Even in summer, the river water fifty meters below Kui Gate was still bone-chillingly cold. A wetsuit could only slow the loss of body heat, not prevent it entirely. The cold crept from the tips of his limbs toward his torso, little by little, like some slow embrace.
Lu Mingfei knew the feeling of being completely enveloped in liquid all too well. It always came hand in hand with some ominous sign.
LCL, an Entry Plug. When that liquid flooded your nose and lungs, your body screamed that this was not where you belonged. Then the neural link activated, and your brain was forcibly connected to an enormous biological weapon. You could feel every nerve in Unit-03, every muscle, every inch of armor, as though that colossal creature had become your new body.
You wielded the power of a god and could withstand a nuclear blast, yet you could not save anyone.
In the final apocalypse, a sea of LCL swallowed the world. Lu Mingfei stood amid the ruins, watching everyone disappear one after another, powerless to do anything.
Every time liquid enveloped him, it meant nothing good.
But this time was different.
Lu Mingfei opened his eyes in the underwater darkness.
This was a real river, in a world where he had lived for eighteen years. Fifty meters beneath the surface, two real people were waiting for him. They were still alive. Nothing had swallowed them, and they had not vanished before his eyes.
This time, he was in his own world.
Lu Mingfei abruptly accelerated his descent.
The numbers on the depth gauge flickered rapidly inside his mask, and he felt a slight pressure against his eardrums. He swallowed, opening his Eustachian tubes and equalizing the pressure.
Fifty meters underwater.
Through the murky river water, Lu Mingfei spotted two searchlight beams. He swam toward them and saw two figures floating with their backs to him. Signal cables stretched from their waists toward the surface above, like two slender umbilical cords.
Before them stood an enormous bronze city wall.
Lu Mingfei flipped sharply and came to a hover beside Ye Sheng and Aki.
"L-Lu?" Aki exclaimed. Under the immense pressure of this deep water, the boy actually moved with greater ease than he did on land.
"We can catch up once we're back on the surface. Let's get moving."
"Roger, S-Rank."
Ye Sheng gestured for them to advance.
The gateway was deeper than any of them had expected. They traveled nearly fifteen meters through it before reaching its end. Their helmet-mounted searchlights swept across the walls on either side, revealing a dense pattern of fine grooves.
"These grooves are arranged very regularly," Aki said, moving closer to examine them. "About five centimeters apart, all the same depth, intersecting at forty-five-degree angles. They look a lot like..."
"Screw threads," Lu Mingfei finished for her. After what he had experienced in the previous world, architectural wonders like this no longer surprised him.
Then all three raised their heads, following the grooves, their searchlight beams tracing the lines upward.
"Morania, are you seeing this?" Ye Sheng asked quietly.
On the bridge, Mans and Selma stared at the footage coming through on the screen.
In the image, a bronze column covered in parallel diagonal grooves was moving slowly.
"What the fuck is that thing, a hydraulic press?" First Mate Grayson leaned over.
Selma rolled her eyes at him. "All we can tell so far is that it's a bronze screw shaft at least three meters in diameter. Its length is unknown."
Mans's eyes darted across the screen, taking in the rotation speed of the threads, their pitch, and the direction in which the shaft extended into the darkness. As more information came in, the model assembling itself in his mind grew increasingly alarming.
Screw drives, meshing gears, linkage mechanisms, cam followers.
Mans froze, then looked down at his wrist. He was wearing an Omega Seamaster 300 dive watch.
"I feel like I'm swimming inside a watch movement," Ye Sheng said.
"Professor von Schneider once proposed that the Dragon King Norton hollowed out an entire mountain to use as a mold, then poured molten bronze into it from the summit. As the bronze city took shape, the intense heat shattered the surrounding rock, leaving a city cast in bronze. It looks like he was right," Mans said. "Keep going. Find the end of the shaft. I want to see what it connects to."
The three continued swimming forward.
Along the bronze passage, nearly thirty meters long, their searchlights kept sweeping over new structures-a second screw shaft, a third, a fourth. They ran parallel within the walls on either side of the passage, connected by gear assemblies. The spacing of the gear teeth was astonishing; each tooth was nearly a meter tall.
"A transmission system," Mans murmured on the bridge. "This is an entire transmission system."
"Where does it lead?" Selma asked.
"Probably to the end of the passage. If this is a complete transmission system, the shafts must be rotating to drive some mechanism..."
Mans broke off abruptly.
The space in the incoming video suddenly opened up. An enormous dome stretched above the three divers, its surface covered in intricate patterns.
Those lines had distinct paths, branches, and closed loops, like circuit diagrams or equations written as pictures. When the beams of their headlamps swept over the script, the characters themselves gave off a faint glow, like ghostly phosphorescence that had slept for a thousand years, only to be awakened by the intruders' breath.
"Dragon Script?" Aki suddenly realized what it was.
"Back it up! Hurry!" Mans said, elated.
A faint bioelectric current radiated from around Ye Sheng's wetsuit, and countless invisible "electric snakes" darted through the passages of the Bronze City. They were Ye Sheng's eyes and feelers, frantically probing the gaps between the bronze wall bricks.
"Found it!" Ye Sheng's eyes snapped open. "Professor, the snakes found it! Directly below us."
"Good work!" Mans cheered over the channel. "Go recover it immediately!"
"Aki, stay here and photograph the dragon inscriptions. Lu Mingfei..." Ye Sheng looked into the darkness below. "Please stay here and cover Aki. Be ready to support me at any moment. I'll go in and get it alone."
Ye Sheng checked his remaining oxygen.
"I have forty minutes of oxygen left. If I'm not back in thirty minutes, withdraw immediately."
"Understood." Aki took a waterproof camera from her bag.
Ye Sheng smiled beneath his mask.
He turned to look at his partner. The searchlight beam traced a slender outline along her side. Her wetsuit clung to her long, slim figure, and the signal cable hanging from her waist swayed gently with the current.
"Aki may be hopeless at this and hopeless at that," Ye Sheng said, "but at least she does as she's told."
"Ye Sheng may be hopeless at this and hopeless at that," she replied without turning around, "but at least he knows his own limitations."
Then Lu Mingfei's voice cut in.
"I'd like to make a suggestion. I'm the S-Rank here, so if something goes wrong, you should be following my orders, right?"
"Your orders?" Ye Sheng's laughter mingled with the rush of water. "Get this straight, Lu Mingfei. This is the Dragon King's palace. The Dragon King has the highest rank here."
"By that logic, we should obey the Dragon King, slit our own throats, and shuffle off to the afterlife."