Year 333 Post-Collision – Six Months and Three Days
[ARCHIVE NOTIFICATION]
[Morning Status: Still Pathetic]
[Leviathan Proximity: Very Yes]
[Drowning Schedule: Confirmed]
[User Emotional State: Preemptive Dread]
Hey fuck you Archive, Sunny thought, because he couldn't actually talk yet and his internal monologue was the only place he had any dignity left. I'd think that if I could think without you commenting on it.
[ARCHIVE RESPONSE: You ARE Thinking It]
[I'm Just The Part Of You That Writes It Down]
[Also You're Welcome For Keeping You Alive]
[Also Also: She's Watching You]
Sunny's infant body went still. He could feel it—that weight, that attention—pressing down on the pocket dimension. The Leviathan was close. Not physically manifested yet, but present in the way that mattered. Like being watched by the ocean itself.
She was going to drown him again.
Of course she was. That's what she did. Every day since the thirty-eighth drowning had been a new variation on the same theme: drop baby in abyss, see if baby survives, pull baby back before baby stays dead, repair baby's broken everything, repeat.
What is she even trying to teach me?
The pressure shifted, and Sunny felt rather than heard her response, like words made of depth:
"Lesson one: Weight exists."
Oh. She could hear his thoughts now. Great. Fantastic. Privacy was dead.
"Lesson two: You exist under weight."
The pressure increased slightly—not enough to hurt, but enough to remind him that hurt was always an option.
"Lesson three: When weight and existence meet, you choose which one matters more."
That's not a lesson, that's just torture with philosophy.
"Is there a difference?"
Sunny would have laughed if he wasn't terrified.
This has to be illegal. Like, child endangerment or something. Pretty sure drowning babies repeatedly violates some kind of law.
"In your old world, perhaps," the Leviathan said, and now she was manifesting, her human-shaped form condensing out of the pressure like a statue emerging from fog. "In this world, there are no laws against making you stronger. Only laws against letting you stay weak."
Pretty sure that's not how laws work.
"Then you do not understand this world yet," she said simply. She crouched down to his level—he was still just floating in her dimensional pocket, a six-month-old baby with increasingly dense bones and trauma he couldn't even verbalize. "In this place, power is law. The strong write rules. The weak follow them. You are mine, which means you will not be weak."
She reached out and tapped his chest where her sigil burned.
"Besides. You survived thirty-eight drownings. You broke through to E- rank. Your body is adapting. This is working."
Working? I can't even sit up! I'm a baby! I'm six months old and you're treating me like a Marine recruit!
"Marines are weak," the Leviathan said dismissively. "Marines break under the pressure I subject you to. You have not broken. Therefore, you are not weak. You are simply... unfinished."
[ARCHIVE INTERJECTION]
[She Has A Point]
[Normal Human Infant Survival Rate Under These Conditions: 0%]
[Your Survival Rate: 100%]
[Admittedly Because She Won't Let You Die]
[But Still Technically Impressive]
I hate both of you.
"Good," the Leviathan said. "Hate is will. Will is survival. Survival is progress." She stood, and her form seemed to stretch vertically in a way that geometry disagreed with. "Now. Today's lesson."
Oh god.
"You have been learning to exist under weight. Density. Pressure. The law of bearing down." Her eyes—those abyss-dark, infinite-depth eyes—fixed on him. "But that is only half of what I am. Today, you learn the other half."
What's the other half?
The water around him went perfectly, impossibly still.
"Hunger."
The Lesson of Wanting
The Leviathan didn't drop him in the abyss this time.
Instead, she did something worse: she left.
Not physically. Her form was still there, crouched in front of him, watching. But her presence—that enormous, crushing, ever-present weight that had been his entire world for six months—pulled back.
Sunny didn't realize how much he'd been leaning on it until it was gone.
The absence was loud.
For his entire second life, he'd existed under pressure. His bones had adapted to it. His heart had learned to beat against it. His lungs had figured out how to pull breath from spaces where air was being compressed out of existence. He'd become something that could only exist because the weight existed first.
And now the weight was gone.
His body didn't know what to do.
