Facing the Deep Sea

Ophelia had originally intended to take Klein and leave.

Her plan was simple—flare her battle qi to its limit, pick up this man who had just drained himself dry with one hand, and sprint across the sea toward the east. She would run out of this contaminated sea and reach a place where that dark green canopy could not touch them. She was fast enough, and her stamina was sufficient; the only variable was whether Klein could withstand the wind pressure from such high-speed movement.

The answer was most likely yes. He wasn't that fragile.

Klein was half-kneeling on the surface of the sea, his repulsion field supporting his body. His face was pale, and sweat continued to pour from his forehead. That previous spell had scraped his mental energy to the bottom—no, it hadn't just reached the bottom; it had scraped through the bottom floor entirely. His skull was buzzing, as if someone were sanding the bone inside his head with sandpaper.

But he could still stand.

Ophelia walked over and reached out her hand.

Klein looked up at her, gave a small smile, and took her hand to pull himself up. His knees were a bit weak, and he wobbled for a moment, but Ophelia caught him by the waist. Her palm pressed against his side, and he could feel the temperature of her hand even through his clothes—steady and hot, like a piece of iron just pulled from the forge.

“Can you move?”

“I can.” Klein rolled his neck, his joints popping twice. “Heading east, right?”

“Right. Hold on tight to me.”

Klein was about to say something—likely some flippant nonsense like “That sounds like my line”—when the sea beneath their feet changed.

The entire sea was sinking.

It wasn't just one area; with the two of them as the center, the sea surface within a hundred-meter radius collapsed entirely, as if someone had pulled a plug from the bottom. The seawater surged and retreated in all directions, letting out a dull, sustained roar, revealing an ever-deepening depression. The bottom of the depression was black, an unnatural black—not the color deep water should have, but the color left behind after light has been devoured.

Klein’s repulsion field dropped half a meter along with the sea surface. He quickly adjusted his output, lifting the two of them back to their original height. The mana consumption was negligible, but the burden on his mental energy was the final straw.

Ophelia’s hand was already on her hilt. She didn't let go of the hand supporting Klein’s waist—it was the other one. Her left hand. The contaminated one. The black scales between her knuckles were almost invisible under the dark green sky, but Klein caught a glimpse of them from the corner of his eye.

The canopy in the west was still pressing in. But the change wasn't just coming from the west anymore—it was from below, above, and all around. The low-frequency hum in the air suddenly jumped an order of magnitude. It was no longer a mist clinging to his eardrums, but a physical entity being poured into his skull. It felt as if someone had shoved an iron rod into his ear and was slowly, irresistibly pushing it further in.

Klein’s ears rang, and a metallic taste of rust filled his nose.

He wiped his nose. His fingertips were red.

“Klein.” Ophelia’s voice was very low. Her hand on his waist tightened slightly.

“I’m fine.” He rubbed his hand on his clothes. “Let’s go, toward the east—”

He didn't finish.

Because the sky in the east had changed color too.

Something deeper, approaching pure black, was spreading upward from the horizon. Its speed was slower than the patch in the west, but its direction was clear—it was closing in.

The south. The north.

Klein turned in a full circle.

It was everywhere.

The vault of heaven was being pinched toward the center from the edges by an invisible hand. The last small patch of starlit night sky above their heads was shrinking. It was like an eye closing. And they stood right in the center of the pupil.

The manifestation of the Divine Kingdom.

It wasn't approaching—it had already descended. The stretch of sea they stood upon was currently at the very center of the Divine Kingdom's projection.

Klein cursed. This time, he said it out loud.

Ophelia didn't curse. She did something more practical—she pulled Klein half a step closer to her, moved her left hand from his waist to her hilt, and flicked the lock open with her thumb.

The movement was crisp and decisive, without a hint of hesitation. But Klein noticed that the moment her left hand gripped the hilt, the edges of the black scales between her knuckles tilted up slightly—as if in response to something.

For the first time, the Deep Sea Evil God revealed power that influenced reality.

