The journey to the Folded Rift was not a straight descent, but a spiral—a slow, deliberate unwinding of the sea's secrets, each turn revealing layers of forgotten history pressed into the ocean's bones like fossils in sedimentary rock. The water here moved differently, with a viscous patience that spoke of epochs rather than moments, its currents carrying whispers from when the continents still slept beneath a single primordial ocean.
Hai Shen Ling traveled alone now, save for the harp that thrummed softly against his back, its strings vibrating in time with the ocean's pulse. The instrument had grown warmer since his communion with the Forgotten Choir, its pearlescent frame now threaded with veins of abyssal blue that pulsed like a slow heartbeat. When he brushed his fingers along its strings, they didn't just produce sound—they emitted visible vibrations, concentric rings of liquid light that hung suspended in the water before dissolving like breath on a winter morning.
His glider—a relic of enchanted driftwood and woven kelp—skimmed above trench-ridges and coral plateaus with unnatural grace. The wings, fashioned from the preserved fins of a sunken sky-whale, caught not just water currents but the faint bioluminescent trails left by ancient spirit beasts. These luminous pathways wound through the depths like submerged constellations, their glow intensifying as he approached the rift, as if the ocean itself was guiding him toward what lay hidden.
The waters grew heavier the deeper he went, not from pressure, but from time itself congealing in the depths. Here, in this transitional space between the known ocean and the Folded Rift, the sea remembered things it had long since buried beneath millennia of accumulating silence. The light didn't just dim—it changed quality, becoming thicker, older, the blue shifting toward ultraviolet wavelengths that made his shadow stretch long and distorted behind him. It was light that had traveled undisturbed for centuries, light that remembered the shapes of creatures now extinct, of cities now drowned, of songs now unsung.
The Seamount Graves rose before him—jagged peaks of drowned mountains that had once kissed the sky before the ocean claimed them. Their slopes were carved with runes so ancient that even the sea had forgotten their meaning, the glyphs worn smooth by endless currents but still humming with residual power. Some pulsed faintly as he passed, reacting to the eighth voice nestled in his chest, their illuminations brief and flickering like dying fireflies. Between the peaks, the bones of massive sea creatures formed archways and ribbed corridors, their fossilized remains transformed by time and pressure into something between stone and memory.
And beneath them, yawning like the mouth of some primordial leviathan, lay the fissure: the Folded Rift.
This was no ordinary geological formation. The edges of the rift shimmered with a strange, non-reflective quality, as if the water there had been folded upon itself too many times and could no longer lie flat. Looking at it directly caused a peculiar doubling in vision—the rift existed in multiple places at once, its true form impossible to perceive with mundane sight. This was a place where the ocean folded in on itself, where depth became abstract, where the usual laws of pressure and light surrendered to older, stranger geometries.
Shen Ling hovered at its edge, his breath steady despite the cold seeping into his bones—a cold that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with proximity to something ancient and essentially other. The crystal around his neck pulsed, its glow deepening to an eerie indigo that cast his face in underwater twilight. He could feel it resonating with something in the rift's depths, a call-and-response that bypassed his ears entirely to vibrate directly in his marrow.
"Voice of the Abyss," he whispered, and the words emerged as visible sound, twisting through the water like eels made of liquid shadow.
The sea parted.
Not in a violent surge as it had for the Sea God's chosen in legends of old, but in a slow, reverent exhale—as if the water itself was stepping aside for him, molecule by molecule, making space for his passage. The division revealed glimpses of impossible colors in the water's heart, hues that belonged to no earthly spectrum, colors that existed only in the dreams of deep-sea creatures who had never seen the sun.
A soft hymn echoed from the rift's depths, a melody that made his soul ring in sympathy. It wasn't music as humans understood it—there was no rhythm, no discernible structure, only a rising and falling of tones that somehow conveyed profound meaning. The song bypassed his ears entirely, vibrating his teeth, his ribs, the fluid in his inner ears. It was the acoustic equivalent of bioluminescence: sound meant to be felt rather than heard.
He descended.
Within the rift, the laws of the sea bent like kelp in a current, twisting into shapes that defied both physics and common sense. Light moved sluggishly here, as if swimming through syrup, its rays bending in impossible arcs that created phantom images at the edges of vision. Sounds traveled backward—whispers becoming shouts before fading into silence, the acoustic equivalent of a film reel played in reverse. The water pressure fluctuated unpredictably, one moment crushing, the next nonexistent, as if the rift couldn't decide whether to welcome or expel him.
Coral bloomed where no light reached, its petals unfolding in impossible colors—deep ultraviolet, infrared black, hues that existed only at the extremes of human perception. These weren't mere plants but living records, their growth patterns encoding histories too complex for linear telling. Some pulsed gently as he passed, their bioluminescence reacting to the eighth voice humming in his chest.
