Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei finds a Freylian

"Wait, don't release it!" Chu Zihang shouted, but it was too late.

"What happened?" Caesar asked, turning around.

"Neutron density drops sharply! Cadmium rods automatically reposition themselves back into the reactor, and the nuclear power module re-enters safety protection mode!" Chu Zihang stared at the data flashing on the screen. "It won't explode!"

"Holy crap!" Lu Mingfei exclaimed, his eyes wide. "Isn't this just a complete joke on us?"

Genjiro's face turned pale. The meticulously designed chess game by the Snake Clan had reached its final move, yet a damned oversight had occurred.

"Detonation circuit malfunction, young master. We must now manually enter the password to force it back into overheating mode," Miyamoto Shigeo urgently reported in the secret channel.

"Manual? At a depth of 8600 meters underwater?" Genji slammed his fist against the railing, which groaned in pain.

"Zeppelin's equipment is still usable, and there's enough time, as long as someone is willing to go down."

Willing? Genji's gaze fell upon the churning black sea below. He could almost picture the Caesar Team's current state: their nerves stretched to the limit, waiting to drop the bomb and surface immediately. Now they were being told not only they couldn't leave, but they were also forced to undertake a deadly deep-sea walk?

“Young Master, we cannot hesitate,” Sakura said, grasping Genji’s hand. “Please tell the Caesar Group.”

"Everyone, I have bad news," Yuan Zhisheng sighed, connecting to the communication channel. "There's been a circuit malfunction. You must proceed with a deep-sea voyage and manually enter the password. Otherwise, the nuclear-powered module cannot be detonated."

A brief silence.

“If we refuse,” Caesar’s voice trailed off, “are we just to wait to die at the bottom of the sea?”

"If we don't detonate it manually, everyone will die."

"The trolley problem? In order for everyone to survive, the three of us have to die."

"Yes."

Caesar's roar exploded through the channel, "You're just going to send us to our deaths like this! Damn it!"

“This is all for everyone,” Genjiro said.

"The Japanese branch is a bunch of sons of bitches and lunatics!" The communication was abruptly cut off.

A few seconds later, Chu Zihang's voice came back in, "Caesar went down. He's a proud man. He set the password, and only he could guess it. There are eight minutes of oxygen left."

Caesar crawled into the pressurized chamber, the heavy hatch closing behind him. The Zeppelin suit was a nearly spherical titanium-magnesium alloy monster, its outer walls five centimeters thick, its interior filled with high-pressure saline solution. He gripped the operating handle of his metal prosthetic limb and took a deep breath.

"Chu Zihang, try communication."

"I can hear you clearly. On your end?"

"The call quality is good," Caesar paused, "We are all proud men."

Chu Zihang was taken aback.

"It's just that we express our pride differently. Ha, if you weren't this kind of person, you wouldn't be worthy of being my opponent. The old fogies in my family have always been targeting you, but that has nothing to do with me. If you survive, go and take them all down."

The pressurized nozzles sprayed, and the spherical container was propelled out of the submersible, plummeting into the darkness below.

Chu Zihang watched the spherical outline shrink through the observation window and saw Caesar giving him a thumbs-up from inside the helmet. He didn't know if it was a sign of "triumph" or "farewell."

The lung snails piled up to waist height. Millions of tiny organisms peeled off the withered Lenin, hitting the Zeppelin's equipment with dull, nauseating thuds.

Caesar, manipulating his clumsy metal prosthetic limbs, trudged through the sticky carpet of flesh, step by step. Above him, countless serpent-tailed, human-bodied corpses rose madly, converging into a golden torrent of death, ignoring him and everything else, frantically fleeing this soon-to-be-destroyed ruin.

Ten meters. The yellow metal hull of the nuclear power module was just ten meters away.

Vision began to blur. Under ultra-high pressure, vision was the first to break down, targets appeared blurry, and the brain felt like it was being repeatedly struck by a blunt object, with waves of excruciating pain. The metal prosthetic limb slipped in the pile of snails, and each leg lift felt like struggling through a mudslide.

five meters.

Caesar closed his eyes.

Kamaitachi, his Word of Power domain unfolded silently. The sound waves propagated through the seawater with minimal loss, expanding the domain to an unprecedented extent. He heard the surging undercurrents, the throbbing of the Corpse Guardian's parched heart, the groans of cracking ruins, and the sound of bells.

The black bells hanging from the collapsed building, after sleeping for millions of years, were disturbed once again by the water flow, playing a mournful song that no one would listen to.

