The Year I Stopped Being His novel Chapter 227

A distance of a thousand feet felt agonizingly stretched out in the pitch-black abyss, so long she felt like she would never reach the end.

Her headlamp swung back and forth, cutting through the water to illuminate a chaotic flurry of suspended particles that looked like shattered stars.

The water temperature was climbing, creeping from her fingertips up her arms inch by inch, as if some ancient, living leviathan was slowly closing in on her from the depths.

She finally arrived.

The depression lay right beneath her. Rocks jutted out from the floor, but they were pathetically small—pulverized into fragments as if a colossal force had ground them to dust.

She crouched down and swept her hand through the rubble, but beneath the disturbed fragments was just more silt. Nothing else. No biofilm, no traces of white, absolutely nothing.

"Professor, the rocks here are completely shattered. Still no sign of the colony."

Her voice was heavily muffled through the regulator, sounding incredibly distant even to her own ears.

Professor Harrison's voice crackled through the static in her earpiece, sounding as if he were shouting through a thick wall: "Are there any other rock formations in the immediate vicinity?"

Sloane stood up, panning her headlamp in a slow circle—

Rubble, silt, and suffocating darkness.

But then, something materialized in the distance. It was faint and blurred, towering like a massive wall. She squinted, unable to make out its precise edges, only discerning a silhouette that was somehow darker than the abyss itself. This wasn't rubble. It was an enormous, solid structure of stone. Her heart skipped a beat.

"Professor, I'm going to push forward and check it out."

She swam further. Sixteen hundred feet.

The water was boiling hot now. Even through her reinforced wetsuit, the scalding heat felt as if an inferno had been raging on the lakebed for tens of thousands of years. Sweat beaded on her forehead, yet her core was freezing—a sickening cocktail of extremes that made her want to vomit. The rocks around her were still pulverized. Still no biofilm.

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