Shen Yao thought he had long grown numb to the wild developments of strange incidents, but this time, the mutation still caught him completely off guard.
What is the Deep Sea?
Murky, profound water; a boundless expanse; and the sound of massive creatures swimming through the darkness.
Just imagining these things made him feel a little suffocated.
Shen Yao remembered. When he was six, he had been crossing a bridge with his mother, and by accident, he fell from the bridge.
Though his mother quickly pulled him out, he could never forget what he saw and heard beneath that bridge, in the River.
He had fallen headfirst, landing in the soft, wet mud.
His entire body was submerged in the River, and in that brief moment, he saw that beneath the calm surface, there was another world: a brilliantly colored serpent lay coiled in the silt, its vertical pupils locking onto him; Snail Eggs clustered densely like pink clouds drifting in the water; a school of tiny black creatures slid between his fingers like fish—he recognized them as Tadpoles.
From above, the River seemed ordinary, but the moment he plunged beneath the surface, he was stunned to discover mysteries unimaginable.
If even a River was like this, what about the sea?
Humanity had explored less than ten percent of the ocean. In those unseen depths grew countless deformed creatures, some massive, some twisted, some bizarre.
They swam indifferently through the freezing Deep Sea, without emotion, without mercy.
There was no Atlantis or mermaids here—only the colossal beings of the Deep Sea.
The sunlight above could not penetrate here. Shen Yao tried turning on his Waterproof Camera, using the flash to record everything he saw.
He kicked his fins, swimming upwards as best he could. This current abnormality did not match the Strange Tales Qiao Yunxue had described.
There were two possibilities: either the Strange Tale had mutated, or… this was a hallucination triggered by his own Urban Legend Syndrome.
No, “hallucination” didn’t feel right. What he saw was actually something brewing in the Zero Dimension, and only due to his excessive inspiration could he briefly connect to the Zero Dimension.
Whether it was a hallucination or a Strange Tale, there was definitely something in the Deep Sea watching him.
He kept swimming upwards, glancing back repeatedly, his hair standing on end. He felt there was something following behind him.
He couldn’t see it—he could only sense the darkness below gradually expanding, as if some enormous creature was rising toward him.
At that moment, Shen Yao suddenly felt the light above his head dim for a moment. Looking up, he saw a Great-Finned Squid slowly gliding above.
Its body resembled a squid, but its tentacles were incredibly long—nine of them, each nearly twelve meters, hanging straight down into the sea like a battleship sailing through the cosmos.
The Deep Sea and the cosmos—strangely, they seemed to share a mysterious connection.
Shen Yao stared as the eerie yet breathtaking creature swam by, momentarily forgetting to breathe.
Suddenly, a surge of water sounded behind him. Shen Yao turned and saw a sudden flash of light in the abyss.
This was the Deep Sea; aside from the camera in his hand, there shouldn’t be any other light source. What was that frequently flickering glow?
He raised the camera, aiming at the source of the light and zooming in, until he finally saw clearly:
It wasn’t a light source at all, but rather the reflection from the scales of a gigantic serpentine creature as it moved, glinting in the camera’s flash.
This enormous serpent writhed silently in the darkness. Just one of its scales was larger than Shen Yao himself.
It coiled through the sea around him, slowly encircling, gradually constricting. Shen Yao had been swimming upward for so long, but he’d never left its territory.
Shen Yao turned the camera and realized that all around him, in every direction, was some part of that great serpent’s body.
It was cruising through the pitch-black water, its head and tail unseen, only its endless body in view.
The deathly still Deep Sea. A serpent too massive to describe.
And Shen Yao, alone and tiny. He felt as if something was crushing his chest, leaving him unable to breathe.
There was nowhere to escape. Nowhere to go. No up or down, no front or back. No sun or moon, no heavens or earth.
Suddenly, a realization dawned on him. He looked down. The expanding darkness beneath his feet had stopped.
No, it hadn’t stopped—it had already filled his entire field of vision, and the human eye could no longer perceive its approach.
From that darkness, a huge, fleshy organ slowly emerged.
Shen Yao suddenly understood: it was part of the serpent’s head—the very tip. It was so enormous that he couldn’t even see its entirety.
The Abyssal Serpent’s head approached him, the fleshy organ growing larger and larger before his eyes.
Shen Yao saw the texture of its skin, the patterns of its muscle, but it kept coming, kept growing.
In this moment, both heretical and sacred, Shen Yao raised his camera, with only one thought in his mind:
Capture it.
*
The currents shifted. It was as if they had grown hands, pushing him toward the abyss.
Shen Yao realized the giant serpent had opened its mouth; the waters around him swirled like a vortex toward its jaws, and he, like a mayfly, was swept along.
At the final moment, he barely managed to steady himself, pointed the camera into the darkness, and pressed the shutter.
A brief, blinding flash erupted, finally illuminating what lay before him—a blood-red wall of flesh, and a monstrous tongue made up of countless tentacles.
Shen Yao’s nose burned with a sour sting, unbearably uncomfortable.
He suddenly spat out a mouthful of water, and his consciousness rushed back to his body as he began retching.
He felt someone pressing on his chest and abdomen, but his mind was hazy and he couldn’t think.
After vomiting the water from his lungs, his hearing gradually returned.
“Shen Yao! Shen Yao!”
They really liked to shout—both Qiao Yunxue and Cheng Orange were always like this. Shen Yao thought she was being noisy, but his throat burned, and he couldn’t speak.
He’d swallowed so much water, yet his throat felt as if it was on fire.
He didn’t know how long it took, but eventually, Shen Yao could finally see where he was.
Not in the Deep Sea, but beside the Swimming Pool. And Qiao Yunxue was pressing down hard on his chest, trying to force the water out.
Shen Yao weakly tilted his head, looking past Qiao Yunxue to the Swimming Pool behind her.
The water there was calm and undisturbed, the surface crystal clear, even showing the patterns on the bottom tiles.
He had so many questions.
Was what he’d just seen really just a hallucination?
Why had he drowned?
What was Qiao Yunxue doing just now?
What was she hiding?
He saw the Waterproof Camera with its camouflage pattern lying quietly at the edge of the Swimming Pool.
Maybe… the camera had captured something…
He reached out for it, but he was too weak. His eyelids fell shut, and he drifted off into deep sleep once more.