The ache had not left.

It lived under my skin now, deep and slow, pulsing through the bone each time I breathed. The feast had filled me, but the fullness had turned to sickness. Every movement hurt. My new fins twitched at random, as if the muscles beneath them hadn’t learned who they belonged to yet.

I drifted above what was left of the vent field, the water around me thick with silt and fading warmth. The carcass pit was quiet now. The predators had taken what I hadn’t. All that remained was the sour scent of burned life and the dim shimmer of scales sinking into the dark.

The sea was colder again. The current moved with its usual patience, as if the gluttony of the last cycle had been a dream. But my body remembered.

I was heavier now, stretched longer, my scales thicker where the growth had hardened them. The new ridges along my fins flexed and caught the current, making every glide sharper than before. I didn’t yet know how to use them properly. They felt like blades welded onto a wound.

The water pressed in, and for a while, I let myself float.

No hunger. No goal. Just breathing.

The silence was complete, until it wasn’t.

A sound touched the edge of hearing. Not a voice, not a roar. A click.

Soft. Faint.

Then another.

I froze, every nerve pulling tight. The sound came from somewhere ahead, bouncing through the dark like pebbles striking stone underwater.

I thought at first it was my heartbeat echoing through the hollow. I pressed my body flat against the current to test it. The sound came again, quicker this time, followed by a series of sharper chirps that pulsed through the water in a steady rhythm.

Not echoes.

Something alive.

I turned slowly, following the direction of the sound. The water carried each vibration straight into the bones of my skull. My new ridges thrummed softly with each pulse.

Click, pause, click.

The pattern repeated.

Sonar.

I had heard small bursts of it before, faint and distant, creatures using sound to paint the dark. But this was close. Closer than anything I had sensed since the feast.

I drifted lower, careful not to stir the current.

The clicks stopped for a heartbeat, then came again, sharper, shorter, angled. They were searching.

I closed my eyes, listening with everything I had.

A shape formed in my mind, built entirely from sound: a cluster of smaller lives moving through the cold water. Their bodies darted like silver needles, weaving between one another as they hunted through the silt. The sonar pulses weren’t random. They mapped the world the way my eyes once had.

Fry.

Others like me.

I stayed still, watching without sight. They swept through the remnants of the carcass field, tearing apart whatever scraps were left. Their pulses lit the water in waves of sound.

Each one bounced against me, faint but clear, tracing the edges of my form. They didn’t seem to notice. To them, I was just another shape in the dark.

Then one of the pulses struck my new ridged fins. The returning echo was sharper than before, carrying a note I hadn’t expected.

I heard myself.

A reflex took hold. My throat convulsed, and I let out a short click of my own. The sound shot forward, struck the stone, and came back at me a moment later, full of shape and distance.

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I saw nothing, yet I knew where everything was. The rock’s edge, the turn of the vent, the drift of plankton, all of it unfolded in my head in perfect silence.

The realisation startled me so badly I clicked again, louder this time. The world expanded. The water was full of things I hadn’t noticed, structures, tunnels, moving shapes.

The abyss wasn’t empty. It was crowded.

The sound made my bones hum. The ridges on my fins buzzed softly. My entire body had become an instrument.

The smaller fry stopped feeding. They turned in unison, their own pulses ceasing for a heartbeat.

The sea went still.

Then, faintly, I heard one of them answer. A double-click, quick and sharp.

An echo to my own.

For a moment, I froze again. The sound wasn’t mechanical; it carried tone, hesitation, awareness.

Another pulse followed, softer, from farther away. Then another. The echoes rippled outward through the water, fading into the distance.

They had heard me.

They knew I was here.

A strange mix of fear and fascination took hold. Part of me, the part that still thought like a man, wanted to call this communication. The start of something more than survival. If I could hear them, maybe they could hear me. Maybe I wasn’t alone in this abyss.

But the part of me that had been reborn in darkness whispered a different truth.