Not through those tentacled monsters, not through anchors in the seawater, and not through any intermediary medium.

It was a direct, undisguised suppression of mortals by a god.

The depression beneath them was still expanding. The seawater had retreated over two hundred meters away, and what was revealed was no longer the seabed—it was a pitch-black void. There were things moving in the void. Many things. Densely packed, their shapes indistinguishable; one could only see the faint points of light stirred up as they moved, like bioluminescent creatures in the deep sea, but the quantity was absurd. Thousands upon thousands. No, more. So many that the points of light merged into sheets, as if the void itself were breathing.

Klein stared at that void for three seconds.

His mage instincts were screaming—demanding that he analyze, calculate, and categorize. But his mental energy reserves wouldn't allow it. He was like an overheated machine now; the gears were still turning, but every rotation was grinding himself down.

Then he pulled his gaze back and looked at Ophelia.

“The plan has changed.”

“Speak.”

“We can’t run—at least not by conventional means.” Klein spoke quickly, his mind already racing. “He has completely boxed in this area. The spatial structure has been overlaid by His Divine Kingdom. I just tried; the channel for information conversion is blocked solid.”

Ophelia’s brow twitched.

“Then the people you sent away just now—”

“They’re fine. They reached their target coordinates the moment the spell was completed,” Klein said. “He is sealing the present, not three minutes ago.”

That was the only good news.

Ophelia nodded, asking no further questions. Her attention had already returned to the closing darkness all around. Her shoulders were set straight, battle qi surged up her spine, and a golden glow flickered at the tips of her hair.

“So,” she drew her sword three inches from its scabbard, the golden battle qi lighting up the exposed section of the blade, “we fight our way out?”

Klein looked at her.

The wind blew her golden hair into a mess. Her boots were planted on the sea surface, and the faint glow of battle qi extended from her feet all the way to her blade. Her posture was relaxed—not a forced composure, but true relaxation. Her shoulders were loose, her breathing steady, and there was no wasted strength in her sword hand.

Faced with the domain of a god, her first reaction was to “fight our way out.”

Klein suddenly felt that marrying this woman might have been a one-time cash-out of all the luck he had accumulated in his past life.

“That’s the gist of it,” he said. “But we have to find a weak point. His Divine Kingdom projection can’t be equally thick everywhere—”

As he spoke, he spread his remaining perception out in a thin layer. It was so thin he could detect almost nothing, but he was still trying—trying to find a single gap in the structure of this cage. If there was even one crack, he could find a way to pry it open.

Before he could finish, something began to rise from the void beneath them.

When it rose from the depths, there was no sound.

Klein had expected there to be—some kind of noise befitting the word “god.” A roar, or a tremor, or at least the massive sound of seawater being displaced.

But there was nothing.

It was unnaturally quiet. So quiet it felt as if sound itself had been extracted from this space.

A crack opened at the bottom of the void. What surged from the rift was not light, nor darkness, but something for which the human visual system simply had no corresponding receptors. Klein couldn't find the words to describe it—not because of a lack of vocabulary, but because his brain refused to assign a concept to this thing.

Klein’s eyeballs throbbed with sudden pain, forcing tears out and blurring his vision for half a second. He instinctively blinked a few times, shaking off the tears, but the stinging pain remained deep in his sockets, like being pricked by needles.

By the time he could see clearly again, the thing had occupied the entire void beneath them.

It was unlike any biological form he had ever seen in these waters.

His “body”—if it could be called that—was fluid. Countless layers of semi-transparent membrane-like structures were stacked together, each layer writhing at a different speed and in a different direction. Some layers were as fast as gossamer caught in the wind, while others were as slow as setting wax. There was no fixed distance between them; they pressed together and pulled apart, overall presenting an irregular pulsation that made his stomach churn.

In the gaps between the membranes, points of light drifted along entirely chaotic trajectories, their density so high it made one's skin crawl.

Those points of light were not decorations; Klein’s perception told him that every single point was an anchor. Millions upon millions of anchors, all growing upon Him.

He was the network itself.