The water itself seemed thicker, heavier, as if each drop carried the weight of a forgotten memory. When Shen Ling moved his hands, they left brief afterimages trailing behind, ghostly duplicates that lingered for seconds before dissolving. His hair floated around his face like seaweed caught in a slow-motion current, each strand moving with eerie independence.
And still, the hum continued—that foundational tone resonating from the rift's heart, the acoustic bedrock upon which all other sounds in this place were built. It grew louder as he descended, or perhaps deeper wasn't the right word—he was moving through the rift's folds, navigating dimensions where "depth" had no meaning in the traditional sense.
Deeper.
Deeper.
Until—
At the center of a sunken spiral altar, he saw it.
Aetherion.
The beast was vast beyond comprehension, its serpentine body stretching into the gloom in both directions simultaneously, a living paradox that defied measurement. Translucent didn't begin to describe its substance—it was woven from trailing symphonies of liquid moonlight, its scales shimmering with half-remembered songs, each one a ghostly refrain from some lost age of the world. Its fins drifted like sheet music torn from the world's oldest hymnbook, the edges frayed by time but the notes still legible to those who knew how to read them.
But its eyes—its eyes held no malice. Only mourning so profound it had crystallized over epochs into something beyond grief, beyond lament, a sorrow that had become part of its very substance. They were whirlpools of abyssal blue, those eyes, deep enough to drown continents in their sadness.
It did not strike.
It listened.
Shen Ling floated before it, the harp now cradled in his hands like an offering. He placed a palm over his heart, where the eighth voice hummed in recognition, its vibration syncing with the leviathan's foundational tone.
"I have heard your lament," he said, his voice carrying the weight of the thrones' memories, the sorrow of the Forgotten Choir, the silence of all the voices the sea had swallowed but never digested. "And I bring mine."
He strummed the harp.
One note—clear and perfect, a tone that contained within it the essence of every wave that had ever broken upon every shore that had ever existed.
Two notes—a harmony that spoke of tides and the pull of moons on oceans, of the slow dance between liquid and gravity.
Three notes—a resonance that shook the folded space around them, making the water itself shimmer with recognition.
The rift trembled.
Aetherion closed its eyes—and sang back.
Not in a roar, nor a shriek—but in resonance, a sound that bypassed ears entirely to vibrate directly in the soul. The leviathan's voice was the acoustic equivalent of starlight filtered through miles of ocean, ancient and filtered and profoundly lonely.
Their voices intertwined, weaving a harmony that made the water itself shimmer with recognition. The sea flared around them, light spiraling outward in concentric rings, each one carrying a name long lost to time—Arion, Velis, Saphira, Kalder, Nyssa, Mourn—names that hung glowing in the water before dissolving like salt in broth.
And in that moment—
Soul ring and soul met.
Not through conquest.
Through understanding.
The moment of communion stretched like the tide across endless shores. Shen Ling felt the leviathan's essence flowing into him not as an invasion, but as a homecoming - as if some part of him had always belonged to these lightless depths. The water between them thickened into visible strands, glowing filaments that pulsed with shared memory, forming a cocoon of liquid time around their joined consciousness.
Aetherion's knowledge unfolded within him like the petals of some enormous deep-sea bloom:
He saw the first days when the oceans were young and hot, steaming under a copper-colored sky. He felt the weight of mountains being born from the seafloor, their peaks breaking the surface in plumes of ash and vapor. He witnessed the birth of the first songs - not created by creatures, but emerging from the water itself as it learned to speak through wave and current.
The visions accelerated - empires of coral and shell rising and falling, wars fought with sound rather than steel, great choruses that could calm storms or summon them. And then... the forgetting. The slow silencing. The drowning of voices. Aetherion had been there for all of it, a silent witness to the sea's long grief.
The transfer of power manifested physically as the water around Shen Ling began to spiral, forming a vortex of liquid energy that pulsed with the rhythm of his heartbeat. His soul rings flared to life one by one, their colors bleeding together in the churning water:
The pale blue of Siren's Echo melted into the shifting violet of Soul Lure Mirage. The deep indigo of Abyssal Trial bled into the black-silver of Drowned Crown. And from their mingling emerged a new hue - a living color that existed only in this moment, somewhere between the blue of midnight depths and the silver of moonlit foam.
The vortex tightened, the pressure mounting until it felt like the entire ocean was pressing down on a single point - and then release. A shockwave of silence radiated outward, momentarily stilling even the eternal currents of the Folded Rift.
When the water cleared, the fifth ring hovered behind Shen Ling, its form constantly shifting between solid and liquid states. It wasn't a perfect circle, but a waveform made manifest, its edges blurring like a sound visualized. The color defied description - not quite black, not quite blue, but the essence of both mixed with something older. When light struck it at certain angles, glimpses of faces appeared in its surface - the same faces from the thrones, now at peace.
