"Dredging up the past 3/3"

Past the doors he'd opened, the lizard swam through a hidden shrine! It was much better lit than outside, making his glowstick a bit redundant, but he didn't mind. He took in all the sights he could, though as there was still no air to be found, he knew he unfortunately couldn't just stick around. Surely there was something even more impressive, this place was hard to find and hard to open...

After some searching, he found it. A large room had a pedestal in its middle, with an impressive-looking trident sitting on it! Energy was seemingly being drawn from it, going both above and below, and the lizard could feel it as he approached. He considered how safe it might be to try to take it... And carefully reached out to pull the trident from its pedestal. It didn't take much effort; it didn't seem to be physically connected to anything.

Holding the trident felt... Perfect. As if it'd been made specifically for the lizard. The energy flows stopped, and he shuddered a little as a wave of it passed through his body, emanating from the trident. For a moment, he wondered what that was... Then he grunted as his chest heaved. By now, he'd been underwater for about an hour and 20 minutes, and his lungs were aching for air. It was time to finally start his ascent.

Exiting the shrine and swimming up, the lizard eventually noticed his need to breathe didn't seem to be growing... When he surfaced, he felt no worse for wear than when he'd first acquired the trident. Satisfied, he started on his way back to shore, happy to have found something that was clearly incredibly important to his ancestors.

In the days that followed, he discovered just what holding the trident had done: His already relatively clear underwater speech was now perfectly so, and his breath holding ability had shot all the way to a limit of 20 hours! Eager to see what else the trident's power could do, he experimented a fair bit, eventually finding he was starting to just barely make out words from fish he'd pass on his dives... There was definitely more to his treasure, he just had to master using it.