The carcass filled the canyon like a continent.

I slid into its torn heart, inch by inch, heat pushing at my skin until it felt like a second hide. The gashes in the Fang-Eel’s body glowed red within red. Blood drifted upward in slow rivers, hot enough to sting, folding and unfurling in shimmering sheets. Bacterial light stitched the dark together in gold constellations. The whole trench was a vertical storm, everything rising, everything turning, everything cooking.

I tasted iron, fat, ash.

I fed.

I did not ask permission from hunger. I opened my mouth and let the meat arrive. It broke apart against my teeth like soft glass and ran down my throat as if it wished to burn a hole out through my belly. My body shook with each swallow. Pain made the muscles twitch, and then the twitch became rhythm, and the rhythm became a way of not thinking.

Even dead, it still tries to kill me.

The water boiled around the ribs. Every few breaths, a bubble of trapped gas climbed out of a tear and burst against my face, sour and hot. Parasites skated the edges of the wounds, pale and patient, riding the rising currents like plankton made of hunger. They nipped at me as I worked, a dozen small stings that brightened the skin and then went numb. I ate them too. The burn of their bodies and the burn of the eel braided together into a single thread that pulled at the spine.

The System flickered with my pulse, short and frantic. Words piled up, tripped on each other, blurred into a grey storm that drew lines across my sight.

[Intake Profile Overflow]

[Integrity Critical]

[Biomass +68 Units]

[Processing...]

[Processing...]

[Processing...]

I kept eating because stopping would mean listening to all the things trying to speak at once. Bone pulped under my jaw. Fat turned the water to smoke. The ribs were streets and I ran them, up one and down the next, into hollows where heat had settled in bowls and out again before the sting taught me a lesson I could not afford.

Faces rose in the light.

The little crustaceans that had begged in clicks, safe-safe-safe. Their words were bubbles now, bursting against my eyes. The rival’s melted grin, one glassed eye pinning me in place as if I were still a smaller thing. The Fang-Eel’s single black gaze reflected me like a moon in water. Behind all that, lightning from a storm I had once watched from a wooden deck, my hands on wet rope, old salt in the mouth, the sky tearing itself apart to make a point.

They overlapped until there was no room left.

I swallowed a strip of muscle as wide as my old arm. It hit the stomach and the stomach crawled to meet it, a spasm that folded the whole body inward. The ribs cramped, and the fins clawed at empty water that did not care.

I tried to rest. The body refused. The current lifted me and set me down again like a mother entering a house where every room was on fire.

The System’s storm gathered and sharpened.

[Integrity Critical]

[Cellular Overload]

[Emergency Reroute Initiated]

[Biomass +11 Units]

[Intake Profile Overflow]

[Processing...]

I drifted deeper into the wound, away from the bright edges, toward a pocket where heat moved slower. The light here was more gold than red, a gentle fever. The ribs reached over me like the remains of a cathedral. Threads of bacterial glow hung from them in veils that shifted when my breath touched them.

I was not thinking anymore. Thought had become a sound the water made, a background noise like sand moving, easy to ignore. Instinct took hold and did what it always does when a body is near its edge. It looked for a way to live.

I found one.

Skin wept.

Not blood. Resin. A clear sap that smelled like burnt salt. It beaded along every cut, thickened in the heat, turned cloudy as ash and fat collected inside it, and then set. The first sheet cracked when I moved. The second held. The third joined it. The fourth covered the throat where the meat had burned the deepest. The water pressed against me, and for once the pressure worked in my favour, smoothing the resin and packing it tighter to the skin.

I curled around a rib spur and let the body build its answer.

The bacterial veils drifted closer. Each brush left a line of light on the resin that sank into it and stayed. Gas rose and shook the cocoon as it thickened. The sea outside roared because the sea always roars. Inside the shell, the sound dulled until it became a hum. The glow from the eel’s torn heart dimmed and became a stain at the edge of sight.

I sank in my own weight. Not falling. Settling. A slow descent into dark within dark.

The heartbeat steadied. It matched a second beat that did not come from flesh. A pulse I had always called the System, even when it felt more like weather than machine. The two found a middle pace and agreed.

The storm of messages broke apart and bled away. In their place came a tight thread of tone. Not words. A feeling that crossed a bridge I had not known was there.

