This was ten thousand meters beneath the sea!
Every square centimeter endured a thousand kilograms of pressure—equivalent to two thousand adult elephants stacked on an adult’s back.
Under that kind of pressure, forget humans—even fish were exceedingly rare.
They had built this deep submersible using the latest materials from the Materials Institute, prized for their strength and flexibility. They had figured it could handle venturing even farther, but it had met its end right at ten thousand meters.
Ten thousand meters was still far from the deep submersible’s pressure limit. Absent this freak accident, it could have plunged even deeper!
That original depth had been their previous record, but material constraints back then had prevented them from capturing any photos or data. Now that they had the means, they planned to make the most of it: pause for a brief rest on the seabed platform, snap some scientific photographs, and then guide the submersible toward any downward crevices.
But now? They had no idea what it had run into, and the deep submersible was completely wrecked!
It had managed one photo before failing—a meager consolation at best. And even that image looked downright bizarre.
Humanoid shadows, with one silhouette’s figure faintly discernible. Looming behind it were two more human-like shadows, and one of them even seemed to be posed in a fishing stance!
No scientific evidence here. The photo defied all reason and shattered human understanding!
Professor Huang knew better than anyone just how hostile the deep sea was to any form of life. No human could possibly survive in those conditions!
So what the hell was this photo?
How could they even begin to explain it?
As Professor Huang fell silent, the other researchers clustered around the display screen erupted into chatter.
“What is that? Human shapes?”
“No way. How could there be people down in the deep sea? It’s gotta be some seabed rock that just looks humanoid.”
“Makes sense, but this looks way too human. You can even make out the body’s outline—the waist, the thighs! The facial features are probably there too if you squint.”
“Maybe you’ve heard the legends of Atlantis…”
“But Atlantis isn’t in the deep sea. At most, it’s in shallower waters.”
“That shadow in the back has such an amateur fishing pose. Total armchair angler.”
“That’s not a person at all… Baiter, quit losing your mind.”
“Ahem.” Professor Huang cleared his throat, silencing the discussion.
“Let’s brighten it up and zoom in first. Probably just some kind of reef…” He directed one of his students to adjust the pixels on the computer.
The next instant, the entire image turned to mush.
That was the System at work.
The original photo had been fairly clear, just too dark. If they’d simply boosted the brightness, they could have made out β-62’s face. But the System had preemptively blurred it the moment they started fiddling with the brightness for a closer look.
“No.” Professor Huang frowned. He studied the brightened and enlarged version for a moment. Far from clarifying into anything recognizable as they’d hoped, it had only grown blurrier!
“Pull up the original for us to see.”
The enlargement was just a copy; the original remained untouched in storage.
When they brought up the original, they all fell silent again.
The image… had changed.
“Something’s off. Who tampered with the backend parameters? Who edited the picture?”
Professor Huang’s gaze snapped to the researcher operating the magnification computer.
“This isn’t the original image. Something’s wrong!”
“I didn’t touch the parameters. You can check the backend edit logs.” The engineer at the central control console—who had been tweaking the photo—shot to his feet.
“But this image has changed. It definitely has!” Professor Huang insisted.
His stern eyes swept the room.
A few seconds later, his star pupil—the researcher poised to one day succeed him as director of the institute—spoke up. “Director Huang, this photo hasn’t changed at all.”
His words uncorked the floodgates. The others jumped back in.
“Yeah, hasn’t it always looked like this?”
“I don’t see any difference from before. Just a big black blob.”
“Zooming in should alter the image parameters by nature, but with the original Professor Huang mentioned… I don’t see an issue.”
“Me neither.”
“Is Professor Huang just too stressed? Maybe it’s getting to his head…”
Of course, that last remark was whispered, too quiet for Professor Huang to catch.
Had he really just been seeing things, his old eyes playing tricks? Hearing the undercurrent of doubt from his team, Professor Huang began to question himself.
However, he still insisted on having someone check the backend logs to see if there were any records of image edits.
In the meantime, they directed the ships floating far out on the sea to retrieve the deep submersible.
By the time Professor Huang got the confirmation that “the backend showed no editing records on the original image,” the salvaged deep submersible had been hauled up.
The once plump and rounded deep submersible was now nothing more than a flat sheet of metal. The only way to confirm it was the one they had built was by examining the telltale patterns in the crushed metal.
“How could this happen? What on earth did it run into?”
Professor Huang fell silent once more upon seeing what had become of the deep submersible.
The craft had undergone rigorous pressure testing before deployment. Not even the crushing weight of seawater at ten thousand meters could deform it. Even if it had disintegrated down there, it never would have been flattened into a single smooth sheet.
This didn’t look like damage from colliding with a rock on the seabed. It was more as if some deep-sea creature had squeezed it with overwhelming force.
But what kind of creature could exert enough pressure to flatten a deep submersible designed to plunge ten thousand meters and withstand a thousand atmospheres?
No ordinary organism could generate that kind of force with muscle alone!
