Chapter 6

“The body is a map where suffering leaves its brightest landmarks.”

First, there was light. Harsh, white, like the flash before you faint. I squeezed my eyes shut, but I could still see it beneath my eyelids. It burned like peroxide on a fresh wound.

Then came the sensation. At first vague, then growing sharper: something was touching my skin. Soft, wet, sticky. I tried to move and realized I was lying down. On something warm. Pulsing.

I stood up. With effort. My swimsuit, soaked through, clung to my body as if it had grown into my skin. Under my hands was a strange surface: pinkish, lined with veins, like something viewed under a microscope. Breathing. Flesh.

The room was spherical. No doors. The walls were made of the same living material. Weak ripples pulsed through them, as if something were shifting inside. The air was thick with a sickly, organic smell, like a hospital ward that hadn’t been aired out in a long time.

I looked around. In the center stood a tall cylinder, resembling a spine. It was shifting. Heavy cords, like umbilical lines, hung from above. One of them swayed and lowered toward me, its tip brushing my cheek. I flinched away, but I wasn’t fast enough — it wrapped around my wrist and squeezed slightly.

An inscription welled up from the wall — oozing from pores like a rash, forming letters:

“To exit, you must become a part. You must abandon your form.”

At first, I didn’t understand. But then, mirrors began to rise from the floor. Distorted. I saw myself — but not quite myself: the reflection had no eyes, the skin quivered like gelatin, and the bones bent at impossible angles. With every passing second, the reflections became less and less human.

And then I heard it: a voice. Not in the air, but inside me. It was my own voice, but older. Battered. As if I were speaking from a body that had given up long ago.

“This is not a body. This is a house. You fear the flesh because it reminds you that you are not a spirit. That you can be broken.”

Something began to move beneath my skin. I screamed, clawing at my shoulder — something foreign was pulsing beneath my fingers. For a moment, I thought: if I were to peel back my skin right now, there wouldn’t be muscles underneath. He would be there. The labyrinth.

I stumbled toward the center. The cord coiled around my leg. My heart hammered frantically. In another corner of the room, a body — or a semblance of one — was crawling toward me. No face. No limbs. Only a maw — gaping in a silent scream.

A new inscription appeared above the cylinder:

“Either you change — or you stay forever.”

I froze. My body was trembling. Fear had turned into physical pain.

I remembered my first dive. The coach’s voice. His demands: “You are not you. You are a function. A tool.” I hadn’t understood back then how right he was. And how wrong.

Darkness. Pressure. A crunching sound — not mine, but sounding as if it were inside me. The walls closed in. I screamed — but only on the inside.

I didn’t die.

I was reborn.

When I surfaced — expelled from a narrow, slimy tube, trembling all over — I found myself on the floor of a new room. The walls were dry. Stone. The labyrinth waited further ahead.

I stood up. My head was spinning. My skin felt foreign. But I knew: I had passed.

I hadn’t abandoned my form. I had learned not to fear losing it.