001 | 1-1. The Monarch of the Southern Hemisphere
Chapter 1: The Azure Prison of the Summit
November 2021.
A dry monsoon swept along the coast of Cairns, Northeast Australia, tracing the shoreline like a skeletal finger.
The Coral Sea was unnervingly still that day. The waves, which should have been crashing into white foam, were unnaturally suppressed. A leaden surface stretched toward the horizon, maintaining an eerie, fragile equilibrium.
Piercing that silence was a jet-black monolith, jutting out into the sea like a splinter of obsidian.
There were no windows. The exterior walls bore no decorations, no nameplates—nothing but a light-devouring blackness that swallowed the afternoon sun. It looked less like a building and more like a gargantuan coffin washed ashore, or perhaps the physical manifestation of a “will” entombed within the earth.
Inside, the structure was filled with hundreds of tons of purified seawater. In this hermetically sealed void, devoid of any human presence, the water lay frozen in silence, forbidden from making even the slightest ripple. Here, sound and time were severed from the outside world.
The name of this bizarre monument:“HADAL.”
Its creator was Edward Kurosaki, CEO of the Cairns-based fintech giant, “Black Dog.” Putting his reputation and his future on the line, he had poured his entire private fortune into the completion of this facility.
It served a single purpose:Cinematography.
A stage with no exits, no audience, and no room for coincidence. It was a machine designed for beauty—and a crystalline monument to madness.
By day, Edward Kurosaki was the president of Black Dog. But today, he would take on his true role: the director of a twisted broadcast. He dismissed contemporary pornography as a “souless collision of flesh.” What he sought instead was the “radiance of instinct”—the raw, primal glow that the human body reveals only when pushed to its absolute limit.
He craved the ultimate eroticism, a bloom that only opens at the precipice of death. To capture it, he had constructed this massive vertical pool, fifty meters wide and deep, ranging from two meters to a staggering 120 meters, equipped with ten distinct “Ordeals.”
Most notably, at the edge of the 120-meter floor, a dark abyss gaped open—a hole ten meters in diameter. This shaft plunged an additional eighty meters down, reaching a total depth of 200 meters. It was the ultimate symbol of Kurosaki’s insanity.
