Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei finds a Freylian

The world was a deep blue, and the rain poured down.

The cramped capsule looked like a tin box swaying in the floodwaters, but the two people crammed inside felt no swaying whatsoever.

Chapter 796 Angers, why are you here again?

At this very moment, in the back alley of the University of Tokyo. The torrential rain has turned this narrow alley, barely wide enough for two people to pass sideways, into a temporary river that is ankle-deep. Rainwater pours down from the eaves of the old wooden school buildings on both sides, splashing onto a row of faded cloth curtains with signs for "Ramen," "Oden," and "Roasted Bird," creating a misty white spray.

Only one lonely paper lantern remained lit in the rain, hanging under the eaves of a handcart, its dim and weak light spreading out a warm halo in the rain.

Angers folded the black umbrella, leaned it against the wooden pillar of the trolley, and placed the heavy suitcase at his feet in a dry spot.

He sat down on the wooden stool in front of the counter, his movements as practiced as if he were back at the bar counter in his own kitchen.

"Soy sauce ramen, with two braised eggs."

"Why are you here again? I thought we had agreed a long time ago that we would never see each other again! You sneak over for a late-night snack every night, what's going on?"

Uesugi Koshi lifted his face from behind the steaming pot of soup. The former patriarch was wearing a faded blue cotton apron and a matching towel on his head; at first glance, he looked like an ordinary old man running a ramen stall.

"Starting tonight, we'll be charging for ramen! It'll be 800 yuan a bowl, and an extra 100 yuan for a braised egg!"

Angers seemed not to hear at all, and reached over to pick up the porcelain bottle on the table, unscrewed the cap, and filled the rough earthenware cup in front of him with sake.

The rain pounded on the roof with a crackling sound, like countless tiny fireworks exploding overhead at the same time.

"Didn't you refuse to let me attend your funeral last time? I promised you I wouldn't. But you don't look like you're going to die anytime soon. I'm just here for a bowl of ramen. I'm not going to eat you into hell."

"Enough talk! Pay the bill first!"

Angers reached into his pocket, pulled out a stack of ten-thousand-yuan bills, and casually placed them on the counter. The bills were brand new, their edges still bearing the sharp feel of the printing ink, looking out of place on this dilapidated ramen stall.

“One million yen, keep the change. From today onwards, I will put it on your tab. You can deduct whatever you eat directly from this amount.”

"You bastard, do you think this place is a cafeteria?" Uesugi glared at him, his long chopsticks holding noodles suspended in mid-air, boiling water dripping from the tips of the chopsticks and sizzling as it landed on the dough.

“Excuse me for being blunt, but your kind of ramen stall really doesn’t make it onto my canteen list. My canteens are mainly located in Paris, such as L’Arpege, L’Ambroisie, and Le Pre Catelan. In Japan, only Ishikawa in Tokyo and Koan in Kanagawa barely qualify,” Angers replied.

"Even if I made nothing but pig swill, you, a distinguished guest who only eats Michelin three-star meals, still braved the rain to come and eat, didn't you? Didn't you feel the urge to squeal a couple of times while chewing on pig swill?" Uesugi Kotsushi said irritably, shaking the noodles into the boiling pot. The broth in the pot had been simmering for a whole day, and the flavor of pork bones and chicken carcasses was extremely rich.

“No problem, Ang Ang.” Ang Ang twirled his folding knife between his fingers and expertly reached out to lift the lid of a small earthenware jar next to the cutting board, taking out two pieces of pickled yellow radish. The radish had been soaking at the bottom of the jar for who knows how many weeks, turning a translucent golden yellow. He used the tip of his knife to cut off a few thin slices, arranged them in a small dish, and pushed them to the center of the cutting board.

"Can't you just leave me alone? How can you guarantee no one's following you? You'll get me into trouble sooner or later if you keep doing this," Uesugi Kotetsu said, shaking his head helplessly as he watched him go home.

"Don't be so tense. As someone whose Word of Power is 'Time Zero,' you can count the number of people in this world who can stick with me on your fingers. And I think there's not a single one who can stick with me without me discovering me. I have no other friends left in Tokyo. My old friends have all grown old and died one by one, and their children have mostly grown old and died too. All that's left is you, this old monster with royal blood flowing through your veins. Shouldn't old monsters have some common ground with each other?"

As he spoke, Angers added condiments to the ramen.

"Aren't you still carrying the important mission of saving the world? Didn't you say that God is about to wake up? I beg you to be more dedicated and go out to find out which corner God is hiding in and hatching, okay? If Tokyo is really destroyed, I won't be able to keep this ramen stand open. I'm begging you, okay?" Uesugi Koshi put the sliced ​​char siu into the noodle bowl.

