96: Chapter 96 Location of the Shipwreck

He did as instructed, feeling that faint, ghost-like warmth seep from his palm. He nodded and tucked the Water-Repelling Bead into his inner pocket.

Time had dragged on into the late night; the ship's clock showed 2:40 AM.

He walked to the gunwale and glanced out.

The night sky was truly beautiful, he had to admit. Even though his mind was currently filled with thoughts of shipwrecks and cargo holds, that night sky still managed to snag his attention visually.

This area was far from the mainland with minimal light pollution. The stars were dense to an almost surreal degree, and the ribbon-like silhouette of the Milky Way was clearly visible, stretching diagonally from the northeast to the southwest. The starlight's reflection on the sea surface rose and fell with the swells, breaking into fragments of shimmering light. A low thumping sound came from the direction of the reef, rhythmic and steady, like something breathing evenly.

Hu Tian stood by the gunwale for about five seconds before turning toward the stern.

He didn't spend much time admiring the view; now was not the time for sightseeing.

Standing before the water entry point at the stern, he adjusted his regulator, bit down on the mouthpiece, and took two normal breaths to confirm the air passage was clear. Then he looked down at the sea surface beneath his feet—it was black, with only the ship's lights casting a small, dim yellow halo on the water. Beyond that halo was an ink-like darkness, deep and bottomless.

He bent his knees and performed a backroll entry. His entry angle was controlled perfectly, creating very little splash and almost no sound. Once in the water, he used the momentum to flip over, adjusting into a head-down descent posture. He pressed the start button on his underwater scooter, which emitted a faint hum as it began pulling him down into the depths.

The scenery of the seabed begins with the disappearance of light.

Five meters below the surface, the ship's lights began to fade, turning into a blurry blue-gray diffuse light. Another ten meters down, even this diffuse light vanished. The world became restricted to the range covered by his headlamp's cone; everything beyond was black—a complete, absolute black. It wasn't the blackness of night, but a directionless black that compressed one's perception into a tiny space.

But the sea was not empty.

As his headlamp swept across, he saw things in the water—jellyfish, both large and small, transparent and floating at the edges of the light cone like translucent lanterns in slow motion. A few drifted curiously toward him for a distance before being gently pushed away by the ripples around his body. The repulsion effect of the Water-Repelling Bead was gentle; it wasn't a harsh rejection but more of a soft partition that caused creatures to naturally change direction rather than startling them.

Descending to twenty meters, the surrounding blue began to deepen, shifting from the original light blue-gray to a heavier blue. Light penetration was very limited at this depth, making the headlamp's cone his only visual reliance. He slowed the scooter's speed to moderate his descent while maintaining his observation of the surroundings.

A barracuda streaked past about three meters to his right. Its silver-white body flashed under the headlamp before disappearing into the darkness—it was so fast it was almost just a streak of light.

Further down were schools of small fish. He couldn't identify the species, but they huddled together densely like a moving cloud. Sensing the presence of him and his ripple field, the entire school surged aside to make a passage. He passed through that corridor as the scooter steadily carried him deeper.

Thirty meters, forty meters.

The water temperature continued to drop. He could feel it, not just because of the cold, but through the tactile feedback of his skin. The Water-Repelling Bead blocked the water pressure but didn't completely insulate against temperature changes. At this depth, the seawater was nearly ten degrees cooler than at the surface, and a stagnant, heavy chill seeped in from all sides.

At fifty meters, he stopped to equalize. With the assistance of the Water-Repelling Bead, the pressure in his ears felt much lighter than expected; a normal equalization maneuver solved it, and he continued down.

At sixty meters, visibility in the water decreased further. It wasn't pitch black, but the distance his headlamp could clearly illuminate had shortened to about eight meters. Beyond eight meters was a blurry expanse of deep blue-gray. Occasionally, something would flash through that blur; he didn't chase those shadows, staying focused and staring in the direction of his descent.

Simultaneously, he activated the Treasure Hunting Radar's passive perception mode, maintaining a low-intensity scan in his mind. He wasn't doing precise positioning yet, just using it to sense if any large objects were nearby, ensuring the darkness beyond his headlamp's cone wasn't a total unknown.

The radar picked up the silhouette of a large object to his front-right. It had low density and an irregular shape—a reef. Its position matched the trend of the reef ridge he had marked earlier. Based on this, he corrected his descent angle, veering about ten degrees to the southeast.

Seventy meters.

He felt the texture of the water beneath him change subtly, becoming more viscous. It wasn't actually viscous, but the combination of seawater density and temperature at this depth brought a unique feedback to his senses, as if he had entered water of a different state—heavier, quieter, and more silent.

Then, his headlamp hit the seabed.

