Geonhak has never been the type of person that one would refer to as 'superstitious', but when he spots something right out of a fairytale during one of his dives, he just knows that there's more to it, there has to be.
And suddenly, he finds himsel...
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༉ · ─────── · 𓆝 · ─────── · ࿐ . .⃗ . 2,2k
A freediver ought to follow a simple set of rules: never dive alone, know yourself, stay calm – and Geonhak had provoked all of them at a single blow.
“I never took you for the yoga type of guy.”
Upon hearing Hyungu’s snicker, Geonhak cracked one eye open – radiant sunlight immediately assaulting his vision behind compressed lids – and let his previously outstretched arms hang loosely by his sides.
“Yoga?” he then asked with a raised eyebrow as he squinted at Hyungu who had rested both his elbows on the rim of the swaying boat, scattered shards of refracted sunlight dancing along his face.
“First these disturbing breathing exercises-…” Hyungu interrupted himself and held his index finger up as though proffering a warning, “don’t ever do that again without giving me a heads-up, I thought we had a corpse aboard – and now the stretching, looks pretty spiritual to me.”
“You mean the diaphragmatic breathing?” Geonhak asked, holding back a laugh and shaking his head upon seeing Hyungu countering an exaggerated shrug in response, “oh please, there’s nothing spiritual or disturbing to it. I could teach you.”
Hyungu blinked at Geonhak, his unimpressed frown creating a crease between his eyebrows, before he lifted himself out of the water and reached for a towel. “No thank you.”
As Geonhak assumed that Hyungu had just declared the conversation closed, he proceeded to rummage through the basket containing his belongings in search for his wetsuit. To be fair, Geonhak had intended to go on about the practice of diaphragmatic breathing and how he was benefitting from the lowered heart rate, the decreased oxygen demand, and the more effortless breathing that resulted from it, but given that Hyungu was a landlubber with all his might, Geonhak had only just got his act together and strangled his enthusiasm that bubbled somewhere underneath eternities spent with divers at his side who were all too familiar with the game plan – no room for him to enthuse anybody with the temptation he was seeing in the great depths, as they were all in the same boat whatsoever.
And Geonhak had to admit that he understood where Hyungu’s discomfort might have emerged from, as sucking up one’s own diaphragm, leaving only skin spanned over a prominent ribcage and a hollow stomach for as long as the breath was held, did look the slightest bit grotesque and inhumane – especially when seeing someone do it for the first time without having ever heard of anything other than chest breathing.
