It was a sunny afternoon.
As usual, Baimu was piloting the unmanned Deep-Sea Vessel across the seafloor.
Suddenly—
"Hm?"
He stopped the controls, adjusted the camera, and backed the vessel up a few steps. A pitch-black cave sprang into view.
More importantly, some kind of pattern seemed to be inscribed on either side of its entrance. Seaweed had hidden it so well that he'd almost missed it.
He used the mechanical arm to pull the seaweed away. Soon, strange murals appeared on the camera feed, thick with algae and damaged in several places.
"Doctor! Come take a look at this!"
Baimu immediately turned and shouted. The three people getting fresh air on deck filed inside and saw the murals, slightly blurred by seawater corrosion and algae growth.
Doctor Hodaka's face lit up. "That's it! This is the place!"
He worked at a nearby computer, and an image appeared on the front screen. Its similarity to the cave murals was an astonishing eighty percent!
"We finally found it!"
Asahi grabbed Baimu's shoulders and shook him excitedly.
At least they hadn't found their target in the very last stretch of unexplored sea, though with only a few areas left, there wasn't much difference.
Kieran said nothing, but relief showed on his face.
Baimu asked, "Should we go straight in, or circle the cave first, clear away the seaweed, and gather more information from the murals?"
"Let's gather information first. If there are murals missing from our records, that'll be a major discovery!" Doctor Hodaka held back his excitement.
"All right."
Baimu agreed.
He was eager to enter the Sealed Chamber and decipher the Ancient Braille, but he knew Doctor Hodaka and the others weren't here so much to find the three Regis as to use them to uncover a more distant past.