The Conquerors Path Chapter 1059 - 1057 — The Abyssal Menagerie

The sheer, unadulterated arrogance of the Aethelgard Dukedom was, frankly, starting to grow on me.

We left the manicured, forced tranquility of the Ducal Gardens behind, descending back into the chaotic thrum of the Dry Wards’ commercial sectors. I had adjusted the perceptual filter again, dialing our presence back to that of wealthy, unremarkable surface scholars. The throngs of human aristocrats and heavily armored dwarven merchants parted around us without a second thought, their minds effortlessly sliding over our existence.

"They call it the Deep-Tide Exhibition. It happens once a month. The Duke’s supreme mages essentially go fishing in the abyss, drag whatever horrifying monstrosities they can find up to the shallows, and put them on display for the land-dwellers."

Krave explained, her voice carrying a bright, theatrical edge as she led us down a sweeping avenue paved in crushed black pearl.

"They put ocean creatures in cages underwater? The redundancy of these people is staggering."

Luna asked, her tone vibrating with profound, deadpan judgment from her perch across my shoulders again.

"Oh, it’s not just cages, it’s a marvel of spatial compression and elemental tyranny. You have to remember, the beasts down in the true trenches survive under pressure that would instantly crush a surface galleon into a wooden marble. If you bring them up to this depth, they literally explode."

Krave laughed, gesturing grandly toward the end of the avenue.

"Messy."

Luna noted, her ears twitching with mild interest.

"Very, so, the Aethelgard mages use localised gravity wards and heavy density arrays to simulate abyssal pressure inside the enclosures. They build highly pressurised terrariums inside the Dry Wards, just so wealthy human nobles can point at things that could swallow their entire bloodlines."

Krave agreed. We turned the final corner, and the architecture of the city dramatically opened up to reveal the exhibition grounds.

It was a staggering structural achievement. A massive, tiered amphitheatre had been carved directly into the obsidian foundation of the city. Instead of a central stage, the viewing platforms spiralled downward, encircling dozens of colossal, freestanding columns of water. These columns weren’t held together by glass or iron; they were contained by shimmering, violent rings of indigo magic. The runes etched into the floor were so thick and dense with mana that they made the air taste like copper and ozone.

Hundreds of tourists lined the spiralling walkways, clutching crystal flutes of pearl-wine and pointing excitedly at the shadows moving within the pressurised columns.

"I have to admit, the runework holding these spatial pockets together is beautifully aggressive. They are actively fighting the natural laws of physics on three separate fronts just to keep the water inside those pillars dense enough."

I murmured, observing the complex flow of energy sustaining the enclosures.

"It’s a colossal waste of mana, I love it! Let’s go see if they managed to catch anything with more than twelve eyes!"

Krave beamed, practically skipping toward the entrance.

We bypassed the ticketing gates without breaking stride. My aura simply suggested to the heavily armed Triton guards that we had already paid the exorbitant entrance fee, and their minds helpfully fabricated the memory of me handing them a pouch of platinum.

The upper tiers of the exhibition were dedicated to the smaller, more violently aggressive fauna of the deep. We strolled past a cylindrical ward containing a swarm of razor-finned ghost-eels, their translucent bodies whipping through the highly pressurised water in an agitated frenzy. A group of surface elves were standing safely on the other side of the magical boundary, sketching the creatures with frantic, excited strokes of charcoal.

"Boring, bottom feeders. They only eat dead whale carcasses and each other."

Krave dismissed the eels with a wave of her delicate hand.

Luna, however, was not bored.

The silver wolf suddenly shifted on my shoulders, her full weight leaning precariously to the right. Her silver eyes locked entirely onto a smaller, heavily reinforced containment sphere resting on a pedestal near the walkway’s edge.

Inside the sphere, suspended in impossibly dense, pitch-black water, floated an angler-crab. It was roughly the size of a warhound, covered in jagged, obsidian-like plating. A fleshy, bioluminescent stalk protruded from its forehead, glowing with a hypnotic, toxic green light. Every time the crab clicked its massive, serrated claws, the water around it literally boiled from the latent heat of its venom.

Luna stared at the crab. The crab, sensing a predator through the magical boundary, turned its glowing stalk toward Luna and snapped its claws aggressively.

"Austin, I want to eat that."

Luna projected directly into my mind, her voice entirely devoid of humor.

"You do not,"

I replied mildly, not breaking my leisurely pace.

"I do, look at it. It is glowing. It looks exceptionally crunchy. The green light implies a high concentration of rare minerals."

Luna insisted, her claws digging a fraction of an inch into my heavy coat to halt my momentum.

"The green light implies neurotoxins, Luna, that is an abyssal angler-crab. Its venom is designed to paralyze trench-wyrms. If you bite into that, it will melt the roof of your mouth and liquefy your jaw."

