Chapter 478

Chapter 478: It Looked Down on the Abyss.

The submersible had already passed beyond the “bottom” of the city-state. The boundless dark water replaced the rough vertical “cliff” from before. The beam from the high?power searchlight stretched endlessly through the sea, and nothing could be seen within its range.

Only from time to time did tiny flashes appear in the beam. They were drifting bubbles or bits of “debris” falling from above, catching and reflecting the light in the water.

Duncan turned a crank on the control console. The sound of water flooding into the ballast tank turned into a low rumble. He slowed the submersible’s descent and carefully raised its nose at a slight angle.

After crossing that boundary, he wanted to “look back” and gaze upward, to see what the city-state’s foundation really looked like.

The beam swept slowly through the darkness. Something so huge it took his breath away emerged from the endless water. An indescribable weight pressed in with that upside?down “rock layer” hanging above. Even without any supernatural forces causing mental corruption, this sight alone was enough to make most ordinary people feel crushed, even hurt in spirit.

The “foundation” of the city-state of Frostholm appeared outside the porthole. It was as if the land itself was hanging upside down. Under that crushing, sky?filling view, he saw countless jagged structures. They looked like clusters of stalagmites, or a forest of spires. Among the many uneven protrusions, tens or even hundreds of meters tall, there were also things like sticky strands stretched between the “stalagmites”.

Yet in the middle of that shock and pressure crashing over him, what rose stronger in Duncan’s heart was a restless curiosity. He steered the crude little diving machine with care and actually headed toward that jagged, twisted upside?down “forest”.

At the same time, on the Vanished, Duncan had already reached the captain’s cabin and pushed open that door of the Lost Ones.

Zhou Ming walked into his studio apartment and, without surprise, saw a new piece in his collection glowing faintly on the table—the delicate “model” of the city-state of Frostholm.

He walked up to the table, picked up the lifelike city model with both hands, and studied every detail. Then he flipped it over to look at the structure on its underside.

The dense, complicated bumps there looked like some kind of tentacles that had degenerated and been laid out in messy rows. Or, to put it more boldly, like some sort of limbs.

Compared to only using the flames to sense the city’s underlying structure, this Deep Dive had given Zhou Ming far more detail.

He slowly closed his eyes, feeling the information coming from another world. He felt the trembling of the submersible, and the grand, shocking “scenery” slowly moving past its portholes.

This unremarkable steel contraption was passing between two “stalagmites” that were probably one to two hundred meters long. The searchlight’s beam swept over the jagged clusters of protrusions farther away, helping Duncan find a relatively safe path through.

This was a scene never mentioned in the records of the Abyssal Trench Project. Neither in the information Tyrian had provided, nor in the dossiers left in City Hall, was there any note of a submersible sailing through an “upside?down forest” at the city’s foundation.

Perhaps the pioneers back then had focused all their attention on the Deep Sea and never did such “extra” things. Perhaps this grotesque, upside?down mass had seemed too dangerous in the dark, so none of the early submersibles chose to venture into it. Or perhaps…

Perhaps someone had done so before, but no one had ever brought the truth they saw back to the surface.

The searchlight’s beam swept across another patch of darkness.

Something appeared in Duncan’s field of view.

In the next second, he yanked a lever on the console. The sudden reversal of the propeller produced a jolt that made the inside of the submersible creak and groan. The fragile steel sphere shuddered in the deep water. With the terrible sound of its mechanisms taking the strain, it finally came to a stop, almost crashing into a nearby “stalagmite”.

Agatha asked in a panic: “What happened?”

She looked up toward the porthole, but saw only many upside?down, scattered points of light outside. Among them was a larger luminous core. It gave off a hazy glow, and she could not make out any detail inside it.

Duncan did not answer at once. He only stared fixedly out the porthole, at what had just emerged from the darkness…

A huge, pale eye.

An eye. An eye wide open, set between those black protrusions that clustered like tentacles. Its diameter might have reached a hundred meters, making the little submersible in front of it look like a single grain of gravel.

The eye had no life in it. It looked as if it had died hundreds or even thousands of years ago, in some far older age. Pale and hollow, it was set into the bottom of the city and hung upside down outside the porthole. It seemed to still calmly gaze down on the endless, deep dark seabed below, even in its last moments of dying. And now the submersible hovered before its dead pupil, as if receiving this ancient, decayed divine gaze.