“The person who should be busy right now is not me, but the one hiding behind the scenes. Someone wants to benefit from the awakening of God, so he has to go and search for God’s incubation ground himself. Takamagahara is the first incubation ground, so where is the second one? That person is much more anxious than me because he is determined to obtain God’s will. I’m just waiting for him to make his move. The bigger the movement he makes, the easier it will be for me to notice.”

“It sounds like you’ve already laid out your entire intelligence network under Tokyo,” Uesugi said, placing the bowl of noodles in front of Angers.

The soy sauce-colored broth was clear and transparent. The noodles were neatly arranged in a small mound in the center of the bowl, with two thinly sliced ​​char siu on top. Next to it lay a halved soft-boiled egg, the yolk perfectly set in a semi-liquid state. Finally, he sprinkled a handful of bright green chopped scallions on top and pushed the bowl forward.

“Although I’m old and frail, once it’s my turn to take charge, I’ll be in control,” Angers said, looking down as he ate his noodles. He picked up a strand of noodles with his chopsticks, blew on it in the steam, and then slurped it all into his mouth.

"Someone like you, who goes to a ramen stand in the middle of the night to eat a bowl of ramen that costs 800 yen, actually dares to claim that he has the situation in Tokyo under his control? It's really hard to trust him. God is not like those dragon kings you killed before. The God after completion is something like the Black King. At that time, I really don't know if there will still be any means in the world to kill it."

Uesugi wiped his hands on his apron, gazing at the torrential rain outside.

The alleyway floor was covered with water several inches deep. Raindrops hit the water and created countless ripples. The light from the streetlights shattered into tiny circular spots in each ripple.

"To be honest, I've already booked a flight to Paris. I'm planning to take a few days off to avoid the storm. I'll be watching you from faraway France and cheering you on through the TV!"

"Through television?" Angers stopped eating and looked up.

“If one day I see on the news that Tokyo suddenly sinks into the sea due to an inexplicable natural disaster, or that a giant monster invades the city, I’ll ask the bartender for a whiskey on the rocks and drink it all in one gulp, and then say—,” Uesugi Koshi took a deep breath, “Angers-kun! Do your best!”

“If we’re talking about the worst emperor in the history of the Snake Clan, I think you deserve the title…” Angers murmured, his chopsticks hanging in mid-air, the soup on the noodles dripping back into the bowl.

"The worst emperor emeritus, thank you!" Uesugi Kotetsu said smugly, and quickly corrected his wording.

“Since you’re already planning to run away, wouldn’t you mind giving me a little more information?” Angers put down his chopsticks, turned around, opened the briefcase at his feet, and took out a pair of reading glasses, which he put on his nose.

“I found some very interesting documents in the University of Tokyo library today…” He placed a thin stack of printed paper on the table, which contained scanned copies of several geological cross-sections with date stamps from the Showa era along the edges.

"I knew you old bastard wouldn't have come here just to mooch a bowl of noodles," Uesugi sighed, leaning against the soup pot. Steam billowed around his towel, momentarily blurring his wrinkled face.

"Didn't I tell you everything I know? I even gossiped about my miserable family. Do you think I could possibly be hiding anything from you?"

"You didn't tell me that for nearly a hundred years, the Sheqi Eight Families have been secretly funding major geological institutions."

"Is this important to you? There are plenty of research institutions funded by the Snake Clan, and geological institutions are indeed on the funding list. Initially, we wanted to use geological exploration to search for ancient ruins, but that didn't make any progress at all," Uesugi Koshi said.

"The lack of progress is because your drilling depth is far from sufficient. The ancient ruins in Japan are very likely buried in strata more than 300 meters deep."

Uesugi was stunned.

"You're not a geologist, so where do you get your confidence? The Sheqi Eight Families have been pouring money into geological institutions for a full hundred years, and they haven't even dug a single natural gas well, let alone any ancient relics."

“I am not. But we have a board member who is a PhD in geophysics. Before I boarded the plane to Tokyo, he sent me an email with his speculation on the location of the ancient ruins.”

As Angers spoke, he pulled a sheet of printed paper from the stack and laid it in front of Uesugi Kotsugi. It was a printed copy of an email, most of which had been heavily marked by Angers in pencil: geological faults showed that the Kanto Plain had experienced a terrifying subsidence about 10,000 years ago.

The stratum corresponding to the subsidence is exactly below the strata of the period during which Mount Fuji erupted most violently.

“He said that no civilization could be confined to a single isolated city. Since the descendants of the White King had built a magnificent city like Takamagahara in Japan, there must have been supporting infrastructure such as roads, cemeteries, and irrigation canals, and even other cities. But all of this was wiped out by the great flood that almost swallowed up the entire country ten thousand years ago. The tide washed Japan clean, leaving no trace of the dragon race.”

