Tidal Surge
While traveling along the official road towards Longfish Bay, Long Tian overheard someone mention some news.
It was while resting at a roadside tea stall that the owner was chatting with a passerby at a nearby table. He mentioned that several coastal villages had been experiencing unrest lately, with fishermen bringing up fragments of pottery and wood scraps in their nets for several days in a row. The wood fragments didn't look like old ship planks; they seemed to have been dismantled from a larger structure and scattered into the sea. Long Tian listened to this conversation while holding his teacup at the next table, put down his teacup, left the money for the tea on the table, and continued walking along the road.
When we arrived at Longfish Bay, it was still early. The people at the stern were turning the boat over and applying tung oil to the bottom at the dock. When they saw us coming down the slope, we didn't get up immediately. Instead, we put the brushes in our hands into the bucket, wiped our hands on our aprons, and stood up to wait for them to approach.
"There's been more stuff floating on the sea these past few days than usual." He said this after Long Tian finished recounting what he'd overheard at the tea stall, his tone straightforward. "Yesterday, when I went out to haul in the nets, I saw a piece of square timber outside that shallow area to the east. The cross-section was similar to a beam used for building houses, and there were signs of cutting on the surface. It didn't look like wood that had been soaking in seawater for a long time. It looked like something had brought it up from the bottom of the sea and then scattered it onto the surface."
Long Tian squatted down by the dock, mentally connecting this incident with the underwater structure he had seen before. He had gone down to check several times before, and the keel and paving surface remained in their respective positions, showing no signs of movement or damage. However, the debris that had broken off from the seabed structure continued to float to the surface, indicating that something might have changed underwater, and the location might not necessarily be in the places he had gone down before, but perhaps in an area he had not yet dived in.
He stood up and walked along the dock to the ship, lifting the old netting on the deck to check the remaining supplies and spare ropes in the hold. A man from the stern walked up behind him and said, "Going out on a scouting trip now won't be a problem. The patrol team has moved north to Soul Hunting Town; there are no sentries along this coast. But once we get outside that shallow area, the water is a bit murky, and visibility might be poor."
Long Tian coiled the ropes from the cabin and laid them on the deck, then turned and squatted by the gunwale for a while. Yu Jin walked over from the shore and squatted down by the dock. The light from the dark gray bead wasn't very noticeable in the afternoon sun, but his expression was slightly more somber than usual. He handed Long Tian a water bag, and after Long Tian took a couple of sips, he said, "If the underwater structure is really crumbling, it might be in a different direction than when we went down last time. Last time I was behind you, and when we came out, I saw a thin crack on the outer edge of the base near the shore. I didn't think much of it then, but now that I think about it, the edges of that crack were a bit uneven, like it had been scraped by some force from the outside."
Long Tian screwed the cap back on the water bag, stood up on the deck, and glanced at the sea. He looked back at the people at the stern and said, "Let's set sail. Go to the outer edge of that shallow area and check the water color and the distribution of floating debris. If conditions are right, I'll go down and check if it's a newly formed crack. If it's just scattered remnants of the old structure, then it's fine. If it's continuously peeling away, then we need to figure out the cause."
The man at the stern nodded, put the brush and oil drum into the hold, untied the mooring rope, and after they boarded, he used a pole to propel the boat away from the shore. After leaving the bay, the boat traveled southeast along the near-shore channel for a distance. As it turned toward the shallow waters, floating objects began to appear in the view—several short pieces of wood and broken pottery shards were scattered on the surface, spaced apart, slowly bobbing up and down in the surging waves, as if they had been continuously pushed up from some deeper place.
The person at the stern loosened the rudder slightly, slowing the boat and propelling it forward along the path of the floating debris. Long Tian crouched at the bow, his gaze sweeping across the sea. As they approached the edge of the shallow waters he had visited several times before, he noticed the seawater was murky, as if continuously stirred-up bottom water had surged up and mixed with the clear surface. Yu Jin stood beside him, the light from the dark gray beads emanating from his collar, casting a steady, continuous glow in the murky water, as if providing a discernible reference point for the surrounding water.
Long Tian stood up at the bow, took off his coat and put it in the cabin, checked the straps of his leather bag, and then flipped into the water. The visibility was indeed worse than before after entering the water; fine particles were suspended in the water, and the light layer of the Dragon Shadow was more clearly scattered when it spread out in the murky water, but the illuminated area was still sufficient. He dived down along the route he had taken before, swimming towards the keel for a while. When he was close to the top of the keel, he saw the thin crack on the outer side of the base. It was a bit wider than before, with continuous debris peeling off the edges. A layer of fresh powder was scattered on the stone surface around the crack, not yet completely washed away by the current.