Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei finds a Freylian

Just as he was thinking about this, the roar of the drilling rig abruptly stopped after an extremely sharp metallic scraping sound.

The sudden silence felt almost tangible, pressing heavily on everyone's eardrums.

The construction workers were stunned for a moment, then simultaneously sprinted through the mud toward the drilling rig. The white light from their gas lamps cast a jumbled shadow of their bright yellow raincoats on the muddy ground.

Holding a transparent plastic umbrella, Masahiko Sakurai waded through the mud, his trousers soaked up to his knees by the mud and water.

The drilling rig was emitting a low rumble as its hydraulic motors turned, pulling the drill rod, which was hundreds of meters long, out of the borehole section by section.

The drill rods were joined together section by section, each section being more than ten meters long. Dozens of them were connected end to end, with the diamond drill bit mounted on the topmost drill rod.

Diamond is the hardest known substance in nature; only diamond can carve a path through granite deep within the Earth's crust.

As the drill rod rose, thick, dark yellow mud gushed out of the borehole, spraying the surrounding construction workers all over their bodies and faces.

Normally, drilling and water injection for cooling will also produce mud, but it would never be this thick, much less gushing out in this much volume.

It looked like the drill bit had already penetrated a rock layer with an alarmingly high water content, and might even have reached the riverbed of the Akagami River, but just then, the drilling rig had an accident.

"What's the problem?" Sakurai Masahiko walked to the drilling rig control panel and asked the operator who was staring intently at the instrument panel.

Chapter 800 The Mysterious Little Fish

The project manager raised his arm and wiped the mud off his face, then rubbed his hands haphazardly on his raincoat, leaving a few dark yellow mud streaks.

He leaned close to Masahiko Sakurai's ear and shouted in a voice loud enough to drown out the roar of the storm, "It seems to have hit an extremely hard rock layer. The drill rod just won't go any further. If we keep drilling, we'll probably wear the drill bit down. Let's pull it up and take a look first."

Anyone who's been in this industry for a while knows that drill bits are the most valuable consumable in the entire drilling project; the cost of a single diamond drill bit can be equivalent to more than half a year's salary for the operator.

"Siliceous rock?" Masahiko Sakurai's mind raced.

The drilling depth has now exceeded 300 meters. According to the previously obtained seismic reflection profile data, this depth should be relatively loose and porous volcanic rock, which would be a very clear wave velocity interface in geology. On the acoustic reflection imaging profile, the volcanic rock layer should appear as a loose and porous continuous medium.

But the drill bit just happened to hit something even harder than quartzite.

He couldn't help but recall a line of small characters written in cinnabar on a handwritten ancient book in his grandfather's study: "Below the Red Demon River, there are bones. The bones are so large that no one knows how many thousands of miles they are."

Back then, he thought it was just a religious allegory, but now, looking at the hydraulic pointers twitching violently on the control panel, he suddenly felt less certain.

"Set up a warning zone. Except for the people operating the drilling rig, everyone else must evacuate outside the warning zone. Don't get too close to the drill hole, or boiling water might gush out," Masahiko Sakurai shouted, turning to the construction workers crowded around the drilling rig.

No one knows for sure how hot the water in the Akagami River is. If it really is fed by underground hot water heated by magma, as the legend says, the water temperature may even exceed 100 degrees Celsius, which would make it a giant high-pressure boiler buried 300 meters deep.

He had personally witnessed the eruption of an ultra-high-temperature geyser during his visit to Yellowstone National Park. A column of boiling water shot into the sky from a crack in the ground, and the steam, carrying pebbles and mud, scalded everything within a radius of tens of meters.

"Don't worry, the protective suits are ready," the project commander gestured. Several construction workers, already dressed in full white protective suits, stepped out of the tent, their heavy boots making a dull thud as they stepped into the mud.

They took over the drilling rig control panel from the original operators, and everyone else withdrew beyond the warning line.

Each protective suit weighs 30 kilograms and is made of layers of asbestos, rubber, carbon fiber and metal mesh, which are heat-pressed together. At first glance, it looks like a simplified version of a spacesuit. It is not only heat-insulating but also tough enough to withstand the high temperature flames of an oil well blowout for a while.

Construction workers in protective suits began using a winch to unload the drill rod section by section from the borehole.

Masahiko Sakurai squatted on the muddy ground, taking samples section by section from the removed drill rod.

Every few meters, a sampling hole is set up on the drill rod. Under extremely high pressure from the strata, the soil is squeezed into these small holes. By analyzing the soil at different depths, a continuous stratigraphic profile can be pieced together. The sampling holes are filled with moist black mud, as black as crushed charcoal.

He tried to burn the black mud with a lighter. As soon as the flame got close, a pale blue tongue of flame rose from the surface of the mud, flickered in the rain, and then went out.

"Watch out, there might be methane gas in the borehole!" Masahiko Sakurai jumped up and shouted to the people still operating the drilling rig inside the warning circle.

Before the words were even finished, a high-pressure column of air roared out of the borehole.

