Rudra's ocean had one region left to drown him in, and it tried its hardest.
The Tide was not a creature in the way the veiled thing had been, or the salt-blind horrors he had spent ninety-nine regions learning to still. The Tide was the ocean's own heartbeat, the current that ran under every other current, and when he finally swam down far enough to find it, he understood that he had been fighting its outer skin the entire time.
It came for him the way an ocean comes for a man, from everywhere at once, and the pressure alone would have crushed six of him. Rudra had learned, across ninety-nine regions, exactly one thing that mattered more than strength.
Patience outlasts pressure.
