UGB Chapter 169 Land Reclamation in the East China Sea and the Deep-Sea Bronze Box
Chapter 169 Land Reclamation in the East China Sea and the Deep-Sea Bronze Box
The East China Sea.
The sea breeze, carrying salty, briny vapors, lashed erratically against the special bulletproof glass. The surface of the sea was completely dark, devoid of any light. The "Eden," a super-cruise ship with a displacement exceeding 100,000 tons, lay anchored in the center of the ocean current.
The music on the lower deck was so loud that it drowned out the roar of the waves.
Blinding laser lights swept wildly across the thousands of square meters of casino space. The air was thick with the mingled scents of cheap cigars, alcohol, and the pungent smell of blood. Three thousand top assassins from the dark web and awakened individuals from overseas were reveling here.
At a gambling table, a bear-like awakened being covered in black bristles slammed a stack of chips onto the table.
"Cheers! For this easy, publicly funded vacation! The people at S.H.I.E.L.D. have lost their minds, spending three billion dollars to gather us on the high seas, just to make us sit here and wait for days?"
The assassins nearby joined in the commotion, raising their glasses of strong liquor and downing them in one gulp.
No one knew that twelve high-yield dirty bombs were strapped to the bottom cargo hold of the entire ship. Even fewer knew that these three thousand vigorous martial artists were, from the very beginning, appetizers that the S.H.I.E.L.D. was preparing to feed to that monster in the deep sea.
Inside the top-floor bridge, it was so quiet that the only sound was the operation of the central air conditioning.
Hughes, head of the S.H.I.E.L.D.'s overseas operations division, stood before the holographic projection platform. On the screen, a massive red dot representing a high-energy source was rapidly rising in a deep trench seven thousand meters below the seabed.
The demon skeleton that crawled out from under the Antarctic glacier has reached the top of the Guixu Secret Realm.
Hughes's communication channel flashed twice. He pressed the answer button.
There was only piercing static noise inside.
Hughes took off his headphones and threw them on the control panel. There had been a full ten minutes of no contact with the city. William's vital signs monitor had just gone completely flat.
The signals from the twelve expensive S-class genetic mutants also disappeared.
Hughes grabbed the hot coffee on the table, took a sip, and forced down the inexplicable tremor in his chest.
The situation in Beijing is most likely in shambles. That young man surnamed Lu from China is far more capable than the think tank's calculations could have predicted.
But so what?
Hughes watched the red dot of the deep sea getting closer and closer on the screen and sneered.
Once the bone of the Nascent Soul stage dragon is pulled out from the seabed, the death energy of Earth's last spiritual vein will burst through the sea surface. At that time, the blood and qi of these three thousand awakened beings, mixed with the radiation from twelve dirty bombs, will be enough to blast a cross-boundary passage into an absolute vacuum within a radius of five hundred miles.
When the army from the Sirius region arrives, even if Lu Yuan has extraordinary abilities, he will be reduced to a pile of mud.
drop.
The radar monitoring system emitted a short, urgent beep.
The operator on the bridge turned his head sharply, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets.
"Sir! The close-in weapon system cannot lock onto the target! The speed exceeds Mach 6! There is no thermal reaction! It's pure kinetic energy!"
Hughes' coffee cup trembled.
"What direction? What's the trajectory?"
The operator's voice was trembling.
"Straight above! Falling vertically!"
The words had barely left his mouth when a sharp, piercing cracking sound came from the alloy ceiling above.
The 100,000-ton super cruise ship sank violently by more than ten meters. The enormous displacement created waves tens of meters high around it, directly turning the open-air swimming pool on the deck upside down.
Lu Yuan placed his feet on the command deck in front of the bridge.
He didn't even try to slow down. The terrifying kinetic energy of the thousands of tons that had been hurtling all the way from the capital crashed into the ship's hull without reservation, flowing down his military boots.
Two deep craters were carved into the half-meter-thick special steel plate. Cracks spread wildly in all directions in a spiderweb pattern.
The shockwave ignored physical barriers and penetrated directly through the two decks below.
The hundreds of Awakened Ones who were just moments before raising their glasses in celebration at the gambling table didn't even have time to scream. Their internal organs and bones were crushed on the spot by the immense force, turning into puddles of rotten flesh stuck to the cabin walls. Blood dripped down the ventilation ducts.
Hughes was knocked to the ground by the blast wave, and coffee was splashed all over his face.
He scrambled toward the control panel, smashing the red glass cover with his hands and feet, and gripped the metal detonation lever tightly with his right hand.
Hughes yelled at the top of his lungs.
"Lu Yuan! Stop right there!"
Cold sweat mixed with coffee dripped from Hughes' forehead as he stared intently at the young man in the black windbreaker outside the window.
"There are twelve high-yield dirty bombs in the lower compartment! The detonation fuses are unlocked! As long as I press the lever, the entire East China Sea will become a dead sea filled with radiation!"
Hughes put all his strength into his right hand, and the veins on the back of his hand bulged out.
"If you take one more step forward, we'll all die together!"
Lu Yuan took his hands out of his windbreaker pockets and shook off the condensation from his sleeves.
"Is the only textbook for your multinational conglomerates' onboarding training to be 'mutual destruction'?"
Lu Yuan lifted his foot and took a step forward.
"William pressed the button for ages in the capital without any response. Are you planning to try again?"
Hughes's mind went blank.
William's detonation failed? How could that be? The detonation circuit of the dirty bomb is an independent physical hard connection, which does not need to go through a quantum network at all, and cannot even be interfered with by radar silence.
But he had no time to think. Lu Yuan's foot had already shattered the bulletproof glass of the bridge.
Hughes gritted his teeth and pushed the lever all the way down.
The lower deck was so quiet that not even a fart could be heard.
