Chapter 251

Chapter 251: Abyssal Trench

Listening to Tyrian’s story, Duncan fell into brief thought. After half a minute, he looked up, speaking slowly: “So, to satisfy her desire to explore, she launched the ‘Abyssal Trench Project’. And the real essence of this project was not exploring Subspace at all, but simply… diving into deep water in the literal sense?”

He paused there, feeling that there was something very strange about all this: “But if that’s all, how did this plan end up connected to the Vanished? The Subspace the Vanished went to and the Deep Sea the Frostholm Queen wanted to explore are two completely different things. Those Rebels shouldn’t be so confused that they can’t tell them apart…”

Tyrian did not answer directly. Instead, he suddenly threw out a question: “Don’t you find it strange? If it was only diving into the water to explore the sea conditions under the city-state, how could that be called ‘forbidden’? Harbor builders and coastal fishermen often have to dive for their work. In safe waters, it is very common to go down a dozen meters or even several dozen. So why did the Frostholm Queen’s ‘Abyssal Trench Project’ become taboo?”

Duncan’s gaze grew more and more serious: “…How deep did you dive?”

“Very, very deep. I don’t know what depth the Queen herself reached in the end, because I’m not a scholar. I only took part on the edges as a naval commander, and in the later half of the project I was no longer directly involved. But as far as I know, before the plan started to become… ‘not right’, their manned submersible had already reached at least one thousand meters below the surface, and they kept breaking that record.”

A thousand meters underwater…

Duncan quickly sorted through what he knew in his mind. On Earth, that number, which did not look impressive at first glance, was already the maximum diving depth for many advanced military submarines. Most military submarines could only dive four or five hundred meters. As for those “extreme Deep Dive records” of several thousand or even nearly ten thousand meters, they were almost all done by specially built Deep Dive craft for short periods. The demands on the equipment were extreme, and those dives were usually unmanned.

But the Frostholm Queen’s manned submersible back then had already reached the threshold of “one thousand meters”. With this world’s industrial level half a century ago, even with some help from supernatural powers, that was already a staggering number.

And behind that staggering number… there was clearly something even more shocking.

Tyrian had just mentioned that in its later stage the project had started to become “not right”. Duncan did not overlook that phrase.

He looked at Tyrian, his gaze darkening: “I want to know the details of the entire exploration project. Tell me everything you were involved in.”

Maybe because he had already answered many questions, and had adapted to this way of talking, Tyrian did not hesitate for long this time. He sank into his memories and spoke slowly:

“…Aside from Frostholm’s Abyssal Trench Project, the recorded normal diving depth for humans, or the ‘safe water depth’, is one hundred and fifty meters, and even that is limited to nearshore waters. Our plan also started at that depth, and everything went smoothly up to three hundred meters.

“It was already very, very dark there. sunlight from the surface could not pass through such a heavy layer of water. The powerful lamps on the submersible could only light up a small area. To see the ‘shape’ of the island under the city-state, and to avoid as much as possible some dangerous ‘creatures’ in the open sea, such as Deep Sea Spawn, we had the submersible dive along the coastline and keep close to the island’s nearshore zone. I still remember how the explorer described the scene after coming back up…

“He said the underside of the island looked like an ugly, rough pillar, covered in thick layers of calcareous deposits. Some strange creatures lived in the pits and hollows of that crust. Aside from the ‘pillar’, there was nothing else around, only darkness.”

“A pillar under the island?” Duncan could not help interrupting Tyrian. “Not a gradually widening supporting structure, but a single pillar?”

“Yes. At least, that is how it is under Frostholm,” Tyrian nodded. “Is there a problem with that?”

Duncan shook his head: “…No. Go on.”

Tyrian gathered his thoughts and continued his earlier memories: “That scene was at about three hundred meters, which was also the first submersible’s limit. After we realized that depth was far from enough to explore the Deep Sea, the Queen ordered the scholars to build a second submersible. That submersible was very successful. It dove straight down to eight hundred meters. And through half a meter of high-strength glass, the explorer saw… still the pillar, a straight pillar.

