Shadow Slave

Although Sunny did not want to admit it, Old Tom’s death had disturbed him quite a bit.

It was not only because of the fact how vast and terrifying the remains of the ancient horror of the depths looked, and it wasn’t even because of the fact that it had been killed.

What disturbed him the most was the manner of Old Tom’s death.

Sunny was not entirely sure that he could have killed the immense creature. What he was sure about, however, was that he would not have been able to finish it off in one blow.

But it had been.

Old Tom had been crushed like an annoying pest.

Knowing that there was something out there capable of doing something like that made him feel uneasy. That creature, whatever it was, was ahead of them in the race toward the Eternal City - so they would inevitably clash with it, in the end.

Sunny could not help but wonder if he could withstand a similar blow. The answer he came up with... was not very reassuring.

The Night Garden continued its descent.

It plummeted into the dark depths... and then deeper, deeper, and deeper still. The water had long started to behave strangely, and so did the world itself. At times, it felt like the very space was starting to bend and crack, crushed by the terrible pressure exerted by the vast expanse of the Stormsea. But mostly, everything around the living ship seemed terribly still.

Sunny was not sure that even his Supreme body would survive at this abyssal depth anymore.

They did not encounter any Nightmare Creatures after sailing past the grotesque, enormous corpse of the Old Time - dead or alive. Perhaps even among the abominable horrors of the depths, very few dwelled in these unfathomable depths... perhaps there was simply something special about the area where the Eternal City had drowned, repelling the abominations.

In any case, the descent of the Night Garden was eerily quiet. At some point, Sunny and Jet found themselves talking simply to hear the sound of human voices. He shared his knowledge of obscure facts about the Dream Realm, while she told stories and anecdotes about her days of serving as a government enforcer.

Eventually, however, even their voices failed to keep the suffocating silence at bay.

Hours passed, slowly flowing into days. It seemed impossible that any body of water could be this deep, and yet the Night Garden continued to descend at great speed with no sign of the seabed in sight.

The soldiers and the civilians were safely hidden below deck, so the only ones who had to face the absolute silence of the black abyss were Sunny, Jet, and the Saints of Night. If not for the rustle of leaves and the glow of the lanterns illuminating the Night Garden, they would have probably long begun to struggle mentally because of the unnatural lack of... anything, out there around them, in the darkness.

It was easy to imagine people going mad from the mere, eerie absence of everything.

Thankfully, they were too busy to lose their minds.

Despite the draining monotony of the endless descent, Sunny and his companions had a lot to do. There were countless checks to be performed to ascertain the condition of the ship, as well as other measures to ensure that everything was going according to plan.

Taught by the bitter experience of his previous two expeditions, Sunny was regularly testing the connection between himself and his other incarnations. He also kept sending mental messages to Cassie at set intervals, to make sure that nothing interfered with their link.

As the Night Garden descended into the unfathomable depths, Cassie’s voice slowly began to sound distant in his mind. However, it never disappeared altogether.

One of the most complicated tasks they had to perform was to make sure that Nephis could still open her Dream Gate near the Night Garden despite the great mass of water separating her from it. Everything seemed to be fine in that regard, too— even if coordinating the tests was growing progressively more difficult because Nephis herself was in the middle of a dangerous expedition. The most persistent threat to Sunny so far... was boredom.

Leaning on one of the arches of the runic hall, he exhaled slowly and asked in a thoughtful tone:

”What do you think will happen if Nephis opens a Dream Gate between the Stormsea and somewhere like the Nightmare Desert, then pools water in?” Aether was controlling the living ship at the moment, while Jet was sitting on the floor and leaning her back against a pillar. She gave him an amused look. ”Wow, that’s a great idea. Actually, that can be used as a weapon of mass destruction. Well... mass irrigation, at least.”

She fell silent for a few moments, then shrugged.

”I guess she would quickly run out of essence despite being Supreme, considering the great volume of water that would be passing through her Gate. A new sea might still appear in the area she decides to flood, though.”

