Chapter 4 –
Just keep swimming, just keep swimming~.
I mentally replayed what I remembered of the tune as I embraced the feeling of calm seas. It’s a shame I couldn't hum it, all that came out of this mouth were pops and grunts.
I have officially achieved a state of mental clarity. My head felt as if it has slowed down and I am no longer having any wild thoughts. The water seemed to be spinning around me as if I reached a Zen of some sort.
Oh, that’s just the signs of me being tired. Well, there was quite a lot that happened since I became a fish. Certainly this had been one of the most eventful days of my life. If it even happened in a span of a day at all.
I had no idea what I could do to tell the time down here, I was not some madman who could count every second that passed. There was a reason we had clocks, people.
Regardless of the time, my body was telling me to go the fuck to sleep, so I should really go to sleep. Problem is, I felt really uncomfortable with the fact I am about to sleep while floating aimlessly in the water.
I was a good swimmer in my past life; I wasn’t really afraid of water, but sleeping in it? Hell no, even floating on my bare back for ten minutes made me want to stand up. I had my reservations about sleeping completely engulfed in water.
It didn’t seem plausible that I would reach the ocean floor in a reasonable amount of time. I had been using my bio-luminescence and other senses to scan the water every now and then, and there’s really no sign of the ocean floor any time soon. Heck, I didn’t see any other creatures along the way, but that was probably for the better.
Now, it's time to totally soldier my to the bottom of the ocean. Actually, on second thought, not really.
Yeah, i’m not gonna risk health issues just because I was being a pansy and wanted to sleep on the seabed. Besides, if I encountered a place with little oxygen and start suffocating? I'd only have myself to blame if I lacked the energy to swim out of that.
My status screen told me I was an abyssal dragonfish, so was I in the abyssal 1 actually abyssopelagic zone or something? That… was very deep. For all I know I was heading straight for a trench at the bottom of the ocean. Or worse, there wasn’t a bottom at all, at least one I could survive in.
Hah, since that's the case I should be careful of any areas devoid of oxygen. Even though my brain seemed to be powered by magic, my body certainly wasn’t. Well, I would definitely sleep very soundly with that thought in my head now.
Ah whatever, I should get to sleeping. More thinking can come after I was well-rested. Hopefully the flow of the water doesn’t carry me somewhere I would regret.
I cleared my thoughts and sunk into the soft embrace of deep sleep.
I woke up, and the first thing that came to my head is:
'I was so stupid yesterday, dammit!’
Well, at least it seemed I’m pretty energized now and nothing got me while I was asleep. The surrounding waters feel as empty as ever. Great, actually, genuinely great; now back to what I was thinking…
Let's forget the whole tentacle fiasco for now.
Yeah, so you know how people tend to cling onto the first sign of hope? I happen to have done just that. Part of the reason I was swimming down into the ocean was because the seafloor usually tends to have more life on it. More life means more chances I would find someone intelligent enough to want to be my friend, right?
WRONG.
First of all, I was too quick to assume that the existence of [Arcane Mind], meant that other people… creatures would have it too. As much as I loathe the comparison, the protagonists of those types of stories usually have an ability to enable their journey. Perhaps this was mine, but I was not so arrogant to think myself as so special.
As I've already thought before, nature wouldn't ignore such a convenient improvement. Yet alone anything that would benefit from the extra mental capacity. Anyways, that wasn’t really the top concern.
The problem was pretty simple, having a brain as smart as a human didn’t mean you could actually communicate on the same level as one from a civilized society. Education was a big thing that separated the hominid of hominids in the era of civilization from their ancestors who didn't even know how to bang rocks together
Just because someone’s brain allowed for ‘t3 int’ or whatever, didn’t mean they could have it. Like, how are they supposed to know about ANY sort of language at all besides simple instructions for cooperating with others?
Language is the hallmark of a civilized society, which I’d be hard pressed to find in the ocean, much more at this depth. Would life in the deep sea even find a reason for such a thing as cooperation beyond hunting in groups? As far as I know there was a minuscule chance for agriculture or livestock to ever happen here.
Ehh, maybe there would be some other unknown way for society to flourish around here, you never know.
What I do know it’s impossible for a creature to get ‘smart’ without having access to that knowledge in the first place, no matter how good it was at getting smart. Unless it could magically extract information from its surroundings.
Actually now that I think about it, I would really like that ability, it seemed nice.
While I would appreciate having someone to interact with as to not go insane; I think having to raise an adult fishchild/squidlet/whatever with this completely alien body and its functions would actually work to drive me insane.
Even if I somehow got through all of those problems I was faced with one, unscalable wall. We would simply think differently, and I mean very differently.
Sure I could train a vicious predator like a crocodile into getting all buddy-buddy with me, but were I somehow to fall down in front of it, it would eat me without remorse. It’s a bit too smug to assume intelligent minds would work on a universal set of values, so I think that would carry over to more intelligent beings too.
