He surfaced from the waters and purged his lungs of the putrid toxin within, and he had never taken a more satisfying gasp of air in his entire life. His mind didn't bother to process where he was; he simply waded in place and breathed. For nearly half a minute, he fell into a lull, immersed in the blissful act of respiration.

  Eventually, he mustered the will to look around, only to realize that he didn't have the glow of his device to see anything. This area was shrouded in pure darkness. To see anything, he would have to dive back down and retrieve his device. Peering through the water, he caught sight of the dim glow below. It was not a challenging swim—nowhere near the distances he had recently covered—but the very thought of going back underwater made him queasy.

  Sadly, he had little choice in the matter. He couldn't wade in place forever.

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  He descended once more, kicking his way down where he had just come from. He hated the very idea of backtracking, which drew his mind to the horrifying notion of trekking back through everything when he wanted to return to the surface.

  As he got closer to his device, he began to make out more details of the illuminated surroundings. The pain and terror he had endured had all been worth it, and he couldn't stop his heart from bounding in glee as he had no clue what he was looking at.

  The machinery was far more complex than anything he could comprehend: cogs and cables, more of those metal boxes the ancients seemed to love, and incalescent fireboxes along with other monitor-like devices. He grabbed his glowing device and kicked off the floor to propel himself back up. It was a short swim, but his tired body made it feel like forever.

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  He resurfaced again; this time, he had his light source to reveal the room. It was gargantuan in scale; he could neither see a roof nor any walls save for the one he used to enter. Best of all, plenty of the machinery was tall enough or jutting from the walls to create above-water ground. He made his way to a nearby metal clamp, many times his size, that jutted out from the wall and mounted himself atop to rest on the blessedly dry space. He relaxed his muscles, and only now did he realize how terribly exhausted he was.

  He rested on his back, mindlessly following the wall of the room up into the unseeable darkness above; he remarked mentally to himself that the walls of this room curved like a grain silo, which greatly differed from every other wall he had seen built by the ancient civilization, at least never to this scale before. This room, whatever it was, was truly unlike anything he had seen from the ancient civilization before. The man was sure that he was the first organism ever to set foot in this place since the mercurial essence had settled in.

  After a few minutes of much-appreciated rest, he was ready to begin exploring the room properly. He went to stand up, but as he did, his upper body inexplicably stretched to an impossible height, causing him to smack his head against the room's ceiling and keeling him over.

  He tumbled to his knees, and his body constricted back to its standard size. He rubbed at his sore head that had somehow smacked against a roof so tall he couldn't even see it.

  The man gazed up into the space above him, squinting his eyes and focusing as hard as he could, attempting to uncover some hidden truth within the empty expanse. Analyzing from a distance revealed nothing.

  Carefully extending one of his hands upward, he watched in amazement as right before him, his arm stretched up impossibly long, through the darkness, above and out of sight, until he could feel the roof of the room. He still couldn't see the roof; it was too far away, but he couldn't see his hand either as it stretched far beyond view.

  Even with his new arm proportions, nothing felt different. His blood still pumped normally, he retained full motor control, and sensations on his palm worked typically as they reminded him that he was, in fact, touching some impossibly tall ceiling.

  He tried to wave his arm to the left, but as he did, his entire stretched forearm popped out of existence, causing a stinging sensation on his hand. Panic barely had time to set in as he soon realized the pain was from smacking his hand against the left wall, which, bewilderingly, his forearm, seemingly detached from his body, was now next to.

  Clenching his fingers in and out of a fist, he tested if he still controlled the dismembered limb. As his fist opened wide, each finger stretched and twisted impossibly; his middle finger, in particular, flattened out and spread all around him as if it were a half dome capping the room.

  All this unfolded before him, mind-boggling in visuals but entirely void in sensation. His arm still felt like it always had, utterly unaffected except for the slight pain caused by accidentally striking the wall.

  His instinctive response was to retract his arm, bringing it as close to his body as possible and hug it dearly, as if that action would somehow protect his arm from these otherworldly manipulations. However, when he pulled his arm back, even though he felt it move in a simple straight motion, visually, it was sporadically jumping all over the place—insides becoming outside, his arm would reject any stable state, it would shift and transform, shrink and grow, continuously morphing into other forms.

  At one point, he witnessed a single stream of blood elegantly shooting into existence on a slight curve before disappearing out of existence. His logical brain told him that the blood should fall to the floor, but it ignored such restraints, almost as if the blood was still safely encased within the artery that contained it. He continued to pull his arm back towards his chest, and the incomprehensible and sporadic sight eventually consolidated to his body and brought it back into the normal shape he was familiar with.

  The man did a few exercises and stretches just to be perfectly certain that nothing was affected, and nothing was. If only the TOIL initiative could see this. This was why he abandoned the initiative; no matter how much funds or time he devoted to them, he would have never gotten to see? Experience? He would have never gotten to interact with whatever this room was.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  It was frustrating, though; he knew that something had to be in this room, more than the strange space in front of him. He knew there was something there that was just hidden; its physical makeup thrown about the room just as his arm was. He needed to find this item somehow and pull it out of the strange, warped space.

