Shadow Slave novel Chapter 2621

2621 /2678

Out there in the vast, cold abyss beyond the fleeting radiance of the Night Garden, a grotesque form drifted slowly on the powerful underwater currents. Its eerie shape was so vast and inconceivable that Sunny failed to fathom what he was looking at for the longest time.

"...Move forward slowly."

The Night Garden was not pushed by the wind or by oars, relying on unknown magic to sail instead. So, it did not matter whether it was gliding across the waves or moving beneath them — Jet could control its speed and direction all the same.

She did as Sunny told, changing the angle of their descent. Before, the Night Garden had been simply plummeting down through the dark abyss, but now, it pushed forward through the crushing mass of water.

Jet drew a deep breath as her gaze grew distant.

Sunny raised an eyebrow.

"What?"

She remained silent for a moment, then shook her head. ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ꜰʀᴏᴍ NoveIＦire.net

"No, nothing. It just feels different when we move underwater - the Night Garden has to push through its mass, after all. So, there is a different relation between the effort I need to exert and the speed it can reach. There's a learning curve."

Jet sighed.

"It feels nice and liberating to glide across the sea. But here... here, it's a bit of a chore. Like running with weights tied to your ankles."

Sunny gave her a odd look.

"Did you often run with weights tied to your ankles?"

Jet stared back.

"You didn't?"

Sunny scratched the back of his head.

"When I ran, it was usually from something trying to eat me. Why would I go around weighing myself down?"

A corner of her mouth curved upward.

"You make a good point."

They fell silent as the Night Garden slowly drew closer to Old Tom's remains. Sunny had to admit that he had misjudged the distance between them and the grotesque corpse. There was no curvature to the depths of the Stormsea, so there was no horizon, and there were no landscape features to serve as reference points either... only the boundless darkness.

Old Tom turned out to be much, much larger than Sunny had thought after beholding it for the first time. "What does that thing look like?"

By then, Jet could see one of the tentacles trailing behind the sinking corpse, but the main body of the horror of the depths was still hidden in the darkness. Sunny did not hurry with the answer, though, trying to understand what Old Tom was... had been, rather... himself.

It took him until the pain of his Flaw became almost unbearable to finally make sense of the horrid visage. "It's... an oyster, I guess."

Sunny said that, but he was not sure that he was correct. There was indeed a hard shell akin to that of a bivalve mollusk somewhere in the terrible mess of formless flesh and tentacles that spilled from its open frame. The shell itself was the size of an island, covered by a forest of eerie black growths - beneath them, however, it glistened with dull gold, as if cast entirely from precious metal.

The gargantuan shell was dwarfed by the lifeless mass of flesh and colossal tentacles spilling out of its mouth, though. It was impossible to imagine that all that revolting flesh could have fit inside the vast confines of the golden shell... and there were other things drifting in the water beside it, as well — things that must have escaped from within Old Tom after its violent death.

There were titanic bones that must have belonged to abominable leviathans, empty shells of indestructible chitin that had once sheltered horrid monsters, rotten carcasses of countless ancient ships, mangled masses of rusted metal, vast shards of something that looked like diamond glass...

Old Tom must have gorged itself on all kinds of things over the eons.