So what exactly had happened to the deep submersible down there?
Professor Huang had been ready to dismiss his earlier suspicions as mere paranoia, convinced those dark shadows were just rocks.
But now, confronted with the wreckage, doubt crept back in.
What had truly befallen the deep submersible at the bottom of the sea?
What secrets lay hidden in these depths?
~~~
“Oh? They’ve figured it out.” β-62 remarked, her tone ambiguous.
“Should I go take care of them all, Deputy Captain?”
She extended her hands, and translucent threads unfurled from her fingertips, drifting lazily through the deep sea.
Under her control, those threads could pluck at human nerves, send electrical impulses, and manipulate thoughts and memories.
“No need,” Luo Shang replied, utterly unflappable as always.
“They won’t uncover anything anyway.”
“Looks like fishing’s off the table today,” Luo Shang said with regret. “There’s nothing worth seeing here anyway. Psionic levels are so low they’re practically nonexistent, tech is primitive—it’s just a backwater world.”
The more vibrant the psionic levels, the more wondrous spectacles a place could produce. Take Chen Guyi, for instance: he hailed from a cultivation clan whose home was a floating mountain range, where aura erupted from the earth below, suspending the peaks in the sky as if in ascension. Auspicious clouds and immortal cranes wreathed the summits. Any mortal who glimpsed it assumed it was a paradise of immortals—which wasn’t far off the mark.
There were immortal realms, secret domains, and more, all of which utterly eclipsed the natural wonders of their own world.
With the deep submersible fiasco, Luo Shang lost all interest in fishing.
Of course! The reason he hadn’t caught anything today had nothing to do with him—it was that damn submersible scaring all the fish away!
Luo Shang consoled himself with practiced ease.
“You’re here now, so how about we catch a movie instead?”
“Sure.” β-62 agreed to Luo Shang’s suggestion without hesitation.
Anything but fishing. Fishing never panned out anyway… Truth be told, with the Deputy Captain’s cursed fishing luck, he might not even hook anything amid a teeming coral reef, let alone in the barren deep sea… So thought Chen Guyi.
He nodded in agreement as well.
“You pick, Deputy Captain.”
It was their first time in this world; they had no idea what was playing.
“But we’re heading somewhere populated, so you two need to switch to normal clothes first,” Luo Shang told them, eyeing their outfits.
One wore dingy work overalls, the other flowing ancient robes—the styles clashed wildly.
“Got it.” β-62 lifted her wristwatch. A laser swept over her from head to toe, and just like that, she was in casual streetwear.
Chen Guyi murmured an incantation, spun on his heel, and transformed into a sleek, long-haired modern heartthrob.
In the blink of an eye, the trio vanished from the spot.
Seawater rippled gently onward. In these depths, unchanged across tens of thousands of years, the seabed slumbered in eternal solitude.
~~~
Meanwhile, after Jiang Jingwu finished venting about Luo Shang, he noticed the face of the man he’d fallen for at first sight drain of color.
“We can’t put it like that!” Su Mingyao cut in hastily.
Jiang Jingwu was bound to cross paths with Luo Shang eventually. No one knew if he could hear heart voice. If he could, Jiang Jingwu wouldn’t dare mouth off in front of him again—which might actually be for the best.
But if he couldn’t hear it… that spelled trouble.
Jiang Jingwu already resented Luo Shang and treated him poorly. True to form, he’d let it show the moment they met—and the fallout from that…
Su Mingyao didn’t even dare imagine how horrifying that scene would be.
Luo Shang could crush him to death without lifting a finger.
And after crushing him, Luo Shang could even use the corpse to put on a show opposite him. The thought alone was terrifying.
Wait a minute—maybe some of the people he was interacting with right now were those who’d offended Luo Shang, gotten killed by him, and been turned into corpses to approach him.
At that realization, Su Mingyao shuddered.
“It was my idea to come walk it!”
“My little brother went out to hang with his classmates and left the dog at home. He usually doesn’t need our help taking care of it, so when he headed out today, I saw the dog cooped up inside looking bored and figured I’d take it for a walk.”
Su Mingyao explained.
In a way, it wasn’t even a lie.
Weren’t his teammates from the Reincarnation Space basically classmates?
And the dog handing over its own leash practically screamed that it was bored out of its mind at home.
If you ignored the fact that his little brother was a world-destroying Extraordinary and that this dog was really just a skeleton, the truth wasn’t all that different from what he’d said.
“I see. You’re such a kind soul!” Sure enough, Jiang Jingwu bought it.
He’d fooled him! Su Mingyao sweated inwardly.
“Then let me tag along. If the dog starts dragging you again, I can help hold it back.”
Jiang Jingwu dropped the questions about his brother and went back to fawning over Su Mingyao.
If it were anyone else, Su Mingyao would’ve brushed them off—he could handle the dog on his own without any help.
But this was a friend from his previous life, so Su Mingyao nodded. “Sure.”
Little did he know, he’d soon regret that decision.
