He is a strange man who feels no pain.
He can work at a depth of seven thousand meters without protective gear, keep his heart rate steady in the icy seawater, and even take a bite from a deep-sea behemoth that breaks his ribs without so much as furrowing his brow.
Everyone says he was born to hunt in the deep sea, the ocean's favorite.
Only he knows he isn't unafraid of pain. He just can't hear it.
Ever since the deep-sea accident three years ago, only one sound has remained in his world:
a faint, heartbeat-like knocking from eleven thousand meters beneath the sea.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The sound guides him past graveyards of shipwrecks and hydrothermal vents, until at last it stops before a door that should not exist in the deep sea.
There is no lock on the door, only a line of writing in some kind of glowing moss:
“Don't open the door. I'm waiting for you to die.”
Standing before the door and staring at those words, he suddenly laughs.
