The descent beyond minus twenty-five thousand meters took humanity past the edge of charted oceanography.
At this depth, the ocean was no longer a fluid body. It had become an unbending, crushing solid. The deep water pressure climbed steadily through two hundred and eighty tons of pressure, then three hundred, until the digital tracking data in Titus’s command module recorded three hundred and twenty-five tons of pressure—over forty-seven thousand pounds of pressure.
A cubic foot of water here weighed as much as a heavy truck. Any conventional military submarine would have been tightly packed into a crushed metal bar of silver-steel in less than eight split seconds.
Yet Titus glided downward with majestic, easy peace.
The giant Xuanwu Sovereign’s newly recrystallized shell of diamond-hard deep-sea dark rock absorbed the huge pressure without a single micro-fracture. His thirty-five metric tons of living mass were balanced perfectly against the thickness slope. His massive flippers moved with slow, rhythmic power, guiding the living bathysphere down the upright dark rock deep gap.
Swimming alongside Titus, lighting up the lightless void with his radiant sky aura, was Echo.
The twenty-five-meter Celestial Tide-Serpent glided through the crushing water like a waving ribbon of midnight sapphire and spun white-gold. With every gentle stroke of his four feathery auroral wings, Echo folded the space right away surrounding Titus and the accompanying expedition cutter, Trident-Prime.