Angers tapped the map on the cutting board lightly with the back of his folding knife. “And these ancient relics should still be sleeping deeper underground.”

“That’s true, but anyone would guess that the ancient city ruins are buried underground, just like Pompeii was buried under volcanic ash.” Uesugi Yue snapped out of his reverie and continued wiping his bamboo ladle by the soup pot, but his brows were now tightly furrowed.

"But it couldn't possibly be buried that deep. I've heard reports from geological experts who say that under natural conditions, ancient cities would only sink a few millimeters per year. Based on that rate, the relics from the Age of Gods would be at most fifty to one hundred meters deep. We can use groundwater analysis to explore, and we have indeed been using this method for over a decade, but we haven't found anything. If you draw the rock strata down to three hundred meters in one go, that would be in what geological era? Even the Devonian period wouldn't yield any of them."

Chapter 797 Groundwater

“Groundwater?” Angers put down his chopsticks and pushed his reading glasses up his nose.

“A very mysterious exploration method.” Uesugi Kotsushi fished the long-handled bamboo ladle out of the soup pot, placed it on the edge of the pot, and wiped his hands with his apron.

Two hard-boiled eggs spun slowly in the boiling water. He was lost in memories, searching for old stories from decades ago. He tapped the cutting board, and flour stuck between his fingers left a few white marks on the wood grain.

Although his ramen stall was as dilapidated as an illegal building that could be demolished at any moment, when he talked about such things, he sounded seven parts like the person who once sat at the highest council table of the Snake Clan.

"Geologists say drilling is too difficult; the cost of each hole is terrifyingly high. Even if we drill tens of thousands of holes at once, there's no guarantee that one will be right on top of the ruins. But if we're studying groundwater, we don't need to drill so many holes. Studying groundwater means analyzing the flow and composition of groundwater. That expert said the ruins would interfere with groundwater. If an underground river flows through an ancient city cast in bronze, the water will contain copper and tin; if an underground river suddenly changes course, it means there's something large enough in the strata to block its path."

"He sounded very convincing, so I approved a not-so-small sum of money for him. But he never even touched a single hair of the ancient ruins before he died in 1983," Uesugi spat, the spittle landing on the wet ground and quickly washed away by the rain. "Experts are reliable? Pigs can fly!"

“Have you ever heard of the underground city of Kaifeng, China?” Angers asked.

"No. I've never been to China, even though I have one-quarter Chinese blood," Uesugi Kotetsu replied casually as he stirred the braised eggs in the pot with long chopsticks.

His one-quarter Chinese ancestry came from his mother, whom he had never even met, and from a brief, fleeting affair with his father.

He only discovered this when he was going through the family archives after he succeeded as patriarch. By then, his mother had long since turned into a low tombstone in a cemetery by the Suzhou River.

"Kaifeng is a stacked city. Apart from the ground level, there are five more cities buried underground, one on top of the other. The palaces and streets are all overlapping from top to bottom, a total of six cities stacked together. Because the Yellow River floods repeatedly, the silt often buries the entire old city completely, so later generations simply built a new city on top of the ruins, exactly as it was."

The blade of the Angers folding knife grazed lightly across the cutting board, as if cutting an invisible cross-section.

"Japan's situation is very similar. Before human history had written records, Japan's elevation was much lower than it is today, and it was completely submerged by rising sea levels several times. Each time it was submerged, the ground sank a bit, and large amounts of sand and gravel swept in by the sea settled and accumulated on the original flat land, layer upon layer. The ruins of the Age of Gods were sealed deep into the earth at a rate several times faster than normal. Based on this calculation, it is about 300 meters deep."

Angers folded his knife and placed it on the edge of the cutting board. The sound of spring rain pattering on the roof sounded like drumbeats coming from a great distance.

"Perhaps beneath the strata of Japan lies an ancient kingdom built by the descendants of the White King, and the god wanders in those sunless ruins, slowly piecing together memories of his past life. How lonely that must be."

“No, it won’t wander around. It should return to the Well of Remains.” Uesugi Kotsushi shook his head, picked up the porcelain bottle, and poured himself a cup of sake.

My fingers froze for a moment when the wine was halfway poured, then I poured the rest back up.

"That is the most secluded place, and also the most foolproof incubator."

"What exactly is the Well of Bones? Did your family's priests ever describe it?" Angers asked. He pushed the bowl of noodles aside, picked up a pencil, and opened the leather-bound notebook in his suitcase; two-thirds of the notebook was already written in.

“There are descriptions, descriptions passed down from station to station since ancient times. But I’m afraid they won’t be of much use to you.” Uesugi Koshi slowly sipped his wine, his gaze passing over the faint light of the paper lantern and landing on the endless black rain curtain at the end of the alley.

