The silence after the Fang-Eel left lingered, like a bruise with pressure on it.

Even when it was gone, the water still shook as if remembering.

Its trail was easy to follow.

Everywhere it had passed, the trench was carved open, a straight line of ruin that glowed faintly with leftover heat. The current ran smoother here, drawn along by its wake. Even the ash drifted in the same direction, as if afraid to stop.

I kept to the edges, far enough back that the water no longer buzzed through my bones. The eel was too far to see, but its size stayed with me. A creature that large didn’t just move through the abyss , it reshaped it.

I moved where it had already erased. Nothing lived here long enough to notice me. No eyes. No noise. Only wreckage.

The first basin I came to was still warm. The ground pulsed with leftover energy, heat bleeding slowly from the stone. The eel had fed here. The signs were everywhere.

Jelly-things floated half-dissolved, their bodies clear and sagging. Crabs and crusted worms were welded into the rock, the metal in their shells melted. Fish were outlines, shadows of things that used to exist.

I hovered for a long time before touching anything. The smell of boiled minerals and cooked blood clung to the current. When I finally fed, it was quiet, careful work, small pieces, clean cuts. Mouthfuls for need, not greed.

The meat fell apart without resistance. It was soft from heat and pressure, rich with stored biomass. I ate until the ache in my ribs softened, then stopped. I had no interest in gluttony. Too much weight, too much scent, either could draw things even the Fang-Eel hadn’t erased yet.

I rinsed my mouth in warm water from a nearby vent and moved on.

Every few kilometres, the same pattern repeated.

Another graveyard. Another basin.

A ridge blackened by baked crustaceans. A field where soft-bodied grazers had slumped into folds. A slope dusted with the remains of plankton that had turned to ash mid-swim.

The eel was a god of efficiency. It left nothing alive, nothing unfinished.

But I found a use for its wake.

I became what followed gods, a scavenger.

I worked slow, gathering what the Fang-Eel had not digested. The thought came once, simple and true:

If I can’t match gods, I’ll live off their echoes.

The water didn’t disagree.

By the second day, the trail crossed an old field of vents, dead ones, sealed with glass from some long-gone eruption. The eel had rested here. I could see the shape of its body written into the stone, long grooves pressed into the crust.

It had coiled three times before moving on. The places where it circled were marked with ruin.

In one spot, the rock had melted into smooth black bowls filled with fish paste that shimmered like oil.

In another, cracked carapaces had split clean down the centre, exposing pale meat that hadn’t yet soured.

And in the third, its pressure wave had come at an angle, leaving the dead scattered in neat lines, the sea’s version of crops flattened after a storm.

I ate from each in turn. Slowly. Respectfully. Always moving after a few mouthfuls.

When I rested, I lay against the cooling stone and listened to the deep hum that still pulsed under it. The eel’s rhythm had left a pattern behind: three strikes, then a pause. Enough time for the sea to recover before it killed again.

It hunted, it fed, it rested.

A cycle as natural as breathing.

And I began to learn that rhythm.

By the third day, I found something new.

At the base of a cracked ridge, a fissure ran deep into the stone. The current that came from it was hot, full of rot and minerals. The smell reminded me of Harbour’s vents, before the fire.

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I hovered at the edge and peered in. The walls glowed faint green. Something inside moved, soft threads of light drifting like slow smoke.

When I edged closer, I realised what I was seeing.

The eel’s leftovers.

It had dragged prey into these cracks during its feeding. The bodies had collapsed, melted, and begun to rot in the trapped heat. Bacteria fed on the mess, blooming in curtains of bioluminescence.

Compost pits. The Fang-Eel’s refuse had become living gardens.

I hesitated. The water reeked of acid and copper. My gills twitched from the burn. But hunger won over caution.

I folded my fins tight and sank inside.

The heat was immediate, pressing into my skin like fever. My gills flared, then closed, adjusting to the toxins. I rationed breath carefully, letting the body learn as it went.

The light grew brighter the deeper I went, swirls of green and blue painting the walls, the colours shimmering on my scales. The corpses below were no longer corpses, just outlines wrapped in bacterial glow.