The sound conjured a picture in Caesar's mind. It was no longer the dark, deep sea, but an ancient city under the moonlight. When the wind rose, thousands of black bells tumbled one after another, their sound like a surging sea, echoing through the long streets and ancient alleys. That was Takamagahara, Takamagahara standing tall on the earth, silent and serene, like a monk standing apart from the world, compassionately watching over the passage of time.

The excruciating pain subsided, and his body became supple. He moved his prosthetic limb as if walking through the moonlit streets of Nara. He bent down by the river and scooped up the clear water. His reflection lingered in the water.

On a distant Buddhist pagoda, an ancient bell tolls.

He and the girl in his reflection both looked up at the same time.

"No, no," Caesar murmured.

"Caesar! Caesar!" Chu Zihang's roar rang out in the communication channel, each time more urgent than the last.

no respond.

In the monitoring footage below the submersible, the spherical equipment lay motionless amidst the swarm of lung snails. Caesar's last action was to tightly embrace a pile of lung snails, and the camera inside his helmet captured the lingering, contented smile on his face.

Vital monitoring showed that the heart was still beating, but consciousness had sunk into the deep sea, or rather, into a deadly, gentle haven constructed by sound.

Chu Zihang silently took off his headphones and covered the microphone. He turned around and looked at Lu Mingfei.

"Underwater communication must rely on cables."

"Could it be?" Lu Mingfei had a bad feeling.

“Yes, that’s what you’re thinking. If I fail, you tell Genjiro that the ignition was successful, but that I and Caesar cannot be retrieved, and ask him to retrieve you. He can’t verify the truth, so he can only choose to believe it.”

"Senior brother, let me light the fire!"

"Don't argue with me," Chu Zihang said, staring into Lu Mingfei's eyes. "Just like Caesar, out of captain's pride, left the danger to himself."

Chu Zihang turned and walked towards the pressurization chamber. "Don't feel guilty if you're the only one who survives."

The hatch closed completely, and a hissing sound of pressurization filled the air.

Lu Mingfei sat alone in the driver's seat, countless flashing instruments in front of him, a bottomless abyss of darkness below, and the repeated "Please respond" from Yuan Zhisheng over the communication channel in his ears. He looked down at his hands, then looked up at the observation window.

The spherical device that Chu Zihang was in had just been ejected and was slowly sinking towards the ocean of lung snails below, the golden torrent of corpse guards, and Caesar lying in it, smiling and unconscious.

Chapter 444 Brother, don't fall for Frilian's honey trap

"Ten minutes have passed, and the Trieste still hasn't started its engines," Sakura said. "Young Master, prepare for battle. A large swarm of corpse guards is approaching the surface, rising much faster than expected. The first batch will emerge in two minutes."

"Understood." Yuan Zhisheng looked at the pitch-black sea below and spoke slowly, "Use all firepower to stop all the corpse guards."

"Yes. But if Caesar's team hadn't detonated the nuclear power plant, there's no way we could have stopped them."

Yuan Zhisheng was silent for a moment, the sea breeze blowing his black hair across his forehead. "I believe in them."

The sirens blared, and the Sumeru Tower seemed like a steel behemoth awakened. Sirens spun, searchlights pierced the rain, and the metallic scraping of ammunition belts sliding into gun barrels, the hum of torpedoes warming up, and the hissing of spool rockets spinning in vain, mixed with the increasingly intense sirens, formed the prelude to war.

All eyes were fixed on the sea, where black waves rippled, and beneath them lay a brute force capable of tearing everything apart.

Yasha loaded the double-barreled shotgun with crimson bullets, while Crow used duct tape to bind the two long magazines together, inserting them into the submachine gun. This was the crude wisdom of gang warfare; simply pull them out, flip them over, and they could keep firing. Sakura stood quietly to the side and behind Genji, her hands empty; she herself was the most lethal weapon.

Genji glanced at Yasha's hunting rifle. "What are you preparing this for?"

Yaksha grinned, "We are the young master's loyal subordinates, we can't go empty-handed!"

Genji smiled. He was glad he still had Yaksha, Crow, and Sakura by his side.

The countdown from Shio Miyamoto came through the headphones. On the large screen in the central control room, hundreds or even thousands of points of light rose rapidly from the seabed, crashing into the net made of depth charges a hundred meters below the surface.

“Here I am,” said Shio Miyamoto.

