Volume 3 Hello, Eri Chapter 233 Breath of the Deep Sea (VI)
"So I asked the director of the executive bureau of the Japanese branch, Yuan Zhisheng, to serve as the on-site commander. He has a high status in the Snake Eight Families. If anything goes wrong, he will be to blame. Lu Mingfei also applied to temporarily withdraw from the diving team and instead keep an eye on the diving base. I agreed to her request, so that we have double insurance." Schneider slid the screen and brought up a digital interface with percentages written on it. The number on it is now 15% on a blue background, and next to it is a series of sound wave readings that are constantly going up and down.
"What is this?" asked Manstein.
"A safety device," Schneider said. " There are , saying that I was involved in the Greenland Ice Sea incident, and after that incident I became a ghost who had to rely on a ventilator to stay alive. This is not groundless but true, but few people in the academy know about that past."
"Tell me about it."
"The Dragon Abyss Project is actually a replica of the Greenland Ice Sea. We also monitored the heartbeat of a strange creature that time. Since it was the first time we encountered such a signal from the deep sea, we had no experience to confirm what it was, but the Greenland Ice Sea was where the Ice Sea Copper Pillar was discovered, so there is reason to speculate that it is something related to the dragon clan." Schneider said, "The school board quickly approved the task of sending outstanding students to dive. Everything went smoothly at the beginning, but then the voice channel was extremely chaotic. I heard those students shouting that they had found a door, and then the message was interrupted. I grabbed an underwater rifle and jumped into the ice sea, thinking that I must not lose my students. They are the elites I am most proud of. If anything hurts them, I will let it be buried with them."
"The place where the students lost contact was not deep. I could reach it with just my diving suit. But I didn't find anything at the target location. No blood, no lost equipment, and nothing that could be called a door. At this moment, I felt an extreme coldness from behind. I realized that there was something behind me. Without any hesitation, I pulled the trigger continuously. In just a split second, I didn't even have time to twist my neck to see what it was. The rapidly dropping temperature froze the seawater around me into a whole block of ice. I saw the golden pupils of the dragon race flash by in the reflection of the ice. At that moment, I realized that it was a dragon. It had sensed danger and hatched in advance."
Schneider said, "The people on the boat found that I had lost contact and immediately recovered the safety line. Fortunately, the safety line was not destroyed by the sudden low temperature, and I was fished out. When I came out of the water, I looked like an ice sculpture from a thousand years ago, and my whole body was sealed in a 4-meter-high circular icicle. The extreme cold destroyed half of my face and even invaded my respiratory tract. When the doctor was rescuing me, my respiratory tract was as crisp as a thin biscuit and would break at the touch. The doctor artificially reshaped my respiratory tract with plastic, and I had to wear an oxygen mask at all times to ensure that I would be safe. If I died one day, it would be either from a dragon or respiratory failure."
"Even with the previous experience, Pompey still felt comfortable letting his precious son dive." Manstein couldn't believe it.
"So don't call it a conspiracy theory. My suspicion is justified." Schneider slid the screen with the percentage in front of Manstein. "I compared the heartbeat data collected from the Greenland Sea with the heartbeat data from the Japan Trench. The rhythms of the two heartbeats are highly consistent. Based on this, I made this early warning system. If its readings increase, it means that the embryos in the Japan Trench are approaching the heartbeat sound before the Greenland Sea tragedy that year, which means the possibility of hatching dragon embryos."
"At least it's safe now." Manstein glanced at the reading which had just risen to 16%. The difference in the sound wave frequencies between the two was still large.
The images on the screens suddenly went out at the same time, and the emergency lights in the central control room slowly turned on. A few seconds ago, there were dozens of projection screens in front of Schneider, but now even the only safety warning system that was on stayed at 16%, and the heartbeat reading from the Japan Trench next to it turned into a straight line.
"Norma, what's going on?" Schneider shouted.
"Kaguya interrupted contact with me 10 seconds ago. I am trying to re-establish the network connection, but Kaguya has not responded for the time being. It is possible that there may be network fluctuations. Please wait." Norma's voice sounded again in the central control room.
