And they were about to reach it.
Soon enough, the Night Garden came to a stop, hovering just a few hundred meters above the ground. Naeve and Bloodwave had joined them at the bridge by then, and all of them stared down with stunned expressions.
Eventually, it was Naeve who spoke first:
"It's... it's flat."
Sunny nodded slowly, confirming that it indeed was.
Below them, a perfectly flat surface stretched in all directions, with nothing at all rising above it even by a centimeter. There was no seaweed or coral, no dirt, no... anything. Just an endless expanse of flawlessly smooth, glistening glass. Or at least of something that looked like glass.
It was as if they were somehow pulled into a video game where a level failed to render, or maybe had fallen through the map. The bottom of the Stormsea looked like a placeholder excuse of proper geometry... a glaring error in the usual messiness of the natural world.
Sunny looked closer and realized that the floor of the vast sea was not actually black. Instead, it was simply perfectly transparent — but this odd glasslike material stretched so far down that there was nothing beneath it except the lack of light.
"What is this?" His voice was full of bewilderment.
After a long stretch of silence, Aether answered in a calm tone:
"It's water."
They all looked at him, failing to understand what he meant.
Aether hesitated for a moment, then explained:
"Under extreme pressure, water changes from a liquid to a solid state... and the solid state of water is ice. Only it can't become ordinary ice here, since it can't expand to form its molecular structure due to the pressure. So, it can only become a solid with a denser crystal lattice — a kind of crystal comparable to diamond in hardness. That is what we're looking at."
He smiled faintly.
"So the Stormsea doesn't really have a bottom. It's just that its waters turned solid under their own weight here."
Sunny stared at Aether for a few moments, then looked back at the flawlessly flat plane of glasslike surface below them.
Eventually, he shook his head.
"That's creepy. I can't help but feel like something is going to stare at us from below this endlessly vast, infinitely thick, perfectly transparent crystal seal..." At that moment, Jet's hand firmly blocked his mouth.
Looking at him with desperation, she whispered loudly:
"sunny! Please, please stop saying these things aloud!"
He stared at her for a moment, then nodded slowly.
When Jet removed his hand, he smiled.
"Why? If the abyss gazes at us for too long... I might just gaze back."
Then, Sunny shrugged.
"Don't worry, though. I am completely sure that there's nothing there." Instead of answering, Jet simply groaned.