102: Chapter 102 Exploring the Abyss, Piecing Together Old Files

Early the next morning. East side of the Cold Dragon Abyss Ring Reef.

When Lu Changyuan, Lu Hu, and ten Sword Ray Cavalry passed through the Cold Gale Mist Zone, the mist was thicker than yesterday.

The gray-blue walls of mist piled up into mid-air, the cavalry's mounts snorted in the fog, and their hooves made muffled, damp sounds as they stepped on the reef rocks.

The moment he emerged from the mist, Lu Changyuan reined in his horse.

The water surface outside the Abyss Mouth had changed.

It was ink-blue yesterday, but today it had an extra layer of black—a dense school of black fish a few feet below the surface had dyed the entire area ink-black.

Looking down from the reef wall, that patch of black spread along the outer edge of the Restriction, slowly wriggling like a living black tide against the water surface.

The number had multiplied several times over compared to yesterday.

Leng Feng was squatting on the reef wall, holding half a piece of charcoal, and his observation records in front of him were already filled for two pages.

"It started increasing at the Hour of the Tiger," Leng Feng said, handing the record to Lu Changyuan. "It went from twelve hundred to just over two thousand within an hour. The water temperature dropped by half a degree. The flow rate remains unchanged."

Lu Changyuan took the record and flipped through the two pages.

Every page was covered in dense, small handwriting—time, estimated quantity, water temperature, and autopsy records of a few dead fish.

Leng Feng's handwriting was still as sloppy as ever, but the data was recorded very thoroughly.

The autopsy results for the dead fish were the same as yesterday: there was bruising from compression in the abdominal cavity, the scales were flipped outward from the inside, and there were tiny blood spots on the surface of the eyeballs.

He looked down from the reef wall. The school of black fish beneath the water was swimming very slowly.

The frequency of their gill covers opening and closing was almost twice as fast as normal sea fish—like a person panting high up in the mountains.

A few fish suddenly flipped their bellies up while swimming, floated for a few breaths outside the edge of the Restriction, and were then nudged aside by the incoming crowd of their own kind.

"The rope," Lu Changyuan said, looking back at Lu Hu.

Lu Hu unloaded a bundle of depth-sounding rope from his horse's back.

The rope was specially made—the outer layer was wrapped in a dense, woven silver-wire mesh, and a fingernail-sized sensor Jade Slip was tied every hundred zhang.

Each Jade Slip would light up in sequence after being immersed in seawater at different depths, allowing them to judge changes in depth and temperature through the order and interval of the lighting.

This was rushed together by Su Qingli last night; there were two bundles in total, each twelve hundred zhang long.

Lu Hu tied the end of the rope to a protruding reef rock and pushed the rope coil toward the Abyss Mouth.

The moment the rope coil rolled over the edge of the reef wall, it kicked up a spray of water, and the rope began to sink at a steady speed.

One hundred zhang. Two hundred zhang. Three hundred zhang.

The school of black fish on the water surface showed no reaction. They continued to circle outside the Restriction.

Four hundred zhang. Five hundred zhang. Six hundred zhang.

The rope coil suddenly stopped.

The entire rope suddenly stopped sinking between six hundred and six hundred and fifty zhang.

The rope body was taut like a bowstring, its end hanging in the water and trembling slightly.

Lu Hu reached out to grasp the rope, but pulled his hand back as soon as his fingers touched the silver-wire mesh.

"It's cold. Much colder than above."

What was even stranger were the black fish on the water surface. From the moment the rope passed six hundred zhang, all the black fish stopped simultaneously.

Over two thousand palm-sized black fish were like being pressed down by an invisible hand—they stopped swimming, stopped bumping against the Restriction, and even their gill covers stopped moving.

They all hung in place, heads down and tails up, maintaining the same angle.

The stillness lasted for about thirty breaths. The rope suddenly loosened—after passing six hundred and fifty zhang, the rope coil began to sink again. The school of black fish also resumed swimming at the same instant.

"There is something at that depth," Lu Hu said, squatting on the edge of the reef wall and looking down.

Lu Changyuan did not speak immediately.

He stood on the reef wall, watching the sequence in which the sensor Jade Slips on the rope lit up. From six hundred to eight hundred zhang, the intervals between the Jade Slips lighting up were significantly longer than in the sections above and below—the rope descended the slowest in that depth range.

The Spiritual Pressure was steady, without fluctuations; the water temperature dropped sharply by nearly four degrees at six hundred zhang, and slowly rose again after eight hundred zhang.