I corrected her, turning to look at the furious, snapping crustacean.

"That’s spicy to me, if you temporarily sever the spatial anchor holding the containment sphere, the ambient pressure of the ward will shatter the glass. The crab will be exposed for approximately zero point four seconds before the pressure differential kills it. I can catch it out of the air before it hits the floor."

Luna countered stubbornly. Her tail gave a single, slow swish.

I stared at the silver wolf currently draped around my neck like a scarf, marveling at the sheer, calculating violence of her logic.

"You want me to intentionally collapse a high-density abyssal pressure ward—which will likely cause a concussive shockwave that will deafen every surface tourist on this tier—just so you can play catch with a highly venomous, exploding deep-sea crab?"

"Yes, it would be an excellent exercise of your spatial manipulation."

Luna said, maintaining direct eye contact.

"The answer is no, we are not assassinating the local wildlife."

I sighed, reaching up to gently tap her snout.

Luna let out a long, theatrical breath of hot air against my cheek.

"You never let me have any fun."

"Ignore her, Austin, she lacks cultural appreciation, come on! The real show is down at the bottom!"

Krave called out from a few yards ahead, waving us forward.

I adjusted my coat, firmly carrying a sulking wolf down the spiralling stone ramps. I will be getting Luna those eels just in a different way. As we descended deeper into the amphitheatre, the ambient lighting of the Dry Wards began to fade. The golden, sunset glow of the city’s dome was replaced by the cold, heavy darkness of the simulated trenches. The air grew noticeably colder, biting at the edges of my passive thermal barrier.

The crowds thinned out down here. The lesser nobility and curious merchants stayed on the upper tiers, intimidated by the sheer, crushing atmosphere of the lowest level. Only the wealthiest, most jaded aristocrats ventured down to the Abyssal Menagerie.

As we stepped off the final ramp onto the expansive, polished stone floor, the scale of the Aethelgard Dukedom’s hubris was fully laid bare.

There were no small spheres or cylindrical pillars here. The entire back wall of the cavernous space was one single, continuous containment ward. It was easily three hundred feet long and stretched up into the darkness above. The magic holding it back was so dense it looked like solid black ice.

Within that unfathomable expanse of heavily pressurised, freezing water, the true titans of the deep were kept.

Krave’s skipping, energetic stride slowed. The manic, bright smile that had been plastered across her face since we entered the capital began to slip, replaced by something ancient, heavy, and intensely still.

I stopped a few paces behind her, keeping my hands in my pockets, and simply watched the exhibit.

A shadow moved within the black water. It was so massive that my mind took a second to fully comprehend the scale. A leviathan drifted past the boundary of the magical glass. It resembled a cross between a mosasaur and a deep-tide serpent, covered in plates of pale, bone-white armour that looked like shifting tectonic plates. Six massive, ragged fins propelled it through the water with agonising slowness. It had no eyes, only a network of glowing, sensory pits running down the length of its jaw.

It was easily the size of a modern surface destroyer. And it was asleep.

"By the Gods, It’s completely dormant. The guide said it hasn’t woken up since they dragged it up here a decade ago."

A human nobleman whispered a few feet away from us, his velvet coat trembling as he stared up at the drifting beast.

"Good thing, too, If a beast like that actually woke up, it would probably shatter the glass just by thrashing. It’s a stupid, sluggish thing. Only fit for observation."

His companion, a sneering elven diplomat, scoffed.

I felt the ambient mana in the room violently stutter.

Krave didn’t move. She didn’t lash out, and she didn’t speak. But her aura—the terrifying, crushing, absolute weight of a divine kraken—briefly flared against the edges of her human disguise. The temperature in the room plummeted by twenty degrees in a single second. The human nobleman and the elven diplomat both gasped, suddenly clutching their chests as their primitive survival instincts screamed at them that they were standing next to an apex predator.

They scrambled away without looking back, terrified by a threat their conscious minds couldn’t even perceive. I stepped forward, coming to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Krave. The silence stretching between us was heavy, thick with centuries of unspoken history.

Krave raised one of her delicate, pale hands and pressed it flat against the freezing surface of the magical ward. Her dark eyes tracked the massive, sleeping leviathan as it slowly banked and disappeared back into the shadows of the artificial trench.

"His name is Ouros."

Krave whispered.

Her voice wasn’t the bright, mocking tone of the tourist she had been playing all day. It was the deep, resonant echo of the sunless trenches. It held the weight of the crushing depths, vibrating with a profound, aching nostalgia.

"He’s an Abyssal Glider, they are... very slow. Very peaceful. They eat the mineral snow that falls from the upper layers of the ocean. They only wake up once every hundred years to migrate to the boiling seas in the south."