Sunny whistled, already imagining where he would put a new sea.

Jet, meanwhile, sighed. ”It has little practical use, however, because it would all be seawater. Otherwise, we might have been able to boost agriculture in several desolate regions of the Dream Realm by now.”

Aether, who had been silent until then, suddenly spoke:

”Or she could pour it into a volcano.”

Both Jet and Sunny looked at him in surprise.

”What? Why?”

Aether coughed in embarrassment.

”Oh, it’s just... the explosion would be quite spectacular. I read that that was how the Minoan civilization had disappeared.”

Sunny blinked a few times.

He did not know what the Minoan civilization was, and why its Supreme had decided to pour a sea into a volcano. But more importantly...

”You really think that Nephis needs new ways of producing spectacular explosions?”

Aether blushed.

”Ah... I did not think about that.”

He wanted to say something else, but at that moment, Sunny’s expression changed.

”Stop the ship. Slow it down, quickly!”

Jet tensed, while Aether looked at him in surprise.

Then, the runic circle shimmered slightly, and the rate of the Night Garden’s descent slowly started to decline.

Torrents of water were expelled from the reservoir, and for a few brief moments, the living ship was surrounded by small, fleeting flashes of light — those were bubbles of air bursting from the obliterating pressure.

Jet jumped to her feet.

”Did you sense something?”

Sunny remained silent for a while, then nodded.

”Yes. I think... I sense the bottom of the sea.”

Indeed, his shadow sense had perceived something solid far below the Night Garden — a vast, never- ending plane of solid ground, in fact.

It seemed that the Stormsea did have a bottom, after all.

And they were about to reach it.

Soon enough, the Night Garden came to a stop, hovering just a few hundred meters above the ground. Naeve and Bloodwave had joined them at the bridge by then, and all of them stared down with stunned expressions.

Eventually, it was Naeve who spoke first:

”It’s... it’s flat.”

Sunny nodded slowly, confirming that it indeed was.

Below them, a perfectly flat surface stretched in all directions, with nothing at all rising above it even by a centimeter. There was no seaweed or coral, no dirt, no... anything. Just an endless expanse of flawlessly smooth, glistening glass. Or at least of something that looked like glass.

It was as if they were somehow pulled into a video game where a level failed to render, or maybe had fallen through the map. The bottom of the Stormsea looked like a placeholder excuse of proper geometry... a glaring error in the usual messiness of the natural world.

Sunny looked closer and realized that the floor of the vast sea was not actually black. Instead, it was simply perfectly transparent — but this odd glasslike material stretched so far down that there was nothing beneath it except the lack of light.

”What is this?” His voice was full of bewilderment.

After a long stretch of silence, Aether answered in a calm tone:

”It’s water.”

They all looked at him, failing to understand what he meant.

Aether hesitated for a moment, then explained:

”Under extreme pressure, water changes from a liquid to a solid state... and the solid state of water is ice. Only it can’t become ordinary ice here, since it can’t expand to form its molecular structure due to the pressure. So, it can only become a solid with a denser crystal lattice — a kind of crystal comparable to diamond in hardness. That is what we’re looking at.”

He smiled faintly.

”So the Stormsea doesn’t really have a bottom. It’s just that its waters turned solid under their own weight here.”

Sunny stared at Aether for a few moments, then looked back at the flawlessly flat plane of glasslike surface below them.

Eventually, he shook his head.

”That’s creepy. I can’t help but feel like something is going to stare at us from below this endlessly vast, infinitely thick, perfectly transparent crystal seal...” At that moment, Jet’s hand firmly blocked his mouth.

Looking at him with desperation, she whispered loudly:

”sunny! Please, please stop saying these things aloud!”

He stared at her for a moment, then nodded slowly.

When Jet removed his hand, he smiled.

”Why? If the abyss gazes at us for too long... I might just gaze back.”

Then, Sunny shrugged.

”Don’t worry, though. I am completely sure that there’s nothing there.” Instead of answering, Jet simply groaned.