"Your time of payment has arrived, Emperor."The voice sounded extremely hoarse, wet, and heavy. The words seemed to be forced out of a throat that had long been clogged by dirty fluids and thick mud.Caleb Thorne sat silently in his chair. He stared at the shattered glass on his desk. A sticky black liquid with a very pungent smell of crude oil continued to drip onto the stone floor. The puddle of toxic oil merged with the shadow beneath his leather shoes.The temperature inside the highest tower of the Black Castle did not turn cold; instead, it became incredibly humid and stuffy. The air felt like being at the bottom of a dead ocean.From within that puddle of black mud, dozens of horrifying figures crawled up into the physical world. They were Mud Ghosts. Their forms lacked a clear skeletal structure. Their bodies were formed entirely of toxic waste, boiling asphalt, and rusted ship chains. Their faces were melted, leaving empty eye sockets that emitted a green sewage light. They

"We are free-falling very fast, My King! This piece of junk iron is sinking straight to the bottom of the sea!"Viktor Krum's baritone voice boomed in panic, breaking through the shrill emergency alarm echoing throughout the control room. The steel-masked Russian giant lost his balance. His massive body was thrown crashing into the rows of computer servers as the giant observation capsule plummeted at deadly speed toward the North Sea Trench."Caleb, stop this thing's fall right now! Use your shadow to tie this facility to the coral cliff out there!" shrieked Isabella Vane hysterically. The woman tightly gripped a metal pillar in the middle of the room so as not to be thrown off. Her face was deathly pale seeing the eternal darkness of the ocean beginning to swallow them from beyond the glass walls.Caleb Thorne stood firmly amidst the brutal shaking. His left hand held onto the navigation console desk. His flawed face remained as cold as a tombstone. Ther

"Ten seconds left, Thorne. Your brain will explode out of your ears from the pressure."Kaelen Cross's voice echoed cynically through the speaker of the submersible drone hovering right in front of Caleb's face. The sociopathic scientist chuckled softly. His laughter sounded crystal clear, cutting through the silence of the ocean floor.Caleb Thorne could not reply to those words at all. Thick red blood mixed with necrotic black fluid began to spurt from his nose and both of his ears. The hydrostatic pressure at a depth of three thousand meters truly knew no mercy. Caleb's eardrums had completely ruptured within the first ten seconds. The freezing seawater pierced in brutally, tearing at the remaining organs inside his cranial cavity."Do it now, Dominus! Or we will all be obliterated into foam in this filthy place!" shrieked the Centurion General. The ancient ghost commander's voice echoed in panic inside Caleb's skull."Silence," Caleb replied v

"Turn that sonar to maximum power, Viktor. I don't care if the machine burns out today, find him right now!"Isabella Vane screamed, her hoarse voice cutting through the howling wind. Her eyes were red and severely swollen, holding back the tears that continued to stream down her dirty cheeks. The North Sea storm battered the deck of the emergency yacht they had managed to hijack from the remnants of the Aegis port facility."Woof. The radar detects a large biological mass at a depth of two thousand meters, Queen," roared Viktor Krum from the wheelhouse. The steel-masked giant pressed the hydraulic winch lever with his massive, trembling hands. "The blip keeps going down. He is not swimming upward."Three thousand meters beneath the ship's hull, absolute darkness reigned once more. Kaelen Cross's submarine had been crushed and had sunk to the bottom of the Ocean Trench. The mud ghosts that had just devoured the sociopath's soul let out a long belch, spewin