Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei finds a Freylian

“Then restore the power,” Caesar said, walking toward the main power switch.

"Wait a minute," Chu Zihang suddenly said, "the oxygen level is showing an anomaly."

Chapter 427 Less than half of the oxygen remained

Caesar quickly shone his flashlight on the oxygen level gauge, an old-fashioned mechanical pointer instrument. The pointer was stopped at 44%.

“That’s strange,” Caesar frowned. “The air chamber is leaking compressed air, so why is the oxygen level so low? That doesn’t make sense.”

“I think it makes perfect sense,” Lu Mingfei said, his voice trembling slightly. He pointed to the observation window on the upper right and said, “Caesar, come and take a look. Those two things floating upwards are our oxygen tanks.”

Caesar and Chu Zihang simultaneously approached the porthole.

In the stark white beam of the searchlight, two spherical blue steel tanks were slowly rising to the surface. As they ascended, they underwent bizarre changes.

The once perfect sphere is gradually deforming and collapsing, like an aluminum can being crushed by an invisible hand. Fine cracks appear on the surface of the steel can, and white oxygen is ejected from the cracks, forming a fine cloud of bubbles in the high-pressure seawater.

These deep-sea oxygen tanks have steel walls 7.5 centimeters thick, sufficient to withstand the pressure of conventional underwater operations. However, at a depth of 7900 meters, the pressure per square centimeter exceeds 800 kilograms, equivalent to the weight of a small car concentrated in an area the size of a fingernail. Even the thickest steel has its limits.

The two steel tanks continued to rise for another ten meters, becoming increasingly deflated until they were finally reduced to two twisted, unevenly thick steel sheets. Having lost their last bit of buoyancy, they began to slowly sink, like two autumn leaves, swirling and plummeting into the deeper darkness below.

Lu Mingfei finally grasped the meaning of extreme high pressure. If the outer shell of the Trieste collapsed, the three of them would not fare any better than those two oxygen tanks—no, they would be worse off. The human body contains numerous cavities and fluids, which, under high pressure, would burst open like a tomato being crushed by a hydraulic press.

“We’ve lost half our oxygen supply,” Caesar said desperately. “During the descent, the bolts securing the oxygen tanks broke. The tanks detached from the supports and impacted the inner walls, causing structural damage. At this depth, even a small breach can be fatal.”

He quickly calculated in his mind: "With the remaining oxygen reserves and emergency supplies, we won't be able to stay underwater for long. This doesn't even include the time needed to return and surface."

A heavy silence fell over the cockpit. They were at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, 7900 meters below the surface, nearly eight kilometers above the water. They could begin their ascent immediately and return safely.

“I’m calling the academy, wait a moment,” Yuan Zhisheng’s voice broke the silence. In the background, you could hear him moving around quickly and pushing open the hatch. “Do not perform any operations, maintain the status quo.”

Communication is temporarily cut off.

In the darkness, only the beams of flashlights flickered. Three young men sat silently in their seats. Outside the Trieste, absolute darkness seemed to swallow even light. Inside the Trieste, the oxygen supply was steadily decreasing at a rate of nearly 1% per minute.

Mai Shude remained pressed against the cold hull, feeling each tremor emanating from deep within the ship. Her golden dragon eyes glowed faintly in the darkness, fixed on the direction where the oxygen tank had just surfaced.

"Looks like we can't return yet," Caesar's voice came through the headset, his tone somewhat strange. "Take a look at the situation."

Because of the power of words, Caesar noticed something was wrong earlier than Lu Mingfei and Chu Zihang.

The Trieste was currently in a state of complete power outage protection, and theoretically, the cockpit should have been completely dark. However, they didn't need flashlights at all to see each other's faces clearly. It wasn't that they had night vision; there was a genuine light source.

A warm red light streamed in through the porthole. Not the stark white beam of a searchlight, but a more natural light. Like the afterglow of late autumn, like the embers in a fireplace, like watching the sunset through amber.

But this is 7900 meters deep. The Mariana Trench, at its deepest point of 11000 meters, is known as the Challenger Deep, a true zone of absolute darkness where even the bioluminescence emitted by deep-sea creatures is pitifully scarce. Although it hasn't reached the ultimate depth yet, it must be perpetual night here.

But what they saw through the porthole was an incredible sight.

Here, life is vibrant, everything is reviving, and the burgeoning vitality is still right before our eyes.

