There was no water.
There was no darkness.
There was no body.
Kuro existed only as sensation—raw, blinding, violent.
A storm of mana tore through what remained of his consciousness, unraveling and rewriting it in alternating waves. Thought dissolved into instinct. Instinct dissolved into hunger. Hunger dissolved into something older, something he did not recognize as himself.
For a moment—
he was the Leviathans.
He felt their agony as their colossal forms cracked beneath divine wrath.
He felt their madness as their minds shattered and bled across the sea.
He felt their last hope as they carved their memories into bone and stone, sealing their final heart away for someone who might one day survive what they could not.
Then—
He was Kuro again.
Barely.
Floating in the smoking afterglow of a dead civilization's final gasp.
He gasped as reality coalesced around him. The chamber reformed, though broken and twisted—rib vaults melted into jagged spirals, runic veins flickering like dying stars. The water felt thick, heavy, saturated with ancient mana.
And beneath him—
Bones.
Thousands of them.
The Cradle of Bones.
A great basin carved from the fused skeletons of Leviathans, forming a nest of jagged white structures that supported his changing form. Mana seeped from every crack, saturating the water until it shimmered with silver flecks.
Kuro drifted above the cradle, body trembling.
He looked down—and froze.
His silhouette had changed.
Not grotesquely.
Not monstrously.
But unmistakably.
His shell—once smooth—was now etched with pale glowing lines, fractal patterns that pulsed with spiraling mana. The cracks from the Core's assimilation had sealed, but the scars remained as faint silver threads.
His tentacles had grown longer, more flexible, ending in fine tapered points lined with faint organic grooves. Not blades—channels. Conduits.
His eyes…
glowed.
Not merely with bioluminescence.
With memory.
With inheritance.
A whisper crawled along the edge of his mind—no longer a voice, but an echo of the Core now fused with him.
"Rise, heir of the abyssal fracture."
He tried to move, but pain—deep, marrow-deep—ripped through him. His limbs spasmed as mana surged through new pathways. His neural frame struggled to reorganize itself around Leviathan instincts now laced into his biology.
He crashed into the bone basin.
For a moment, he lay motionless, gasping silently in the crushing water.
Black blood—thin, shimmering—flowed from fresh seams along his mantle. The bones beneath him drank the droplets greedily, glowing faintly as if acknowledging their new bearer.
The Cradle accepted him.
Rebirth through suffering.
Kuro forced himself upright, tentacles anchoring against the ribbed flooring. His mind stabilized, and floating panels flickered across his sight.
> [New Trait Acquired: Leviathan Resonance]
A fragment of ancient abyssal lineage now flows through your core.
Your presence exerts pressure on weaker beings.
Your mana pathways have been reorganized.
> [New Ability Unlocked: Echo Pulse]
Emit a shockwave of resonant mana capable of destabilizing constructs and illusions.
> [Warning: Assimilation Incomplete.]
Neural integration at 64%.
Mental instability risk: Moderate.
Continue adaptation or risk structural collapse.
Kuro exhaled.
Or tried to.
A wave of dizziness hit him.
Not physical.
Cognitive.
His thoughts layered on top of one another—Kuro's voice intertwined with the whispers of extinct Leviathans.
Hunger.
Containment.
Ascend.
He slammed a tentacle into the bone floor, anchoring himself until the overlapping voices retreated. The glowing runes carved into his shell dimmed, stabilizing.
He rose slowly.
The Cradle of Bones shifted with him, responding like a living organism. Pillars of fused vertebrae unfurled. Jawbones clacked open. Faint runic motes drifted upward like ash in reverse, forming a spiraling path deeper into the ruins.
The Core had not given him power.
It had given him direction.
A pulse echoed from the far end of the cradle—a heartbeat, slow and thunderous, deeper than the trench itself. Something else had awakened. Something the Leviathans had buried even from themselves.
Kuro steadied his new limbs.
His shell gleamed with runic light.
His eyes burned like two sinking suns.
His instincts sharpened with a clarity he had never experienced.
Whatever lay ahead in the depths of the Cradle did not threaten him.
It awaited him.
He drifted forward, the water trembling around his altered form.
Reborn.
Remade.
Not a Leviathan—
but something meant to surpass them.
The abyss had given him its inheritance.
Now he would decide what to do with it.