Unseen Depths: Sunken City
Unseen Depths: Sunken City — A gift made from a city
Holothurian greets the Hero as someone they have met before and someone meeting them for the first time. Twenty more sea slugs have fused with their body and acquired sentience, changing the collective that speaks under the familiar name. The Adeptus Kathooli have gathered to celebrate Kathool’s gift: an entire city on the seabed. What its people lost has become a grand temple, a place of pilgrimage for the curious and ambitious. Holothurian invites the Hero to face the Nereid Princess, whose tests of survival, they say, nobody has yet passed.
The city’s name has been swallowed by the Depths. Holothurian says the Adeptus were invited to feast on its people and knowledge, while explorers, scholars and treasure hunters continue arriving to become food or members of the collective. They sense Kathool’s gaze around the city and within the Hero, a connection that fascinates them more than hunger. Their gratitude is pointed: they credit the Hero for making the feast possible, then offer to thank human hubris instead. This is the cult’s accusation and invitation, not an independent explanation of every act that sank the city.
Unseen Depths: Sunken City — Amensalism and the ecology of a lure
Amensalism turns the Hero toward six Blubber Balls from the Necro Adipocere. Holothurian senses that the Hero recognizes the beings Kathool sent and finds the emotions they awaken fascinating. They freely invite the Hero to consume or destroy them, treating either response as part of the visit. The completion explains their purpose: the Necro Adipocere are a gift and a lure, attracting hungry creatures that will find food and a new home by burrowing inside and eating them from within. The settlement’s horror reproduces itself through an offer of sustenance.
The invitation extends to the god itself. If Kathool manifests a portion of its flesh here, Holothurian wants the Hero to taste it first. They notice disgust and long to acquire that sensation too. The exchange makes emotion another substance to absorb: fear, fascination and revulsion are experiences the growing collective can pursue alongside bodies and knowledge. Where the Hero recoils, Holothurian sees the possibility of another enlargement of the self.
Unseen Depths: Sunken City — Mutualism on unequal terms
Mutualism requires twelve Merdrathoolian Eyes. Holothurian is surprised that Merdraconians set aside their pride and asked to join the feast, merging with the Adeptus to become Merdrathoolians. These new beings want to fuse with the Hero as well. Holothurian expects rejection, then condemns their presumption: they are unworthy to become the Hero’s eyes and limbs, and even imagining it is blasphemy against Kathool. The collective’s language of belonging still permits hierarchy and exclusion. Its welcome is not a promise that every member may claim every other body.
The route opens farther into the city after Mutualism, leading toward the Nereid Princess. Amensalism and Mutualism each award one Sea Creature Membrane, while their repeated availability does not erase their order in the visit. The progression moves from Kathool’s bait, through creatures accepting assimilation, toward a composite being formed from the city’s dead. It is an introduction to the temple’s expanding community rather than evidence that the Hero has accepted membership.
Unseen Depths: Sunken City — The Nereid Princess and the inheritance of self-loathing
Holothurian describes two colleagues, a mollusk and a lamprey, feeding on the remains of the sunken city’s princess. They fused, became sentient and gained what Holothurian regards as a remarkable pleasure: self-loathing. Symbiogenesis names their new form the Nereid Princess and warns the Hero that failing the encounter means becoming part of her. Her title carries the person whose remains they consumed, but the account describes a composite transformation rather than straightforwardly announcing that the dead princess has returned to life.
The quest requires one Nereid Crown and awards one Oxidized Steel. Holothurian celebrates the change from an individual into a collective and claims the princess’s self-loathing as a shared possession. The city and the Princess will bring more visitors, they predict, and those visitors will become more of the same expanding body. All three native quests permit repeated completion. Their account ends with the continuing spread of the Adeptus Kathooli, not with proof that one victorious encounter has emptied the temple or ended Kathool’s influence.
Unseen Depths: Sunken City — Another promise of ascension
The guide’s related Cult of Dzeza article points toward a competing promise, clarified by archived public posts. The visible opening of a Dzeza Demographics post at cylisse-ae describes recruits frightened by their insignificance beside overwhelming cosmic beings. A separate Door to Door preview imagines Kathool’s recruiters discovering that a household has turned to Dzeza instead. The embarrassed recruiter is even corrected for speaking as an individual rather than a collective. These are preview and contextual passages, not additional events witnessed during the Sunken City quests.
An October 2025 promotion at Alina_AE presents Dzeza’s offer as freedom from powers that keep people small, promising ultimate forms at a coming Day of Destiny. Read beside Holothurian’s invitations, the two appeals offer different forms of enlargement: Dzeza’s promotion promises release into an ultimate form, while Holothurian celebrates bodies and experiences becoming part of a collective. The promotion establishes what Dzeza’s recruiters promise, not that the promised ascension has occurred or that every claim about its benefits is true.