She continued, her fingers tracing the condensation on the outside of the ward. She let out a soft, shuddering breath, her forehead resting lightly against the glass.

"We used to share a trench, before I went to sleep. Whenever the deep-tide currents shifted, the water would rush through the hollow spaces in his armor. It sounded like... a chorus. He used to sing the whole trench to sleep. He was my neighbor for three thousand years."

Krave murmured, her eyes completely distant. I looked at the ancient terror of the deep, currently wearing the fragile skin of a human woman, mourning the captivity of a beast that the rest of the world viewed as an unthinking monster.

"Do you want me to break the ward?"

I asked quietly.

It wasn’t a joke. I didn’t offer it with a smile. I simply analyzed the structural runework holding the massive tank together, calculated the exact sequence of reality-edits required to safely shunt the leviathan back into the open ocean without destroying the city in the process, and waited for her command. I would do it in a heartbeat, she could do it too.

Krave stayed silent for a long time. She watched the dark water, her hand still pressed against the glass.

"No, the shock of the spatial transfer would stop his heart. He’s too old, Austin. The Aethelgard mages crippled him when they dragged him through the pressure gradients. If you put him back in the true abyss now, the weight of his own home would crush him."

She finally said, her voice barely more than a sigh.

She pulled her hand away from the glass, her fingers curling into a tight fist.

"He has to stay here. Asleep."

"I see."

I said softly.

"It’s just..."

Krave forced a small, utterly broken smile onto her face, refusing to look at me.

"It’s just a little loud in this city. He always hated the noise."

I didn’t press her for an explanation. I didn’t offer empty platitudes or fake sympathy. I simply nodded, expanding my perceptual filter to completely blanket the two of us, ensuring that no wandering noble or patrolling guard would interrupt her silence.

Krave turned away from the glass. She walked purposefully toward a small, heavily enchanted alcove carved into the side of the viewing platform. Behind a crystal desk sat an elderly triton clerk, managing the ledger for the exhibition’s maintenance costs. The Aethelgard Dukedom, in its infinite greed, allowed wealthy patrons to ’sponsor’ the enclosures in exchange for having their names carved into the stone plaques lining the walls.

Krave approached the desk. Because of my filter, the clerk simply saw a wealthy, veiled aristocrat.

Without a single word of her usual banter, Krave reached into her coat. She didn’t pull out the pouch of platinum she had won at the tavern. Instead, she accessed her own ancient spatial storage. She withdrew three solid, flawless bricks of compressed Deep-Earth Orichalcum—a metal so rare and incredibly dense with pure mana that surface empires had gone to war over fragments of it. It was enough wealth to buy the entire Dry Wards outright.

She placed the three bricks onto the crystal desk. They landed with a heavy, deafening thud that made the clerk jump out of his seat.

"The Leviathan enclosure, double the thickness of the sound-dampening arrays. Increase the purity of the ambient mana filters by four hundred percent. And cool the water down by another ten degrees. I want the maintenance on that tank flawless for the next five centuries."

Krave commanded, her voice cold, flat, and absolute.

The clerk stared at the priceless bricks of orichalcum, his jaw completely unhinged.

"M-Madam, this... this is a king’s ransom! What name shall I put on the sponsorship plaque?"

"Leave it blank. If a single letter is carved into that stone, I will return and feed your soul to the abyss. Do you understand?"

Krave ordered.

"Y-Yes, perfectly, madam!"

The clerk stammered, frantically sweeping the bricks into his secure lockbox.

Krave turned away without waiting for a receipt. She walked back to where I was standing, her posture rigid, her eyes fixed firmly on the ground. The manic energy was entirely gone, burned away by the harsh reality of returning to a world that had moved on without her.

Luna, completely immune to the emotional weight of the scene, let out a soft yawn and shifted her weight on my shoulders.

"Are we done looking at the depressed fish? I am hungry, and you still haven’t bought me a tapestry to sleep on."

The wolf asked dryly.

Krave let out a short, wet laugh, the tension breaking just a fraction. She reached out and lightly ruffled the fur on top of Luna’s head. Luna bared her teeth in annoyance but didn’t snap at her fingers.

"Yeah, we’re done here. Let’s go find the street food. I want to see if Luna will actually eat a magma-shrimp without crying."

Krave said softly, looking up at me, the bright, false smile slowly finding some genuine warmth again.

"I do not cry, I conquer."

Luna warned.

I offered Krave a small, barely perceptible nod.

"Lead the way."

I maintained the perfect illusion of our disguise as we walked out of the Abyssal Menagerie, leaving the sleeping leviathan to dream in his newly bought silence, and stepped back into the loud, artificial light of the upper city.