Chapter 152: A Beautiful Crimson
Kael draped his old coat around his shoulders and dismissed the Stone Coffin.
Looking at his left hand felt wrong. The phantom pain had made it impossible to forget he was an arm short, but he had grown comfortable enough with the absence that it became negligible until it suddenly wasn't. Now the hand was back and the absence was the strange thing.
He rolled a card between his fingers.
It had really been regenerated. His hand, and his arm. He flexed it and it responded exactly as it once had.
"Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet."
He created some distance between himself and the entrance to the Depths.
The island was small. Forty minutes to walk around it at most, thirteen to cross straight through. Rocky and tropical, with palm-like trees on the higher ground. The entrance to the Depths itself was narrow. It must have been cone-shaped, tapering to its tip at the surface, Kael concluded.
He tracked the sun for a while, then stepped onto the water and started walking west.
True to Jian's words, the Datum mote made the water solid underfoot. The problem was that it made everything solid. Waves hitting him felt like brick walls. He stepped onto a wave crest and then into the air itself, walking a few centimetres above the white tips.
'I wonder…'
He glanced at his feet. Deactivated the mote on one foot and took a step as though climbing a stair. He rose. Did it again. And again. Eventually he was standing twenty meters above the surface.
'So I could climb like this? Almost like a poor type of flying.'
Not indefinitely though. Like most motes, activation cost more than maintaining it. He would have to pause and reactivate in stages. Ascent was possible, but a continuous ascent was not.
He deactivated it and landed back on the water.
Compared to the Depths this felt like a waste of time. The Depths had offered endless things to learn from. And this was just… well it was water.
He continued.
When the first stars appeared Kael snapped back to the present and yawned.
Even if it hadn't been night, the water beneath him would have looked black. From the textbooks he had read, the Thalassic Ocean, which he was currently walking across, had an average depth of a hundred kilometres. Which was a little counterintuitive knowing the Depths existed beneath it.
'Could it be that the first layer is almost tunnel-like?'
He scratched his forehead.
He had been unknowingly assuming it was arranged like a literal layer, flat and open, extending endlessly in every direction. But if that was true, everything would just collapse inwardly.
'Calling it a layer is misleading. It should be called something more like the first Depth network.'
The tunnels had been so massive many would have struggled to accept it as truth.
The sun had taken the wind with it, leaving the Thalassic Ocean looking like a massive mirror. Kael stepped onto its surface and kept walking. There was nothing wrong with walking in the air, but the water gave a better sense of solidity beneath him. The mote had nothing to do with it. The feeling of water against his boots was simply more grounding.
Far below, a blue light shone that he hadn't noticed before.
Luminescent seagrass stretched upward from somewhere deep, reaching toward the sunlight. At least a kilometre down. They swayed with an invisible undercurrent, their movements creating something like an ocean of their own within the ocean above them.
An army of jellyfish drifted among them, glowing in the same blue, moving between individual weeds without a care in the world.
In the blink of an eye a week passed.
The seagrass had long since disappeared, replaced by deeper and darker water that offered nothing to look at. Even the night sky had stopped holding his attention.
Kael laid on the Stone Coffin and studied the blood red arrow that had pierced Point Aegis back in Velthoria.
A novice sees the beauty of a finished work. The artist tends to see the thousand things that could have gone wrong. The same applied to Kael when it came to this arrow. He had been impressed by it at first, but the longer he spent studying it the more perplexed he became.
Not having Obsidian Shard also made it considerably worse. It wouldn't be a stretch to say his studying took ten times longer at minimum.
The threads of rules woven into the arrow were so carefully constructed they looked like nothing but chaos, and yet somehow operated in perfect union. He was ages away from fully understanding it. But it had helped him regardless. The knowledge had contributed to the new pathway he had created and deepened his understanding in ways he was still mapping.
He turned it over one last time before jumping down from the coffin and tossing it inside.
Over time the weight it had previously seemed to carry had depleted. By now he could lift it without difficulty. But that brought its own concern.