The seawater displayed a dreamlike sunset hue, not a single color, but a gradient: a deep, dark red at the top, gradually transitioning to a fiery golden-red below, with a dazzling, lava-like bright orange churning in the deepest fissures. Thousands upon thousands of fish floated in this radiant expanse, like flocks of birds suspended in the air.

Lu Mingfei held his breath.

The size and shape of the fish exceeded all his knowledge of fish. Some fish spiraled upwards, forming huge, slowly rotating silver tornadoes, each fish shimmering with a metallic sheen. Others plunged into the depths like whirlpools; those fish were almost transparent, with only their internal organs emitting a faint blue-green fluorescence, resembling a galaxy falling from the night sky as they spun.

Occasionally, a giant manta ray with a wingspan exceeding ten meters would slowly swim by, flapping its fleshy, feather-like fins. The school of fish would automatically part to create a passage for it, then close up again after it had passed through. The manta rays had black and white exoskeletons on their heads, shaped like the helmets of medieval knights, reflecting an eerie, glazed sheen under the red light.

Even more astonishing was the sight of a sea turtle, if it could even be called one. Its carapace wasn't a hard shell, but rather fleshy, blood vessel-covered red tissue, cracked like freshly solidified basalt, with viscous, luminous mucus flowing from its edges. Its wing-like fins moved clumsily yet gracefully, synchronized with the school of fish, like a meticulously choreographed underwater ballet.

The scene before me possessed an aura of vastness, magnificence, and power that transcended the limits of human comprehension. This was not a sight to behold in ocean documentaries, nor even in science fiction films. It was breathtakingly beautiful, unrealistically beautiful, and terrifyingly so.

Lu Mingfei rubbed his eyes, wondering if he was experiencing a collective hallucination due to extreme oxygen deprivation and stress.

“Avatar?” he murmured to himself.

Just then, the "clouds" moved.

The flowing, grayish-white "cloud" above the submersible suddenly turned, its movement incredibly slow yet awe-inspiring. A massive tail, over a hundred meters long, churned the seawater, leaving behind a transparent whirlpool more than fifteen meters in diameter. The water crashed against the hull of the Trieste, producing a thunderous roar. The ship rocked slightly.

This is not a cloud, but the pattern on the belly of an organism.

There shouldn't be such a large whale in the world. The largest known blue whale is only about 30 meters long, while this creature is at least three times the size of a blue whale.

Its skin wasn't smooth; instead, it was covered with layers of bony plates, like armor, from which a dark red bioluminescence seeped. Huge eyes, each the size of a small car, slowly rotated on either side of its head, their pupils vertical golden slits.

Chapter 428 Winning the Big Prize

“Judging from its appearance,” Chu Zihang said softly, afraid of disturbing the creatures outside, “it looks like a Basilosaurus, which went extinct 35 million years ago. But the largest Basilosaurus fossil record doesn’t exceed 20 meters. This is either an undiscovered subspecies, or…”

“Or it’s been modified by something,” Caesar interjected, his hand already on the hilt of Dicket’s sword. “We’re almost there for the embryo, aren’t we?”

"Yes," Chu Zihang said, adjusting the magnification of the viewing window.

“At such a deep sea, only a few extremophiles and crustaceans should be able to survive. But we see a complete ecosystem, from plankton to large predators. The abnormal ecological environment indicates that something nearby has fundamentally restructured the ecological rules here. Look down, we are now directly above the Arctic Ocean.”

Lu Mingfei lunged at the observation window on the left, his face almost pressed against the cold glass.

He finally understood why the sea was red.

The Trieste is suspended at the deepest point of the Japan Trench. To its left is a relatively gentle seabed covered with thick, grayish-white sediments. To its right are near-vertical cliffs, jagged black rocks riddled with cracks. This is the collision boundary between the Eurasian and Pacific Plates; the left side belongs to the continent, and the right side to the ocean.

Less than 300 meters below them, the seabed split open.

This is a golden crack running north-south, stretching as far as the eye can see, with a width of fifty meters even at its narrowest point. The earth's crust has completely broken off there, and the reddish-brown rock layers beneath have rolled up, like a wound that will never heal.

The magma erupted intermittently, each eruption sounding like the Earth's core breathing. Dark red lava columns broke through the pressure of the seawater, rising tens of meters upwards, before being cooled and solidified by the icy seawater, turning into black rock fragments that slowly sank.

