Li didn't even have time to breathe as he was thrown into the dark sea below; worse, something was dragging him down.
"What—" he opened his mouth in surprise, and as soon he did, salty water rushed inside, filling his lungs and stomach.
He couldn't breathe; he was suffocating.
'What… why…'
'I can't… breath…'
He tried to free himself of the clutches of the thing that had grabbed him. His hands slipped on the slimy surface; he couldn't get a grip on it.
In his panic, he looked to see what had trapped him. Instead, he saw two human hands tightly grasping his neck. Slim but strong as the mountains. He was dying a slow and inevitable death.
'Why…'
'I-I can't… breath.' He tried to strike at them, but his hands were weak and small, too small. Looking at them, he saw the hands of a child.
'W-why, are you doing… this…'
'…Mom,'
He felt a sudden burst of energy in his chest as fire escaped from his chest. It gathered in a ball and continued to grow to the size of his head. As he was losing consciousness, the ball exploded.
The water around him started to boil as it burned the tentacle around his waist. It convulsed and shrieked in pain as it let go of Li and retrieved down the water.
Before he could pass out, Li shot up with a burst of wind. The pressure that the water exerted on him decreasing as he approached the surface.
"BHAW—" With a gasp, he pushed air in as he tried to breathe, but before that, he pushed out all the water in his lungs with his aspect, and it was followed by the water in his gut.
The breath that followed was almost divine, but he couldn't dwell on it. He scanned his surroundings for anything he could stand on, and in the distance, he found it.
A large, uneven surface breaks the water in the distance. With a deep breath, he propelled himself forward with wind and caught up to it in an instant.
Grabbing the edge, Li pulled himself up and dropped on his back. He breathed and breathed, his chest falling up and down as he tried to calm his nerves.
'What was that vision there? Whose memories it was..?' it felt real, too real. Li couldn't wrap his head around it. He had the same vision once in the academy.
"…"
"How would I know?" he said. "I will eventually." He tried to stand up and check his surroundings; looking down, he saw what he had been standing on the whole time.
It was a giant bone, the ribcage of a beast, to be exact. There was still some meat left on the bones.
"I see. That explains it." The beast that had dragged him down probably wanted this corps as its dinner but was instead handed fresh meat in its place, in the form of Li.
He lay back down, still shivering. He didn't want to attract too much attention to himself.
Li curled up into a ball and hugged himself; he didn't want to start a fire, fearing that whatever was down there would notice him again. He slowly produced heat with his hands and sighed with relief as his body began to warm up.
All around him was water, dark, dreadful water. 'I hate water.' He thought to himself. He wasn't sure when this phobia of his started, but all he knows now is fear of water.
After warming up enough to not shiver anymore, he summoned his armor—the [Eternal Night] wrapped around his body, its matte-black plates camouflaging him in the night.
He lay on his back and stared into the dark sky above. 'What are the others doing right now? Are they safe?' he thought to himself. He wanted to sleep, but he didn't want to dream about someone else's life right now.
So he lay there, his expression unreadable. He looked and looked till he got tired of it. Eventually, he pinched his nose and cursed under his breath.
"I hate water," his nose was currently being assaulted by the scent of salt, vile, corrupted sea salt.
With a sigh, he closed his eyes and went to sleep.
***
Li stayed hidden behind a batch of coral, eyeing his prey.
It was an unfortunate scavenger, wounded and dying. Li watched it completely still. Only his eyes moved, following every action of the beast.
He had been eyeing this one for a few hours now, and he was still unnoticed. He was waiting for his chance to kill it.
The limping scavenger missed its footing and toppled to the ground, seeing that Li jumped forward, instantly closing the gap between them. He raised his claymore and cleaved the scavenger's head clean off.
The scavenger's body twitched; all its limbs fell like a broken marionette and finally dropped down. It was dead.
[You have slain an Awakened Beast: Carapace Scavenger.]
Patting himself on the shoulder, Li crouched down and started cutting the body with his nails. Making an opening, he plunged his hand into the beast's abdomen and, after wiggling around a bit, retrieved the soul shard.
His prize for the hunt, then he put it in the [Nights Comfort] with the rest of the shards.
It has been five days since the winter solstice, and he has made this land into his hunting ground. Every weak and pathetic-looking scavenger has fallen by his hands.
He has fought with groups of healthy scavengers a few times and managed to kill some of them, but it ultimately attracted too much attention from the nearby beasts and nearly cost him his life on one occasion.
After that time, he made sure to not fight them with flashy fireballs or similar spells in the future and wait for his chance to strike true.
As a result, his hiding skills had improved drastically, and now he can follow a beast for hours on end without getting noticed.
After killing a dozen or so scavengers, he realized that with every echo that he receives from killing, he gets stronger by a tiny, almost minuscule amount.
He hadn't noticed the change in his body in the nightmare because of the mind hex, perhaps. His memories of the first nightmare had become blurry and unreadable.
It wasn't like this when he was in the waking world, but ever since coming here, his own thoughts and memories had somewhat merged with the memories of the dead. There was that time two days ago when his personality had shifted.
He acted like a scholar the whole day and did nothing but run and cry about his strange body. The day after, he had come to his senses and, this time cried out of secondhand embarrassment.
Ever since he started meditating to focus his mind, it hadn't been particularly helpful. He still gets confused about his identity randomly, and it's worse when it happens in the middle of a fight.
So, he made it a point to wait and kill anything he saw with a single strike.
He sighed as the foul smell of the scavenger's guts and inners assaulted his nose. He had surrounded his nose with a ball of air, slowly breathing out of that. He had learned this trick after his third kill.
He can now swim underwater for about thirty minutes if he chooses to and can close out the disgusting, salty stench of the crab meat. But he won't, he still hates water. Now more than ever, as he's literally surrounded by it comes night.
He grimmest as he began to cut the crab meat with his nails, slowly and painfully. After some time, he tied the meat with a rope fashioned out of seaweed and put it on his shoulder. He wasn't going to put that thing in his precious pouch.
With a deep breath, he leaped off into the air. He didn't have much time left, so he needs to get to higher ground fast.