The monsters, the schools of fish, and the contaminated seawater scattered throughout the entire sea were merely His peripheral nerves. And now, all the terminals had been pulled back, converging here, gathering into this—this existence that Klein could not even fully observe.

The sky completely fell the moment He rose. It wasn't devoured by dark green—the sky itself was bending toward Him. The clouds, the starlight, the atmosphere—everything belonging to this world was collapsing in His direction, as if the entire vault of heaven were being warped by His mass.

Klein’s nose began to bleed again, this time from both nostrils. He wiped it messily with his sleeve, and all calculations in his head stopped. It wasn't that he couldn't calculate; it was that it was meaningless—the information volume of the thing before him exceeded his processing limit. He couldn't even achieve a complete observation, let alone an analysis.

His brain was refusing to work. It wasn't exhaustion; it was self-preservation. Just as a human cannot look directly at the sun, his mind could not face the full scope of this thing.

Ophelia moved.

Without hesitation, without testing, without any unnecessary preparation. The moment her sword left its sheath, the golden battle qi was no longer a thin layer—it poured out from within her, covering her entire being along the blade, her arms, her shoulders, and her back.

Golden light exploded in the darkness, so bright it made Klein squint.

She charged across the sea. With every step she took, the sea surface beneath her was pressed into a half-meter deep pit by the aftershocks of her battle qi, water exploding to both sides, pulling two white wakes behind her.

The first strike slashed into His outermost membrane-like structure.

The golden battle qi sliced through the membrane—it cut, it truly cut. A rift over a dozen meters long opened, its edges curling back to the sides. The moment the points of light on the cut surface were severed, they let out an extremely faint sound, like glass shattering.

But the rift was healing. Before Ophelia could even pull back her sword, the dozen-meter wound had already closed. It didn't grow back; the membranes on both sides simply slid over, covering the rift. It was as if it were mocking her.

Ophelia didn't stop. A second strike, a third, a fourth. Every strike cut deeper, the golden battle qi exploding in patches of light across His surface, illuminating the sea for hundreds of meters around. Her sword speed grew faster and faster, her battle qi output more and more violent. By the seventh strike, she had already cut into the third layer of the membrane structure—deeper than any human warrior had ever reached against a god.

Standing behind her, Klein saw it clearly.

Ophelia’s attacks were effective. Every strike caused damage, and every strike disrupted His structure. But—

“It’s useless.” Klein’s voice was very soft, so soft only he could hear it.

He was too big. The rifts Ophelia carved, relative to His entirety, didn't even qualify as scratches. She was using a sword to cut a mountain. No, something far larger than a mountain. A mountain, at least, is finite.

Then, He moved.

It wasn't a counterattack. It couldn't even be said that He had “noticed.”

He simply—adjusted His posture.

The stacked membrane structures contracted slightly, the movement so small it was almost imperceptible. It was like a person rolling over in their sleep, without even involving their consciousness.

But this tiny contraction, at the position where Ophelia stood, translated into a very real repulsive force.

Ophelia was sent flying back.

She flipped twice in the air to shed the momentum, her boots planting firmly back on the sea surface, sliding more than thirty meters before stopping. Her soles frictioned two white water trails across the sea. The golden light of her battle qi remained, but the web of her thumb on her right hand had split. Blood seeped from between her fingers, trickling down the hilt and falling drop by drop into the sea, instantly swallowed by the black water.

Klein’s heart skipped a beat. A heavy, singular beat.

He took a step forward—his repulsion field was unstable, and he wobbled, but he didn't stop.

“Ophelia!”

She glanced back at him. Her expression was calm.

Ophelia shook the blood from her hand and switched her sword to her left.

That contaminated left hand, where black scales were faintly visible between the knuckles.

The moment the hilt settled into her left palm, Klein saw those black scales move. They were moving on their own. As if sensing something, as if responding to the presence of the behemoth beneath them. The edges of the scales tilted up slightly, and a very faint, dark green light seeped from the gaps.

It was the exact same color as the membrane structures on Him.