest, original impulse remained—advance, strike.

Mechanical steps shattered the fluorescent, sticky surface, advancing through oily white light toward the target pointing at him.

Retinal photoreceptors faithfully converted the towering abomination into electrochemical signals, yet the brain had no capacity left for fine processing, drowned in inescapable madness and agony.

There was no room for technique or defense, no capacity for complex thought—only desperate, pure action.

The writhing pallor in his vision expanded relentlessly; his charge granted sufficient momentum, both arms swung the sword, following inertia, delivering the fullest force of the blow.

He succeeded—perhaps the creature never expected prey deemed incapacitated to perform such an act, or perhaps it simply did not care, allowing Kraft to complete the strike.

The blade conveyed an unprecedented, bizarre sensation: resistance was not great, yet the cut was uneven, encountering resilient fascia, granular teeth, and an unknown substance with the texture of coarse fiber.

Inside the gaping wound lay an even more chaotic structure: intertwined muscle fibers pierced by long bones, rows of grinding teeth lining deep cavities connected to digestive organs churning acidic fluid.

Hyperplastic glands were crushed into unrecognizable shapes within crevices, their roots from luminous tumors embedded within, siphoning unknown substances.

These structures had no place within a single tentacle; they did not evolve from marine life but seemed crudely stolen and assembled from unrelated organisms, violating all anatomical and mechanical laws, barely functioning only through brutal, forced concatenation—hence their stiffness and unnaturalness.

These familiar structures gave Kraft an unexpected sense of recognition—he knew only one kind of organism, and always only that one. A terrifying hypothesis surfaced uncontrollably, igniting a fierce urge to investigate.

These familiar structures operated in ways utterly irrational, their illogical packing nonetheless achieving function, overturning everything he had learned.

He desperately wanted to understand it; pathological knowledge surged into his mind as he observed, yet he remained unsatisfied.

Kraft forgot where he was; before him were only these dazzling revelations, striving to memorize more, observe more, heedless of whether his consciousness could bear it—until he breached a boundary.

The assaulted consciousness and surging emotions exceeded his upper limit. Touch, hearing, sight, smell, temperature, position—all senses receded, dissolving into chaos.

Body, instinct, common sense—all shattered completely, stripped of restraint.

Order was disrupted, layers overturned, sealed contents released—including the deepest, most tightly locked portions.

In the end, only the sensation of falling remained.

Kraft heard the sound of water splashing beside his ear, a cold, flowing sensation engulfing his entire body; darkness re-filled his vision, the glowing white light swept clean away—no tentacle, no wound remained, as if it had all been a vivid hallucination.

His body quickly touched bottom; saltwater flooded his mouth and nose, the choking sensation spurred him to move, using his sword to brace against the floor and flail upward. Fortunately, the water was shallow—he stood to find it lapping at his waist, not a deep zone.

Around him rose wooden planks slightly above the waterline—tabletops. Chairs were submerged, several of poor quality floating atop the surface.

Kraft realized he had fallen into another antechamber, identical, yet the water had risen to waist-depth, and the luminous creatures had vanished without a trace.

Flickering afterimages of light still glimmered, revealing incomplete outlines of the tumors; his muscles remained tense, fingers clenched tightly around the sword hilt wrapped in rough cloth.

Terrifying, bizarre images flashed before his eyes like a film rewinding—the scenes bathed in white light merged with the dark, empty space before him; the alien forms, driven by familiar muscles and bones in unfamiliar ways, still lingered in his vision.

In a daze, Kraft saw those muscles and bones move again, compressing digestive cavities and glands, spewing acidic fluid mixed with teeth from the lined tubes.

Training instinct drove him to raise his sword before his eyes, stumbling backward through the water.

Nothing happened. In the silent, dark space, he was the only living thing—the fleeting images were merely the imagination running wild on an overly vivid memory, a phantom, a terrifying shadow.

Physical pain and mental anguish flowed within his skull; fragmented memories and thoughts scattered and mingled.

One moment replaying the scene he had just endured, the next leaping to a memory of flipping through a book, then shifting to a physical training session.

His mind resembled a looted fragile-goods store—unrecognizable. Consciousness struggled to reassemble the shattered pieces, linking fragments that bore some connection, yet lacked strict logic, with odd, out-of-place elements mixed in.

They seemed like recordings captured from a third-person perspective—though that description was imprecise; Kraft chose to classify them as “recordings.”

Yet these contents were far more intricate than mere recordings, depicting three-dimensional forms, even internal structures, akin to 3D-reconstructed scans.

Consciousness effortlessly linked these bizarre contents with visual recordings from the same period, assembling them into coherence, recognizing they had been synchronously recorded—though Kraft himself had no subjective memory of them.

The speed of this assembly increased; the hardest part of any puzzle is always the beginning—once a portion was complete, subsequent connections grew easier, more “3D models” aligning with corresponding sensory data from the same time.

Alongside other senses, this could only be another sense—a new one, long suppressed by instinct and subjective will, perceiving the world from a different angle.

It was the embodiment of consciousness and spirit, an extended consciousness freed, spreading and flowing through space. Like other senses, once discovered, its existence became self-evident, its meaning instantly understood.

This was the true “gift” gained during that unremembered contact. In ancient times, fish evolved lungs when encountering land; humanity, upon encountering higher, deeper layers, underwent a passive transformation—an evolution on another level—to adapt.

Enhanced memory was merely a surface manifestation; the spirit and will had been fundamentally elevated into a new organ—a tangible entity.

Human biological instinct rejected this foreign element, sealing it deep within.

Today, violent shock briefly shattered common sense and instinct; it was released, accepted by subjective consciousness, and could no longer be hidden.

Kraft finally understood the indescribable “smell” and “intuition” he had felt near aberrant entities—it was the materialization of spirit perceiving information from another layer, hijacking other sensory neural pathways to produce synesthesia.

He “touched” his surroundings with his spirit—an invisible yet real force fed him feedback: air currents, worm-eaten holes in the floor, waterlogged, porous wood—inside and outside, surface and depth, nothing could restrict this perspective.

His spirit could directly perceive the differences in this space. If before he had merely sensed a presence from another layer, now he was within that layer itself.

Thanks to his connection with entities beyond the normal layer, that indescribable thing sensed his difference, pursued him from the Salt Tides, dragged him into a pseudo-deep world—call it “Layer One.”

It seemed a kind of “reflection,” a twisted nightmare version of the normal world, governed by its own rules, capable of forming utterly irrational things—like that bizarre device resembling a phone, or… biologically illogical creatures.

The layer connected to him was deeper still; when instinct and will were shattered together, resistance vanished, and he was pulled downward into deeper layers.

Thus he now stood here—“Layer Two.”

Kraft stood waist-deep in seawater, his spirit sensing an even stronger sense of “abnormality”; the water’s depth was merely a visible manifestation of difference from the real world—this disparity fundamentally indicated…

【Farther away】