Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 750: The Drowned Crown (1/2)

The sea changed color three hours into the new morning, and Fraisea was the one who noticed it first.

"That’s not current," she said, standing very still at the bow with her palms out over water that had gone from violet to a deep, restless gold. "Currents don’t spiral like that. Something below is pulling."

The pull was a whirlpool, slow and enormous, its center a full mile off the Chainbreaker’s bow, and at its heart the ocean’s surface had begun to glow, faint gold light rising from somewhere so far down that no one on deck could guess the depth.

The Hub answered before anyone had to ask.

[Rare Event Detected: A Rift has opened.]

[Fourth Objective: The Drowned Palace of Thurmugin lies beneath this Rift. Claim what it holds before the Rift reseals.]

[Time Remaining: 06:00:00]

"Six hours," Marcus read aloud, and something in his voice sharpened. "That’s a tenth of what we’ve had for anything else."

"Thurmugin," Rudra repeated slowly, and every head on deck turned, because it was the name of the ocean itself, and nobody aboard had ever stopped to wonder if the ocean had been named after something that once actually existed.

Lily was already listening, eyes closed, head tilted toward the gold light. "There’s a note under the water," she said. "Old. Enormous. Not moving, not breathing, but not gone either. Whatever’s down there, it isn’t nothing."

Almond leaned over the rail and read the water itself, the way he had read the whole ocean once with a bucket on a rope, and this time the essence he found was not hunger.

"It’s grief," he said quietly. "This whole rift. Something enormous died here, and the ocean has been carrying the shape of it ever since." He straightened, and the craftsman in him settled into something steadier and more careful. "Whatever’s down there, it isn’t a monster waiting to be killed. It’s a grave. We should treat it like one."

Big D’s old eyes stayed fixed on the golden light. "Grave or not, the Hub called it an objective, and the ocean doesn’t open graves for free. Someone else may already be racing us to it." He turned from the rail. "We don’t have six hours to decide. We have six hours to act."

---

The first problem was the water itself, and it was Ainen who said the thing everyone else had been too focused on the glow to notice.

"We can’t breathe down there," he said. "Six hours means nothing to a body that dies in five seconds."

The deck went quiet at that, because he was right, and the ordinary rules of the ocean had not softened just because something ancient and golden had opened a door in them.

"The rule is about what the ocean recognizes," Almond said slowly, thinking it through out loud. "A native ship floats because it carries the water’s mark. What if the mark works the same way on a person? Not to float. To breathe."

"You want to mark ourselves," Lily said.

"I want to borrow what the ocean already gives everything else that belongs to it," Almond said. "We have duskiron. We have the wyrm’s crystal. We have every essence we’ve pulled from two islands. Somewhere in that, there should be something the water already calls its own."

Lily found it in under an hour, because finding hidden things under pressure was becoming the thing she did best. A reef at the edge of the whirlpool’s pull, close enough to reach by boat, grew a pale blue coral that hummed with the ocean’s own note louder than anything else Almond had read since the first island.

"Tide-coral," she named it, breaking a piece free with careful hands. "It’s alive down here the way nothing else is. If anything on this ocean already knows how to belong underwater, it’s this."

Ainen took the coral and did what he always did with anything the world handed him, which was refuse to accept its first shape as its only one. He ground it, rendered it, folded it through duskiron dust and a binding oil pulled from the last of his island stores, and by the fourth hour he had six small dark beads sitting in his palm, each one humming faintly with the same note as the reef.

"Tide-Marks," he said, pressing one against his own collarbone to test it. The bead sank into his skin without a mark left behind, and for a moment his breath caught, and then steadied, easier than it should have in open air. "They won’t last forever. I can feel this one already spending itself just sitting here. Whoever wears these needs to be fast."

"How long?" Rudra asked.

"Ainen’s best guess," Ainen said, which from him was as close to a formal estimate as anyone was getting. "An hour of real depth. Maybe less if you’re fighting."

An hour, against six hours of Rift and however long the depth actually was, meant only one thing. Not everyone was going down.

---

The dive team was six. Almond, Lily, Rudra, and Ainen, because the Rift had not opened for anyone else’s essence, hearing, current, or stubbornness. Gopu, because the palace below would need a way back up in a hurry if the swim proved longer than the mark allowed. And Marcus, because someone level-headed needed to stand at the edge of the golden light and make the call if the mark ran out on anyone before they surfaced.

Big D held the ship. "Go fast," he said, pressing a Tide-Mark bead into Marcus’s hand himself, gruff in the particular way that meant he was worried and would rather die than say so. "And come back whole. That’s an order, not a hope."

They went into the gold light at the four hour mark, six figures dropping through water that parted for them the way it had never parted for anything else that whole voyage, and the descent did not feel like drowning. It felled like sinking into a memory that had been waiting a very long time for someone to visit it.

The palace rose out of the deep dark below the gold, and it took every one of them a moment to understand its scale. Towers of pale stone, taller than the mast that had carried them across the whole ocean, wrapped in kelp gone silver with age, and at the palace’s heart a throne room open to the water on every side, its roof long since fallen, its floor a field of drowned gold.

"It’s not a monster’s lair," Lily said, her voice carrying strange and clear through the water. "It’s a tomb. A king’s tomb."

At the center of the throne room, resting on a dais the sea had spent centuries trying and failing to erode, sat a crown too large for any living head, its points shaped like breaking waves, and around the dais stood a dozen figures of coral-wrapped stone, still and silent, that had clearly not always been still.

"Guardians," Rudra said, and every member of the dive team felt the same old cold settle over them, the readiness that came before a fight rather than during one. "Drowned honor guard. Whatever king ruled here, he was loved enough to be watched over, even dead."