Dragon Raja 3; Chapter 132: Tomb of God (5)

Dragon Raja 3

“The Lenin,” Chu Zihang said.

“What did you say?” Caesar asked.

“I said we still haven’t found the Lenin,” Chu Zihang said while checking the photos of the ruins taken by the Diliast. “We descended from the location where the Lenin sank. It’s a 134-meter-long icebreaker, which should be quite an obvious target, yet we haven’t located it. According to the intel, the Lenin took the embryo from the northwest Siberian port, while the sonar scan indicates the heartbeat is coming from beneath the ruins. The Lenin sank right here in these ruins; it went down eight kilometers into the sea, which must have been an astonishing speed. Its bow, designed to break through ice, is extremely hard and heavy, so it would have naturally oriented itself downward. The hard bow would pierce through the seabed, sending the embryo underground. However, it’s impossible for such a large target to be completely buried in the seabed; most of it should still be exposed.”

“Could it have been crushed by the high pressure?” Lu Mingfei recalled the two oxygen tanks that had been flattened like steel sheets.

“Not likely. The oxygen tanks were crushed because they contained gas, while the sunken Lenin was surrounded by seawater, which balances the pressure,” Chu Zihang said.

“It’s inside the ruins!” Caesar exclaimed. “The Lenin is inside the ruins! We haven’t found it because it’s covered by shellfish! It has been sunken for thirty years; it surely doesn’t look the same as it did in the photos. It should look like a part of the ruins!”

“Exactly! Then we just need to find a section of the ruins that can accommodate that mass of steel, and we’ll find the embryo, then ‘bang,’ we launch the sulfur bomb and turn back home!” Lu Mingfei said cheerfully.

“But where can a 134-meter-long icebreaker hide in those ruins?” Caesar quickly flipped through the photos.

“Hey, hey, stop looking at the photos. Looking at the photos is pointless,” Lu Mingfei said. “Just look up.”

Caesar slowly lifted his head, following Lu Mingfei’s gaze through the top observation window. Behind the torii gate, the strangely shaped ruins of a building loomed like a mountain, seemingly on the verge of collapsing and burying the Diliast. Like other buildings in the ruins, it was covered with unknown black shellfish, thousands of little creatures resembling snails tightly clustered together, their texture like rust. However, when Chu Zihang pointed the long-range camera at that building, the screen revealed that those small rusty creatures were wriggling. Lu Mingfei felt a wave of nausea, as if he were seeing a mass of maggots crawling in and out of an elephant’s carcass.

“The shellfish here are particularly dense; I don’t know why,” Chu Zihang whispered. “If that’s really the Lenin, it’s only been sunken for thirty years; how could so many shellfish have gathered here?”

“I’ve never seen shellfish move around like that. What kind of shellfish are these? They’re so disgusting!” Lu Mingfei exclaimed.

“They’re mating. These look like lung snails, and they are hermaphrodites, but to exchange genes, they mate with each other and store the fertilized eggs in their gill cavities to hatch,” Caesar said quietly. “They’re not really wriggling; they’re continuously opening their shells to expel the successfully hatched lung snails. This is incredible; these lung snails mate and reproduce at an astonishing rate, producing thousands of little lung snails every second, their reproductive activities are remarkably frequent!”

“Then the lung snails that float up should have accumulated into mountains, right?” Lu Mingfei asked.

“Those marine creatures,” Chu Zihang said, “came here for these lung snails. There’s a nest of lung snails deep in the abyss, which is continuously producing little lung snails. The little lung snails feed on phosphorous ejected from the volcano and produce protein through anaerobic chemical reactions. And protein is the most important nutritional source for those marine creatures; fish feed on this protein, while predators feed on the fish, and the dragon vipers survive by eating the predators. Because of this protein factory, such a bizarre ecological environment can form in the deep sea.”

“Are those marine creatures all subspecies of dragons?” Lu Mingfei asked. “Then the things inside here…”

“The dragon embryo is right in front of us; those marine creatures are mutated because of it,” Chu Zihang took a deep breath. “We’ve found it.”

“A matching target was found in the database of Japan’s ‘Shinjidai writing’; the patterns in the photo refer to…” Kaguya paused, “…Takamagahara.”

“Repeat that; what does that pattern mean?” Caesar’s voice trembled slightly.

“The interpretation result is that those patterns in Shinjidai writing refer to the dwelling place of the gods, Takamagahara,” Kaguya said.

“What is Shinjidai writing?” Lu Mingfei saw that both Caesar and Chu Zihang were serious and, feeling confused, had to ask.

Caesar licked his lips. “Traditional historians believe that Japan originally had no writing, only language, and that it wasn’t until the third century AD, when Chinese characters were introduced, that the Japanese invented kana to transcribe their language. But by the Kamakura period, the priest Abe no Kiyomaro claimed that Japan had its own pictographic writing, which was said to be inherited from the mythological era, thus called Shinjidai writing. Later, some produced texts written in Shinjidai writing, such as the ‘Izumo Caves Text.’ However, its phonetic system is drastically different from Old Japanese, so even Japanese linguists consider it to be pseudo-writing. To most people, the so-called Shinjidai writing is a manifestation of Japanese national pride, unwilling to acknowledge that their culture today is greatly influenced by Chinese civilization, thus fabricating stories of advanced civilizations and writing existing in Japan before recorded history.”

“Perhaps Shinjidai writing isn’t Japanese at all, which is why it has a different phonetic rule than Japanese,” Chu Zihang said, “but rather another form of prehistoric writing, a kind of pictographic writing derived from dragon writing.”

“Then who are their gods?” Lu Mingfei had already guessed the answer.

“The dragons; what the Japanese refer to as the ‘god race’ today is actually the dragon race!” Chu Zihang said quietly. “The history of that family of gods in Japanese mythology… is actually the history of a dragon family!”

“Damn, is the Imperial Family really of dragon lineage?” Lu Mingfei exclaimed. “In history class, I actually believed that emperors and nobles had no defined bloodlines!”

“No, the Imperial Family is not mixed-blood… the real mixed-blood is… Yamata no Orochi!” Caesar replied.

“Are you saying our Japanese division is descended from the gods?” Lu Mingfei was stunned.

At that moment, the Diliast slowly passed under the massive torii gate, sliding into the shadow where the lava could not reach. Whether it was an illusion or not, as the submersible passed under the torii, Lu Mingfei seemed to hear countless voices groaning hoarsely, as if the souls of bleeding ghosts were flowing from hell. The ruins began to shake, and fragments of stone and the shells of dead lung snails slowly rose with the water’s flow, striking against the Diliast’s exterior, producing a dull sound.

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