The airflow was so fast it sounded like a train whistle, tearing through the roar of the downpour. Everyone present instinctively raised their hands to cover their ears.

The gas lamp, suspended high above, was shattered by the blast wave. Glass shards flew in all directions with the airflow, and the exposed electric arc flashed with a bluish-purple spark.

The moment the black gas ball touched the electric arc, the air at the borehole was ignited, and a blazing column of flame shot up from the borehole, reaching a height of more than ten meters, illuminating the entire construction site as if it were daytime.

This is indeed a biogas borehole.

The black mud that ignites easily is organic soil rich in methane. Methane is the product of anaerobic fermentation by anaerobic bacteria in rocks over many years. It has been sealed deep underground under high pressure for millions of years and its reserves are extremely large.

Fortunately, the construction workers who remained within the cordon were all wearing heavy protective suits and were not afraid of this level of fire.

They professionally set up high-pressure water cannons and continuously sprayed water at the base of the flames while simultaneously lifting the drill rod upwards. The winch rotated steadily between the water mist and the flames, and section after section of the blackened drill rod was hoisted out of the borehole.

In the last few sections of the drill rod, the black mud squeezed out of the sampling hole began to turn dark red.

Masahiko Sakurai scraped off a little dark red mud with a sampling shovel and rubbed it between his palms.

It has a very sticky texture, completely different from the sandy feel of the previous black mud, and is more like a paste.

He brought it to his nose and smelled it; a faint fishy smell entered his nasal cavity. His brows furrowed sharply. The fishy smell usually comes from gases released during protein degradation—a basic fact in biochemistry.

Where do proteins come from deep underground?

Only living organisms can produce proteins. He couldn't help but think of the black mud again. Black mud is organic soil rich in methane, and the source of organic matter is also the decomposition of biological remains.

But they are currently hundreds of meters below the surface, drilling through an entire sedimentary rock system that was formed millions of years ago, before humans even emerged.

The last drill rod was pulled out of the borehole by the winch.

The fire extinguished instantly, and the borehole remained silent for a brief moment before dark red liquid gushed out, forming a crimson fountain over ten meters high.

Everyone was stunned. The construction workers present were all seasoned geologists who had spent half their lives working on drilling sites all over the world, but they had never seen anything like this before.

The dark red liquid lost its momentum at its highest point, turning into a crimson rain that poured down around the borehole and dripped viscously onto the protective suits and masks.

The floodwaters quickly rose above the construction workers' calves, and under the few searchlights that were still on, the water surface shimmered with a dark, menacing red reflection.

A strange feeling welled up in Masahiko Sakurai's mind; he felt that his colleagues who were working in the cordon were standing in a pool of blood.

Wearing protective suits from head to toe, the construction workers were not afraid of this liquid of unknown origin.

They used a long-handled sampler to take a water sample from the center of the fountain, sealed it in a glass test tube, and handed it out of the warning circle along with the last drill rod that had been removed, to Masahiko Sakurai.

"Water with extremely high iron content?" Masahiko Sakurai shook the test tube. Under the searchlight, the liquid in the tube shone with a reddish hue darker than blood, its viscosity far exceeding that of ordinary groundwater. It clung to the glass wall for quite some time before slowly dripping down.

Among common minerals, only hematite is red. In the Orinoco River basin of South America, there is a tributary that flows with red water year-round because it cuts through a layer of hematite. The local indigenous people call it the "blood river".

But the color in this test tube was different from the brick red of hematite slag; it was deeper, closer to the color of something he knew all too well but would never want to encounter hundreds of meters underground.

He unscrewed the test tube cap, and the fishy smell became even stronger. It wasn't the metallic smell of rust, but rather a warm, pungent smell of blood that made one's stomach churn, more like the smell of blood in a slaughterhouse.

He tightened the test tube and stuffed it into the sample box, then turned to inspect the drill bit that had just been removed.

When he saw the state of the diamond drill bit, he felt as if he had been hit on the head with a club. The drill bit was completely twisted and deformed, the diamond insert was broken and fell off in large areas, the alloy matrix underneath was full of cracks, and the surface was covered with scratches and pits that reached as far as the bone. Everywhere there were shocking scars.

This level of damage has reduced this top-of-the-line precision drilling equipment, which required his personal approval for each use and was so expensive it was almost a luxury, to nothing more than a piece of scrap metal.

No wonder the drill bit suddenly stopped. Something that could destroy a diamond drill bit like this must be harder than any known natural rock on Earth.

But what sent chills down his spine wasn't even that. This level of damage didn't resemble wear and tear at all.

The wear is distributed in even circles, which are smooth wounds left by diamond and rock grinding against each other over a long period of time. These scratches are irregular, some deep and some shallow, some long and some short. Some are straight like they have been cut by a sharp blade, while others meander around the alloy matrix.

It looked as if something had been frantically gnawing at it. Was there something underground that chewed up the drill bit?

A tremendous fear, like an icy hand, reached down the back of his neck and into his collar, grabbing him suddenly.

