Museum Core Chapter 106: The Abyss

What in God’s name was going on? That System certainly was showing a lot of personality, but everything else was both strange and concerning.

Yet the System window also gave her quite a bit of information.

The guardian was likely the anchor beast; the System could be accessed merely by being present, and as for what that System did, all she had to do was ask.

The System of Machine Ascendency functions around the idea of using technology to grow beyond oneself, gaining abilities based on the primary purpose(s) of the integrated machine.

Interesting.

Not quite her cup of tea, especially considering how much of her build revolved around the synergistic effects that sat at the core of her Class, but there were a whole lot of people who’d doubtlessly love this, assuming they could get the system to respond.

However, proper investigation would have to wait, because her impact against the ocean floor might have been heard. After all, sound carried down here. And she might have been seen too, seeing as even the relatively gentle “landing” had sent eddies of silt swirling upwards.

That was when she noticed something: she wasn’t floating anymore.

Well, she wasn’t moving around normally, that was for sure, she was still very clearly underwater and the ocean was carrying much of her weight, leaving her feeling as though she were walking on the surface of the moon or something, but that endless pressure upwards, as though the water were attempting to eject her, the natural buyancy of the human body, was gone.

… the only reason Jaclyn didn’t facepalm was that doing so would have rung the dinner bell for everything in the area. That was actually normal. Once you got deep enough, the air in the human body was compressed until a diver was actually denser than water and would sink naturally. And she’d known that, when it had actually happened, however, it had caught her completely off guard.

She swiped her hand through the floating silt in front of her, in a vain attempt at getting rid of it. Her already abysmal ability to see her surroundings had just hit a new low.

Part of her itched to grab one of her light sticks and trigger it to illuminate her surroundings, but that would have only made things infinitely worse, surrounding her in a wall of illuminated silt. Not to mention that doing so would likely just be the visual equivalent of waking the dinner bell with a sledgehammer.

If something was already going after her, on the other hand … well, these things had been permanently pushed to F-Rank, then given a temporary bump to E via an overcharge power. In other words, blasting that in the eyes of a deep-sea-adapted monster was a near-guaranteed get out of jail free card.

She paused for a second, considering how she wanted to proceed, then decided to swim a couple of meters above the bottom to avoid unleashing more silt, even if the distance also made it nearly impossible to actually, you know, see the ground, making that position almost as terrifying as simply free-floating in the “void.”

Jaclyn groaned internally, grumbling slightly, then flinched as she realized that the sound had, in fact, carried.

Screw this place!

… and then she felt a burst of pity for whichever poor bastard had to explore the Chinese oceanic transformation zone, which was far deeper and seemed to have no bottom.

With another sigh, this one carefully kept silent, she picked herself up and began to swim forward, in a direction that, according to the compass she could barely see, lay deeper into the transformation zone.

Everything was still just a mess of silt-covered rock, oddly bare of wildlife.

Well, “odd” compared to any even remotely shallow region, she had no earthly idea how “dead” or “alive” the area was supposed to look.

But there was nothing supernatural there, or even just plain “natural.”

Had they gotten lucky? Was this just a random patch of seafloor that had been transposed onto this planet, containing just the anchor beast?

No … there was little chance of that.

A third bout of internal grumbling, then she began to speed up until she was moving at a good clip.

Then she heard it. The groan. It wasn’t anything she’d ever heard, no creature she’d ever seen or even heard about would have made a sound like that, but it certainly wasn’t human.

It was deep, cavernous, vast, and impossible to follow back to its source.

And she could still barely see her hand in front of her face.

Once again, fuck this place!

Then again … if not her, then who? Then what? Depend on Daedalus to do everything?

Cursing herself, Jaclyn resumed her swimming. A handful of minutes later, her “courage” was rewarded, as the first buildings came into view. Well, sort of …

The geometric shapes were too plentiful, too evenly spaced, too … well, too perfect to be coincidental, but that was all she could see beneath a thick layer of all sorts of detritus and plantlife. Dying plant life that had clearly been green, quite recently, in fact.