From what he understood, one of the reasons the rank one Luminaire had managed to fire what was effectively a rank five mote was precisely because he hadn't. When the arrow left the bow it had been rank one. Only after absorbing the Luminaires it passed by did it climb in rank, and only then did it manage to pierce his hand. Kael's current concern was that the arrow would eventually exhaust whatever had made it worth studying, leaving behind nothing but an ordinary piece of wood and metal. That would still take a long time. But it was a clock.
Initially he had wanted to use the arrow to accelerate his rank advancement by studying something so profound, but after his conversation with Jian he was less certain how to proceed. His knowledge of refinement was already a mountain, and the possibility of starting anywhere within it produced a strange kind of confusion.
That confusion was exciting though.
Oh, how much there still was to learn in this world!
Kael raised his hands toward the stars and framed a square with his thumbs and index fingers. There was no particular reason. He simply wanted something to do.
Nine stars rested inside the frame. With enough imagination you were supposed to see something like an eagle in them.
However, he struggled to see it.
He had never understood star signs. The earliest humans had looked up at the same darkness and projected shapes onto the gaps between lights, finding pictures in what was essentially random proximity. And the patterns changed depending on which continent you stood on, which undermined any practical value they might have had.
And yet he understood why people did it.
There was something in the act of looking up and finding meaning, even invented meaning, that said something true about what humans were. They couldn't leave things empty. A gap between stars became a wing. A cluster became a crown. The sky was too large and too indifferent to look at plainly, so they filled it with stories until it felt like something that knew they were there.
He, the ocean, and the stars. That was his world right now. Perhaps for his earliest ancestors it had been the same. No noble families, pathways, motes or depths. Just the dark and the lights in it and the question of what they meant.
Of course, not everything needed to mean something. He knew that. But the reaching for meaning was itself something worth noting. It was what separated humans from the beasts down there that simply survived. Humans survived and then immediately started asking why.
That was probably worth something.
Lowering his hands, a massive aurora came into view.
Blinding crimson, moving across the sky in slow waves far lower than red auroras normally appeared.
For the next hour his head stayed tilted back.
A red aurora of this intensity was as rare as a solar eclipse. For one this bright to appear there would have had to have been a high-magnitude solar storm. Before humanity grew wiser the sight of one would send entire populations into panic. The sky bleeding red had a way of doing that.
His mind drifted to the soul-bound mote recipe he had received from Syleena.
Unlike lower ranked mote recipes, this one required not just ingredients but conditions. That had been a genuine surprise. He had no shame in the ignorance. Luminaires who encountered recipes requiring specific conditions were exceedingly rare. This was likely the only one even someone like Syleena possessed. And Kael had been one of those many not too long ago.
But the conditions were specific. Not a red aurora, thankfully, but a white one. The physics of a white aurora were a little more complex, but simplified it required either a rare atmospheric heat event that occurred once or twice per decade, or an extremely violent storm.
Kael closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
So the recipe was more or less completely out of reach for now, whether he had the ingredients or not.
When he looked back up the aurora had descended so low he felt he could almost touch it by reaching up.
He started walking toward it.
There was no physical sensation when he stepped inside it, but a sharp metallic taste arrived on his tongue immediately. If he hadn't known better he might have thought he had licked a coin.
"It shouldn't be able to come this low."
He reached his hand out and moved it through the light as though testing water. Nothing changed.
Then Kael's eyes snapped upward.
Before anything could register the air left his lungs.
Something dived onto him and its talons slammed against him like a wall. The two shot straight down into the water, pulling the aurora with them. Water exploded into the air and bubbles chased them downward in a blur of red and white.
They descended far enough that Kael's lungs began to feel it, and the seagrass became visible again kilometres below. They went even deeper, until they grazed it. Then the talons tightened.
Not around Kael.
Around a sea leviathan that had been roaming the deep.
Kael had been caught between an apex predator and its prey.