When I touched one, the flesh came away like jelly. I took a bite. Bitter at first, then sweet. It burned going down, but sat warm in the gut.

It wasn’t food meant for me, but it worked.

I learned fast. The trick was not to breathe too deep. Keep low, stay still, take small cuts. If the bloom stirred too much, the air turned to poison.

By the time I reached the surface again, my gills stung and my eyes watered, but I was alive. My chest was hot from the inside, but not broken.

The System flickered faintly across my vision.

[Apex Feeding Zone Logged]

[Toxic Adaptation +3%]

[Environmental Comprehension +2%]

Another line appeared, clear and deliberate:

[Objective Added: Exploit Apex Feeding Zones]

The words felt right. Simple. Not command, not reward, instruction.

I looked back at the glowing pit. It was beautiful in a sick way. Life is born from death, feeding off the scraps of something far greater.

The sea didn’t waste anything.

Over the next few days, I found more of those fissures. Each one was different.

One was shallow, with golden light from a layer of sulphur feeding beneath the rot.

Another was deep and narrow, trembling with trapped heat. I didn’t go far in that one.

A third was little more than a scar in the rock, where the eel had dragged carcasses until they became pulp and slipped away.

Some glowed green. Some blue. One even shimmered violet, though I stayed well clear of that.

Each time, the System marked another update.

[Apex Feeding Zone Logged]

[Toxic Adaptation +1%]

[Environmental Comprehension +5%]

I didn’t feel stronger. But I did feel smarter.

The sea made more sense each day. The heat patterns, the toxin levels, the way the currents shifted before a collapse , all of it began to form rules I could read.

The Fang-Eel’s destruction had turned the deep into a textbook. I was just learning to read its pages.

When I wasn’t feeding, I watched for signs of the eel. It didn’t appear again, but its presence was everywhere. Sometimes the stone would hum beneath me, a low pulse like a memory. Sometimes the current would shift without warning, warm then cold, as though something vast had stirred in sleep.

I learned the difference between when it hunted and when it rested.

When it hunted, the water trembled like a plucked string.

When it slept, everything held still, waiting.

During those rests, I would slip into the pits and take what I could.

I didn’t thank it. The Fang-Eel wasn’t something you thanked.

It was something you used carefully.

Once, I saw it again, far off, just a suggestion of mass in the fog. The glow of its scars was faint, barely visible. Even from that distance, the trench felt smaller. My body froze on instinct, fins locking in place. It passed like a mountain shifting beneath the sea, too big to be real.

I didn’t move until it was gone. Watching was enough. Watching was safer.

By the end of the week, my gills had toughened from the toxin burns. The plates along my sides had hardened into darker armour. My movements were sharper, smoother. The body had learned.

My biomass count rose for the first time since Harbour. Not much, but steady.

The sea hadn’t given me anything. It had simply left enough remains for me to take.

And that was all I needed.

I found one last fissure before resting. It was different from the others, shallow, capped with broken stone instead of bodies. The light inside wasn’t green or blue. It was violet, a colour that didn’t belong to this world. The heat was sharp and thin, cutting rather than warming.

I hovered there, curious, but didn’t go in. The eel had sealed it for a reason. Some doors in the abyss weren’t meant to open twice.

I marked it in my map and swam on.

The trench had grown quieter again. The Fang-Eel had moved on to some deeper, darker place. The current in its wake flowed like a slow heartbeat, a trail carved for those clever or foolish enough to follow.

I drifted beside the rocks, full but not heavy. The burns along my gills pulsed faintly. The sea had changed me, and the Fang-Eel had taught me its rhythm without ever meaning to.

The System whispered, almost softly.

[Biomass Stable]

[Objective Progress: 38%, Exploitation Ongoing]

I let the words fade. They were only keeping count.

The truth was simpler:

The sea gives nothing. It only leaves remains.

I followed the current forward, toward colder water, carrying the lesson with me.

Behind me, the Fang-Eel’s path glowed faintly like a scar, a god’s handwriting etched across the sea floor.

I swam along its edges, a scavenger trailing the shadow of something too big to understand, too ancient to worship, and too powerful to ignore.