Low-frequency intimidation. Extremely stable frequency and intensity. The range was precise—exactly between six hundred and eight hundred zhang.

It felt very much like the aftermath of spiritual power unintentionally released by a Golden Core Cultivator that he had sensed outside Luo Qingcheng's Guest Elder dojo on Qixia Peak through the Seal-Breath Restriction—but the range was much larger, the frequency much lower, and the source much deeper.

A giant beast. Sleeping. The intimidation unintentionally released in its sleep spread upward along the cold currents at the bottom of the abyss, forming a continuously existing compression layer between six hundred and eight hundred zhang.

The black fish were bottom-dwelling deep-water fish, originally living in the Deep Water Zone below eight hundred zhang.

The intimidation released when the giant beast turned over pushed the small organisms of the bottom layer upward, layer by layer—whoever could not withstand the intimidation was pushed up.

These black fish were squeezed above six hundred zhang; there was no cover further up, the intimidation blocked the way down, and the Restriction blocked the way forward—they were trapped in this narrow gap outside the Restriction where they could only exist but not leave.

The compression injuries were left behind when they were forced up from several hundred zhang deep by the intimidation and their bodies could not withstand the pressure change.

"The temperature is still dropping," Leng Feng said, squatting by the water, his fingers inserted under the surface to measure for half an incense stick's time. "It's not dropping fast, but it is constantly dropping—half a degree in half an hour. At this rate, within three days, the water temperature will drop to a level that normal sea fish cannot withstand."

"What will happen to them then?"

"Die. All of them."

Lu Changyuan walked a circle along the reef wall. The water surface inside the Ring Reef was like the opening of a huge deep well, and beneath the ink-blue water, one could vaguely see more black shadows floating up from the depths—not just black fish, but also some smaller, translucent deep-sea krill and a few flat-bodied fish whose names he could not identify.

They were all floating upward, stopping when they reached the outer edge of the Restriction, and then, like the black fish, began to circle in place.

The bottom-layer food chain was moving upward, layer by layer.

He recorded the sounding data on the Jade Slip he carried with him. Depth, temperature, intimidation range, changes in fish school behavior—every item was marked with the observation time and conditions.

After recording, he looked up at the ink-blue, almost black water surface deep in the Abyss Mouth, then turned and mounted his horse.

"Leng Feng—the observation post should report every two hours as discussed yesterday. Add one thing: report separately every time the water temperature drops by half a degree."

"Understood."

"Uncle Hu, back to the island. We are going to find someone."

When they passed out of the Cold Gale Mist Zone on the return trip, the sunlight on the sea surface was spread out wide.

On horseback, Lu Changyuan looked back at the gray-blue wall of mist—the mist was as thick as usual, but something beneath the mist was changing the temperature structure of the entire sea area at an extremely slow speed.

A giant beast sleeping in a deep-sea trench hundreds of miles away had, through the aftermath of its unintentional breathing, stirred up the ecological distribution of the entire deep sea.

It didn't even need to do anything—its very existence was a form of power.

Blue Moon Island, Lords Mansion. Afternoon.

Su Qingli laid out twelve incomplete shipping manifests in a row on the long table.

Each manifest had its four corners weighed down by clean little pebbles, arranged from left to right by date.

The earliest was on the left—March, seventeen years ago. The latest was on the right—the same month, seventeen years ago.

"These twelve manifests have one thing in common," Su Qingli said, pointing to the first one on the left. "The shipping dates are all on the fifth of every month. Not even a month was missed—the fifth day of the first month, the fifth day of the second month, the fifth day of the third month seventeen years ago... all the way to the next year. One batch every month, as punctual as the tide."

She picked up a spirit mineral manifest and an incomplete miscellaneous manifest and placed them side by side.

"On the spirit mineral manifest, the shipping category is raw spirit mineral, the recipient is written with the full name of the firm, and the sign-off column has a signature, a secret seal, and an entry number—every item is complete."

She moved her finger to the miscellaneous manifest. "On the miscellaneous manifest, the shipping categories are 'Array Material Scraps,' 'Discarded Talisman Paper,' and 'Old Warehouse Bottom Materials'—all things that look worthless. But the recipient has been cut off, and the sign-off column has been completely blacked out."

"The spirit mineral manifest goes through the open accounts, while the miscellaneous manifest goes through the secret accounts," Chen Mo said, putting down the spiritual light jade talisman in his hand. "The open accounts list spirit minerals—the quantity, destination, and signer are all public. The secret accounts list waste materials—but 'waste materials' is just a name written on paper; what is actually in the boxes is known only to the signer."

