THE LAST KEEPER

Chapter 330. THE POOL

The moment Sagiri hit the dark water below, he soon realised why anyone who tried to swim in the wretched pool did not make it out alive. The moment his body touched the water, he knew something was wrong.

There was no splash.

The warm surface simply opened beneath him and swallowed him whole. His body dropped through the darkness far faster than gravity should have allowed. Instinctively, he kicked upward, but the water seized him like a living thing.

The deeper he sank, the stronger the pull became. It wasn’t dragging him downward. It was drinking him. The warmth vanished first as the water suddenly became ice-cold. He had always felt calm when underwater, but no. This pool was not peaceful at all.

Above and below ceased to matter. The black water pressed against him from every side, carrying a hunger that made his skin crawl. Sagiri forced his senses outward and immediately regretted it. The pool was not a pool at all. It was a vast wound beneath the fortress, a bottomless abyss hidden beneath a thin surface. Countless currents spiraled through its depths like invisible chains, each one designed to drag anything that entered farther and farther from the world above.

He understood then why no one who entered ever returned. There was no floor to find. No wall to climb. No sense of direction to follow. Every movement only fed the currents. Every struggle carried a person deeper into the endless dark. Even the archive felt distant here, muffled by whatever ancient force slept beneath the water.

For the first time since arriving in the South and after a very long time, Sagiri felt something he rarely experienced. A little fear. He should have listened to his mother’s sandshade’s advice. Because this place had not been built to imprison bodies. It had been built to erase them.

No matter how much air he had stored in his lungs, it was instantly sucked out. The water sucked him whole into its depths at a speed he had never imagined. The hellpool back at Galka would have wept at how it had been outshone. Sagiri could not push the archer out of breath or even gain control. For a few minutes, he was at the mercy of the pool. He was now disoriented. He could not tell left from right or even if he was dropping low.

The currents suddenly changed. What had been a steady pull became violent. Sagiri felt the water seize him and twist. The darkness around him began to spin. Faster. Faster.

A whirlpool formed somewhere below, vast beyond comprehension, and he was caught in its grip. His body was dragged into the rotation before he could react, and the pressure hit him immediately.

His chest tightened as the last of his breath was torn from his lungs. Water roared past him in complete darkness, carrying him deeper into the abyss. Sagiri tried to fight it. The whirlpool answered by pulling harder.

Did you call me here to kill me? Sagiri thought as his situation worsened. Yet it was about to get even worse.

His ears exploded with pain. The pressure built with every passing second until it felt as though invisible hands were crushing his skull. He clenched his teeth to suppress the pain.

His vision blurred suddenly, and he could feel his consciousness slipping away. For the first time in years, his instincts screamed a simple truth at him.

He was going to die.

He was going to get crushed and drowned in a darkness so deep that no one would ever know where he had fallen. Another surge of pressure slammed into him at that moment, making his teeth rattle in his skull. His ears rang violently. Black spots swam across his vision. The currents tightened around him like chains and dragged him even deeper into the endless void below.

Then, just as Sagiri reached his limit, everything suddenly stopped. Right when he thought it was over for him and his was fading away, there was suddenly deafening stillness. The currents vanished, and the whirlpool disappeared. The crushing pressure that had been threatening to tear him apart simply ceased to exist.

One moment, he was being dragged toward death, and the next, he was floating motionless in absolute silence. His body drifted weightlessly in the darkness, limbs hanging loose as he struggled to understand what had happened. His lungs burned, and his vision flickered at the edges.

He could feel consciousness slipping through his fingers. Yet the pool no longer seemed interested in claiming him. The water around him had become perfectly still.

It was as though the abyss itself had suddenly decided he had gone deep enough. Sagiri floated there thousands of feet beneath the fortress, suspended in a darkness so complete that even his senses struggled to grasp it. The silence felt endless.

His heartbeat slowed. The pain in his ears faded into a distant ache. For a brief moment, balanced between consciousness and oblivion, Sagiri simply drifted. No longer falling. No longer fighting. Just floating alone in the heart of the abyss while the black water held him gently, almost carefully, as though he had imagined what had just happened.

Sagiri dared not move as he feared that any moment would trigger the pools again.

"What a mass of violent water.

Sagiri let himself drift lower and lower, but more slowly this time. Anyone could have already died from the mere force of the whirlpool. Anyone could have been torn into a million pieces, ground to powder, but the archive had shielded his body, and even with the air sucked from his lungs, he was very much alive.

"Sagiri let the silence hold him for a while, letting himself fall.

Suddenly, however, something touched him. Sagiri’s right eye snapped open instantly. For a moment, he had been floating motionless in the silent abyss, his fading senses straining against the darkness.

Then he felt it again.

A cold brush against his arm. Another around his leg. The darkness surrounding him was moving. Long tendrils of blackness emerged from the water itself, so dark they seemed to devour what little light existed. One wrapped around his wrist. Another coiled around his waist. More followed.

They came from every direction, drifting through the abyss without a sound or ripple, winding themselves around his body with an almost unsettling gentleness. Sagiri tensed and tried to move, but his limbs felt distant and heavy. The tendrils continued climbing, swallowing his legs, his torso, and his arms until only his head remained free. There was no violence in their grip, no malice, only an undeniable certainty.

Sagiri had given up on trying to fight the pool or anything within it, but he still fought. It was futile, however.

More darkness gathered, weaving itself over him until he could no longer tell where the water ended, and the shadows began. Then, just before the last opening closed, Sagiri caught sight of a colossal shape far below, something vast enough to make the abyss itself seem small. The darkness folded over his face a heartbeat later and swallowed him whole.