“Of course, compared with the radius of the city-state itself, that ‘pillar’, already at least eight hundred meters long, was still very short in proportion. Rather than a support column, it was more like a neat, disc-shaped base holding up an island.

“After that, we built a third submersible. Because of technical limits, its improvements over the second were quite small. It had to dive very carefully to challenge the second submersible’s record. And it was during that slow descent, meter by meter, that we discovered something.

“The ‘pillar’ beneath the city-state was actually only eight hundred and fifty meters ‘long’. Below that, there was nothing.

“The whole structure floated in the sea.”

Tyrian stopped and looked up into Duncan’s eyes: “Now you understand why I said it was more like a disc-shaped base than a pillar, right?”

Duncan frowned tightly. He did not speak. In his mind, he quickly sketched out the whole structure according to Tyrian’s description.

In the Deep Sea era, people “huddled” inside their city-states. These sea islands had first struck Duncan as cramped and narrow, but in fact, as fully functional, self-sustaining places to live, the city-states had to have a certain basic size. There were some small islands, but most of the major cities with real names had a “base radius” of more than ten kilometers, even several tens. As the largest city-state in the Frost Sea in the past, Frostholm would not be any smaller.

To match that huge structure on the sea, its underwater “base” was “only” eight hundred and fifty meters deep. When the explorers first saw the underwater part of the city at three hundred meters, stretching straight down into the Deep Sea, they instinctively imagined it as a pillar reaching straight to the “seafloor”. But in terms of proportions, that “pillar” was more like a thin disc.

The vast city sat on top of that “disc”.

Just as Tyrian had said: the whole structure floated in the sea.

But once he pictured this model, a huge doubt rose in Duncan’s heart.

Were all city-states like this?

If every city-state was like this, a rootless “floating thing”, how did they stay so stable? If the stability of a city-state itself came from its sheer size, what about the stable relative positions between city-states? How could that be explained?

The Boundless Sea rolled with endless waves, yet these “floating islands” had never shifted their positions. Why?

Duncan voiced his doubts, but Tyrian only shook his head: “We wondered about that too, but in the end we never figured it out. And compared with what happened later… the question of how city-states float on the sea stopped mattering.”

“What happened later?” Duncan could not help asking. “What happened? What did you actually see in the Deep Sea?”

“Later… the third submersible kept pushing the depth limit. We spent nearly two years raising the record from eight hundred and fifty meters to nine hundred and fifty. As you can imagine, during that descent the submersible gradually moved away from the city-state’s ‘base’. Remember what I said at the beginning? To avoid trouble in the open sea, we had the submersible dive in the ‘nearshore safety zone’ close to the coast. During that whole process, it stayed pressed against the city-state and its underwater ‘structure’. But as the dive went on and the explorer got farther from that ‘base’, things started to go wrong.

“Auditory and visual hallucinations. It felt like strange lights appeared in the water. It felt like someone was knocking on the hull outside, even turning the handle of the hatch. The deeper they went, the worse these things became. Even explorers with special training and strong wills began to feel tremendous pressure during every dive. And the protection given by the Holy Oil, holy books, and scripture cloth they carried grew weaker and weaker.

“Of course, up to that point, everything was still within what we expected. Exploring the unknown always comes with trials of will. Scholars who explore the seas of the Spirit Realm and the Abyssal Deep often face similar troubles. So we continued, only strengthening the explorers’ Mental Ward to the strictest standard.

“The problem came when we tried to push from nine hundred and ninety meters to one thousand.

“The third submersible suddenly sent an emergency signal to surface at once. Then it rushed upward like a mad thing, blowing all the ballast water. The explorer inside seemed not to care at all that such a rapid ascent could kill him. When he burst back to the surface, that explorer was already mad. When the hatch opened, he roared and shouted under the sunlight, as if trying desperately to describe something terrifying to us. After a long flood of chaotic, incomprehensible words, he spoke one single clear sentence:

“We all died down there.”