"A bottom-warehouse verification clerk handled the same batch of 'waste material' shipments every month while in office," Su Qingli said, pushing Xu Sanlan's list next to the shipping manifests. "The shipping dates of the 'waste materials' he handled completely overlap with the months of the material scheduling dates before every voyage of the old Sealed Fleet."

Chen Mo placed the last shipping manifest over the spiritual light jade talisman to check it. The ink layer turned grayish-white under the pale white spiritual light of the talisman, and the handwriting underneath surfaced once again—the same surname. Zhou.

On all twelve blacked-out shipping manifests, the sign-off columns all had the same person's signature. The handwriting was consistent, the ink color was consistent, and even the small, hook-shaped secret mark next to the signature was consistent—that was a confirmation symbol exclusive to the bottom-warehouse verification clerk, equivalent to a private anti-counterfeiting mark.

"Zhou [Something]," Su Qingli said, writing the name on a piece of paper. "The first person on Xu Sanlan's list—a bottom-warehouse verification clerk. Seventeen years ago, he handled one batch of 'waste material' shipments for the Sealed Fleet every month, totaling at least twelve batches. The shipping date for each batch was three days before the Sealed Fleet set sail."

"What exactly was inside the shipped boxes?" Chen Mo asked, putting down the jade talisman.

Su Qingli did not answer. She opened the summary of Xu Sanlan's testimony and pointed her finger at a line—"The last verification record for the Sealed Fleet array materials verified thirty-two boxes of Sealed Fleet array materials. But the warehouse entry record that day only listed twenty-four boxes. No one ever asked where the missing eight boxes went."

The afternoon light shone on the row of shipping manifests on the long table.

Twelve incomplete manifests were lined up—each was missing the recipient, but each had the same person's signature. These waste materials did not enter the market—they went directly onto the Sealed Fleet, set sail with the Sealed Fleet array materials, were opened at sea, and the contents were used in some undisclosed place.

By the time Lu Changyuan returned from the Cold Dragon Abyss, Su Qingli had already organized the twelve shipping manifests into a comparison table according to the timeline.

On the left was the shipping date, in the middle was the shipping category (all "waste materials"), and on the right was the signer (all the same person).

He stood in front of the table and watched for a good while. Then he picked up Xu Sanlan's list and circled the name in the first row with a charcoal pencil.

"Is this person still alive?"

"I don't know." Su Qingli opened the supplementary population registration roster—a thick stack, every page densely filled with names, ages, and original organizational affiliations.

"The three batches of supplementary population add up to nearly six thousand people, and the roster is arranged by batch number, not by surname—we have to look through it one by one."

"Look. Flip through it from beginning to end." Lu Changyuan pushed the roster to Chen Mo, then turned and walked to the window.

On the water surface of the harbor, the receding tide was gradually exposing the broken reefs of the shallows.

The cold light emitted by the Starlight Coral mother branch on the reef wall outside the berth was almost invisible in the daylight, but the difference in water quality was visible to the naked eye—the seawater within three zhang of the mother branch was one shade clearer than further away.

He looked down at the dark gold ring on his hand.

All six bottom objects had landed—but while the farthest one was hatching at the bottom of the abyss, it had stirred up a giant beast sleeping in a deeper trench.

That giant beast had turned over, and the changes it triggered were spreading outward at an extremely slow speed.

The black fish were just the first batch—Leng Feng was right; if the water temperature continued to drop, more bottom-layer creatures would be driven up by the intimidation and trapped outside the Restriction.

They would come in batch after batch, until that source of intimidation returned to silence.

And how long this would take—no one knew.

"Young Lord," Lu Hu said, pushing the door open. "The road to Qixia Peak is clear. Should we send a visiting card to Senior Luo first?"

"No need," Lu Changyuan said, turning from the window. "I will go myself."

He took the depth-sounding Jade Slip from his robe and placed it on the table. Su Qingli glanced at the data recorded on the Jade Slip and looked up.

"You want to ask her to use her Divine Sense to probe the bottom of the abyss?"

"The intimidation layer between six hundred and eight hundred zhang—I measured the temperature, depth, and frequency, but I don't know how big the source of the intimidation is, how deep it is, or what it is doing," Lu Changyuan said, picking up the riding crop from the table. "Golden Core Divine Sense can penetrate deep water of over two thousand zhang, which is more accurate than any depth-sounding rope. Let her take a look—see clearly what is sleeping down there."

He paused when he reached the door.

"Continue flipping through the roster. Find that person before I return."