[ALERT: ENVIRONMENTAL PRESSURE NORMALIZED]
[WAIT]
[WHY IS THIS WORSE]
[ABYSSAL DENSITY ENTRY: CONFUSED]
[USER STATUS: PANICKING]
Sunny's infant body started to fail. Not from pressure. From the lack of it.
His bones, compressed and reinforced and rebuilt to withstand impossible force, suddenly felt too heavy for his muscles. His heart, trained to pump against resistance, started beating irregularly without something to push against. His lungs, adapted to pulling breath from hostile spaces, couldn't figure out how to process normal air.
He tried to cry and choked.
He tried to move and couldn't.
He tried to exist and found that he didn't know how without the weight.
What—what is—
"This is what I am teaching you," the Leviathan said, and her voice was quieter now, less pressure and more... current. Pulling instead of pushing. "You have learned to survive under force. Now learn what happens when that force leaves."
I'm dying—
"You are not dying. You are wanting."
[ARCHIVE ANALYSIS]
[OH]
[OH NO]
[SHE'S RIGHT]
[USER HAS BECOME DEPENDENT ON EXTERNAL PRESSURE]
[SURVIVAL MECHANISM HAS BECOME SURVIVAL REQUIREMENT]
[THIS IS BAD]
[THIS IS A DESIGN FLAW]
[THIS IS—]
[WAIT]
[IS THIS THE LESSON?]
The Leviathan leaned closer, and even though her presence was pulled back, her form was still there, still impossible to look away from.
"You know what I am, small thing? Truly?"
Sunny couldn't respond. He was too busy trying to remember how to breathe without resistance.
"I am not just pressure. Pressure is only the method. I am hunger." Her eyes reflected nothing, consumed everything. "I am the thing at the bottom that wants. That pulls everything down, that takes, that never stops taking because taking is what I am."
She tapped his chest again.
"You stole from me. Do you remember? Your first act in this world was wanting so desperately that you committed theft against a god. You hungered to not disappear. That hunger is what I recognized. That hunger is why I claimed you."
I just—I didn't want to die—
"Yes. You wanted." The Leviathan's smile was sharp and ancient and approving. "That is the law I truly embody. Not weight. Want. Pressure is just the shape want takes when it has nowhere else to go."
She stood again, and Sunny realized he could see her more clearly now without the pressure distorting everything. See the way her form was hollow at the center, like she was a shell around an absence. Like hunger given shape.
"You have been learning to bear down," she said. "Now learn to pull. Learn to want something enough that reality provides it. Learn hunger, small thing. Learn to take what you need to survive."
How—
But she was already gone. Not manifested-gone. Actually gone. Her presence vanished completely from the pocket dimension, leaving Sunny alone in a space that suddenly felt too big, too empty, too light.
His body was still failing. His bones too dense. His heart struggling. His lungs confused.
He was going to die of normal pressure.
That was the stupidest fucking way to die he could imagine.
[ARCHIVE EMERGENCY PROTOCOL]
[USER WILL EXPIRE IN: 40 Seconds]
[CAUSE: Adaptation Paradox]
[SOLUTION: Unknown]
[WAIT]
[USER HAS MEDIA CATALOG]
[SEARCHING: "Survival Through Wanting"]
[RESULTS: 10,000+]
[REFINING: "I Want To Live" Moments]
[TOP MATCH: Every Shonen Anime Ever]
[ESTIMATED UTILITY: F-]
[PROCEED ANYWAY? YOU'RE DYING]
[Y/N]
Yes you fucking—just—HELP—
The Archive dumped every "I refuse to die here" moment from every piece of media Sunny had ever consumed directly into his fragmenting consciousness.
Naruto screaming about never giving up.
Luffy declaring he'd become Pirate King.
Simon piercing the heavens with a drill made of fighting spirit.
Guts surviving because he was too angry to die.
Subaru clawing back from death because someone was waiting for him.
A thousand protagonists, a thousand moments of want made manifest.
All F- rank. All fictional. All completely useless in practical terms.
But the concept was there.
Wanting so hard that reality had to acknowledge it.
Sunny's failing body, his compressed bones and confused heart and struggling lungs, reached.
