Dragon Clan: Lu Mingfei Returns from Japan

Chapter 508 Collapse
"So light."

This was Lu Mingfei’s first feeling.

Judging from her appearance, Ling is already very small, even smaller than Xia Mi. With her golden hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, she is the kind of girl who would be regarded as a mascot if she were surrounded by other girls.

So Lu Mingfei was actually prepared for Ling's light weight.

But the girl's lightness probably exceeded Lu Mingfei's psychological expectations. As Ling's arms gently wrapped around Lu Mingfei, the place where her delicate arms touched Lu Mingfei's neck skin had a subtle touch of silk sliding through fingers, and a hint of coolness.

It was as if just a snowflake fell on him.

However, the few of them did not stay too long for this little episode. After Lu Mingfei stood up with Ling on his back, the group walked up the U-shaped stairs at a neither fast nor slow pace.

The stairs without handrails went up along the wall. The lights cast swirling shadows of several people on the mottled and old wall, and the elongated shadows looked a bit funny.

Probably due to years of disrepair, each step feels soft and shaky when you step on it, with some creaking sounds. I guess these steps are not all solid.

Lu Mingfei, who was walking at the back of the crowd, looked at the shadow on the wall boredly.

Then he noticed that Shutoku Aki would occasionally look back at him as they walked, as if to see if he, who was carrying Zero on his back, had been left behind.

Lu Mingfei originally wanted to tell Aki that she didn’t need to keep looking back, as he could catch up, as Ling was actually quite light.

But for a moment, Lu Mingfei suddenly had an illusion that there seemed to be a little bit of worry hidden in Aki's gaze when she turned around and lowered her head.

Lu Mingfei reacted instantly and realized that this was probably because of the diving mission that Aki and he had carried out in the morning.

An accident occurred during the dive, and the undercurrent generated by the living breathing washed him away. Only Aki was pulled onto the Moniah by the lifeline.

Aki was still upset about this incident, thinking that she had not taken good care of herself. She even endured the discomfort in her body and insisted on going into the water again to look for him.

Lu Mingfei, whose emotional intelligence had evolved a long time ago, thought about it and finally chose to say nothing.

If I accept Senior Sister Aki's kindness silently, it will probably be better for her, so that she won't always feel guilty about what happened before.

"How long do we have to walk?" Selma looked up at the dome and curled her lips: "It feels like we have climbed many floors, and we haven't reached the top yet?"

"Well, we're about halfway up, right? About ten floors."

Ye Sheng said with a smile, looking at Lu Mingfei: "Junior Brother Lu hasn't complained yet, Selma, why are you complaining first?"

Selma gave Lu Mingfei a wicked smile: "Hehe. I think Junior Brother Lu should be hoping that he can't finish walking up all these stairs, right? That way he can always carry Ling on his back. By the way, Junior Sister Ling is really cute. I want to switch with Junior Brother Lu."

Ye Sheng smiled helplessly: "Don't make such jokes. Selma, you know that Junior Brother Lu has a girlfriend."

Selma shrugged: "I know, I know, the little girl from Valentine's family. What's her name? Sue..."

Ye Sheng said: "Su Xiaoqiang."

Until Ye Sheng said that Lu Mingfei had a girlfriend, Ling just lay quietly on Lu Mingfei's back with an expressionless face.

When the three words "Su Xiaoqiang" fell gently to the ground, Lu Mingfei clearly felt that Ling's body trembled as if he was electrocuted.

Lu Mingfei keenly caught this abnormality, turned around and asked Ling: "What's wrong?"

Ling lowered his head, rested his forehead on Lu Mingfei's back and shook his head gently without saying anything more.

However, Ling's behavior was obviously not as if nothing had happened. Just as Lu Mingfei was about to ask more questions, the steps under his feet suddenly began to vibrate violently again!

The vibration was felt from the bottom up, and from the bottomless darkness came an ancient roar like a temple bell. In the stairwell environment similar to an echo wall, the roar was amplified countless times by the rebound and reflection of the wall. The thrilling and violent sound made everyone stop and subconsciously cover their ears. Even Ling jumped off Lu Mingfei and covered his ears.

The weathered walls obviously couldn't withstand such damage, shaking with the vibration. Everyone kept bending over and crawling, covering their ears while moving towards the inside of the wall. Even in such an environment, they could maintain the most basic judgment and knew to prevent the violent shaking from shaking them down the stairs. At a height of more than ten floors, even if they were mixed-bloods, they would die on the spot if they fell down.