The seabed was flatter than he had imagined. The reef ridge was a protrusion extending from left to right, covered in various corals. Their colors were dull under the headlamp, lacking the vibrancy they would have in shallow water, but their forms were intact. Brain coral, staghorn coral, and plate coral were arranged alternately. To the west of the reef ridge was an open patch of sandy ground—fine sand, grayish in color, with slight undulations left by some unknown force.

He slowed the scooter and hovered about two meters above the reef ridge, scanning the area to confirm his sense of direction.

Then, he moved toward the sandy area on the west side of the reef, slowly lowering his altitude until his feet were close to the seabed, maintaining a hover as he began a systematic scan of the sand with his headlamp.

The surface of the sediment showed no abnormalities. Visually, this patch of sand was no different from any other part of the seabed. There were no timbers protruding, no broken pottery shards—nothing that could be identified by the naked eye as a shipwreck buried beneath.

But the radar didn't lie.

He switched to deep positioning mode in his mind, pushing the scanning focus below the sediment layer. The radar signals returned steadily, and the silhouette of the keel re-imaged in his perception. He compared this image with the terrain beneath his feet and confirmed the approximate projected location of the cargo hold. It was roughly eight meters ahead and slightly to the right of his current hovering point.

He moved slowly toward that position.

Moving directly over the sandy area, he hovered again and looked down. The surface of the sand was calm, with a few sea cucumbers half-buried and motionless. The shadow of the reef ridge stretched into a curved dark zone under the angle of his headlamp. Something in that dark zone reflected light. He adjusted the angle of his headlamp to see clearly—it was a stone, irregularly shaped and covered in a calcified layer. It was likely the result of sediment and lime encasing the 'shape memory' left behind after a piece of timber had rotted away, but it could also just be a fragment of reef. He didn't make an immediate judgment.

He reached out his right hand and slowly brushed away the fine sand around the stone. After clearing it about two fists deep, a darker sediment layer was revealed. It was an organic sediment, dark brown in color, carrying a scent of decay. Even through the respirator, he could sense a peculiar, ancient quality seeping into the water.

He took a long, thin probe from his waist and slowly inserted it into the sediment layer. When the probe had gone in thirty centimeters, it struck something hard. It wasn't the solid feel of stone, but a slight sense of hollowness, as if the probe had pierced the sediment and touched the surface edge of some structure beneath.

Timber.

He could confirm it was timber, not reef. The tactile sensation was wrong; reef was denser, while the surface of rotted timber had a unique fragility. With a light press of the probe, he could feel the fibers on the surface yielding slightly.

He withdrew the probe, reconfirmed the cargo hold's location with the radar, and then swapped the probe for a thinner metal marker stake. He gently inserted it into the confirmed spot, letting it mark the surface of the sediment as a reference point for future operations.

Cargo hold location confirmed.

He looked up and swept his headlamp along the estimated length of the cargo hold. Based on the position of the middle-front section of the keel and the estimated size of the thirty-to-forty-meter ship, the cargo hold's length might be between six and eight meters, with a width of four to five meters. This was no small compartment. The goods packed inside were densely stacked beneath two meters of sediment.

He hovered above the cargo hold, sensing the centuries of slumber beneath his feet.

A South China Sea merchant ship from the Ming or Qing dynasties, running the Nanyang trade route. During one voyage, it encountered something and sank here. The cargo and the people on board simply vanished on a certain day in that era, slowly buried by seawater and sediment. Then followed a long silence—one hundred years, two hundred years, perhaps three hundred or more—until tonight, when it was found again by someone standing on a ship using something called a Treasure Hunting Radar.

He didn't usually have much of a sense for history, but here in the darkness seventy meters under the sea, with a real centuries-old shipwreck beneath him, that feeling became inexplicably clear.

He didn't linger in these reflections for long; he had more important things to confirm.

He moved slowly along the estimated boundaries of the cargo hold, conducting a meticulous peripheral scan of the surroundings. He focused on whether there were any traces of prior human activity on the sediment surface, such as disturbed sediment, marks from cutting tools, or pits left by manual salvage. These were crucial indicators for judging whether the shipwreck had already been touched by previous looting activities.

After scanning, he found nothing. The surface of the sediment was intact, without any signs of disturbance. The quiet state of this seabed indicated that no one had reached this place before him, or rather, no one knew a shipwreck was here.

This was the thing he wanted to confirm most.

He finished the peripheral survey, re-checked the positions of the probe and marker stake, and systematically organized all the information in his mind: the boundaries of the hold, the center position, the thickness of the overlying sediment, the softness of the sediment, and the terrain details he had recorded during the survey. Everything was in order.

Then, he noticed that weak metallic signal on the south side of the reef ridge. He had discovered it while scanning from the ship earlier; it was a lower priority than the cargo hold, but since he was already on the seabed, it wouldn't take much time to have a look on the way.