For all I know I would make friends with a seemingly sane creature, but for him murderizing and taking advantage of me once I was in a tricky situation was a perfectly reasonable and normal action. Hell, it doesn’t even take an alien to run on that logic.
Haah, why can’t we achieve our ideals without being stupid? I really would have to move heaven and earth just so I could have someone to have a cup of translucent squid organs with.
Maybe a pet is fine, at least I’ll know it wants to murder me, so no trust issues there.
I’m really getting ahead of myself huh; those are an issue for the far future. I had to focus on the present.
Right! The system thingy, I should give it a nickname someday, but we have to get to know each other a little more. Y’know, go on a couple dates, watch a movie together and thoroughly inspect each other’s insides. The system thingy is really ahead of me in the last one, so it’s time to catch up~
Right, it said I had improvements available. Bring up a list of those please!
Okay, I guess not. Oooohhhh. Arghhh. Okay, that didn’t actually hurt but it probably should with how the information suddenly popped into my mind.
Seemed it didn’t see the need for any screening this time. Understandable given how much it injected into my mind, a list like that would be hell. Unless it was somehow scrollable.
Basically – for any clueless observers out there – I now know all the improvements I can have. Unfortunately, this means that I cannot draw conclusions about how system thingy works from improvements I did not have access to.
Back when I first saw it, I was curious why the improvements section did not mention my strong teeth, my ability to produce red light and what was essentially a super sense of sorts detecting the water around me.
It seems that I could now understand, I think the system thingy uses my species or race as some sort of baseline. Even though my teeth are most likely already extremely tough; I could still buy improvements for them, the case was the same for my luminescence but unfortunately not for whatever gave me the ability to sense the water.
Just a hunch, but the qualitative values might be related to other members of my species, would explain why intelligence is an outlier. Still not so useful without knowing what the numbers mean.
So it seemed that it took what nature had to offer and built on it? I wonder if improved body parts and organs would eventually pass on through genetics. If that was the case...
Ugh, the thought of giant, flying fire-breathing cockroaches of death emerging from system thingy-induced evolution sends shivers down my spine.
Aside from mostly physical improvements, there were no mental ones, not even anything to help me gather a little information.
It also seemed I could use the improvement to restore myself to ‘full health’(the extent of which I do not know), with the obvious cost of losing it. Perhaps I should save at least one improvement for a life-or-death situation?
My answer for that was already a ‘no’, simply because I could buy improvements that increased my chances of survival better. I have no idea how durable deep sea fish were, but even if I heal to ‘full health’ with teeth sunken deep inside me, I would still surely die!
It was better to buy something that prevents me from getting into such a situation in the first place, like maybe increasing my metabolism so I will recover faster? No… that’ll increase my need for food. On the other hand, improving my durability through my flesh would be equally useless given how fragile it is.
Aha, if I don’t want to get hit I’ll just increase my speed and agility by improving my fins. That way I could run circles around predator and prey alike.
Wait, there was something better...
2I researched some deep sea dragonfish tail pictures. Some already had forked tails(although I don't think they were too forked), some did not. I decided not to make the 'abyssal' version of the dragonfish originally have a forked tail. Although some of them may choose it upon rank up.
Oh, so it needs a popup for this one? Well, it does make sense for such an important thing.
The reason why I chose this is: I’d rather not have to confront any enemy at all if given the choice. Call me a coward but, I’d never even start to think about fighting an enemy head on.
No, I’m not being a coward, I’m just being reasonable. If a battle ends up being fair, then someone’s already fucked up.
I’d rather creep up on my foes completely undetected and chomp their head clean off! All my prey shall see in their final moments are faint flashes of red light.
For anything that’s not prey, I’ll be avoiding that, thank you very much. The system thingy seems to reward me by merely surviving an encounter anyway. Though I’ll have to find out what to what extent it does that.
Anyways, I was given a chance for confirmation; I’ll double check if that’s truly the best option.
Wait a minute!
Yeah, it’s really the best one I have got here.
‘Huaah! I feel the power coursing through me.’ Is what I want to think but there weren’t really any special effects that came with this one. Just a mental ‘click’ that something was in fact different. Maybe, it’ll be flashier If I went under a more drastic change.
I swam around a bit, noticing that my ‘footprints’ that cause changes in the pressure of the water weren’t as much as before. I was sure even with my senses, I would not notice something like this until it was already within a few meters of me. Even then I would think it was a smaller fish, and not something of my size.
Combined with my ultra-black body, surely there were few things in the sea that can accurately pinpoint me now. The next rank, I should pick up some countermeasures for stealth.
This was surprisingly fun.
I steel myself to proceed downwards, regardless of whatever danger lurks further beneath the ocean depths.
Yo dude. Do you still have plans of continuing this story? I'm interested in it, but don't want to get hooked (fishing pun intended) if it's going to be stopped after 10 chapters. Lol.