At twenty thousand deep-water lengths below the surface of the world, the physical properties of matter underwent a total, terrifying transformation.
The deep water pressure here exceeded ten mountain-crushing pressure. Under such impossible to understand, crushing weight, liquid aether was tightly packed into a dense, jelly-like medium that possessed the consistency of warm glass. Water ceased to flow as a liquid. It moved in slow, plastic earth-shaking plates that ground against one another with the deep, muffled screech of diamond cutting diamond. Light itself seemed to bend and curdle under the load, refracting through the dense fluid in sluggish amber ribbons that cast long, distorted shadows across the drowned chasms.
Mortal flesh could not survive this depth. An ordinary man cast into this deep pit would have been tightly packed into a flat disk of dead stone powder before his lungs could complete a single breath. The air in his blood would have crystal-hardened into needles of ice. His marrow would have shattered like dry pine needles under the blow of an iron maul.
Yet Qiao Ming was no ordinary man. He was the Lead-Sounder of the Sunken Heavens, hardened by fifty years of diving into the Hadal Trenches and pickled in the bitter salt water of three drowned epochs.