The seawater and lava intertwine to create a bizarre scene, where scorching heat and extreme cold merge in the most intimate way, emitting a continuous hissing sound, like millions of snakes simultaneously flicking their tongues.

From deeper within came faint rumbling sounds, the resonance of crustal movement and churning magma chambers.

"Holy crap..." Lu Mingfei's vocabulary completely dried up. "I thought the depths of the Abyss would be a pitch-black place, but it turns out, it's hell's living room!"

“Underwater volcano,” Chu Zihang explained, “a crack in the Earth’s crust that contains trillions of tons of magma. This is why Japan is the country with the most frequent earthquakes in the world; the entire archipelago sits on this time bomb. Theoretically, one day it could really sink into the sea like the legendary Atlantis.”

He paused for a moment, then said, "The dragon actually chose the seabed as its hatching ground."

“We’ve won the lottery!” Caesar laughed. “That’s the old Chinese saying, ‘You can search high and low and still not find it.’”

“This isn’t a big prize,” Lu Mingfei said, turning his head with a distorted expression. “Caesar, you went hunting and drove into a lion’s territory while yelling that I’d won the lottery. The lion thought it was a great day and drove its own breakfast to your door, with delivery service included.”

He pointed to the creatures swimming outside the porthole, "Why are these fish, turtles, and whales here? Are they waiting to be eaten by dragons?"

“As I see it,” Caesar adjusted the angle of another observation window, aiming it at a group of small, spiraling silver fish.

"They come looking for food. This place reminds me a lot of the waters near Norway. The cold currents bring large amounts of microorganisms to the fishing grounds, forming huge clouds of plankton. Divers there will see similar sights: schools of fish either mating, migrating, or feeding on microorganisms in the water."

"How could there be microorganisms in this godforsaken place?" Lu Mingfei wondered. "At a depth of 7900 meters, with high pressure, low temperature, and no sunlight, even bacteria couldn't survive for more than a few species, right?"

“That’s usually how it is,” Chu Zihang continued, “but look at that fissure in the ground, the magma keeps erupting, bringing a lot of minerals and heat. A unique chemosynthetic ecosystem forms near hydrothermal vents: certain bacteria can use chemicals such as hydrogen sulfide to synthesize organic matter, becoming the basis of the food chain. However…”

He frowned slightly. "The scale and complexity of this ecosystem far exceed any known deep-sea hydrothermal vent ecosystem. Those large creatures shouldn't be here at all; they can't find enough food."

“Collect some water samples to take back for the biology teachers to study.” Caesar turned on the pre-scan switch for the sample collection system. Although there was no power, manual operation was still possible. “In short, there must be a special reason why these fish, and even prehistoric whales, could gather in the deep sea. There’s another possibility.”

He looked at Chu Zihang and said, "The embryo releases pheromones, or more advanced mental inducements, to lure these creatures here as food reserves."

Lu Mingfei felt a chill run down his spine: "Wait for the rabbit to run into the tree stump? We swim up to the dragon, then awkwardly say, 'Please have a meal?'"

"Don't do that, it's disgusting."

"The fish have disappeared! Something's wrong!" Chu Zihang said in a low voice, almost as if his voice was just rolling in his throat.

The once bustling, sunset-colored waters are now eerily empty. Schools of silvery fish, luminous jellyfish, slowly swimming giant turtles, manta rays—all the creatures vanished without a trace within a few seconds. The sunset-colored seawater continues to flow, but only pure, lifeless liquid light remains.

"Damn it, open the door! It's really bad, the big one's coming. Get ready." Caesar unbuckled his seatbelt and placed his hand on the hilt of Dick's knife. His golden eyes shone in the dim cockpit like two dim lights.

"Caesar, your Chinese is getting better and better. Is something big coming?" Lu Mingfei felt a chill run down his spine and shrank back. The surrounding silence was even more unsettling than when the fish had been swimming. It was a deliberate, warning silence.

“Nono has tutored me quite a bit. As for now, let’s see how things go.” Caesar slowly moved to the central observation window and pressed his face against the cold glass. “But anything that can instantly silence the entire ecosystem is definitely not a small thing.”

"The big one is here," Chu Zihang said, pointing to the observation window on the right.

A slender black shadow swam leisurely in the rosy sea.