A voice. Not mine.

It did not enter through the ear. It ran along the new resin and into the skin beneath as if the shell were an instrument and I were the string.

[Integration complete], it did not say, and yet I heard that. Adaptive potential expanded, it did not say, and yet I knew it.

[Choose your path]

Light no longer came from the carcass. It came from the inside of my eyes. The System’s glyphs were not pictures. They were pressures that carried meaning. Three shapes pressed near, each a different weight, a different temperature, a different promise.

The first was a hum that filled the jaw. It made the teeth feel longer. The water trembled as if the sea itself had been plucked and would not stop ringing.

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[Path of the Abyssal Fang]

A pressure hymn with iron in it. The skin along my face remembered what it felt like to strike first and to need nothing after.

I saw teeth breaking continents. Not a vision with edges, more a knowledge of what happens when vibration ceases to be a hint and becomes law. I tasted stone powder and the thin copper of old blood left inside fossils.

The System condensed the feeling into clean lines.

[Apex Predator Resonance Adaptation]

[Vibration Sense Amplified]

[Feeding Efficiency +25%]

[Armour Density +29%]

[Energy Demand Increased]

[Aggression Loop Risk]

Rule or be ruled, said the undertone. The sea would call it natural. I would call it simple.

The second shape cooled the mouth. The resin forgot its heat for a breath. A whisper of current slipped under my plates and made the body think about moving without being seen.

[Path of the Luminous Depth]

Not brightness. Control. A promise that light could be tool instead of signal. Speed without wake. Shadows worn like skin. The thought of turning aside from a strike so cleanly the strike would forget I had been there at all.

The System wrote the rules and set them in front of me.

[Bioluminescent Manipulation]

[Stealth Signature Reduction]

[Reaction Time +42%]

[Energy Efficiency +16%]

[Armour Integrity Reduced]

[Cognitive Drift Risk]

See before you are seen, said the undertone. See and survive. The sea rarely rewards that first. It does sometimes reward it last.

The third shape was not outside me at all. It pressed inward, a heartbeat under my own. A memory that had not happened yet. The resin carried it carefully. The mind opened because the body let it.

[Path of the Mind-Tide]

Not thought as a voice, thought as a tide that moves other tides. My skull felt like a bowl into which other bowls could be placed. Echoes came close and did not break me. They wanted that. They wanted to be named.

The System made a small stack of truths.

[Cognitive Synchronisation Expanded]

[Echo-Memory Reconstruction]

[Subconscious Command Interface]

[System Awareness Integration +10%]

[Sanity Erosion Risk]

[Identity Dilution Probable]

Know what you consume, said the undertone, or become it. The sea trades. You can bargain, or you can be the bargain.

Around the edges of the glyphs, the world scraped past. The carcass groaned as gases found new routes. Bacteria rose in gold spirals and stuck to the resin and became small stars, then went out. The vertical storm outside my shell slowed and sank toward honest gravity again.

Inside, the heart measured, once for me, once for the other pulse, twice for both.

I thought about the fry who had begged ‘same-same’. I tasted their panic again, the way their clicks had rung like thin glass on a knife edge. I thought about the rival, the way its mind had burned undermine until there was a moment when we liked the same kill. I watched the Fang-Eel die again, and then I watched the sea forget it as soon as eating made forgetting useful.

If I took the Path of the Abyssal Fang, I could rule basins I had once skulked through. I could break the next rival and the next without needing to count. If I took the Luminous Depth, I could unhook myself from the notice of bigger mouths and choose where the ledger wrote my name. If I took the Mind-Tide, I could open the book and read every line I had swallowed and the lines of those I would swallow next.

Three doors. Three taxes.

The resin tightened as if to remind me that time was not a thing I could bend here. The water cooled one breath more. Somewhere above, a sheet of fat peeled from a wall and flapped once, a banner with no country left to claim it, then fell with a soft sound.

The System stayed very still. It did not rush me. It did not help.

I listened long enough for the body to stop panicking and for hunger to settle into a small, honest ache. I wanted the tooth and the quiet and the book. I had learned that wanting is fine and that choosing is what the sea uses to see whether you should continue.

Strength enough to feed, I told the dark. Awareness enough to fear what I will become.