Duncan finally broke the silence and said softly: “It is an eye.”

He turned his head and looked out through the porthole on the other side, checking other directions.

The spill of light from the searchlamp lit up the surroundings. He saw those black “stalagmites” hanging upside down in the water. Now he could finally be sure: these things really were limbs.

They were tentacles that had mutated, degenerated, and then lost all life.

These tentacles drooped in the seawater like withered vines hanging from a cave ceiling.

Agatha gripped the handrail hard. Even though her heart had long stopped beating, she still felt as if something in her chest was about to burst out. When she realized what she had just heard, when she understood what those faint lights in front of her really were, she felt a suffocating pressure she had not felt in a long time. She stammered: “You… you mean…”

“The city-state was built on some kind of massive creature,” Duncan said slowly. He was also shaken by what he saw, but he forced himself to calm down and sort out his thoughts. “At least… there are still some traces of it being a living thing.”

Agatha could not speak for a long time. After a long while, she finally managed to put words together amid her shock and confusion: “Is it… dead?”

She lowered her voice without thinking, as if she was afraid that speaking too loudly would wake that unimaginable, unknowable “creature”.

“It should be dead,” Duncan said. At the same time, he carefully steered the submersible, slowly moving away from the huge pale eye. His movements were very cautious. Even though he was almost sure this giant creature was dead, he could not help but imagine something horrible, as if the moment the submersible made any sudden move, that eye would suddenly turn. “And in theory, it should not look like this. This does not fit any biological rule… it looks more like a twisted corpse, or something built out of a corpse as raw material…”

Agatha did not answer. She did not know whether she should marvel that Captain Duncan could still analyze things calmly in such a situation, or marvel at whether a creature large enough to carry a city even needed to “follow biological rules” at all. The sheer chaos and shock filled her heart so much that she could not think about these questions the way she usually did.

The worldview she had built up over so many years was being put to the test.

The true form beneath the cities was so twisted and terrifying. The only safe shelter Mortals had in the Boundless Sea was built on top of an unnameable creature. Under everyone’s feet, under rock and soil thousands of meters deep, withered tentacles hung down into the Deep Sea, and a pale eye looked down at the sea trench. And no one knew anything about it.

After staring blankly for who knew how long, Agatha finally came back to herself. She turned to Duncan and asked hesitantly: “Is only Frostholm like this?”

She did not know why she had to ask Captain Duncan this question. She had not even thought she would get any answer. It was just that the chaos in her heart pushed her to speak, even though the question was doomed to have no clear conclusion.

But the captain answered.

“Maybe all the city-states are like this,” Duncan said slowly. He remembered that time he had ‘sensed’ what lay under Pland. At the same time, from another point of view, he was studying the “collectible” on the shelf in his studio apartment. “Under Pland there are structures similar to these too—but there is no eye. In the place that should match it, there is only a swollen, deformed mass.”

In her shock, Agatha blurted out: “You have dived under Pland before?”

Duncan shook his head: “No. This is my first time diving into the Deep Sea in person. But I have other methods that let me roughly sense what lies under a city-state.”

As he spoke, he raised his head and looked at the upside?down “forest” that hung in the darkness outside the porthole.

Rough sensing always had its limits. If he had not come down to see it with his own eyes, he might never have guessed that the jagged, strange structures under the cities were actually unnameable remains.

The huge pale eyeball was slowly receding from view. The beam from the searchlight slid over the tentacles around it. Yet even as the eye sank back into the dark, the feeling of being under its long divine gaze clung to Duncan’s mind, like countless invisible feelers coiling around the submersible’s hull from all directions.

Even the running of the steam core seemed to grow heavy and sluggish.

But it was all an illusion. The submersible kept moving steadily away from that “forest” and that eye. Nothing was really stopping it.

“We still have to keep diving,” Duncan said, turning to Agatha. “The truth about the city’s ‘foundation’ is only the beginning. We are stepping into a blind spot outside the civilized world’s sight. Anything could appear next. Do you still have the courage for it?”

Agatha also turned her head. Through the black curtain, she met Duncan’s gaze calmly.

“I am ready,” the city-state’s Guardian said in a steady voice. “Let’s keep going down.”