Before he could even muster any rational thought, he heard a chorus of low gasps from the construction workers around him.

Silver-blue specks of light gushed from the borehole along with the dark red water. Hundreds and thousands, tens of thousands, were tossed into the night sky by the fountains, then floated slowly in the downpour, looking as if someone had scattered a handful of glowing stars into Thunder Valley.

The silvery-blue light flickered on each spot, like the luminous plankton in the deep sea.

They scattered under the dark, wet sky, drifting to every corner of the construction site, landing on Masahiko Sakurai's shoulder, and sticking to the face shield of his protective suit.

Each point of light is a small, silvery-blue fish, short in body and long in tail, its jagged tail vertebrae clearly visible beneath its thin, almost transparent scales. The fish's scales are covered with a layer of glue-like mucus, which clumsily wriggles its tail as it adheres to the mask, its mouth opening and closing.

It's not surprising that there are creatures in underground rivers. The famous cave blind fish is a typical inhabitant of underground rivers. They never see sunlight in their entire lives, and their eyes have gradually degenerated into two shallow pits over millions of years of evolution.

The depth of the Akaki River is several hundred meters. It is a miracle that such a large fish population can be raised in such a deep underground river. To support such a fish population, an extremely complete ecosystem is required. In the depths of the earth, there is usually no sunlight that can penetrate. The bottom of the food chain must be based on the chemically synthesized food of bacteria.

The construction workers grabbed small fish from their masks and excitedly stuffed them into glass bottles, intending to take them back as specimens.

Everyone was captivated by the beautiful sight, and no one noticed the strange change happening to the little fish stuck to the mask.

The little fish opened their mouths. What had previously been tiny, round holes suddenly stretched to be wider than the diameter of their bodies, revealing translucent, icy teeth. Each tooth was triangular with serrated edges, gleaming with a chilling white light against the silvery-blue glow.

In an instant, they transformed from docile, glowing specimens into raging little snakes.

The construction worker was startled by its exaggeratedly wide mouth and was about to throw it away when a sudden, excruciating pain shot through his palm.

He looked down and saw only a thin, silver tail sticking out of the crack in his protective suit and thrashing about in his palm. The little fish had bitten through the asbestos and rubber-coated outer layer of the suit and burrowed into his hand.

Another small fish made eye contact with the construction worker inside through the tempered glass mask for a moment, then plunged headfirst into the seam between the mask and the helmet and began to bite wildly.

Its sharp teeth scraped against the tempered glass with a teeth-grinding crunch, then it found the almost invisible assembly gap, squeezed its body little by little into the helmet, and then crawled into the construction worker's nostril.

In just over ten seconds, dozens of silver-blue fish pierced through the protective suit from all sorts of incredible angles, some with only their slender tails sticking out of the holes and trembling violently.

"Help me! Help me!" the construction worker screamed as he stumbled and ran through the cordon.

He tripped and fell into the reddish water that reached above his calves. When he got up, his entire body was covered in the viscous red liquid from head to toe. Through the mask, his bloodied and mangled face could be vaguely seen, and a few silver lights were still wriggling back and forth on his face, searching for a new entrance.

More points of light are falling from the sky.

Masahiko Sakurai stood in the puddles outside the cordon, watching his colleagues of many years fall one by one before his eyes, while the stars continued to fall from the sky.

The blood-red water was teeming with tiny fish, each one thrashing about wildly.

"First aid kit! Where's the first aid kit?" the project commander cried, stumbling and running through the crowd.

Chapter 801 Dragon Executioner

"The first aid kit is useless now. Can't you tell they're already dead?" Masahiko Sakurai's voice was as cold as a frozen iron plate, devoid of any inflection or trace of "compassion" in the downpour.

He held the Glock, which he had just pulled from its waterproof holster, the muzzle still pointing downwards at the ground, rainwater trickling down the anti-slip grooves of the holster.

"That stuff is like the plague; anyone who gets it will die. All we can do is burn the corpses. Go get the fuel!"

"Sakurai-kun, you're killing people! They're all our colleagues!" The project manager's eyes widened, his facial muscles twitching violently in the downpour. He shared the same office, the same canteen, and the same old coffee machine that had been used for over a decade with the construction workers in their protective suits. Now, asking him to personally pour fuel on them was something he simply couldn't do.

A scream that sounded inhuman came from the edge of the warning circle.

A construction worker, his protective suit riddled with bite marks, mustered his last bit of strength and staggered toward the only exit on the outside. His outstretched hand flailing futilely in the air, while silver-blue specks of light flickered erratically beneath his protective mask.

The team medic, carrying a first-aid kit, rushed out from behind Masahiko Sakurai, attempting to help his blood-covered colleague. Suddenly, Sakurai raised his gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger.

The Glock's gunshot rang out crisply in the downpour, the sound of the ejected cartridge case being less loud than the thud of it falling into a puddle.

The bullet struck the construction worker squarely in the forehead. He stumbled forward two steps and collapsed at the feet of the team medic. His protective mask shattered the moment it hit the ground, and blood slowly seeped out from the crack.