  Once again, he moved his hand into the air above him, aimlessly waving it around, searching for this object while simultaneously gawking at the spectacle that was his transforming limb.

  Suddenly, he felt a push at his back; it was the first time his experimentation here had led to sensation. He was very careful; he knew that any sudden arm movement could dramatically change its apparent position, so he cautiously twisted his neck to see what had touched his back without moving his arm.

  Behind him, he saw his finger, many times larger than his own body. He could make out the individual pores and the unique imprint formed by the lines of his fingerprint. He jolted back at the perplexing and cosmically questioning sight. His sudden movement, of course, caused his arm to move immediately, making the large finger disappear.

  After recollecting himself, he found himself frustrated with his reckless behaviour. He wanted to find a way to get his finger back where it was. He had a curious thought.

  It took a while of random arm waving and awkward pose-holding, but eventually, he managed to get his entire hand back to that enlarged position beside him. It really was a marvel to see a part of your own body in such comprehensive detail. It was easy to lose himself in child-like wonder, but he had tests that needed running.

  He pulled his eyes down to the giant clamp-turned platform that he stood upon. The clamp was leviathan in size; he would guess it had to weigh in the hundreds of tons. He grasped the clamp with his giant hand, the whole thing fitting comfortably in his hand. Then he pulled.

  The clamp, nearly weightless, followed and the sudden tug of the platform he stood on made him instinctively crouch down for balance. As he crouched, his arm swiftly followed suit, and that's when things fell apart.

  The burst of motion spontaneously ripped the clamp from under him, dumping him into the water and,

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  machinery, metal, and flesh all violently flickered in and out of existence, morphing in shape and location. The once-stationary technology in the water below now spun in chaotic disarray. A sudden piece of metal grew out of thin air and smacked against his head before just as quickly disappearing again.

  Various cross-sections of the same material danced around him. Then, as quickly as the carnage had begun, it ended, leaving his arm perfectly normal and securely attached to its shoulder.

  The room now lay empty, with only him sinking in the water, clutching an odd rectangular contraption that fit comfortably in his hand.

  Before any investigation, he kicked upwards, sickened with swimming and now also sporting a head wound, he was eager to

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  resurface and take in a breath. With the clamp gone, he had no platform to stand on and was forced to tread water. A worthwhile sacrifice now that he could more closely inspect this strange contraption. The man very foolishly turned the contraption around, immediately forgetting everything this room tried to teach him, and the contraption burst outward, unravelling into a much larger construct that walloped him in the nose,

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  shoving him underwater. His hands quickly covered his bleeding nose, and he let out a half-pained, half-annoyed yelp, which sounded out as a muffled gargling underwater. He pushed his body upward,

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  surfacing again for the umpteenth time. The small rectangular contraption was now stretched out from end to end of the room as a massive blackboard and littered with an indecipherable mess of scribbles and equations. This was actual writing left behind by the ancient civilization!

  He couldn't make out what any of it said; no one had ever found enough of the civilization's writing to decipher it.

  He desperately wanted to find a way to bring this device out of the ruins with him, but he wasn't sure if it was possible. The device was exceptionally volatile, where any form of movement seemed to be able to cause limitless repercussions.

  The man caught a sudden motion from the peripheral of his vision and quickly turned to see a featureless pink face leaning over his shoulder. He let out a panicked scream and promptly swam away from the object.

  Now that he was further away, he could properly make out the full shape of the entity. It looked like a featureless human without legs or arms floating in the air. Its face was a blank canvas containing no features, no eyes, nose, mouth, or ears. The entirety of the entity was this impossibly smooth and bright pink colour, which contrasted drastically with the darkness around it.

  The pink creature spared the man only a cursory glance before turning its empty head back to the blackboard. It was nearly impossible to discern any expression from the blank face, but it seemed as though the pink creature was actually reading the ancient text!

  The pink creature ceased scanning the board as its vacant face fixated on one of the formulas. Suddenly, a pink shape materialized out of thin air in front of it. The pink shape began to morph and change, grow and shrink, much like his arm had when he waved it toward the room's ceiling.

  Eventually, the shifting pink shape settled into a single arm that seamlessly attached to the creature as if it had always been there. The arm terminated in a small seven-fingered hand which pressed against the blackboard, erasing a short horizontal dash that was drawn right in front of what the man assumed was one of the ancient civilization's numerical symbols.

  The pink creature then grabbed the blackboard at its edge, and both the creature's hand and the board slipped out of existence. The man frowned at seeing his most prized discovery being so casually stolen.

  The creature then turned to face the man. The motion was accented by the chime of a bell, and another pink shape appeared in between the creature and the man. It looked like the creature was materializing another arm, but this time, it was holding on to a glowing parchment which it was offering to the man.

  He cautiously swam closer to the pink creature and glanced at the parchment: it read.