The glyph that answered did not burn. It moved. It poured into the resin like heat into a mould. The other two dimmed, then split into a snow of motes. Those drifted away through the shell as if the sea had inhaled them for later.

The System cleared its throat for the first time. The text did not stutter. It did not cut itself off. It did not lie by accident.

[Selection Registered]

[Predator-Class Form: Initialising]

[Adaptive Neural Framework Engaged]

[System Integrity: 94% → 100%]

[Welcome to Tier 1 Evolution Sequence.]

The words clicked into the spine. A line ran from the skull to the tail, bright and private. Something unhooked in the old meat. Something else took its place.

The resin sealed.

Outside, the carcass finished cooling from red to gold to brown to dark. The vertical storm fluttered like a dying heart and then became rain. The ribs were now only architecture. The heat was now only a memory. Bioluminescent spores rose in thin threads and climbed the last warm currents until the trench set them gently into the black, where they became a soft weather of falling stars.

Inside, light remained.

Not from fat, not from bacteria, not from any honest burn. A clean glow, only as big as a hand, lived behind my eyes and under the plates and at the base of the skull. It pulsed with the heart that was mine and with the other one that was not. Two beats, in time, then out, then in again. Learning.

Maybe the System is not fixing itself. Maybe it is learning how to be alive.

Pain returned, but with edges. It came with work to do.

The shell warmed from within. Filaments grew in the gills, thickening the nets that air must cross. Plates along the flanks drank the resin and gave it back as structure instead of a scab. The jaw lightened in the hinge and grew denser at the bite. The tongue remembered how to be a tool instead of meat. Nerves untied their knots, then tied new ones elsewhere.

The System sang only when it had to.

[Skeletal Micro-Calcification: Ongoing]

[Respiratory Surface Area +8%]

[Thermal Tolerance Band Expanded]

[Neural Latency Reduced]

[Reflex Arc Re-routing]

[Load Test: Pass]

I fell out of time. There was only the drum and the answering drum and the small work of structures.

When memory came, it came as taste. Old blood, mine and not. Harsh salt from a storm on a wooden hull. Smoke from a kitchen I half remembered, the way the air sang when the pan first took heat. A hand squeezing a lime over white flesh and a voice that said, Thank the sea, boy. I thanked it now, and the word did not empty me, which meant I still knew where the line was between eating and worship.

Faces drifted close and did not bite. The fry’s clicking made its pattern again. Same-same. In the shell, I made its rhythm with the tongue against the roof of the mouth and felt nothing break. The rival gnawed the edge of my thought and then softened. The eel rolled over and looked at me with its wound where an eye had been, and even that did not turn me to paste.

I slept without sleeping. Woke without waking.

I counted because numbers steadied me and because there were so many ways not to be steady.

One hundred beats, the System inside, then one hundred mine, then ten where both arrived together as if we had always been a pair. The shell ticked as it cooled. The trench settled into a new shape beyond my little cocoon. The carcass’s gases found a last seam and climbed away like the end of a story told twice.

When I opened the eyes, I could not see because the shell was closed, and I could see because the System’s light wrote the inside of the shell like a sky. The glyph that had poured into me left a faint mark there, as if the choices always leave scars.

I could have asked it a question. I did not. It did not speak unless spoken to, and I wanted the quiet to teach me more than answers could.

The hunger returned, honest again. The body reminded me that evolution is not a gift. It is a bill. It must be paid with breath and with meat. But for now, breath was enough, and the last food I had swallowed would keep its promise until the shell softened.

Outside, the ribs framed a picture I could not see but could imagine. The cocoon glowed within that frame; a small pulse folded in a larger skeleton. From above, if anything had cared to look, the trench would have seemed like a galaxy seen through glass. One light rekindled where a god fell. Little constellations lifting away in spores that would carry the story by accident into rooms where no one would know how to read it.

The water settled against me like a muscle remembering what it was for. The sea had traded. I had paid. It had kept its side, or at least it had not cheated. The System noticed my noticing and warmed the pulse by a hair.

The closing thought arrived the way warm currents arrive from nowhere.

The sea trades.

The answer came, not across the eye, not across any of the old rails, but through the shell.

[Exchange Confirmed.]

[Body Ready for Metamorphosis]

I let the two heartbeats find each other again and closed the last piece of myself around the work.

The trench went very quiet.