For centuries, it had been still. A meditation basin carved deep into the island's rootstone, shaped like a conch unfurled. It reflected nothing. No moonlight touched it, no reflection marred its surface. Even Bo Saixi rarely approached it.
It was the place where those with siren-type martial souls once went to dream.
But dreaming required memory.
And memory, until recently, had been silent.
The morning after the tidal relics came ashore, the Siren Pool stirred. Not violently—but with rhythm. Pulses of concentric rings unfurled across its glassy surface, moving not outward from a point—but inward, spiraling toward the center as though the sea itself were remembering how to breathe.
Hai Shen Ling stood beside it.
He had not been called.
But he had known.
The harp on his back pulsed once, twice, then dimmed—allowing the pool to sing.
Not aloud.
It was not a song heard with ears.
It was a summoning in bone, a melody the marrow heard.
He sat cross-legged before the water and placed both palms flat against the rim of the basin.
The Pool responded.
His vision was yanked downward—not dragged, but unraveled, like thread from a spool uncoiling into the deep.
There was no darkness.
There was time.
Years compressed into currents.
He saw faces—his own, but not his own. Bodies moved through water the way dancers moved through dreams, limbs trailing streaks of sound instead of light. He saw the First Singers—siren martial soul bearers who sang not for battle but for binding, their voices weaving pacts between humans and beasts, reef and storm, coral and tide.
They had sung peace into existence.
Then came silence.
An old pain surfaced.
He saw the cause—not a war, but a forgetting. A massive ritual, conducted at sea's deepest fault line, meant to silence the rebellious Thrones. It had worked… too well. The sea forgot not just war, but everything tied to the Thrones—including the Siren Song.
He saw the moment the first Siren pool dried.
Not from lack of water.
From lack of memory.
But now… it stirred again.
Because one had remembered.
The next wave of change didn't come from the sanctuary, or even the sea beasts.
It came from the oldest records keeper on the island: Elder Mo.
He was a brittle reed of a man, more parchment than person, who hadn't left the tower in thirty years. His voice was thin, his hands shaky. No one took him seriously anymore—until that morning.
The bell in the Tower of Remnants rang twelve times.
It hadn't rung once in five centuries.
Disciples sprinted up the winding spiral to find Mo in his robes, sleeves ink-stained, breath hissing like a punctured tide-pipe.
He was… smiling.
"Bring them," he whispered, lifting a scroll case capped in silver and bone. "Bring them all."
The scroll he unfurled was not like the others. It sang as it opened—not audibly, but visually. The ink shimmered, each letter warping into sound-marks, resonance glyphs that hadn't been legible for generations.
Shen Ling arrived within moments, the harp across his back emitting a soft harmonic hum.
Mo turned to him.
"You've unlocked the echo-script," he said, voice trembling. "We didn't destroy the old hymns—we just forgot how to hear them."
He gestured to a section near the base of the scroll, a tangled spiral of script that had once been considered an ancient seal.
"It's not a seal," he breathed. "It's a chorus marker."
Shen Ling blinked. "A passage?"
"No," Mo said, tears spilling from his sunken eyes. "A response. The sea wrote back."
On the opposite side of Sea God Island, in the Tide-Eyed Caverns—once a ceremonial site for rites of passage now used only for storage—glows began to emerge beneath the algae-covered floors.
When disciples went to investigate, they found runes lighting up in perfect rhythm.
The floor hummed.
Not just with spirit energy, but with intention.
Sea Star Douluo arrived at once and fell to one knee.
"These aren't just carvings," she whispered. "They're notations."
In the oldest rites, the ocean itself had to agree to transitions—rank-ups, ring hunts, pacts. The spirit masters of Sea God Island were never meant to take from the ocean without permission.
That permission had required song.
The notation underfoot was not musical in the modern sense.
It was geometrically harmonic: a combination of spatial frequency, ritual gesture, and soul-tone output.
Shen Ling entered the cavern. He didn't need translation.
The floor responded.
The hum rose in pitch—not to deafen, but to align.
His fifth soul ring pulsed, and with it, his presence seemed to elongate—no longer a boy, but an embodiment of something older.
He lifted his hand.
The echoes fell silent.
And for a moment, the whole cavern exhaled.
The rites had not been forgotten.
They had been waiting.
Perhaps the most chilling revelation came two days later.
In a small village carved into the seaward cliffs—home to sea farmers, kelp-weavers, and low-ranked soul cultivators—an elder named Ya-Mu was found unconscious in the shallows.
When she woke, she spoke a name no one had heard before:
"Velis."
When asked, she could not explain why.
But she remembered dreams—walking reefs made of glass and bone, singing to sea beasts whose blood shimmered in rhythms, not colors.
Bo Saixi was summoned.
She questioned the woman gently, patiently.
By the time the sun fell, over a dozen names had emerged—each matched by ancient tomb markers buried in the archive floors below the sanctuary.
The Sea God's people were not just resonating.
They were being called.
Ancestral memory had awakened not just in blood, but in songline—the inheritance of voice passed not through birth, but through resonance itself.
And the sea…
The sea was naming them again.
That night, Shen Ling dreamt.
It wasn't a dream of words.
It was a dream of presence.
He stood beneath the seabed—not swimming, not breathing, just being.
Above him, the dunes undulated like breaths.
Beneath him, silence.
Then—
A whisper.
It wasn't a voice.
It was an echo.
And it said:
"You've begun the Remembrance.But what of the Forgotten?"
He turned—but there was no source. Only a pressure in his chest. The eighth voice thrummed within him, soft and steady. The fifth ring flared gently, as if acknowledging the question.
Then the sand split.
Not wide—just enough to reveal a sliver of black coral, engraved with a single word:
"Nyssa."
He woke with that name on his lips.
And in the archives, Elder Mo, unprompted, uncovered a sealed relic: a harp string made of woven sea-silver.
Etched on it:
"Nyssa's Lament."
Bo Saixi held the fragment for a long time, her expression unreadable.
Then she said, "There are still thrones who have not yet wept."