Not for the Leviathan. She was gone. This was the test.
He reached for his own Archive. For the fragment of Abyssal Density that he'd stolen, that had saved him thirty-eight times, that was currently useless because it was built for pressure and there was no pressure anymore.
And he changed it.
Not refined it. Not ranked it up. Not evolved it through survival.
He wanted it to be something else.
He wanted it to be the thing that pulled inward instead of bore down. The thing that created its own weight instead of surviving external weight. The thing that hungered for stability and took it from the environment.
[ALERT: UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY MODIFICATION DETECTED]
[USER IS ATTEMPTING TO: Manually Rewrite Recorded Law]
[THIS SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE]
[THIS IS LITERALLY HERESY]
[CONTINUITY DEBT INCREASING RAPIDLY]
[WAIT]
[IT'S WORKING?]
[HOW IS IT WORKING]
Sunny felt the fragment of Abyssal Density twist inside him. It hurt. It hurt like his bones breaking again, like his soul was trying to edit itself, like reality was arguing with his desperate, stupid, infant want and losing the argument through sheer fucking stubbornness.
The density stopped being external pressure resistance.
It became internal pressure generation.
His bones stopped being too heavy.
They became correctly heavy—dense enough to create their own small gravity well, pulling his body into stability instead of relying on outside force.
His heart found its rhythm again—beating not against pressure, but creating pressure with each pulse, micro-compressions of space with every contraction.
His lungs pulled breath not because the air was being given, but because he wanted the air and his body took it.
[AETERNUM ARCHIVE: CRITICAL EVENT]
[ENTRY EVOLUTION: Abyssal Density (Fragment) → Abyssal Density (Hunger Aspect)]
[RANK: E-]
[NEW MANIFESTATION:]
[- Self-Generated Gravitational Stability]
[- Pressure Through Want]
[- Micro-Density Manipulation (0.001% Effect)]
[THIS IS DIFFERENT FROM NORMAL REFINEMENT]
[YOU DIDN'T JUST SURVIVE]
[YOU CHANGED THE ENTRY]
[HOW]
[CONTINUITY DEBT: 8.2%]
[WARNING: EDITORS MAY TAKE NOTICE]
Sunny gasped—a real gasp, his lungs pulling air because he wanted air—and the pocket dimension settled around him.
The Leviathan reappeared instantly, her presence slamming back into the space like a tsunami, and Sunny didn't collapse this time. His body held. Not comfortably. Not easily. But it held.
She was staring at him with something that might have been surprise.
"You did not just survive the absence," she said slowly. "You rewrote the fragment I gave you. You made it yours. Truly yours."
Sunny tried to respond and remembered he was still a baby. No words yet. Just exhausted, traumatized existing.
The Leviathan laughed. It sounded like icebergs calving.
"Good," she said. "Very good, small thing. You have learned lesson three faster than I expected."
There are NUMBERED lessons?
"Of course. Did you think I was drowning you randomly?" She settled back, looking almost pleased. "Lesson one: Bear weight. Lesson two: Want survival. Lesson three: Take what you need from whatever is available, even if what is available is nothing."
She manifested a hand and patted his head. It felt like having a mountain brush against you affectionately.
"You have earned rest. Tomorrow we continue. But tonight—" She paused, considering. "—I will teach you words. You clearly have thoughts worth speaking, and I am tired of guessing which ones are insults."
All of them. They're all insults.
"I know," the Leviathan said fondly. "That is why you are mine."
[END CHAPTER 3]
[CONTINUITY DEBT: 8.2%]
[ARCHIVE ENTRIES: 1 (Modified)]
[NEW ABILITY DISCOVERED: Manual Entry Rewriting]
[EDITOR ATTENTION: Pending]
[AGE: 6 Months, 3 Days]
[STATUS: Pathetic But Evolving]
[LESSONS LEARNED: 3/Unknown]
[NEXT DROWNING: Tomorrow (Probably)]
[ARCHIVE NOTE: This Is Fine]
[ARCHIVE NOTE: This Is Not Fine]
[ARCHIVE NOTE: We're Making It Work Anyway]