An ominous premonition arose in Schneider's heart. People are like this, they will become paranoid because of something. It was a signal interruption that led to the tragedy in the Greenland Sea. It won't be that the same drama will be repeated today because of the signal interruption, right?
Chu Zihang took a look at the depth reading on the Trieste. This legendary device from the last century still used an old-fashioned dashboard, which was completely independent and had no dashboard representing five digits. The current reading was 7566 meters.
Even though Lu Mingfei tried her best to liven up the atmosphere and kept chattering for such a long time, few people could stand it. Everyone was a little tired. Caesar lit a cigar to refresh himself. Although the space in the submersible was small, the air circulation system could still expel the smoke.
"Would you like some water?" Lu Mingfei was still working hard, even talking about gossip in the academy. Chu Zihang could tell that she was a little tired. She had been talking for three hours in a row, and even a crosstalk master wouldn't work so hard. She needed to moisten her throat.
"Fortunately... I've already said that I want to be your most solid and powerful logistics, so of course I have to keep you in my sight at all times. It would be dereliction of duty if I let you out of my surveillance for even a second." Lu Mingfei answered a little weakly, but with an irrefutable determination.
Chu Zihang did not persuade her a second time. He knew that this girl was sometimes very stubborn. What she said to you was a firm hope that you would respect her. If you dare to resist, she would always find a way to make you obey her. This kind of creature is called a cute girlfriend. Not every girl is qualified to be called that. Some are coquettish and slutty, and some are green tea bitches with ulterior motives. Chu Zihang is very lucky. The girl he picked up may be one of the best girlfriends in the world.
A ray of light shone in from the porthole and hit Chu Zihang's face. Caesar looked at Chu Zihang in surprise as he closed his eyes to avoid it. It was a beam of warm red light. How could he encounter light in the 7,900-meter deep sea?
All the cameras of the Trieste were turned on to the most perfect power and angle, so that it had an almost circular surrounding view. Chu Zihang and Caesar each occupied a porthole, and they clearly saw that this place was full of vitality. The color of the water was like the sunset, and large schools of fish consisting of thousands of fish were floating in the water like the glow of the sunset. Some of them walked out of the spiral upward arc, and some plunged into the seabed like a whirlpool. Some of these fish were as bright as silver, some were almost transparent, and others emitted a faint blue fluorescence.
Chu Zihang looked at these schools of fish in shock, whose names he could not even call out. Or maybe he could call out names, but they could no longer be called the original species. The flat flounder, which was as flat as a scallop, had two tentacles almost as long as its body on its head. The giant sea turtle that swam with the school of fish had a fleshy thing on its head that looked like a tumor protruding from its body. The black and white manta rays had an uncoordinated appearance, and their needle-like tail fins could even reach an astonishing 10 meters. When they passed through the school of fish, they would cause a gap in the school of fish that would not heal for a long time. The spread pectoral fins looked like a fighter jet in the deep sea.
Any biological oceanographer who comes here will think that he has strayed into a wonderful world in a fairy tale. Every creature seems to be a new species that has never been discovered. They have their previous appearance, but also have distortions that are inconsistent with scientific development, which is amazing.
"Did you see it?" Caesar held the headset and asked the support group on the Sumeru throne.
"Very clear, it seems you are approaching your destination." Yuan Zhisheng looked at the clouds rolling over on the big screen. The gray and white patterns on the belly of the giant whale looked like clouds. This thing may be more than 100 meters long, but there are no such large whales in the world now. Judging from its appearance, it is very likely the extinct Basilosaurus, a creature that lived tens of millions of years ago. Now it appeared in everyone's sight in an active posture. The huge long tail stirred the sea water, and even the Trieste in the distance was affected by some impact fluctuations.
"There shouldn't be such large marine life at such a deep place. The surrounding ecological environment is also very strange and too rich," said Chu Zihang.
