The familiar warmth of the contract lingered faintly in the back of his mind.

The unhatched wyrm remained asleep. The faint connection between their souls was still there, weak but unmistakable, quiet and content and completely oblivious to the world that was changing outside.

Lucien couldn’t help finding that a little amusing. It was an actual crossbreed of a dragon and a phoenix, and the thing slept through the apocalypse without a care.

Even after waking up, the thought still felt surreal.

For a brief moment he simply lay on the couch staring at the ceiling, and then he frowned as something felt different, though he couldn’t immediately identify what it was.

Then realization struck. The noise that had filled every waking moment over the past several days, that endless roar of Black Water moving through the city, wasn’t as much as before.

It was still there, but diminished enough that the difference was immediately noticeable, at least to him.

Lucien sat up and stepped onto the balcony a few seconds later.

"Wha—"

Only to find the Black Water had receded, and not by a small amount either as now the entire sections of road that had remained submerged yesterday were now visible beneath the morning light, at least their outline, concrete and guardrails and fragments of abandoned vehicles all reappearing like the city was slowly remembering what it used to look like.

Neither had anyone else missed it. Residents occupied nearly every balcony throughout the surrounding apartment buildings, windows stood open and people leaned over railings with conversations drifting through the morning air from every direction.

"The water dropped."

"How much though?"

"A lot. Just look at it."

How the hell did this happen?

Lucien’s gaze swept across the neighboring buildings, finding reactions that varied from confusion to disbelief, but mostly hope was what he saw, that particular kind of desperate and fragile hope that people cling to when they’ve been surviving on nothing else for far too long.

One elderly woman clasped her hands together and whispered something under her breath. Two balconies away, a middle-aged man grinned broadly at the woman beside him. "I told you things would get better, why should we follow a kid’s words who is still wet behind his ears."

His wife smacked the back of his head without looking away from the water. "You’ve spent the past three days telling me we were doomed."

A few people laughed, and the sound felt strangely foreign in the morning air.

While Lucien simply listened to it for a moment, at the laughter. He hadn’t heard much of that lately, and the apocalypse had a habit of stealing simple things like that first.

Evelyn stepped outside before sliding the balcony window open, her hair still slightly messy from the sleep. She followed his gaze toward the city and stood there for several moments without saying anything.

Then, quietly, "What in the world just happened?"

"Seems like the Black Water has receded back.," Lucien said.

She rolled her eyes. "Thank you, I wouldn’t have known without you telling me that."

"No problem." His mouth twitch slightly at her words, but there were more important things to focus on for now.

Her gaze drifted toward the horizon, then upward, then slowly across the city. A slight frown appeared on her face. "Do you feel that?"

Lucien glanced at her. "Feel what?"

"The air."

He blinked. "What about the air?"

"Its skmehow different. I don’t know how, but it feels a little different than what ut used to," she said before he could respond.

She continued. "It just feels different. I can’t explain it properly, it’s more like a sensation than something I can actually put into words."

She studied the sky for another moment before shaking her head. "Or maybe I’m just imagining things, who knows?"

"Maybe," Lucien said, though the word carried less certainty than he intended because for some reason, he didn’t stop thinking about what she had said.

The day passed slowly.

The Black Water continued receding hour by hour, and the change was steady and consistent rather than dramatic, which was somehow more convincing. People gradually stopped watching in disbelief and started believing what they were seeing, and that was when things changed. Not the water itself, but the residents around it.

Hope spread faster than fear ever had.

People began making plans, scavenging routes and food runs and arguments about who should organize what. A group of younger residents spent nearly twenty minutes debating whether they should explore the neighboring apartment blocks. For the first time since the flood began, conversations focused on tomorrow instead of on surviving today, and Lucien listened to all of it from a distance.

He wasn’t convinced.

Not because he was losing his grip on such a huge number of people, no, he didn’t care about them from the very start, what mattered to him was the sudden change andbthe reason for it.

Because nothing happened without a cause.

The Black Water hadn’t behaved naturally when it appeared. And even if the water level had increased, the decrement was even faster than that? Still, he kept those thoughts to himself.

There was little point in ruining hope with suspicion, even to his own people he actually cared about.

By nightfall, Lucien found himself wondering whether it really was simply ending as he neither discovered something weird nor suspicious.

Maybe everything would return back to how it was? But do I want that to happen?

He fell asleep with that word turning over quietly in his mind.

The following morning, he woke up before walking to the balcony and opened the window to have a look.

"The Black Water is completely gone."

Now visible roads stretched through the city once more, parking lots and intersections and sidewalks and everything that had vanished beneath the flood now stood exposed beneath the morning sunlight.

Wet concrete reflected the faint glimmers of light, mud coated the streets and abandoned vehicles remained exactly where they had been left weeks ago, and broken signs lay scattered among piles of debris everywhere he looked.

What about those mutated sea creatures?

The flood had vanished and its scars remained, and the combination of the two felt deeply wrong and unsettling to him.

Yesterday there had still been enough water to swallow entire streets.

And today it no longer existed.

A cheer suddenly erupted from a nearby building, then another and another after that. People flooded onto balconies and voices echoed throughout the complex. Some laughed. Some cried. One man dropped openly to his knees on a balcony two floors below and nobody mocked him for it, because relief could break people just as easily as fear could.

Lucien watched the celebrations for a while and then looked back at the city.

Something felt off.

Beside him, Evelyn stepped onto the balcony. This time she didn’t speak immediately, her eyes moving slowly across the empty roads and exposed buildings and motionless city before she finally said, "It’s creepy seeing how silent it is."

Lucien nodded.

She looked at him, slightly surprised. "You think the same?"

"I do."

That seemed to bother her more than a disagreement would have. She crossed her arms and turned back toward the streets below. "A few days ago I would’ve done anything for the flooding to stop.

I thought about it every hour, genuinely. And now that it’s actually gone, I can’t shake this feeling that something is still wrong, like the city is waiting for something and I just can’t figure out what it is."

"Most people down there don’t feel that way," Lucien said.

"I know." She frowned. "That almost makes it worse."

Lucien understood exactly what she meant, though he said nothing.

Then he paused.

A strange sensation brushed against his senses. It was subtle and almost imperceptible, present for a moment and then gone the next second before he could properly identify it.

His brows furrowed, recalling Evelyn’s words.

This time he focused, slowly and deliberately. He inhaled once, then again, and then very quietly circulated his cultivation technique without drawing any attention to himself.

The surrounding spiritual energy responded immediately. More smoothly than it should have, more readily than he was used to, gathering faster and with noticeably less resistance than even yesterday.

His expression became serious.

The density had increased and the difference wasn’t his imagination.

"What is it?" Evelyn had noticed his expression change.

Lucien remained quiet for a moment before he slowly returned his gaze to the city.

The flood was gone and the spiritual energy density had increased. The timing couldn’t be a coincidence, and yet no clean explanation surfaced immediately, which bothered him more than his observation itself.

In his previous life, uncertainty usually meant one of two things. Either he lacked enough information, or something dangerous was already happening.

And here, perhaps it meant both.

A possibility formed slowly in his mind, one he didn’t particularly like.

Don’t tell me...

The Black Water hadn’t simply disappeared. Something had changed within it, and it felt almost as though whatever the water had been carrying all this time had finally been released rather than removed. Dispersed into the atmosphere itself instead of draining away somewhere. A faint chill moved through him at the thought.

Because if that was correct, then the true problem might have never ended at all.