Noise was attention. Attention was danger.

The fry weren’t talking. They were hunting.

The sound of movement returned, sharper and faster now. I clicked once, barely audible, and the returning echo showed their formation spreading through the water. They were searching, sending waves of sonar outward in quick bursts.

They were using sound like a net.

I pulled back toward the wall of the trench, my ridges scraping softly against the rock. The faint glow under my scales dimmed as I slowed my breathing.

The clicks grew louder. One passed directly overhead. The vibrations in the water pressed down like fingers testing for movement.

I didn’t move.

My heartbeat thudded slow and heavy in my chest.

Click. Pause.

Click.

Then silence.

They moved on.

The water relaxed around me, the sound fading to nothing. Only the faint hum of the vents remained.

I stayed still for a long time, barely breathing, waiting to be sure.

When I finally moved again, it was with small, measured strokes. I let the current guide me upward, toward the quieter edge of the shelf.

As I rose, I began to test the sound myself.

A soft click.

It echoed back from the rocks, the slope, the distant walls of the vent. I added another, then another, shaping the rhythm. With each pulse, the world sharpened in my mind. I could feel space as clearly as I once saw it. The depth of the trench. The arch of the stone above me. The small creatures drifting in the current.

The sound carried weight. It carried presence.

I realised then that I had been blind before, not just in the dark, but to the truth of this place. The abyss wasn’t silent. It was full of conversation.

Every creature spoke through sound: the groan of vents, the scrape of shells, the flicker of fins. The sea was never quiet. I had simply not known how to listen.

Now I did.

The System flickered faintly, acknowledging the change.

[Environmental Awareness +2%]

The numbers felt irrelevant compared to the revelation itself. I could sense the size of the world around me for the first time.

But the excitement carried a cost.

Each click, no matter how soft, carried outward. Each echo marked my position in the dark.

The memory of the fry’s answering double-click returned. The echo that wasn’t mine.

It had been faint, almost curious. But I could not tell if it had come from one of the smaller fry or something else, something deeper.

A larger echo, distorted by distance, could mean something vast was listening.

I tested one more click, this time directed upward. The sound reached far and came back… different.

Slower. Heavier.

An echo that did not belong to anything small.

I stopped.

The water felt thicker now, the current bending slightly around a shape that I could not yet see.

Something was up there. Something large enough to bend the sound of the world.

It did not move closer. It simply lingered, waiting.

I waited too, my body pressed tight against the rock. The faint light under my scales flickered once, then stilled.

A single, heavy click came from above. Not from me. Not from the smaller fry.

A sound so low it felt like a tremor in the bone.

Then silence.

Whatever it was, it had heard me. And it had answered.

The pulse faded slowly through the water, echoing off the walls of the trench. I waited until it was gone completely before daring to move again.

My gills fluttered weakly, drawing in the cold.

The abyss had language, yes, but not all of its words were safe to hear.

I pushed away from the wall, gliding through the cold current. My body still ached from the growth, but the pain was manageable now. The new fins cut smoothly through the water, sharp but balanced.

The sound of smaller lives filled the background again, the quiet chatter of plankton clouds, the soft scratch of shell grazers on stone.

It almost felt calm.

But the memory of that last, deep click stayed with me.

My human mind whispered that it was language. A message. Maybe a greeting.

My instincts said otherwise.

It was not a word. It was a warning.

I chose to listen to instinct.

I let the sea go quiet around me. No more clicks. No more testing. I closed my mouth and drifted with the current until the world faded to silence again.

Restraint over curiosity. That was survival here.

The System’s light stirred one last time before darkness reclaimed me.

[Skill Prototype: Echolocation – Initiated]

[Environmental Awareness +2%]

The glow faded, and I was left with only the memory of sound, lingering in the bones like the echo of a heartbeat.

The abyss was no longer silent.

It was speaking.

And now that I could hear it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what it was saying.