Cerqin recalled what she knew about the Sea within the Sea as she twisted like seaweed in a slow current, hunting for a softer pose.

Silver Luan slept with her locked in his arms, pressing like a reef on her ribs, his dragon tail coiled around her legs like an iron cable.

She finally pried open the tail tip, stopping it from sinking farther, then pushed aside the plush against her cheek and surfaced her face like a fish.

Now certain they were inside the Sea within the Sea, she judged a high-tier leviathan’s self-detonation had blasted a hole in the seabed like a cratered wound.

The water pressure up by the sky-dome wasn’t the same as here, so the two were sucked in like leaves in a whirl, and the current should point back to the mouth.

If Silver Luan woke, going back safely felt like a shore already in sight.

She also understood why this deep-reef zone, shaped like a miner’s dream and perfect for sea-crystal ore, lay eerily barren like a silent desert.

The prime culprit was this special terrain, a second ocean folded inside the first like a hidden pocket.

This huge cave inside the Sea within the Sea had the smell of riches, a treasure chest yawning in the dark.

It might be untouched, a place the sea-dragonfolk had combed for years yet never found, like a pearl sleeping under mud.

A trove like this carried a price like a crown.

Maybe the legend of a Sea-Dragon legacy sat somewhere inside this massive cave, like a rumor turned real.

The thought stirred her heart first, then her hands itched to send spiritual sense outward like a thin ray.

There were many colossi drifting outside, but giant sea beasts were dull to spirit-sense, slower to catch a probing breeze.

Earlier, she hadn’t dared persist; her scan had met those shadows like thunder, and she shrank back in a heartbeat.

She weighed it, then let spirit-sense slip out again, a thread kept tight and small like a lamp wick.

She held it to a radius of a hundred meters, barely brushing the edges of leviathans like silhouettes behind fog. After several tests, she speared her sense up through the rock above like a needle.

Maybe the sky-dome held mana condensed like frost, or it was built of strange ores that drank light.

Upward, the damping felt heavier, like swimming through tar.

After a fruitless hundred meters, she shelved the urge to measure the dome’s thickness; one good sign remained, the current here ran with a clear direction like a river vein.

Could she yank their shell free from the wedged rock and ride that river out like a boat?

She thought it through, then decided to try. With their energies aligned now, maybe she could pilot the round shell Silver Luan had formed.

But the egg-shaped shell ignored spirit-sense like stone, and its best trick after defense seemed to be screening scans like a veil.

Cerqin carefully stretched out her foot and touched the shell’s body like testing cold glass.

The texture wasn’t a simple mana shimmer; it was solid, a skin under her sole.

It felt part metal, part spring, like tempered leather stretched over steel.

As a lover of Arcanotechnology who’d handled many materials, Cerqin felt a spark of curiosity rise like a flame.

“Between biomass and metal—how did he forge this?”

She eased out a trace of life aura, warmth like sap, and found that outside her body it turned wild like scattered bees.

The unruly life energy slipped free, then got pulled back into her like tide into a bay.

She frowned; life energy obeyed inside like an arm, yet it wasn’t truly hers at the bone.

Once it left, it refused her reins; she tried her own mana next, and the shell showed no ripple at all.

She reconsidered, set her foot on the inner wall again, and used spirit-sense to drive life energy to her sole like water to a gate.

This time the shell answered like a heartbeat; the familiar thrum grew, life energy sank through her foot and merged into the shell, wrapped their sphere, and the whole thing shivered.

Her face went cold; on the edge of her sense, placid giants twitched like storms waking and began to thrash.

Cerqin yanked her foot back, nerves drawn taut like bowstrings.

The seabed’s mana was a muddled stew, and she hadn’t expected beasts so deaf to spirit yet so quick to mana’s spark.

She stopped in time; the giants wheeled like eddies, failed to fix a target, then settled like silt.

Cerqin sighed; prying the shell free looked off the table for now, like a door barred by fate.

If the beasts found them, the outcome felt like dice thrown in deep water, unknowable and cold.

Lucky, they might be swallowed whole like seeds; unlucky, the shell could be crushed like an egg. With Silver Luan asleep, that spelled death.

Cerqin had no way to wake him, not even with a whisper.

Her options stalled, yet she felt her body’s strength climbing like a tide.

Maybe a few days more, and she’d touch the Sixth Rank’s threshold, break through, and muscle past these giants like a spear.

That assumed no high-tier presence lurked among the Sea within the Sea’s colossi like a king under the waves.

This massive cave shouldn’t cradle beasts that huge; mutant individuals were rare as comets, not easily met.

So the plan felt viable, a thin thread of hope through stone.

Thinking and thinking, she felt she should be bolder, heart first, hands second.

She’d push spirit-sense at full tilt and try to see the cave’s full shape like a map unrolling.

At Fifth Rank, even a full burn only covered a tight radius; a kilometer was about the limit like a candle’s circle.

Directed in one line, she could stretch to two kilometers like an arrow flight.

Given time, she could lean on the Love God; controlled sense had caps, but in a narrow fan she estimated five kilometers like a beam.

Upward sounded hopeless; the deep-water distance from surface to seabed ran over ten thousand meters like an abyss.

The sky-dome’s rock chewed spirit penetration hard, cutting distance by half or more like teeth.

Cerqin guessed the dome’s thickness at five hundred to a thousand meters, and piercing it with spirit might still fail like rain on granite.

Downward mapping felt more real, the road underfoot rather than the stair to heaven.

Wary of any special beast keen to spirit-sense, she didn’t scan straight down; she traced the rock rim like a fingertip along a bowl.

She cast in one direction; at about two kilometers she touched an edge like a wall. She turned opposite; at roughly two kilometers she hit rock again like a mirror.

“Smaller than I thought…”

She exhaled; four kilometers across meant it likely didn’t host absurd giants, the kind that filled legends like mountains.

The odds of a high-tier sea beast dropped like a lowered spear.

Probing down, she fixed the sizes for up and down, and the two crosswise directions like axes.

The cave inside the Sea within the Sea ran about four kilometers in diameter like a well’s mouth; the other two directions kept going with no end felt.

With the Love God lending reach to five kilometers, she still didn’t touch a final limit like a line in mist.

Cerqin hadn’t expected the cave to be a long cylinder like a traditional tunnel, a pillar bored through rock.

It wasn’t a broad chamber wrought by earth plates pressing, but a hole deep as a spear thrust.

Its shape felt less like nature’s artistry and more like a burrow gnawed by something colossal, a nest chewed in stone.

“…”

She froze, then swept the wall again with spirit like a brush, and shock bloomed in her chest like fire.

“Could this be…”

Her guesses hardened with scans from multiple angles, clues stacking like bones.

On the cave wall stood orderly, giant bar-shaped ridges, and at the top lay massive segments like vertebrae.

All of it pointed to a single truth like sun through cloud.

This vast cave inside the Sea within the Sea was formed by an enormous skeleton, a hollow cut by death.

Four words rose in Cerqin’s mind like a tide: Sea-Dragon remains.