The room was dim except for the flickering glow of the computer screen."Oh, sh… I failed again!" my master KID shouted, slamming his keyboard. He had always been obsessed with games, and every tricky trap seemed to drive him closer to madness.
A sudden knock broke the silence."Sir, your delivery has arrived," someone called from outside.
KID dragged himself to the door and found a small package waiting. Inside lay a curious bottle, the glass glowing faintly as if it held something alive. The label read: "This can take you back to the moment you were born."
KID snorted. "What the… who would believe such nonsense?" With a careless flick of his hand, he tossed the bottle into my tank.
The liquid swirled around me like dark smoke. For a second, I thought it was poison. But then—
I woke up somewhere else.
When I opened my eyes, the world was no longer the quiet tank in my master's room.Above me stretched a pale green sky, shimmering as if the sunlight had to fight through endless layers of water. Strange shadows glided across the waves—creatures with countless limbs and eyes, none of which I had ever seen before. The seabed below was alive, not with plants but with forests of soft corals swaying like alien trees.
My gills flared instinctively. The water here felt heavier, richer, almost raw with life. The currents carried scents of salt and something ancient, a taste older than memory itself.
Then it struck me. Kid's voice echoed in my mind—his words from last night, when he leaned over my tank and rambled about his favorite era of the sea."You know, if you could see the Cambrian oceans, you'd meet creatures that look like nightmares—Anomalocaris, Opabinia, trilobites everywhere. It was the dawn of life's grand show."
Cold realization washed over me.This wasn't a dream.I was staring at the Cambrian, a world half a billion years before humans.
But one question gnawed at me—why here?If I had truly lived for countless millions of years, why did my memory begin only in Kid's little tank?Was I born in this primeval ocean? Or had I simply forgotten an eternity of wandering, my past washed away like sand under the tide?
My thoughts froze as I noticed movement nearby.A cluster of trilobites scuttled across the seabed, their shells clinking softly like tiny shields.Then—suddenly—they all scattered, vanishing into the silt as if fleeing from some unseen terror.
A chill ran down my spine.Slowly, I turned.
And there it was.Two enormous, hollow eyes, blank and glassy, fixed directly on me.The body behind them stretched sleek and alien, its mouthparts bristling with hooked limbs.Anomalocaris—the apex hunter of the Cambrian—was staring at me like I was its next meal.
Instinct screamed at me—run.My fins slashed against the heavy water, pushing me forward as fast as I could. Behind me, I felt the pressure of the current shift, as if the great predator's bulk displaced the ocean itself.
The seabed blurred past. I shot over carpets of spongy mats, past tall fronds that looked like plants but weren't plants at all, their soft tendrils waving hungrily in the current. I didn't dare slow down to look closer—every shadow felt like jaws waiting to snap shut.
A thought flickered through my mind, absurdly clear in the panic: thank whatever gods this ocean has that I haven't run into Opabinia. Five eyes swiveling on stalks, a hose-like claw snatching prey from the silt—just imagining it made my gills seize.
At last, a dark crevice appeared in the coral-like wall ahead. I darted inside, scraping my flank against jagged stone. The water grew cooler, quieter, as if the very sounds of pursuit were muffled by the rock around me. My heart hammered. Was I safe?
I swam deeper. The passage twisted and narrowed, then suddenly—opened.
Before me stretched a hidden chamber, glowing faintly with filtered light. The place teemed with life, delicate and strange. Tiny, threadlike bodies wriggled through the water in gentle arcs—Pikaia, faint notochords glinting like translucent spines.
Nearby, graceful forms like living arrows drifted slowly—Amiskwia sagittiformis, their bodies sleek, almost alien fish without bones.
From the sandy floor sprouted odd little cones with frilled openings—Haplophrentis, tiny hyoliths raising their shells like trumpets of some forgotten fanfare.
And crawling across the rocks, armored but clumsy, were slug-like beings studded with overlapping plates—Halkieria, ancestors of the mollusks, strange cousins to creatures I might one day recognize.
The sight was overwhelming. I had stumbled into a secret garden of the Cambrian, a cradle of experiments, a place where evolution's first drafts swam and wriggled.
