Darkness wasn't the absence of light.
It was pressure — weight — a silence so vast it became sound.
Atsuya Kurose floated in that silence, or perhaps sank. It was hard to tell anymore. The floodlights from the submersible had gone out ten minutes ago. The controls no longer responded. And the ocean — his ocean — had turned from a subject of study into a living thing that devoured its observer.
He remembered the shudder. The metallic shriek as the hull cracked. A sound like bones breaking under the breath of God.
Then — cold. A cold that reached through his wetsuit, through muscle, through thought.
> Is this it?
After all those years studying the abyss… I end up part of it.
His lungs burned. The oxygen gauge blinked red, mocking him. He felt the mask press against his face, tighter, tighter, until he realized it wasn't pressure — it was the deep itself pulling him closer.
The black outside wasn't empty. It shimmered. Something vast drifted beyond the edge of his light — translucent, like a veil moving against the current. Its eyes, or what might have been eyes, watched him not with curiosity but with ancient recognition.
He'd written about things like this.
About creatures that should not exist, life forms adapting beyond reason.
Now one hovered inches from him, silent, reverent.
> Bioluminescent signature… approximately two meters across.
Tentacles… or filaments? No — too many. It's not…
The scientist in him still catalogued the end.
Then came the crack — the sound of his oxygen tank collapsing. A silver explosion of bubbles. His breath vanished into the dark. His body convulsed once, twice, and then—
Silence.
He didn't remember dying.
Only falling.
Through layers of darkness that grew thicker, denser, until light was no longer a concept but a memory.
And then — a pulse.
> [You are descending beyond human reach.]
[Pressure equalization commencing.]
The words weren't heard but felt — like sonar vibrations scraping against his mind.
He tried to open his eyes, but he had none.
He tried to breathe, but there were no lungs.
Only the pulse of a strange rhythm — a fluid heartbeat echoing through a soft, gelatinous body.
> [Vital structure recalibrated. Host adaptation successful.]
Pain followed. Not the sharp agony of injury, but the stretching ache of becoming.
His flesh — or what replaced it — flexed and folded, transparent limbs twisting in currents he couldn't control.
When he tried to move, the world responded sluggishly, as though time had turned to syrup.
He drifted, and through some biological instinct, his body began to glow faintly.
A dim azure shimmer rippled across his skin — not light, but mana.
The abyss around him flickered in response, alive with distant eyes and whispers.
> What… what am I?
Why can't I feel my hands?
He reached for his own voice and found only a chorus of faint pulses echoing from within his head. A sonar ping — and the world painted itself in sound.
Contours of rock. A drifting cloud of plankton. Something larger moving in the distance, slow and deliberate.
He saw it not with sight but resonance.
> [Entity: Host. Classification: Unknown.] [Designation: Larval Cephalopod — Abyssal strain.]
[Cognitive template detected: Human.]
[Initiating synchronization.]
A scream built in his mind — though he no longer had lungs to release it.
When awareness returned again, it was quieter.
He floated among cold currents, smaller than a hand, translucent and fragile. The deep pressed around him — the weight of a thousand mountains.
Each current carried whispers that weren't quite language, a chorus murmuring at the edge of thought.
> [Feed. Survive. Evolve.]
He twitched instinctively — and a jet of water propelled him forward.
Instinct — not decision. The body knew what to do even if the mind did not.
Somewhere above, far beyond the shroud of darkness, he remembered sunlight.
The hum of a research vessel. The laughter of a colleague.
He reached for it in his thoughts — and found nothing.
> No… not nothing. Just… distance.
Atsuya Kurose was still there, somewhere behind the glass wall of his new existence. Watching, analyzing, refusing to accept.
> I'm dead.
No, I'm… I'm data. No, that's absurd. I can feel current. Temperature. Smell—?
The sense was alien — tasting vibration, feeling color through water pressure. Every nerve screamed novelty. Every thought fractured between terror and fascination.
Then, for the first time, he felt hunger.
It wasn't the human gnaw of an empty stomach. It was cellular.
The Abyss itself whispered through his flesh, ancient and hungry.
> [Predatory Directive Engaged.]
[Target: Detected.]
His sonar pulse mapped the shape — a tiny shrimp-like creature drifting close. Weak. Vulnerable.
> No. I'm not going to—
His tentacles struck before thought could intervene.
A splash of blue. A crunch. Warm fluid diffused through the current.
Then — silence again.
> [Assimilation Complete.]
[Skill Acquired: Micro Jet Propulsion.]
[Evolution Path Progress: 0.02%]
The voice was neither machine nor god — yet somehow both.
Each word rippled through his being, rearranging tissue, rewriting instinct.
He felt the shrimp's essence dissolve into him, and the next breath came easier.
> I ate it.
I… survived.
The thought wasn't proud. It was cold, analytical — the same way he once dissected a specimen.
But beneath that calm, something began to stir:
A pulse of satisfaction.
A seed of instinct that didn't belong to Atsuya Kurose.
> Feed. Survive. Evolve.
The whisper deepened — not a voice, but the Abyss itself speaking through the current.
He turned his gaze — or sonar — downward.
Far below, the world stretched endlessly: towers of black coral, rivers of glowing plankton, and something vast slumbering beyond all comprehension.
> How deep does it go?
The abyss didn't answer.
But the whisper did.
> [Deeper.]
And so he descended — a newborn godling drifting into the darkness that had claimed his soul.