The silence felt different now. No longer empty, but filled with echoes of laughter and promises of tomorrow's meeting. Devon lay back on the sampan, letting his small boat drift slowly with the unseen current, towards the island that promised their next encounter. The lavender sky and its twin moons were a perfect canvas for his reverie. Meeting Shia, the cheerful and inquisitive half-shark girl, was a delightful anomaly in his usually solitary journey.
His thoughts drifted to their silly conversations. About his "washboard" abs, about mistaking books for food, and about the pure innocence in her questions about the hearts of men. A faint, genuine smile touched his lips. For a moment, this omnipotent entity who had traversed countless universes felt like an ordinary traveler who had just found a unique travel companion.
He reached for his slightly damp book, "Understanding Women's Hearts in Thirty Days," and opened it to the first page. Illuminated by the silver and jade light from the two moons above, he began to read. The words were merely a distraction, a small play he performed for himself, a way to experience being 'human' who needed to learn things that he had understood since the beginning.
The mirrored ocean around him was so calm, so perfect. However, Devon sensed something. A subtle dissonance in the symphony of silence. The water surface, once smooth as glass, now trembled, not from the wind, but from something below. The vibration was so deep, so massive, as if the heart of the ocean itself began to beat erratically.
He did not lift his head from the book, but his eyes, hidden behind his black hair, narrowed slightly. Beneath his sampan, a shadow began to form. Not the shadow of a fish or whale. This was a living darkness, a colossal silhouette that obscured the moonlight reflected from the seabed, growing larger at a terrifying rate.
Time seemed to slow down for Devon. Or rather, his perception raced far beyond the normal flow of time. In a split second that felt instantaneous to other beings, Devon could see everything in terrifying detail. The water beneath the sampan began to concave downwards, drawn by an incredible suction. From the darkness, a hellish maw yawned open. Not a toothed jaw like a shark or ordinary predator, but a pulsating, fleshy cave, wide enough to swallow a small hamlet. Its inner walls were lined with rows of slimy, spiraling protrusions, designed not to chew, but to pull and swallow whole. Devon even managed to identify the creature as a female Leviathan from an ancient era that should have long been extinct.
GROOOOOM...
The water-ripping rumble was not a sound, but a pure vibration that shook every molecule around it. Before the wooden sampan could shatter into pieces, Devon's entire world went pitch black. He, along with his sampan, was swallowed whole. The sounds of the outside world were cut off instantly, replaced by the sound of shifting flesh, suffocating liquid pressure, and the pungent odor of ammonia and ancient decay.
Inside the monster's belly, the pale wooden sampan was crushed into splinters under the immense pressure. The book dissolved in seconds. Yet Devon remained floating amidst the chaos, untouched. Absolute calm emanated from him, contrasting with the monster's turbulent internal environment. He was not panicked at all. There was only a cold annoyance, as if his quiet reading time had been disturbed by an oversized insect.
A strange thought crossed his mind, a spark of curiosity in this fatal situation. 'How would the little shark girl handle this?' He imagined Shia, with her natural ferocity, might bite and tear from the inside, fighting with hunter's instinct. A brutal and primitive fight. 'Maybe she could escape. Maybe not. Interesting.'
His thoughts returned to the present. The monster continued to dive, taking him deeper into the lightless abyss. The darkness outside the monster's belly was as thick as inside. The pressure at this depth would crush a military submarine to the size of a soda can. To Devon, it was no more than a gentle hug. Breathing? That was a mortal concept he had long ceased to need.
Enough of this game.
From his eyes, which had been hidden all this time, two points of red embers ignited, burning the darkness inside the Leviathan's belly. Without a sound, without warning, two needle-thin red laser lines shot out, one up, one down. The laser was not ordinary heat; it was the negation of existence, a surgical blade of light that severed the fundamental bonds of matter. The red lines bisected the monster's giant flesh, organs, and bones from the inside out with absolute precision.
In the deafening abyssal silence, the fifty-meter-long monster's body split into two perfectly symmetrical halves. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the cold, intensely pressurized seawater burst in, tearing the remains of the carcass apart in a horrific, silent explosion.
Devon now floated freely in the depths of the ocean, surrounded by infinite darkness. The monster's remains slowly drifted down to the bottom like bloody snow. Here, there was no up or down, no direction, only eternal darkness.
However, he was not alone.
The disturbance from the Leviathan's death had awakened other inhabitants of this abyss. From the edge of his vision, nightmare silhouettes began to arrive. Red eyes, just like his a moment ago, lit up in the distance, approaching rapidly. These creatures were not ordinary fish. They were terrifying amalgams of crustaceans, squid, and eels, with extendable jaws and barbed, grasping tentacles.
They swarmed towards him, seeing him as a source of light or new prey.
What happened next was not a fight. It was a dance.
Devon glided through the water with impossible grace. As a creature with giant pincers lunged, he dodged sideways with a slight twist, allowing the creature's momentum to carry it past Devon. When several abyssal eels tried to wrap around him, he simply shifted his position slightly, causing them to entangle each other in a deadly knot. Occasionally, his eyes would flash red, and a brief laser would shoot out, severing a tentacle or cutting off a head without the slightest visible effort. His movements were so efficient, so calm, as if he were brushing dust off his cloak. The entire slaughter was recorded in total silence, a ballet of death illuminated only by the brief red flashes from his eyes.
Again, he wondered to himself. 'How would the little shark girl handle all this? Would she consider this a dangerous playground?' The thought made him smile faintly once more. This world, with all its horror and beauty, was indeed an interesting story.
After the last inhabitant of the abyss became floating pieces, Devon stopped. He floated in the midst of silence and total darkness. There were no more threats. No more disturbances.
He did not swim upwards. He simply let himself go. By his will, the laws of physics that bound this world obediently assisted him. His body, lighter than nothingness, began to lift, floating slowly upwards. Passing through zones of pressure, passing through layers of temperature, rising from eternal darkness back towards the world illuminated by light.
The journey upwards felt long, but to him it was only a moment. Finally, his back broke the surface of the mirrored ocean that had now calmed again.
SPLASH.
He stood on the water, his impossible white cloak remaining dry, fluttering gently. The lavender sky and twin moons greeted him as if nothing had happened. In the distance, the silhouette of the island was still there, a promise waiting for him. His sampan was gone. His book was destroyed. But none of that mattered.
He took a deep breath, not because he needed to, but to feel the cool night air again. Then, with a calm step, he began to walk on the water, towards the island, towards his meeting tomorrow. The silence that accompanied him now felt deeper, more meaningful, filled with the echoes of the death dance in the depths and the anticipation of a silly conversation under the sunlight.