Aetherion's massive form began to dissipate, not in death but in fulfillment. Its substance unraveled into countless glowing particles that swirled around Shen Ling in one final, gentle current before dispersing into the rift. The last to fade were those bottomless eyes - they lingered a moment longer, gazing at him with something that might have been gratitude, before dissolving like salt in warm water.
The harp in Shen Ling's hands thrummed with new energy, its strings now glowing with the same abyssal light as the fifth ring. When he plucked one experimentally, the note hung in the water far longer than physics should allow, and within its vibration he could faintly hear echoes of Aetherion's song.
He knew without being told that this place would not welcome him again - the Folded Rift had served its purpose. Already the strange geometries were unraveling, the water returning to its normal state. It was time to ascend.
The Return
The journey back to the surface felt both instantaneous and eternal. The waters that had parted so reverently for his descent now buoyed him upward with gentle insistence. He moved without swimming, carried by currents that remembered his touch, the fifth ring pulsing softly behind him like a second heart.
As he rose through the layers of the ocean, he noticed changes in himself:
His skin had taken on a faint bioluminescent sheen, visible only in the darkest depths. His hair floated around him in slow, undulating waves even when no current moved it. Most strikingly, when he opened his mouth to breathe, the water itself seemed to part around his lips, granting him air without the need to surface.
The Seamount Graves looked different now - no longer ominous, but watchful. The runes on their slopes glowed softly as he passed, not with warning but with recognition. The bones of ancient creatures that formed the archways seemed to shift slightly, adjusting their posture into something resembling respect.
When he finally broke through to open water, the transition was seamless. There was no dramatic burst through the surface - one moment he was in the ocean, the next he was above it, hovering effortlessly at the boundary between air and water. His glider had transformed during the ascent - the driftwood frame now bore intricate carvings that matched the runes in the rift, and the kelp wings shimmered with the same impossible colors he'd seen in the depths.
Bo Saixi waited at the cliffs, exactly where he'd left her, though by the position of the moon overhead, days had passed. Her robes whipped around her in the salt-laced wind, but her stance remained perfectly still. Only the slight widening of her eyes betrayed any surprise at his transformation.
He landed silently, the harp still humming against his back, its song now harmonizing with the crash of waves against stone. His bare feet left damp prints that glowed faintly before fading.
"Your fifth?" she asked, though her eyes - reflecting the pulsing light of the strange new ring - already held the answer.
He nodded. "It was not taken. It was given." The words carried weight beyond their meaning, vibrating in the air with physical force.
The Douluo gathered, their expressions ranging from awe to disbelief. Sea Woman Douluo reached out instinctively toward the fifth ring before catching herself, her fingers curling back into a fist. Sea Ghost's bioluminescent tattoos flared brightly, reacting to the energy radiating from Shen Ling. Even stoic Sea Dragon Douluo's breath hitched when he got close enough to feel the power thrumming in the space between them.
Shen Ling raised a hand - and the fifth ring pulsed. The effect was instantaneous: the wind died, the waves stilled, even the distant cries of gulls were silenced.
"Fifth Soul Skill: Covenant of the Voiceless Deep."
His form blurred, the edges of his body becoming indistinct as if viewed through heat haze. For three heartbeats, he existed simultaneously as solid and liquid, his physical form alternating between states too rapidly for the eye to follow. When he spoke, his voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
"Enemies who strike me while this skill is active will be afflicted with echo-silence. They forget their own skills for three seconds."
Sea Woman Douluo took an involuntary step back. "A silencing field? That... borders on divine." Her voice trembled slightly on the last word.
Sea Spear Douluo's grip tightened on his namesake weapon. "Not just that. It's conceptual suppression." His eyes narrowed as he analyzed the effect. "He's not just stealing their power - he's making them forget they ever had it. That's not spirit energy manipulation. That's touching the fabric of memory itself."
Bo Saixi nodded slowly, her gaze never leaving Shen Ling's transformed state. "Because it came from communion. Not conquest." There was something new in her voice - not quite fear, but the careful respect one shows when standing too close to a precipice.
Shen Ling's aura dimmed, the ocean's light receding like the tide from shore. As his form solidified back into normalcy, he added softly, "It is the silence after the song. The breath before mourning."
The others stood in stunned silence. Even the most experienced among them had never witnessed a soul skill like this - one born not from battle, but from understanding; not from taking, but from being given.
And the sea, for a long while, did not speak. The waves lapped gently at the rocks, the wind resumed its whispering, the gulls returned to their crying - but beneath it all was a new quality of quiet, as if the ocean itself was holding its breath in anticipation.
But it remembered.
And so did they.