The black void-salt water was not ordinary sea water. It was the freezing, hadal salt water of the Mariana Trench beneath the Southern Sea—water so dense with stone salt, dead giant beast marrow, and deep-sea pressure that it smelled of drowned dark rock, deep sulfur vents, and ancient shipwrecks rotting in the dark. It flooded the Inner Sanctum to a depth of thirty feet, submerging the fallen stonework, the shattered gold-silver metal arches, and the silver floor under an iron-hard blanket of pitch-black ocean. In the depths, normal vision was useless. Light didn’t penetrate two arm-lengths before being swallowed by the dense, stone gloom.
Ren Prime clung to the central gold-silver metal bracket of the dais, his boots sunk in three feet of swirling water, his teeth chattering wildly in the sub-zero chill. His lungs burned with the painful tightness of Deep-Diver Ren’s exclusion penalty. Sky dysbaric pain flaring through his chest as the dry surrounding air of the room fought against the deep-sea humidity of the flood. Every breath felt like inhaling cold needles. His ribs, already brittle from Artificer Ren’s exclusion, throbbed with excruciating pressure as if iron bands were being tightened around his chest bone.
Beside him, Mira stood waist-deep in the black salt water, her mortal left hand clamped tightly around his forearm. Meanwhile, her smoky quartz right arm glowed like an underwater bright light. Her pure silver chime traveled through the dense water in rhythmic, visible pressure waves that rippled outward in glowing violet rings…