Lu Mingfei heard someone shouting something, but he couldn't hear what that person was saying, or even who it was. Because the noise in the stairwell was so loud, Lu Mingfei had no doubt that if he let go of his hand, his eardrums would be shattered by the violent roar.

But then a voice suddenly sounded in my mind:

"It's me, I'm Ye Sheng. I'm using 'Snake' to pull everyone into the same audio channel. Does anyone know what happened?"

"Ye Sheng, are you using the Word Spirit again? No, you're already seriously overloaded today..." This is Selma's voice.

"I'm fine! It's an emergency." Ye Sheng said in a slightly weak voice, and repeated the previous question: "Does anyone know what happened?"

"I might know something..." At this time, Aki hesitated to reply.

"Aki, what do you know?" Ye Sheng asked.

"Whenever someone enters the mausoleum from the entrance, the structure inside the mausoleum will be disrupted and reorganized. The movement we felt might be due to this. Perhaps someone else entered the mausoleum after us..."

Before Aki could finish her words, Zero immediately denied it: "No. The vibration and sound this time are obviously different from the previous ones. It's like..."

"Like what?" Ye Sheng asked.

But before Ling could answer, Zhou Li's surprised voice completely cut off the conversation.

"Look down there!"

See below?
Everyone looked down at the same time, and then everyone saw a scene that would be unforgettable in their lives.

collapse!

The mausoleum, everything, everything within sight, was collapsing.

The entire mausoleum was dismembered by a great force! That was the power from nature! The roar they heard came from the mausoleum's fear of nature!

All the walls collapsed, and huge water columns rushed in from all directions. The water quickly filled up at a speed visible to the naked eye. The silver-cast wall blocks lost their supporting structure and fell down, sinking silently into the Yangtze River, raising fine and dense bubbles.

The sound of vibration, collapse, falling water, the girl's scream...all the sounds mixed together at this moment!
The dark blue river water in the darkness seemed like a huge mouth of the abyss, and was rapidly swallowing up the tomb that had been sealed for a thousand years. And it was obvious that the greed of this big mouth was far more than that, it was still rapidly moving upwards, upwards, trying to swallow into its stomach everything it could reach and everything it had not yet reached!

"Run up quickly!" Someone shouted.

"We can't run upwards!" Lu Mingfei shouted loudly, "We can't outrun the rising water! Everyone, take a deep breath and jump into the water! We can only dive up!" Everyone immediately realized that Lu Mingfei's judgment was correct! Because the upper part of the building was also collapsing after the structure was destroyed, going up would be a dead end.

After Lu Mingfei finished speaking, he immediately began to inhale, then puffed up his mouth and pinched his nose like a frog and jumped into the rising water. Frogs followed him one after another and jumped into the Yangtze River.

Everyone lit up their golden eyes at the same time. Only golden eyes could provide a bit of vision in this dark and impurity-filled underwater.

Even so, everyone was unable to see anything. The collapsed walls formed obstacles in front of them.

Ye Sheng waved his arms as nimbly as seaweed and swam ahead of everyone else.

"I'll use the 'snake' to explore the way, everyone follow me!" Ye Sheng's voice rang in everyone's mind.

Everything in sight was falling, huge walls, mountains along the coast, buried bones, the six-man team swiftly bypassed obstacles one after another in a one-two-three formation like geese flying south. It felt like playing obstacle avoidance games like Subway Surfers on Android phones a few years later, except that the scene was changed from the subway to the bottom of a river a hundred meters deep.

Ye Sheng was already exhausted at this time, and his head felt like it was about to explode. This was a side effect of "Snake".

"Snake" is a very convenient word spirit for exploration or communication. Users with a high level of mastery can even transmit messages over a distance of thousands of meters. However, the flip side of "Snake" is that it will bring a large amount of information to the user. It takes a lot of brainpower to filter and parse out the required information from this pile of information.

This is also the reason why the "snake" cannot be used in battle but the "kama-weasel" can, because the "kama-weasel" often brings back useful information. It takes a lot of time to select the useful information from the pile of information brought back by the "snake".

But even though he had a splitting headache and felt dizzy and wanted to fall asleep on the spot, he still gritted his teeth and forced himself to use the Word Spirit. He needed to use the "snake" to find the very high frequency band emitted by the VHF-DSC on-duty machine on the "Moniah".

As long as they could use the Snake to contact the Moniach, Professor Mans would be able to immediately find their location and come to rescue them.

But perhaps his use of the Word Spirit today really exceeded the limit of his body's endurance. He was clearly underwater, fighting at home, and his "snake" should have been able to easily swim a thousand meters, but he could only unfold a pitifully small alchemical field.