"Why do you say that? I think it's very beautiful." Lu Mingfei didn't understand all this. When she saw this scene, she thought it was as beautiful as an aquarium like most girls. However, it was difficult to have such a large school of fish in an aquarium, not to mention a whale that was so big that it would even cause a bit of gigantic phobia. Just looking at it here was amazing. I wonder what it felt like to watch that thing swimming past them from Caesar and Chu Zihang's perspective.
"It's a simple reason. Such a deep sea would lack the necessary food." Caesar said, "Humans have tried to explore the deep sea many times. In the extremely deep sea, there live foraminifera, radiolarians, cnidarians, annelids, echinoderms and arthropods. We saw such a large school of fish in just one place, and even such a big whale. Can you imagine how much food they consume every day? The creatures I mentioned are all pitifully small and cannot meet the nutrient needs of such a large scale. This shows that there is something around that can provide them with nutrients and re-establish the biosphere that should not exist in such a deep sea."
"It's probably the pheromones released by the embryo," Yuan Zhisheng whispered. "The hatching embryo released pheromones, luring these creatures to its vicinity as food. Most of them don't actually live here, but are attracted by the embryo."
"Not quite right." Chu Zihang shook his head. "Dragons like to choose places far away from humans or any other creatures to hatch their embryos. They don't need these schools of fish as food, and they won't easily release pheromones. In history, there are only examples of evolution and mutation due to contact with dragon blood. If this is a large number of dragon subspecies born under the influence of embryo secretions, then it means that our textbooks should be rewritten."
"Dragon embryos don't need food to hatch? How do they grow?" Lu Mingfei was surprised. She thought of Norton and Samson. She once thought that Samson might need to eat more to supplement nutrition like a pregnant mother, so that she could feed two people. But Samson never seemed to care whether Norton's eggs were full. She always kept her body in good condition when eating, not much different from an ordinary girl. Now she was directly told that dragon embryos didn't need to eat, which made her worldview a little unacceptable.
"I don't know. Dragons don't follow science." Caesar said, "It's like if a human were enlarged five times, they would look like a giant in a fantasy story, but in reality your weight would be 125 times greater. The bones that originally supported the body would instantly bear a hundred times the pressure and would simply collapse to their knees. With a dragon's huge body, it's impossible to understand its body structure or energy system from a scientific perspective, not to mention whether their embryos need energy to hatch."
"Textbooks are written based on existing knowledge. The more we know, the more likely we are to recompile them. We can take more photos to record what we see. Now is not the time to dwell on this issue. There are more important things to do. Let's search along the surrounding seabed. If it really wants to eat, it should have prepared food within reach. Otherwise, it will be too difficult for it to eat given its current state of being unable to move."
"Got it," Caesar replied, and when it was time to get down to business he put out the unfinished cigar.
Caesar activated the Trieste's stabilizing fins, and the propeller at the tail began to rotate at high speed. This legendary submersible immediately gained the forward mobility, like a submarine, and could reach a speed of 12 nautical miles per hour.
The searchlight shone below the Trieste, and the seawater was red like the sunset glow. It was not caused by the fish, but because the submersible had reached the top of the Japan Trench. On the left was the gently sloping seabed, and on the right was a rugged cliff, like a folded up L-shape. The scene that only appeared in the form of pictures in the textbook was reproduced in front of everyone. On the left was the Eurasian Plate, and on the right was the Pacific Plate. If you didn't see it with your own eyes, it would be hard to believe that the seabed and land were formed by the collision of two chocolate-like continents.
The bottom of the trench is an extremely long underwater canyon. It cannot be called tortuous and deep but rather a natural ravine. It is astonishingly wide. Looking around, there is red magma rolling and gushing everywhere, like a barrier lake composed of red flames. It quickly vaporizes not long after it rises, and then repeats the process, making a thunder-like sound.
People always say that water and fire are incompatible, but that is only a phenomenon in most daily lives. In the trenches thousands of meters deep, sea water and magma blend perfectly, reaching a delicate balance. Neither can destroy the other, and the two sides continue in an eternal tug-of-war, which is truly fantastic.