For a moment, I forgot the predator outside.For a moment, I felt like I was witnessing the very dawn of life's possibilities.
As I drifted among the Cambrian garden of strange pioneers, something brushed against my mind.Not sound exactly, not water vibration, but a whisper curling through the marrow of my being.
"Finley…"
I froze.That word… no—that name—wrapped around me like a warm current.Finley.It felt familiar, as if I had carried it across countless tides, though I could not remember when it had first belonged to me. The name pulsed inside my chest, comforting and terrifying at once.
Almost without realizing, I began to swim deeper into the cavern, drawn by some instinct older than memory. The chamber narrowed, light dwindled, and the garden of small creatures faded into shadow.
Deeper… and deeper still.
But at the end, there was nothing.Just a wall of rough stone, cold and lifeless.The voice was gone.
I lingered in the dark, staring at the emptiness, my thoughts unraveling like torn kelp in the current. No direction, no purpose—only the endless water pressing from all sides. My body drifted, fins moving without will, carrying me wherever the slow current chose.
Time lost its meaning.
Until—The passage widened once again, and I found myself in a chamber larger than any before. I floated inside, my eyes adjusting to the dim glow seeping through cracks in the ceiling. For a moment, I thought I had found safety.
Then I turned.
The entrance behind me—once open—was blocked. Massive slabs of stone had shifted, sealing the only way out.
My gills flared. Panic tightened in my chest.
And then came the sound.
Soft, thin, almost too quiet to be real:a skittering, a whispering, the faint scrape of many small things moving in unison.
Shhhk… sssk… shhhk…
It came from everywhere—walls, ceiling, floor—as though the very rock itself was alive and restless.
I was no longer alone.
"Why… why must even my only pet leave me? What did I do wrong this time?"
KID's voice cracked, fading into the dim room with no answer but silence. He turned his gaze to the fish tank. Empty. Nothing but a faint, eerie glow pulsing from the water, like a quiet doorway left ajar.
His hands dropped helplessly to his sides. The keyboard, once his battlefield, was now just plastic and dust. Slowly, he dragged himself to the corner of the bed and collapsed, his back pressing against the wall. He stared up at the ceiling, eyes hollow, mind drifting.
Will it return to some river?Or vanish into the endless sea?Or… never come back at all?
The questions circled endlessly, gnawing at him. Yet a strange thought rooted itself in his mind: perhaps the tank wasn't truly empty. Perhaps it was a passageway—one only his pet had managed to cross.
He sat up again, the glow reflected in his tired eyes. On the desk lay a handful of small things: a coin, a broken pencil stub, a smooth pebble from childhood. One by one, he picked them up.
With trembling fingers, KID placed them gently into the tank.
Ripples spread across the water, swallowing each object whole. No sinking. No floating. Just gone—as if the tank itself had devoured them.
KID's breath caught in his throat."What… what are you?"
I drifted aimlessly, still haunted by the memory of the whisper—Finley—when a new movement brushed against the water. A cluster of shadows emerged from the silt, gliding with surprising grace.
At first, my heart clenched, expecting another predator. But as they drew closer, I saw their broad, horseshoe-shaped carapaces gleaming in the filtered light, like shields of living metal. Their strange mouths sifted gently through the sediment, their short spiny appendages brushing the sand.
Cambroraster.
A whole group of them circled me, not with menace but with a kind of calm curiosity. Their movements seemed deliberate, almost reassuring—an unspoken gesture that I was safe among them. They did not strike or chase. Instead, they formed a loose ring, guiding me slowly, steadily, toward a wide hollow in the seabed.
It was their home.Their sanctuary.
For the first time since I awoke in this world, I felt a measure of peace. Exhaustion washed over me, heavy as the tide. My body slackened, and I let myself drift into slumber within their watchful circle.
In my dreams, the voice returned.Finley…Softer now, nearer, as if just behind the veil of the water.
My eyes fluttered open.
The Cambroraster were still around me, quiet and unmoving. But beyond them, in the murk, something else stirred.
A black shape.Slow. Silent. Drawing closer.
Every instinct screamed at me to flee, yet my body betrayed me—I could not move, not a fin, not a breath.
The shadow loomed larger.Closer.