WETRIED TRANSLATIONS

Wizard of the Abyss

[Translator – Aren]

Chapter 170 - Resident (6)

"What is this?"

I fiddled with the tentacles growing beside the anglerfish’s fin and lightly tore at the tip.

[...!]

The anglerfish immediately writhed in pain.

As if it were truly part of its own body.

I crushed it.

-Crunch!

"The resistance feels about the same..."

It didn’t seem any more resistant to pressure.

But there was no doubt about it. Jellyfish tentacles had grown from it.

After a brief moment of thought, I swam out again, dragging back several more anglerfish, and began experimenting one by one.

[Grreeegh...]

"Huh.”

The results—were astonishing.

Those that consumed more than twenty or thirty jellyfish balls began to gain traits of those jellyfish.

Not all of them grew tentacles. Some secreted mucus from their mouths. Some had skin that became faintly translucent. Some sprouted tentacles from their fins.

None of it seemed particularly useful evolution-wise.

But one thing was certain.

"So that’s why they all look so bizarre…”

I scanned the surrounding deep-sea creatures and nodded to myself.

An eel with steel-like teeth.

A shark with the lower body of an octopus.

Eyeless anglerfish, and so on.

Now I understood why they looked so different from ordinary deep-sea creatures and why even members of the same species looked different from each other.

It came down to their diet.

They grew according to what they ate. I didn’t know if this followed the same logic as “eat walnuts and get smarter,” but since it was happening in front of me, I couldn’t really deny it.

Fascinating. Yes, it really was fascinating.

...But.

'Completely useless.'

I frowned at the heap of crushed anglerfish corpses surrounding me.

They had all died the same way. I even force-fed one over fifty jellyfish balls, creating a grotesque translucent anglerfish with tentacles and mucus secretion, then compressed it. If anything, it burst far more easily than the others. The only difference was that it sprayed mucus around when it popped.

Of course, it offered no improvement in withstanding the pressure.

The octopus had tricked me.

Worse, if I were to eat jellyfish and sprout tentacles myself, those would become parts of my body. Meaning new weak points that could lead to new pain.

I had no desire to grow grotesque lures from my head by eating these anglerfish corpses either, of course.

Sighing at the utterly useless results, I noticed my Water Partition beginning to visibly distort.

Without any hesitation, I stuffed my mouth full of the World-Sealing Elixirs I had brought along.

-Crack...

The rate at which my Water Partition was shrinking slightly slowed.

Considering how many World-Sealing Elixirs I had left, I could probably last about a day at most.

If I pushed myself a little, maybe two, but if I did that, I’d be crushed by the Abyssal Sea the moment I returned to the surface.

'Should I just leave?’

It might be better to go back and use the remaining World-Sealing Elixirs for survival in the real world instead.

It wasn’t like I’d suddenly discover something incredible in this vast sea within the remaining time. Maybe it would be better to place my hopes on Dercia finding a solution…

...And at that thought, I let out a hollow laugh.

Since when had I ever considered relying on someone else as an option?

The more anxious I became, the weaker my thoughts grew. If it came down to it, I’d do what I did before and squeeze jellyfish, smearing their mucus all over my body, enduring the Abyssal Sea like that if I had to.

I had to bring back results myself.

-Smack! 

I slapped my cheeks to regain my senses, then swam with all my might toward the opposite side of the canyon.

There was no way that in this enormous ocean there was only that octopus and nothing else. As I combed through the canyon with everything I had, a question suddenly arose in me.

'What was that octopus mixed with?'

I had only seen its tentacles, but aside from being massive, it looked like an ordinary octopus.

Living in this Abyssal Sea, it should have eaten countless strange things and become a grotesque hybrid like the others…but the only thing odd about it was its huge limbs. That was strange.

"Perhaps..."

I tried to imagine the octopus’ head, which I hadn’t seen. Maybe it had something other than an octopus head attached to its limbs, like those shark-octopus hybrids.

Well, not that it really mattered. After swimming along the seemingly endless canyon for about thirty minutes, I realized the pressure on my Water Partition was gradually increasing.

"Agh."

I stopped abruptly. I hadn’t noticed because of how long it was, but this canyon sloped downward into even deeper depths. 

In other words, if I continued along it, I would be descending further. If I didn’t want to dive deep enough to trigger decompression sickness, I needed to turn back now.

I was about to reposition myself, thinking I should start heading left for now, when…

-Clack.

"?"

From very far across the canyon, a current rippled toward me. Something hard had struck something else.

If I had remained ignorant of the Abyssal Sea, I might have just shrugged it off as just another strange phenomenon.

-Clack, clack, clack!

But then, the moment that ultrasonic-like sound echoed, the clams snapped their shells shut.

It was quite the spectacular sight. Like a wave in a stadium, the shells closed in perfect succession of one another, in a chain stretching into the distance.

Except unlike a cheering wave, they did not reopen.

"..."

I hesitated as I watched this scene unfold before me.

These clams were extremely sensitive to danger. Even when the octopus summoned the tidal wave, they had begun chattering long before it arrived. Since they couldn’t move from their spots, their sensory abilities seemed far superior to other deep-sea creatures.

However, these things had attacked anglerfish far larger than themselves without any fear. They had babbled boldly even in front of those shark-like things that were even larger.

So why would they react so violently to a single ultrasonic pulse?

I briefly checked my Water Partition and prepared myself.

"...Should I go take a look?”

If something long-lived existed over there, then perhaps it was capable of conversation like that octopus.

If conversation was possible, then perhaps bargaining was possible as well. Just in case, I prepared the anglerfish lumps I had brought and swam along the canyon again, enduring even stronger pressure.