On the seabed, a dazzling light shone. It was as if flames were burning upwards from the bottom of the abyss. Half a second later, a violent shockwave tore through the sea surface, and a white giant wave shot into the sky, mixed with shredded, dark blue limbs and filthy blood.

“There’s still 40% of the corpses guarding the area!” Miyamoto Shigeo roared.

The Wasp's tail guns roared in the sky, raining down bullets and forcibly pushing many corpse guards back into the sea. The torpedoes of the naval patrol boats streaked through the water, leaving white trails, while the triple-mounted guns roared deafeningly, their flashes of fire making the sea surface flicker.

Yuan Zhisheng stood on high ground, his heavy sniper rifle steadily spitting fire, each bullet accurately penetrating the corpse guard's hideous head or heart.

"Second wave!" Miyamoto Shigeo's warning rang out again; there was no time to set up a new depth charge barrier.

Hundreds more corpse guardians burst forth from the water without hindrance, this time displaying a terrifying aggression amplified by alchemy. Some corpse guardians twisted their bodies, slamming heavily onto the naval patrol boat, their thick, long tails tightly coiling around the fire-spitting gun barrels. The metal creaked and twisted with a teeth-grinding sound, followed by explosions that engulfed the turrets. Corpse guardians thrown back into the sea by the flames immediately submerged, turning their attacks to more vulnerable targets.

Yuan Zhisheng kept pulling the trigger, spent cartridges clattering to the ground at his feet. For the time being, these things posed no threat to the towering Sumeru Throne, but if the Corpse Guardians continued to surge forward wave after wave, seemingly endlessly, the consequences would be unimaginable.

....

Inside the Trieste, Lu Mingfei watched as the lung snails, like a viscous, fleshy mudslide, gradually engulfed Caesar and Chu Zihang's spherical suits. Chu Zihang struggled to paddle with his prosthetic limbs, trying to reach the unconscious Caesar and drag him towards the nuclear power module. The sight of the two spheres struggling within the lung snail mass was both absurd and desperate.

The Zeppelin's equipment was designed to last five minutes. Caesar exceeded the time limit by seven minutes, and Chu Zihang by two minutes. Caesar fell completely unconscious, a strange smile on his face. Chu Zihang's vital signs were rapidly deteriorating; he had used his Bloodlust Technique, but in this extreme environment, the slight improvement was futile.

More and more corpses crawled out of the cracks in the seabed, writhing and swimming like thousands of awakened earthworms.

That wasn't the worst of it; a swarm of fireflies flew out of the crack.

Ghost-toothed viper.

Silvery bands of light converged in the seawater, showing no interest in the lung snails and corpse guardians, heading straight for the two struggling spherical devices. Lu Mingfei clearly remembered that these creatures swarmed, capable of chewing and swallowing even bronze. How long could their titanium-magnesium alloy shells last?

"Run! Run!" he screamed into the microphone.

Chu Zihang heard him. He loosened the straps securing Caesar and frantically pushed aside the lung snails in front of him, moving towards the nuclear power module. He was gambling, gambling that he could guess that damned code before the swarm of dragon vipers pounced on him.

For the first time, Lu Mingfei hated that his Word of Power only had a time limit of zero, and now he could do nothing.

"Good evening, brother?" A cool, soft hand pressed against his stiff shoulder and began to massage it vigorously.

"Who?!" Lu Mingfei shouted and jumped up, his head hitting the monitor above him hard.

"Your dearest brother."

Lu Mingfei turned his head and saw the little devil Lu Mingze sitting on the control panel with his hands supporting his chin.

"Didn't you go on vacation?"

"My dear brother is in trouble, I'm coming right away. What a pity about the beautiful lady I was chatting up earlier."

Is the situation serious?

Lu Mingze sighed, "It's serious. There are thousands of corpses guarding the area, and underground there's an ancient pure-blooded dragon with a title, created using alchemy."

"I'll handle the Corpse Guardian; the problem now is the Ghosttooth Dragon Viper."

“The corpse guards are not easy to deal with,” Lu Mingze laughed, but there was a cold undertone to his smile.

"They are brain dead, but their nerves, hearts, and muscles are intact, sealed in their own placenta. Their bloodlust and aggression far exceed those before they were alive, and their torsos and bones have been alchemically treated to be indestructible."

Why did Caesar fall into a coma?

"A hallucination, huh?" Lu Mingze shrugged. "The bells formed an alchemical field, causing hallucinations in those who heard them. Caesar's incantation happened to be a weasel, amplifying the effect."

boom!