The abyss waited.
Not quietly. Not passively.
It pressed, heavy and patient, a weight without form. Ren felt it in his tentacles, in the faint pulse beneath his translucent skin, in the echo of a heartbeat that wasn't his own.
He had killed, hunted, and survived. But the hunger—the true hunger—had only begun.
Something inside him stirred. A thread of thought, woven from instincts he had never known as human. It was cold. Precise. Urgent.
Grow.
Ren flexed his tentacles. They rippled with a strange electric sensation. The bioluminescent markings along his limbs pulsed, not randomly, but like a heartbeat in sync with the deep. Each pulse carried information: pressure, temperature, currents, scent… and something else. Something alive.
The Abyss whispered.
"Your body remembers. It hungers. It chooses."
Ren tried to resist. Tried to hold onto whatever fragment of himself remained. But as he drifted, the water shifted, carrying a new current that tickled his senses with alien familiarity. Something large stirred in the darkness ahead.
A shadow. Massive. Vast. Malevolent. Its approach was slow but inevitable, like the crushing tide of a continent sliding into the sea.
Ren felt fear—the old human fear—but it was faint, like a candle struggling against a storm.
The creature revealed itself: a Rift Behemoth. Scars of abyssal storms ran along its flanks, jagged fins slicing the black like shattered glass. Its mouth opened, a cavernous maw lined with impossible angles, rows of teeth sharp as coral shards.
And yet it was curious. It hesitated as it sensed him, not prey, not predator. Something… different.
Ren's mind hummed with alien calculation. He could feel the tentacles tightening, the beak flexing, the instincts sharpening.
He fed on that moment of hesitation.
Tentacles lashing, he struck. The Behemoth reared, but his body moved faster than thought. He wrapped around a jagged fin, the behemoth's skin tearing under alien strength, and tore free a shard of its muscle.
Pain? Yes. But exhilarating. Pure, focused. A communion of predator and prey.
[Predatory Assimilation — Rift Behemoth]
[Skill Acquired — Pressure Manipulation]
[Evolution Path Progress — 12.7%]
The Abyss purred in his mind, a vibration that pressed against every nerve, every tendon.
"Yes… learn. Become more. Transform."
Ren's body convulsed. A surge of mana from the Behemoth seeped into him, twisting his form, reshaping muscles and tentacles, restructuring his bioluminescent patterns. His skin thickened, mottled with deep indigo and black patches. His eyes split, now capable of seeing in multiple spectra.
Pain and ecstasy intertwined. He could feel the Abyss crawling through him, remapping him. He had never felt this alive.
And yet the Abyss' whisper lingered, soft, dangerous:
"Remember… what you were. Or forget entirely. Choice is mine, little shadow."
Ren's mind flickered with memory:
A rainy rooftop.
Shiori screaming.
The submersible cracking around him.
The ocean waiting.
Humanity clawed at him, but his new instincts crushed it. A part of him screamed for sanity—but another part, sharper and darker, thrived.
Ren's body shifted again. A subtle ridge formed along his back, a secondary sensory fin rippled along his spine. He flexed his tentacles experimentally. They responded with new precision, weaving pressure fields that could crush or disperse water around him like a blade of liquid.
The Abyss hummed:
"You will not remain what you were. Not here. Not ever. You are mine… but the world above will remember nothing of you."
Ren paused. Let the silence stretch. Felt the weight of the abyssal dark settle into his bones.
And then he moved forward.
Toward the next shadow. Toward the next hunger. Toward the mutation that would make him more than human, less than divine.
Every pulse of water, every flicker of light, every whisper of the Abyss carried a single message:
Evolve. Or vanish.
Ren shivered—or thought he shivered. The feeling had lost meaning.
He was becoming something else. Something patient. Something cruel. Something the deep would fear.
And in that dark, cathedral-like world of water and pressure, the first true godling of the abyss had taken its first deliberate breath.