Lu Yuan's Mahayana-stage divine sense had already pulverized the entire ship's physical wiring a second before landing. Under the crushing force of his divine sense, those special alloy wires had long since become pieces of scrap iron that had lost their conductive function.
Lu Yuan raised his right hand, spread his five fingers, and aimed them at the deck beneath his feet.
"Three thousand sacrificial offerings are being wasted here."
A secret demonic technique used during the Mahayana stage. Remotely extracting souls.
The more than two thousand surviving assassins and awakened individuals on the cruise ship stopped all their movements at the same time.
The person running fell to the ground in a stride. The person drawing a gun had their finger frozen on the trigger.
Their facial features began to contort violently, and black, stagnant blood uncontrollably flowed from their seven orifices.
One by one, translucent souls were forcibly ripped from the tops of the head. More than two thousand souls let out a mournful wail in mid-air that was inaudible to ordinary people, piercing through the thick deck and converging into a long, pale green river in the night sky, all of which flowed into Lu Yuan's palm.
Lu Yuan flipped his palm over. A ball of Samadhi True Fire ignited in his palm.
The river of souls, along with Hughes's terrified remnant soul, crackled and popped under the scorching heat of the true fire. Impurities were instantly incinerated, finally condensing into a pure soul power crystal the size of a walnut.
Lu Yuan didn't even glance at the ship full of corpses, and casually tossed the soul power crystal into his storage ring.
The cruise ship beneath my feet began to make cracking noises, as if it were about to break apart.
The sea was churning violently. A massive whirlpool, over 500 meters in diameter, was forming beneath the cruise ship. Dark seawater was pouring in frantically, and massive amounts of bubbles were rising from the seabed, carrying a strong aura of death from the earth's veins.
The plug in the Guixu Secret Realm has been pulled.
A deep, rumbling sound came from the depths of the sea. It was the primal pressure emanating from the remains of a Nascent Soul stage dragon that had been disturbed.
Lu Yuan looked down at the bottomless center of the vortex, preparing to jump in.
His Mahayana-stage divine sense inadvertently swept over the broken hold of the cruise ship.
A shipping container, encased in heavy lead, was smashed open by the seawater. Inside, there were no ordinary goods, only a bronze box covered in green rust.
The surface of the box was covered with distorted star patterns.
More importantly, the aura emanating from the box was exactly the same as the void crack on the surface of the Nine Heavens Storage Ring on Lu Yuan's finger.
Lu Yuan stopped in his tracks.
He raised his hand and glanced at the ring on his index finger.
This Nine Heavens Storage Ring was a top-tier magical artifact he used to withstand the spatial gales when traversing the void. The cracks on it were caused by the pure backlash of the void laws. How could a wasteland like Earth, with its depleted spiritual energy, possibly contain a physical object imbued with the same void laws, where even a tribulation of the Nascent Soul stage cannot be nurtured?
Where did the S.H.I.E.L.D. dig this thing up from?
Lu Yuan made a grasping motion with his five fingers. The immense suction force pierced through hundreds of meters of seawater, pulling the bronze box out of the ruins.
The box was extremely heavy. The rust on the surface appeared to be formed from some kind of dried blood.
Lu Yuan didn't break the seal on the box immediately; instead, he put it into his ring. He'd settle this score later, after dismantling the skeleton in the sea.
The 100,000-ton cruise ship broke in half and was mercilessly swallowed by the whirlpool at the bottom of the sea.
Lu Yuan did not raise his true essence shield. He let the icy seawater engulf him.
His physical body, at the peak of the Mahayana stage, showed no discomfort under the high pressure of the deep sea. He was pulled straight into the seven-thousand-meter-deep seabed trench by the immense force of the current.
Light has completely disappeared here.
The surrounding water pressure was so great that it could crush the armor of a main battle tank into a piece of waste paper. The mutated fish in the deep sea had long since fled.
Only at the very bottom of the ravine, at the so-called high-energy radiation source that the Bureau of Extraordinary Immortals had been monitoring, did bursts of dark red blood light emanate.
It was a massive altar built from countless bones.
In the very center of the altar, there is a hundred-meter-long dragon spine, its entire body translucent and pale gold.
This bone is like a stabilizing force, pressing down on a dark, twisting seabed dragon vein beneath it.
The demon skeleton that escaped from Antarctica was currently lying on the dragon's spine.
The several pained human faces on its chest had been completely crushed by the high pressure of the deep sea, leaving only bare white bones. Its arms clung tightly to the top of the dragon's spine, slowly pulling the plug out.
As the bones were removed, the seal on the black dragon vein below shattered completely. A massive amount of spiritual energy mixed with death energy was leaking outwards, forming visible black torrents in the seawater.
Lu Yuan's feet landed on the edge of the altar.
The enormous reaction force forcibly pushed aside tens of thousands of tons of seawater, creating a temporary vacuum zone with a radius of hundreds of meters.
The demon skeleton stopped pulling out its bones.
It turned its head over the skull devoid of flesh and blood, and two dark red soul flames ignited in its empty eye sockets, staring intently at Lu Yuan.
Lu Yuan didn't look at it.
His gaze passed over the ball of soul fire and landed on the left hand of the demon skeleton.
In that pale, bony claw, besides gripping the dragon's spine, a palm-sized metal plaque was also tightly clutched.
That's not some kind of magical artifact from the cultivation world at all.
It was an identity plaque made of special titanium alloy used by the Chinese military. The edges of the plaque had been deformed by the high pressure of the deep sea, and it was still stained with a faint trace of the essence blood of a cultivator.
By the dark red glow of the altar, Lu Yuan could make out the two characters carved on it.
Land warfare.
That was the name of his biological father, who had been missing for over a decade and was rumored to have died in the capital's prison.