Chapter 1: Seville's Hidden Currents

Egon's knuckles slammed against the slick rock wall, pain nearly knocking him out. No groan escaped. He clenched his jaw, used the last dregs of strength to wedge himself into a crawlspace barely wide enough for one man. The air here was thick as rotting fruit pulp, stinking of rust and dead fish. Above, boot soles crunching glass and rotted wood drew closer, frantic and erratic—Marcos's search team blindly sweeping the ruins.

"Search every shadow," a voice crackled through a transmitter, sharp and distorted by current. "If Victor's relics aren't in the sunken ship, they're in these sewer dead-ends. Find it—or find the scavenger."

Egon held his breath, both hands shielding his collar. There, the just-activated hydro-acoustic resonator pulsed a faint blue light, like a dying heart thrashing. The glow bled through his coarse linen shirt, casting eerie shadows on the moss-flecked walls. He dared not look at it—the visions were still running.

Under the resonator's frequency, Egon's mind was yanked back into a sealed memory fragment. Not ordinary visual recall—a stripping of the senses. He smelled the sea salt from Captain Victor's last voyage thirty years ago, heard the groan of whalebone keel snapping. The Victor in the vision wasn't the slovenly, greedy man of legend. His eyes were clear enough to chill the heart, clutching a sheepskin chart blackened by seawater.

"Egon... no, child," the vision's Victor whispered into the void, voice seeming to sound directly in his skull. "If you ever touch this badge, it means the Abyss has woken. The chart's lower half hides where the echo rings strongest. Remember—not by sight. By sound."

Egon's heart skipped. Echo? He scanned the dim channel. Water surged through stone cracks with a low rumble. No sea here—only a drainage system the city forgot. But the resonator seemed to hint at some supernatural link between these underground waters and the old wreck.

Then the noise above stopped.

Dead silence.

That stillness, worse than any noise, froze Egon's blood. A heavy footfall landed on the grate above his head; the floor trembled. A swaying searchlight beam cut through the grate's slits like a blade of white light, slicing into the channel.

"Opening here!" a gruff voice shouted. "Heat coming off it. Someone's hiding!"

Egon instinctively tried to retreat, but his ankle caught on a protruding rock. The light cone widened, illuminating his mud-caked face and eyes blown wide with terror. Several figures dropped through the grate. Leading them: a tall man in a gas mask, gripping a modified electric shock baton.

"Grab him—don't hurt him too bad. Captain wants him alive."

Egon's mind raced. Flight was impossible; the channel exit sat inside their cordon. His only move: force the resonator into full overload, flood the space with disorienting sonic fog. He jammed the red button on its side—a self-rigged fail-safe he'd added without permission.

*Wheee—!*

A high-frequency shriek erupted—not from the device itself, but from every body of water around. The channel's pooled water began to boil violently, countless tiny bubbles bursting with a sound like ten thousand shattering panes. The noise filled the cramped space, wrecking hearing and balance alike. The search team clapped hands over ears, breathing ragged behind their masks; one dropped to a knee and vomited a black puddle.

Egon used those few chaotic seconds to roll into the fastest-flowing side channel. Icy filth flooded his mouth and nose, choking him, but he didn't stop. He groped through darkness, palms flat against the slick walls, letting the current carry him deeper. The vision sharpened. Victor's face blurred, but the sheepskin chart unfurled before his eyes.

It showed an ancient harbor map, marked with seven anchor points. The first six had been confirmed in earlier searches. But the seventh—the treasure's core—was covered by a blot of thick ink. Beneath the ink, barely visible: a coordinate fragment in old cipher, `Ω-47.5`, and an arrow pointing to a seabed fissure.

When the current finally dumped him at the bottom of a vast abandoned reservoir, Egon collapsed against a pile of rusted machinery. He coughed violently, spat water, consciousness slowly returning. Trembling, he pulled out the resonator, tried to re-read the vision.

The blue light flickered twice—then died.

Screen black. Only the badge's faint residual glow held on stubbornly. Egon pressed his fingertips to the glowing symbols, desperate to summon the vanished image. He recalled Victor's last words: "The chart's lower half... by sound."

He closed his eyes, pressed the Resonance Meter to his chest, and tried to catch echoes from the past in the silence. At first there was nothing, only his heavy breathing. Then, faintly, a frequency pierced the noise. It was not a sound, but a vibration.

He opened the screen again.

The vision returned. Victor’s face vanished, and the background became a bottomless black hole. The parchment map surfaced again, but this time something had changed.

The parchment map, which had originally shown its upper half in full, now looked as if an unseen hand had torn it. Its edges blackened, curled, and finally disintegrated into the void. The delicate lines marking coastlines and the ink dots marking islands vanished completely.

Only two parts remained.

One was the fragment of coordinates `Ω-47.5`, floating alone in the center of the darkness like an abandoned eye. The other was the blank area that should have occupied the lower half of the map. That had once been the treasure’s exact hiding place; now it had become a black smear of ink, as if some force had erased it by force.

Egon stared at the ink smear, his pupils contracting violently. He understood what had happened. The Resonance Meter’s energy was not enough to carry the complete secret. It was like a filter, able to bear only part of the truth. To keep him alive, to let him escape with a clue, the system had automatically destroyed the other half of the data.

This meant Marcus’s people were not only looking for the treasure; they were also looking for the complete map. With only half, the treasure was worthless scrap; with the other half, it became the key capable of overturning the entire port district’s economic lifeline. And that other half still lay quietly somewhere, waiting to be unlocked by another key.

“Damn it…” Egon cursed under his breath, his fingers bleeding from pressing too hard, staining the screen red.

At that moment, from deep within the reservoir, came a sound that belonged to none of the people just now.

*Thud… thud…*

Slow, heavy, rhythmic echoes came from deep beneath the water. It was not the sound of mechanical failure, nor the reverberation of flowing water. It sounded as if some enormous creature, below the dark waterline, was gently tapping the hull.

The Resonance Meter lit up again. This time there was no image, only a line of cold red text slowly rising at the bottom of the screen:

[Warning: Biological signal detected. Source: unknown. Distance: 0.5 meters. Establishing connection…]

Egon froze in place, his heart nearly stopping. He looked down. In the gaps among the pile of rusted parts, a pair of cloudy yet bright eyes stared at him through the black standing water.