novelraw Chapter 92: Silver-Purple Hue
Chapter 92: Silver-Purple Hue
Although it was hard to tell at first glance, as their heads broke the surface of the water and they took in a couple of ragged breaths, the two of them found themselves far from their original locations.
The monster swam at an extraordinary rate, and so after Damon managed to calm his burning lungs, he quickly noticed something in the far distance, something that screamed refuge in this endless sea.
Following his narrowed gaze, Nyla turned, and her eyes widened at the sight before them.
They jutted up from the surface of the sea, rising from a small, plateau-like mass that floated above the water. At first, Damon thought they were the jagged lines in the sky, the same ones that led to the rift core, but as he squinted, he realised his mistake.
These weren’t lines.
They were roots.
Massive, splintered roots, thick as towers, twisting upward into the sky instead of burrowing beneath the earth. They stretched endlessly, clawing toward the pale, eerie moon, as if the tree before them had been planted upside down.
Seeing this, Damon couldn’t help but dwell on a different question.
If the jagged lines before him weren’t the lines that were leading toward the rift core... then where were they?
Before he would try to find an answer, he turned his focus back to that place of refuge in the far distance.
"Let’s get to it before any other monster tries to eat us," he said as he began paddling his arms and swimming toward him. Nyla followed without delay, staying as close to him as she could.
The swim was treacherous.
The sea here was unlike anything they had crossed before. The water was darker and somehow thicker, as if it resisted every stroke they made, and the silence pressing down on them from all sides had a weight that felt deliberate.
Despite both of them having a high stamina stat, the sheer distance of continuous paddling drained most of it before they could reach refuge, and so after an hour of swimming, their reserves were nearing their end. They were now throwing their arms over their shoulders in long, slow arcs, each stroke a desperate bid to reach the plateau before the sea could swallow them once again.
"Boss, I... I can’t move my arms anymore." Nyla finally said. Her stamina was the first to break, which wasn’t surprising considering Damon’s Level.
He quickly moved toward her, letting the girl hook her arms and legs tightly around him, so that she could rest and replenish her stamina, before he turned and began to continue to swim toward the object.
The closer they got to the object of their refuge, the more eerie it looked. Unlike from the distance, the roots protruding from the plateau and stretching across the sky weren’t black, they were silver with a very faint purple hue to them.
Now that he thought about it and looked more carefully, the moon carried that very same purple hue. It was almost indistinguishable at a glance, or perhaps it was simply his mind playing tricks on him, trying to force Earth’s image of the moon onto whatever this thing truly was. But now he could clearly see that eerie purple tinge settled across it.
"It looks... oddly beautiful," Nyla murmured as she stared at the protruding roots that were now casting a pale silver-purple light across the dark sea.
Damon’s mind focused more on the word ’oddly’ rather than the word ’beautiful’.
Why was it so odd? He couldn’t quite find an answer for some reason.
And as if to make everything even more eerie, he soon noticed that same pale light emanating from deep beneath them. He slowed for a moment and glanced down, and his breath caught.
The roots didn’t just look like an upside-down tree, they were an upside-down tree. Below the roots stretched a tree far too large for anything one could find on Earth. It was the size of a skyscraper, its silver-purple leaves and branches casting a pale, ghostly light across the sea’s depths.
"You’re seeing this too, right?" Damon asked Nyla, who hadn’t noticed it until now.
She gasped softly against his ear as her eyes caught the sight below them.
For a long moment, she remained silent and simply stared. He could feel her grip tighten around him, her nails pressing lightly into his skin without her seeming to notice she was doing it, until she finally spoke.
"B-But how can a tree grow underwater but have its roots out in the air?"
"I don’t know..." Damon replied truthfully. "But I don’t think we wanna find out."
Damon felt a sudden, bad premonition about this place, not quite fear, but something adjacent to it, something instinctive and unmistakable.
He began to swim faster, pushing through the remaining distance with everything he had left. The gap between them and the roots shortened with each stroke, Damon cutting through the water at the speed of a small boat rather than a man.
And finally, with one last, exhausted paddle, they reached it.
He let Nyla climb up first, then grabbed a jagged edge and hauled himself over, landing beside her to find the girl staring up at the roots above. They rose into the sky like the ribcage of something ancient, silver and vast and utterly silent.
He let out an exhausted sigh before speaking.
"That was quite a swim, huh?" he said half-heartedly, but as the girl turned and spoke, his heart paused.
"What swim?" Her eyes had a purple-silver hue to them, the very same one both the roots and the moon had. The colour looked wrong in her gaze, it looked both too still and too bright as if something was staring back at him through her eyes.
Damon took an instinctive step back, but at that moment, his world swayed. He barely had time to register what was happening before his legs gave out beneath him and he hit the ground with a heavy thud.