My lungs began to feel a burning sensation, a sign that my lung capacity had reached the bottom. It was still too difficult to swim from hundreds of meters underwater in the Yangtze River to the surface in one breath.

He was a realist and never believed in so-called miracles, but now he was thinking:
"Let's have a miracle..."

Ye Sheng closed his eyes tiredly.

"..."

……

Something held him up.

Ye Sheng tried to open his eyes, and his golden pupils, which were originally a little sluggish, suddenly flashed with something. He seemed to have caught something, and the "snake" brought him back a "sizzling" electrical signal. There were only the "Moniah" and the search and rescue ship mobilized by Norma working nearby. The electrical signal he caught was very likely from the "Moniah".

It seemed as if his brain began to become clear again at this moment. He looked back at Selma beside him and immediately connected the "snake" with the electrical signal he had just captured.

One second, two seconds...

Two seconds later, the familiar middle-aged male voice sounded in Ye Sheng's mind.

"This is the Moniach! I'm Captain Mance! If this is Ye Sheng, please report the situation on your side immediately."

Ye Sheng was so excited that he almost cried, but this was obviously not the time to cry. He immediately reported the situation of himself and everyone else to Professor Mans.

"I'm Ye Sheng, we are now..."

The report was very brief, but of course it couldn't be too long, as the long period of diving had already pushed their lung capacity to the limit.

But there was no need to report. The moment he caught the electrical signal of Ye Sheng's "snake", Professor Mans immediately put on a diving suit and jumped into the water. The moment he fell into the water, a series of sonic booms came out of Mans' mouth.

Yanling·dustless land.

He issued an order in the field, and the huge air pressure from inside to outside kept the river water out of the field of "Dust-free Land". A transparent water ball quickly expanded outward with Professor Mans as the center. The water in the spherical space with a diameter of several meters was kept out by the tough laws! The vortex spun around him rapidly.

"Tell me the coordinates of Ye Sheng and the others!" Professor Mans communicated with the crew on the ship through the communication line on the diving suit.

Guderian grabbed the communication microphone and replied: "They are at the 135° direction taught by Mans! It is about 40 meters underwater!"

"Roger that!"

The whirlpool pushed Mans to sink rapidly in the direction Guderian said. Within a dozen seconds, he saw his students struggling underwater. Lu Mingfei, who had been searching and rescuing, was also among the crowd.

When Mans saw Ye Sheng, Lu Mingfei and others, Ye Sheng and Lu Mingfei also obviously saw Professor Mans.

"Professor Mance."

Only then did Ye Sheng finally relax his tense nerves. He closed his eyes gently, as if he wanted to sink to the bottom of the river along with the fragments of the mausoleum. But in the end, he was unable to sink, because Professor Mance's arms had already embraced him.

"I know you have a lot to say, and I have a lot to ask. But that's for after the mission is over. Let's get out of here now. There is enough oxygen in the 'Dust-free Land', but you just surfaced from the deep waters and are likely to suffer from decompression sickness. You need to return to the 'Moniah' and enter the decompression chamber for treatment immediately!"

Professor Mans held the unconscious Ye Sheng in his arms, his eyes swept across the faces of the people lying on the ground in the "Dustless Land" gasping for breath, and finally landed on Ling. He was obviously a little confused about this new student who had appeared from nowhere.

But as he said, the identity of this strange girl is a matter for the future. The most urgent task now is to return to the "Moniah" immediately. Everyone is at risk of decompression sickness, and Ye Sheng is in a coma. What needs to be done now is to give everyone treatment and full-body examinations.

Lu Mingfei lay on the "ground", covering his lungs with one hand and breathing deeply, looking back at the place where they escaped.

The "Eye of Kuimen" that the Moniach had been using to locate had sunk to the bottom of the river along with part of the Qiyao Mountain Range next to it. The entire river water was muddy due to the huge movement. Waves several meters high rose and fell on the river surface. It was expected that the Geological Bureau's ships would come to the vicinity to conduct an investigation soon.

No one knows why the intact mausoleum suddenly collapsed.

But fortunately, at least they escaped.

Lu Mingfei had just thought this in his mind, and then, the expression of having survived a disaster suddenly froze on his face.

After the mausoleum collapsed and slowly sank, a bright red light suddenly appeared at the bottom of the turbid Yangtze River. It flashed quickly in the turbid water, but the turbid water could not cover up the sharp water line.

The bright red line looked like a ball of magma that had surged out due to the recent mountain collapse. In the mist, it faintly illuminated the majestic buildings behind the turbid water.

Bronze City.

……

(End of this chapter)