The deeper I went, the darker the already dark Abyssal Sea became. The water pressure increased exponentially, and the number of clams lining the canyon steadily decreased until not a single one remained at one point.

"Kgh, wait, what is that—?”

After barely ten minutes of movement, I ground my teeth and stopped. I could feel that going any deeper would be dangerous.

The level of pressure I had used to crush the anglerfish was a constant here.

Naturally, there were almost no deep-sea creatures around.

And the few that did appear…

[...]

[...--‚. ---....]

—were incredibly huge.

Not quite as big as the octopus, but a whale with eyes twice my whole body’s length swam past, letting out a bone-chilling roar.

Of course, it wasn’t a normal whale.

Craack- 

When it opened its mouth, I could see bizarre stuff spilling out.

Countless varieties of deep-sea creatures. The difference was that all of them were nothing but bones, tied together with white threads connected to the whale’s gums.

Those hundreds of skeletons, which by all rights shouldn’t have been able to move, scanned the canyon as if they were alive, gathering leftover scraps and stuffing them back into the whale’s throat.

Speechless, I stared at it blankly. It was the most grotesque sight I had seen since coming to the Abyssal Sea. Then a swordfish-like skeleton approached, eyeing my pile of anglerfish lumps.

[...?]

Of course, it couldn’t detect me. Still, the sight of bones gathering around was a truly unsettling sight, so I tossed one of the balls over for it to eat and be done with it.

That was when—

-Click.

"-!"

The ultrasonic pulse that had led me here rang out again.

This time it was much louder. It sounded like it was coming from right beside me.

[...Wooooo...]

Where?

I quickly narrowed the range of my Tide Sense and focused it more.

But it was useless. Detecting the source of the ultrasound was nearly impossible.

I tried changing my approach, searching for the origin of the sound instead, but that didn’t work either. I glanced toward the whale, wondering if it had produced the sound.

"...What’s it doing?”

The whale was just floating there.

No, it wasn’t just that.

The swarm of skeletal remains it had expelled, and the whale itself, were frozen in place, not even stirring the slightest current.

The whale wasn’t dead. It seemed like it was doing it of its own will.

...Why?

Tilting my head, I pulled out one of the World-Sealing Elixirs from my pocket and tossed it at the whale.

Riding the current, the pill gently drifted and tapped lightly against the whale’s massive body.

In the next moment—

[.........!!!!!!!!!....!!, ....!!!!!!!!!!!!]

The whale screamed.

The spot where the World-Sealing Elixir had touched was gouged out massively, as if excavated by a blackhole.

It took one second for me to come to the conjecture that the ingredients for the World-Sealing Elixir could kill deep-sea creatures.

It took two seconds for me to faintly catch the presence of something chewing inside the whale’s purple blood through my Tide Sense.

[...]

It had black outer plating and no eyes. Its size was about that of a single shark, so moderately large by the Abyssal Sea’s standards.

Without a word, it diligently tore into the whale’s flesh. At a glance, it resembled a lobster.

However, its claws were a million light-years away from any normal lobsters.

Its pincers—were divided into four prongs, like a Phillips screwdriver or one of those claw machine claws at arcades. They bent bizarrely and were clearly designed for slicing through flesh.

Its legs were all thin, yet thicker than a human leg. Anchoring itself firmly into the canyon with those legs, it devoured the massive chunks of meat in an instant, then it ‘looked’ at the whale.

It had no eyes, I could instinctively tell that its Tide Sense had shifted toward the whale.

And I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

[...!!--,------!!!!]

Writhing in pain, the whale snapped its jaws shut in fury. The skeletal remains that had been outside were shoved back into its mouth.

Usually, such a massive wound would mean instant death under this pressure, but the whale was enormous, so it seemed capable of enduring it.

-Click, clickclick.

The lobster snapped its claws as it slowly approached.

It moved toward that massive body, without a single shred of fear, and then stopped.

[Slo, slo…! Slo...!!!!]

The whale muttered something as it unleashed crushing pressure.

It hadn’t grown that large for nothing. The force was enormous.

"...Kgh."

Even I, who wasn’t the target, felt my body tightening under the strain.

Pressure powerful enough to grind a mountain into a fist-sized lump of dirt. This weight of ages clearly showed that its power was on a completely different level from mine.

Before that, the lobster could not endure.

-Crack, Craaack...

Fractures began to appear on its trembling outer shell.

Naturally so. No matter how sturdy it was, if anything, the harder the shell, the more vulnerable it became to pressure. I couldn’t even understand how this thing had chosen to retain an exoskeleton at this depth.

Its initial strike had certainly been threatening. But its stupidity in prioritizing feeding over finishing the fight had decided the outcome.

The lobster would gradually curl into itself like a ball and get crushed.

-Click.

[......!?]

The next moment.

The lobster’s shell was completely restored.

That much I could understand. It couldn’t have survived without some form of regeneration.

But—it ignored the pressure as well.

"??”

I couldn’t believe what my own Tide Sense was telling me.

The whale was still exerting pressure, but at some point, as if it no longer mattered, the lobster rose and charged at the whale again.

[...!!!!!!!]

The whale screamed soundlessly, but without its crushing pressure, it meant nothing.

One bite, two bites, three bites.

Gradually torn apart, the whale was ultimately defeated by the Abyssal Sea.

-Cruuunch...

The enormous whale compressed into a single sphere. The lobster waited and then swallowed it lightly before disappearing into the darkness. I swallowed hard.

Because I had realized something.

-Click, clickclick.

...If I had to eat something...

There was only one option.

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