Based on her limited botanical knowledge, these plants had still been aquatic, so wherever this place had been before the merge, it had still clearly been beneath the waves, but in a far shallower place than this, where light had still been able to reach.

Or maybe the alien star had been absurdly powerful, and light had been able to penetrate this deeply, though when you considered that the amount of light that reached down was cut in half every ten meters. When you reversed that logic, and doubled the “normal” light level of an underwater kelp forest two hundred times to reach the surface … well, the human brain wasn’t very good at grasping the concept of exponential growth, but she still knew that kind power output had to have been downright apocalyptic to anything even remotely close to the surface.

She grabbed some plants and stuffed them in a pocket reserved for samples, then kept going.

The entire city, if that was indeed what this was, rather than being some kind of weird environment like the crystal landscape that now sat in Siberia, had been empty for a long, looong, time, countless layers of silt and plants having accumulated on every available surface.

Until eventually, she decided to duck into one of the larger buildings she could see and finally risked using a glowstick.

It was … well, it was a house, filled with silt that swirled up every time she moved, but that was all. Even before the merge, very few plants had chosen to live in here, cut off from the sunlight that had surely been present back then.

But in the gloom, she laid eyes on the first corpse of this entire delve. Not human, not even remotely human-oid, but that didn’t have to mean anything. Especially not after she’d encountered the mantees.

It was, well, it looked like a fish. Nothing to write home about, a simple, bog-standard “tailfin, dorsal fin, two-to-four pectorals” fish that any child might have drawn on a whim, perfectly ordinary in all respects. Even analyzing it with Inspect only revealed that it had been F-Rank in life, at least based on the quality of “materials” it had “left behind.”

The fish was also about the size of a sheep, making it far too large to store.

This was the point when Jaclyn made her decision. She’d grab the fish, head back up, rejoin the flotilla and have someone do an autopsy on this thing, see if someone could figure something out based on that and the plants.

Granted, she might have been barking up the entirely wrong tree here, but she was pretty sure this thing was deeper than it was supposed to have been based on the signs of life she’d found.

So she grasped the dead animal at the base of the tail, then just began swimming upwards, only for a tremendous scraping and grinding sound, like an entire mountain collapsing, coming from beneath her. No, not collapsing, moving.

Jaclyn grabbed a second glowstick, a special one, and dropped it.

Nothing happened for several seconds as it floated away, bit by bit, then the coating of the gadget began to flake away just as it had been designed, lighting up at a distance, illuminating vast clouds of sand and silt as they were there in the water, swirling about.

Well, something had certainly happened, but was it really that ba- … oh, bollocks!

Jaclyn shot “skyward” at all possible speed, feeling the fish in her hand begin to tear and forcing her to pour mending magic into its flesh to prevent herself from losing her prize.

She hadn’t even seen the entire monster, just the end of one limb. A crab’s claw that could snap the ship that had brought her in half, and not even notice.

But even as she fled, she began to grin. The ocean, the void, the entire world of emptiness that lay beneath the waves, none of that was for her.

That thing, though, that beast? Oh, that, she understood. Fighting monsters was what she did. And a crab the size of several aircraft carriers put together? Well, there was no way in hell she’d be able to eat it all before it went bad, but she’d damn well give it her best shot!

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I don't know if you can tell, but I find the deep ocean seriously scary. Oh, and one of these days, I definitely want to write an entirely ocean-based story, or perhaps just a one-of, with a heaping dose of thalassophobia-fodder. 

And it doesn't even have to be that deep to be creepy. For the Advanced Open Water Diving Certification, you need to conduct a deep dive of ~40m, and the weather wasn't completely calm for that dive. Not even remotely rough, mind you, but enough that there was some silt floating about. I was right next to the dive master, literally shoulder-to-shoulder, arms linked, and i counldn't see my buddy, who was in the same position on the other side of the guy. Separated by the width of a perfectly normal man's shoulders but as far as either of us knew, the other was just ... gone. 

Anyway, back to London in the next chapter.