He did not fall.
He descended.
There was a difference between gravity and whatever this grotesque ocean did to him. Kai's body passed through the viscous, pulsing mass of flesh the way a stone sinks through thickened blood. It wasn't water no liquidity, no temperature but a disturbing organic softness that pressed against him from every direction, as though the sea itself had muscles contracting and flexing around him.
From the moment he broke the surface, he knew something was wrong.
Not metaphorically.
Literally, biologically wrong.
The fleshy material clung to him, wrapping around him with little twitching threads. It tried to stitch him into itself. As if the ocean didn't want visitors it wanted pieces.
Kai resisted, but the sensation was maddening.
It was like a tickle that turned into a bite, and the bite turned into a gnaw.
He grit his teeth, pushing downward with what remained of his energy. But the deeper he sank, the heavier he became like something in him was dissolving, being unmade.
One thought cut through his mind like a scalpel:
The ocean wants to digest me.
That realization would have terrified a sane being.
But Kai was no longer in sanity's neighborhood.
His mind spun in chaos thoughts colliding, memories flickering, instincts biting into themselves.
He felt teeth.
Not imagined. Not symbolic.
Literal teeth.
As the flesh thickened, little jaws formed inside it hundreds, tiny as new-born monsters, latching onto him. Biting. Chewing. Testing the texture of his skin like he was simply another meat fragment.
Pain became constant, rhythmic, precise.
He couldn't scream.
Air wasn't a thing here.
So he fell in silence, being bitten a thousand times over.
His core's energy weakened. His senses dimmed. His heartbeat slowed.
Even the crimson eyes stopped helping; the sea blurred everything, obscured his sight.
Then something else woke.
On his left wrist, beneath the flesh trying to claim him, the black band pulsed.
Slowly.
Patiently.
Like something that only woke when truly needed.
Its chains slithered into motion, wrapping around his arm, coiling toward his shoulder and chest like serpents made of shadow. Tiny links moved with strange intelligence, shielding patches of his skin.
Where the chains covered him, the ocean couldn't bite through.
Kai didn't understand it.
He didn't need to.
It was a lifeline.
He continued falling. Downward, downward, deeper until eventually the sea grew darker and more silent. The biting stopped, only because the sea itself had stopped behaving like sea. It was becoming… thicker. Stagnant. Pregnant with something unspoken.
Kai barely felt his limbs now.
Pain had become numbness, and numbness had become a calming silence that was more frightening than the pain.
He didn't understand if he was still alive.
Then his foot hit something.
A surface.
A texture different from flesh.
It was… smooth.
He pushed downward with the last shred of his awareness, and his palm pressed against it.
The floor.
A floor at the bottom of the flesh sea.
He opened his eyes slowly, painfully and saw something that didn't fit the world he was in.
The bottom wasn't flesh.
It was mirror.
A perfect reflective surface, so polished it held no scratches, no distortions. It was like he had reached the underworld's hidden truth.
Kai breathed for the first time in what felt like forever.
And then.
the mirror shattered.
Not dramatically, not violently just the precise quiet fracture of reality deciding it had been holding a lie too long.
He dropped again.
But this time, he landed not in flesh.
Instead, he broke into another space entirely.
The air burned his lungs.
Pain rushed through his nerves again.
Bite marks covered his body in maddening patterns, pulsing with a faint ache, but he was breathing. He was conscious. He existed.
He looked below,
There was no mirror floor anymore.
The mirror above had been the lie.
Down below was something real.
Something ancient.
Something built.
A palace vast and overwhelming rising from the hidden depths beneath the flesh sea. Massive walls shaped not by reflection or illusion, but by hands or forces that understood architecture the way gods understood creation.
Its gates were towering and carved with symbols that seemed to carry meaning without language. A presence that pressed on the soul, whispering truth older than speech.
Kai crashed beside those gates.
He couldn't move. His strength had been spent during the descent.
His breathing was ragged, shallow.
He just stared.
The symbols suddenly made sense like memory flooding back when the brain accepted something long buried.
The palace above had only been reflection.
This was the original.
This buried structure was the truth.
And something about that realization made everything that had been said about secrets, about what was hidden finally align in his mind.
This was the secret buried beneath the trial.
Or…
perhaps beneath the world.
But Kai couldn't pursue the thought.
He lay still, unable to lift even a finger.
His eyes slowly closed.
Outside.
The forest was loud. Loud not with conversation or chaos, but with a living presence trees groaning, leaves hissing, the unnatural hum of a creature whose existence should have been impossible.
Zane, Ray, and Catalina stared at each other.
Zane's expression was casual in the worst possible way as if he was half asleep or half bored or half insane. His accent warped every word, giving even serious statements an oddly comedic undertone.
The three of them had sensed the beast the defiled Ravager tree-type and none of them wanted to fight it.
The lightning and wind users in the distance laughed to themselves, thinking they could use the situation to their advantage. Lightning crackled in their palms, gathering like storm-clouds in miniature.
They fired.
The lightning streaked across the sky.
Zane, Ray, and Catalina all followed its motion with their eyes.
The timing was absurdly perfect.
All three watched its graceful arc with synchronized, slow-head-turn comedy.
Then:
Boom.
Lightning struck a distant point right at the massive palace.
Zane's voice broke the silence, in his ordinary, chillingly normal tone:
"It has found us."
Ray blinked. "Are you sure? It might be blind."
"No." Zane shook his head. "It is not blind. It is literally looking at us with… anger."
Catalina squinted. "Really? Why would it be angry? We didn't disturb it, so I doubt it looking for us"
Zane pointed to the place where the lightning and wind users should have been standing.
Except.
They weren't there.
They were just gone.
Ray stared. Catalina stared.
They both inhaled sharply the exact same moment.
Zane blinked once, unfazed. "We are the only three here. So, yes, it is angry at us."
They didn't argue.
They didn't try to reason.
They just ran.
Three figures leapt from one branch to another, exploding into chaotic motion. It wasn't heroic or graceful or dramatic no, it was pure survival instinct fueled by comedic timing.
Branches snapped.
Mist burst.
Flames spiraled.
Behind them, the tree-beast roared, its voice shaking the ground.
Vines shot forward dozens, then hundreds like a rain of tentacles born from its roots. They lashed toward the three fleeing figures.
Zane reacted first his katana slicing through the air, clean and cold, severing several vines.
Catalina rolled, mist slashing the vines around her like ghostly blades.
Ray spun, igniting the branches behind him with bursts of flame, burning off the vines that tried to coil around his ankles.
The ground trembled.
The beast roared again.
The fight hadn't even begun,
and already chaos owned the forest.
And beneath the earth, beneath the sea of flesh, beneath the mirror, beneath the palace…
Kai lay motionless.
Alive.
But not ready.
Not yet.