Its posture was extremely composed, its long tail swaying slowly, like a nobleman strolling in his own garden. But everyone could see that behind this composure lay a terrifying speed that could be unleashed at any moment. This was the signature posture of an apex predator, seemingly lazy, but in reality, every muscle was in peak condition, ready to launch like a torpedo at any time.

Chapter 429 Sharks and Giant Squid (Part 1)

The shadowy figure gradually became clearer.

This is a hammerhead shark, but unlike any hammerhead shark Lu Mingfei has ever seen in the documentary. It is ridiculously large, at least twenty meters long. Its iconic "T"-shaped head is flat and broad, like a giant geological exploration hammer.

The most bizarre thing about it was its eyes: two eyes were located on the left and right sides of its head, a distance of two and a half meters apart, giving it a nearly 360-degree panoramic view. At this moment, the eyes were a cloudy white, but deep within the pupils, faint dark golden specks of light flickered.

“This shark is probably one of the top predators in this area,” Caesar said softly, his voice carrying the professional judgment of a hunter. “When it appears, other creatures downstream in the food chain will instinctively give way. This is often seen in fishing grounds; when a school of small fish suddenly changes direction and forms a huge gap to avoid it, it means a big one is coming.”

Lu Mingfei patted his chest and let out a long sigh: "Phew, that's it. I thought a dragon had come to feed, but it turned out to be a shark, albeit a big one."

Before he could finish speaking, the hammerhead shark outside the window suddenly moved.

It wasn't an attack, but an acceleration. With just a few gentle flicks of its tail, its massive body appeared instantly, seemingly weightless, less than fifty meters in front of the submersible. The seawater churned, forming a visible, transparent whirlpool. The shark stopped, slowly moving one of its eyes—a murky white sphere over forty centimeters in diameter—directly in front of the observation window.

It began to observe.

The enormous eyeballs rolled, adjusting their focus. The irises were covered with fine, dark blood vessels, and the pupils contracted into narrow slits under the red light. Lu Mingfei could clearly see the patterns on the surface of the eyeballs, even a few tiny scars; this was clearly an old shark that had fought countless battles.

"Such big eyes! I won't look at Bikini Bottom without you in my sight." Lu Mingfei involuntarily stepped back, his back bumping against the dashboard. "We're all humans who are masters of technology and ruthless skill! Don't eat me!"

Although he didn't think he could read the shark's eyes, at this moment, the way the shark was watching them through the glass looked like someone admiring the main course in front of a display case in a high-end restaurant.

"Don't worry, don't worry," Caesar said calmly. "There are basically no species in the ocean that really like to eat people. Just like you said, humans are all about technology and ruthless work, which doesn't make them palatable food for hammerhead sharks. The fat ratio is wrong, too much bone and too little muscle."

He paused for a moment, then added, "What it really likes is probably large, fresh, and healthy food like giant squid. It must taste like top-quality sashimi."

“Let me tell you more about the giant squid,” Lu Mingfei said, his eyes never leaving the sharks outside the window.

"This enormous squid is possibly the largest invertebrate currently living on Earth," Chu Zihang's voice came from the left, as he also observed the sharks. "The largest individual ever caught by humans was about 15 meters long, but it's speculated that even larger ones exist in the deep sea. They are one of the sperm whale's main prey and its only rival in the deep sea."

"The two species hunt each other in waters thousands of meters deep. If the sperm whale drags the squid to shallow waters, the squid dies. If the squid drags the sperm whale to deeper waters, the sperm whale dies. Someone once found a squid beak with a diameter of more than 30 centimeters in the stomach of a sperm whale, speculating that the squid's tentacles may have been more than 60 meters long."

"There are many tentacles, and also suckers, is that right?" Lu Mingfei's voice began to tremble.

"It has ten arms, two of which are particularly long and are used for hunting and feeding," Chu Zihang continued, explaining, "The tentacles have hundreds of suckers, each with a sharp keratin ring around its edge. The largest known sucker scar is over 40 centimeters in diameter, which means the tentacle that left the scar is thicker than an adult's waist."

"How did we begin this academic discussion?" Caesar glanced at them, but quickly looked back out the window.

The hammerhead shark began to swim slowly around the submersible, as if assessing the value of its prey.

Lu Mingfei's face grew paler and paler. "I only care about creatures that can eat me."