Cold.
Not the sharp cold of winter air.
Not the numbing chill of rain.
This was a cold so immense it seemed to possess weight. It pressed against him from every direction, wrapping around him with relentless force. His thoughts surfaced from a void of silence only to be drowned beneath that unbearable pressure.
His first instinct was to inhale.
Nothing happened.
Panic exploded through his mind.
His chest refused to expand. There were no lungs to draw breath into. Every attempt to breathe only intensified the terror rising inside him.
I'm suffocating...
The realization sent him into blind desperation. His body convulsed, but the movement felt impossibly wrong.
His arms—
Where were his arms?
He tried to clench his fists.
Nothing.
He tried to kick his legs.
Nothing.
Instead, dozens of unfamiliar muscles contracted all at once.
Something soft whipped through the surrounding water.
His body spun violently.
The world lurched.
A violent impact rattled him before everything became still again.
Pain bloomed through flesh that felt disturbingly flexible.
"...What...?"
No sound left him.
His voice had vanished.
Darkness surrounded him.
Not the darkness of a room with closed eyes.
Not even the darkness beneath the ocean at night.
This was absolute.
There was no up.
No down.
No horizon.
No light.
Only endless black.
His heartbeat should have been thunder in his ears.
Instead...
There was another rhythm.
Steady.
Measured.
Water flowed through narrow passages inside him.
A constant current.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
His body wasn't breathing.
Water was.
His thoughts froze.
No...
Again he reached for hands that didn't exist.
Again nothing answered.
Instead, strange appendages twisted beneath him. Too many.
Far too many.
His mind insisted there should be two arms.
His body answered with eight slender limbs and two longer ones that moved differently, each obeying commands a fraction of a second too late.
It felt like trying to write with ten fingers that each belonged to someone else.
He lashed out instinctively.
Every limb tangled together.
His entire body corkscrewed through the water.
Another collision.
Rock.
The impact reverberated through flesh that bent instead of breaking.
Pain, but no bones.
No bones...
The thought refused to settle.
He forced himself to stop moving.
Think.
Panic accomplishes nothing.
That had always been true.
Even now.
Especially now.
Slowly, he focused on sensation instead of fear.
The water around him was impossibly dense.
Every tiny current brushed against his skin with surprising clarity.
Pressure varied across different parts of his body.
Tiny grains drifted nearby.
Something rough rested beneath him.
Stone.
A faint current swept from his left.
Slightly warmer.
Mineral rich.
Without seeing it, he could almost picture the terrain.
His eyes—
Were they closed?
He tried to blink.
Nothing.
No eyelids moved.
Instead, he became aware of a dim awareness unlike vision.
Shadows.
Movement.
Contrast.
Not images.
Only suggestions.
His mind struggled to interpret signals that had never belonged to a human brain.
Then another sensation arrived.
Taste.
Except he hadn't eaten anything.
The water itself carried information.
Metal.
Salt.
Organic compounds.
Countless invisible traces drifted around him, painting an impossible picture of nearby life.
His scientific training surfaced through the panic.
Chemical detection...?
No human could perceive dissolved molecules like this.
No...
No human body could.
Memory returned in fractured pieces.
Steel walls.
Emergency lights flashing red.
Warning alarms.
The research vessel shuddering.
A catastrophic implosion somewhere below.
The viewport.
The crushing roar of pressure.
Then...
Nothing.
"...I died."
The certainty settled over him more heavily than the ocean itself.
His experiment.
The trench.
The collapse.
His death.
Then this.
His thoughts wandered toward impossible conclusions.
Dream?
Hallucination?
Afterlife?
None explained the body he could no longer recognize.
A tiny movement disturbed the current.
Something alive.
Instinct overrode thought.
His limbs froze against the stone.
Pigment shifted beneath his skin without conscious effort.
His body...
Disappeared.
Not physically.
Visually.
Even without understanding how, he knew his skin had changed.
Camouflage.
The nearby current passed.
Whatever had approached continued on without noticing him.
Only after several long moments did the involuntary disguise fade.
"...That wasn't me."
His body had acted on its own.
It hadn't asked permission.
It simply survived.
Fear settled into something colder.
His instincts no longer belonged to a man.
Silence returned.
The darkness stretched forever.
How deep was he?
Hundreds of meters?
Thousands?
He had spent years studying deep-sea ecosystems.
He knew what existed below.
He also knew something else.
No human should survive here.
No ordinary animal either.
His thoughts drifted toward one final possibility.
Reincarnation.
The word felt absurd.
Ridiculous.
Yet every other explanation had already failed.
He tried once more to move carefully.
This time, one appendage extended.
Then another.
Ten limbs answered.
Soft.
Flexible.
Boneless.
His body floated effortlessly, held by water instead of gravity.
Something inside him clenched.
A powerful contraction.
Water exploded behind him.
He shot forward like an arrow.
Before he could react—
CRACK.
Stone met flesh.
The impact sent him tumbling end over end.
Pain flashed through every nerve.
Then stillness.
For several seconds, he simply floated.
Finally, a bitter laugh echoed only inside his own mind.
Jet propulsion...
Only a handful of marine animals moved like that.
The answer arrived before he wanted it.
He already knew.
His limbs.
His breathing.
His camouflage.
His propulsion.
The horrifying absence of bones.
"...A squid."
The words never left his mouth.
There was no mouth capable of speaking them.
Only acceptance.
Tiny.
Fragile.
Lost.
Somewhere beneath an ocean without light.
The darkness remained silent.
Until it wasn't.
A voice.
Not heard.
Not spoken.
It existed somewhere deeper than thought itself.
Older than language.
Older than memory.
It uttered only a single word.
[Live.]
The pressure surrounding him seemed to pulse.
Then the presence disappeared, leaving only the endless abyss.
Atsuya Kurose—marine biologist, twenty-nine years old, dead—
Curled his tiny body against the cold stone.
Above him lay a world he could never reach.
Below him waited an ocean that had forgotten the sun.
And somewhere within that infinite darkness...
Something had acknowledged his existence.