He recalled a passage he had heard long ago, which the previous generation of priests recited while kneeling on the prayer mats in the inner three ancestral halls, in a voice as aged as tree bark rubbing against stone.

"It's incredibly mysterious. They say it's a well that connects heaven and earth, running from the Sea of ​​Cold Water straight to the Sea of ​​Blazing Fire. The upper half is cold water, and the lower half is flames. Izanagi wrapped the sacred remains in purple linen, tied them tightly with golden ropes, and sailed himself and the sacred remains together in a longship to the end of the Sea of ​​Cold Water. He dived to the bottom of the Sea of ​​Cold Water, threw the sacred remains into the well, and watched them slowly sink into the Sea of ​​Blazing Fire. Then he placed an extremely heavy basalt rock above the well opening," Uesugi Echizen swirled his sake cup. "The myth of Izanagi sealing off Yomotsu Hirasaka is about this very story."

“I don’t understand at all.” Angers took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I was hoping for a more concrete description, like the approximate location of the well, the surrounding terrain features, and any landmarks for reference. Instead, you’ve given me a whole set of mythological riddles. But—”

He pushed the paper and pen toward Uesugi Kotsugi, "I'd like to ask you, where are the areas you've been drilling in over the past hundred years located? Shikoku? Kyushu? Or Hokkaido?"

“I do know that,” Uesugi said, putting down his bowl, moving the pen that Angers had placed beside him, picking up his bamboo ladle for scooping soup, and then using his wooden chopsticks to dip some of the thickening soy sauce noodle soup from the pot.

He spread a thin layer of noodle soup on the cutting board, then slowly drew an east-west arc in the air with a bamboo spoon.

"All the drilling was done by following the flow of the underground river. The underground river always flows from the mountains to the sea, so the drilling was done against the current, starting from Tokyo Bay, going west along the Akaishi Mountains, and finally reaching the Izumo region. It took almost a hundred years to complete the entire line. A total of 12,000 boreholes were drilled, and today—"

Uesugi Kotsushi flipped through his memory of the briefing he had recently glanced at. He had casually pressed the briefing under his ledger when he was calculating the amount of flour he needed for the day and had only given it a cursory look. “It’s about time to make 10,000.”

"I'll draw you a simple diagram, marking the distribution of the boreholes. But I can't guarantee how accurate it will be; that diagram is from seventy years ago..."

Uesugi Koshi dipped his chopsticks into the noodle soup and stirred it twice, then dipped a small amount of the dark brown broth onto the cutting board.

"The drilling route is as follows: the first borehole was drilled in Hachioji City—"

"You bastard! Even if you're a ramen chef, can't you at least be a little more professional? Don't use chopsticks dipped in noodle soup to draw this kind of thing on the cutting board!" Angers roared in anger, grabbing the pencil and a piece of white paper that had just been pushed over and slamming them hard onto the cutting board in front of Uesugi Kotsugi.

Chapter 798 Tachibana Masamune Attempts to Win Over Genji Waki ​​a Second Time

When Yuan Zhisheng received the news, it was pouring rain outside the window.

Sakura pushed open the office door and walked in, her expression showing an unusual uncertainty.

She walked up to Yuan Zhisheng, lowering her voice, afraid that someone might overhear, even though there were only the two of them in this office located on the upper floors of Yuanshi Heavy Industries.

"Young Master, we've found the head of the family."

Yuan Zhisheng turned around from in front of the floor-to-ceiling window. He had been working for dozens of hours straight without closing his eyes; the whites of his eyes were covered with fine blood vessels, and the shadows under his eyes were so deep they looked like they had been drawn with charcoal.

The chase at the Kabuki-za Theater ended in disappointment. When he rushed into the room at the end of the corridor, he only saw a blood-red dress fluttering in the night wind.

The Enforcement Bureau then tracked down all possible leads overnight, but it was as if Genji had vanished into thin air.

Now, Tachibana Masamune has also gone missing after being attacked a few days ago. The Ganryu Research Institute and Maruyama Construction Site have been repeatedly searched by the Executive Bureau, but nothing has been found except for the Garuda remains that have been blown to scrap metal.

"Where is it?" Genji asked, picking up the black trench coat draped over the back of the chair.

“It was the patriarch who contacted us first,” Sakura said, her tone becoming more subtle. “He sent us a coordinate, saying he wanted to see the young master. Alone. The coordinates were in the reclaimed industrial area between Kawasaki City and Haneda Airport on the west side of Tokyo Bay. That area has large areas of abandoned storage facilities and factories awaiting demolition, and from satellite images, it appears almost deserted.”