118: Radiation exclusion zone! A lone soldier exits the vehicle to deliver that ghost's final blow!

"Flood sequence initiated."

Accompanied by the teeth-gritting sound of hydraulic pumps operating, the valve at the bottom of the airlock slowly opened.

Bone-chilling seawater surged in instantly.

Even through the thick "Abyssal Walker" powered armor and the thermal bodysuit underneath,

Jiang Ran could still feel a chill that seemed to come from hell itself.

The water level rose rapidly, washing over his ankles, submerging his knees, and finally swallowing his field of vision.

"Gurgle—"

After the bubbles churned, the world instantly went silent.

The noisy sounds of mechanical operation and electrical hums from inside the cabin all vanished.

Replacing them was an absolute, suffocating silence.

"Huu... haaa..."

All that remained in his ears was his own heavy breathing and the monotonous, rhythmic hum of the life support system's oxygen circulation pump.

"External power disconnected."

"Internal circulation system initiated.

Remaining oxygen: 4 hours."

The pale green HUD interface before his eyes flickered, showing that all survival metrics were normal.

Jiang Ran moved his heavy mechanical neck joint.

Through the hemispherical panoramic faceplate, he glanced at the circular gate in front of him that was slowly opening outward.

Beyond the door lay an endless abyss.

"I'm heading out."

He gave a brief update over the communication channel.

Then, operating this steel shell weighing half a ton, he took a heavy step out of the protection of the black iron.

A sense of weightlessness instantly hit him.

He didn't fall as he would on land; under the influence of the buoyancy control system,

Jiang Ran was like a black fallen leaf, slowly floating in the void eight hundred meters deep in the ocean.

He instinctively looked back.

Behind him, the black iron was hovering quietly in the darkness.

Against the backdrop of the pitch-black seawater, the warship, nearly a hundred meters long, emitted a faint blue glow.

The bioluminescent strips on both sides of the hull pulsed slowly, like an ancient giant whale resting in the deep sea.

It was the only light source in this hopeless darkness, and the only island of civilization.

But now, this island was drifting away from him.

"That feeling of being abandoned by the world is back."

Jiang Ran watched as that warm glow gradually grew smaller in his field of vision.

Finally, it became a blurry speck of light, and an indescribable sense of loneliness welled up in his heart.

Here, there were no teammates, no support.

Only this layer of carbon fiber armor, less than two centimeters thick, isolated him from the lethal embrace of eighty atmospheres of pressure outside.

He turned around, turning his back to the light and facing the endless darkness and abyss.

The thrusters emitted two faint streams of gas, pushing him toward that even larger, more silent steel corpse.

With the fine-tuning of the thrusters, that towering steel wall rapidly enlarged in Jiang Ran's field of vision.

Closer.

When the distance shortened to just a few meters, the pressure brought by this aircraft carrier reached its peak.

It was no longer just a ship.

It wasn't even a man-made object anymore, but a land covered in traces of time that obscured all sight.

"Electromagnetic Adhesion Array: Full power."

Jiang Ran adjusted his posture, slightly bent his legs, and crashed toward a relatively flat section of the armor belt.

"Thud!"

A dull impact sound was transmitted directly to Jiang Ran's eardrums through the metal skeleton of the armor.

Simultaneously, the two high-power electromagnetic generators at the soles of his feet instantly generated several tons of suction,

pinning the heavy powered armor firmly to the vertical hull of the ship.

"Adhesion status stable."

Jiang Ran tried to lift a leg and felt a massive resistance.

He had to control the alternating switching of the magnetic force through the sensors in his feet to take steps on this vertical wall.

"Clack... clack..."

Like a spider wearing iron shoes, he defied common sense regarding gravity,

and began to walk on this steel cliff that was dozens of meters high.

The sensation was extremely bizarre, even causing a strong sense of dizziness.

In his subjective perception, the hull beneath his feet became "the ground,"

while the original "above" and "below" had now become bottomless cliffs.

Jiang Ran stopped, tilted his head slightly, and let the spotlight on his helmet shine "down" along the hull.

The light extended less than fifty meters into the murky seawater before being swallowed.

But even so, he still couldn't see the end of this wall.

The rusted armor, covered in barnacles, extended infinitely toward the abyss, as if leading straight to hell.

And deeper still, the suspended stern of the ship hung precariously at the edge of an undersea cliff,

like the open maw of a giant beast ready to devour anyone at any moment.

"So insignificant."

Jiang Ran looked at the small green dot representing his position in the corner of his field of vision.

On the massive structural diagram of the ship, that dot was so small it was like a grain of dust on the surface of a skyscraper.

The industrial miracles humans took pride in appeared so fragile before the great power of nature and the erosion of time;

and as an individual human, he was so insignificant before this industrial corpse.

"Huu..."

Jiang Ran took a deep breath of recycled oxygen that tasted of rubber, forcibly suppressing the megaphobia that arose in that moment.

"Don't look; that's a dead man's tombstone."

He whispered to himself, his gaze sharpening again as he locked onto the insertion point marked on the HUD:

"And I'm here to rob the grave."

He started walking again.

His magnetic boots left indentations on the rusted steel plates as he climbed steadily toward the massive breach on the broadside... "Clack... clack..."

The dull sounds of magnetic adhesion repeated monotonously.

When Jiang Ran climbed to a height roughly equivalent to the fifth floor of an old era building, a row of circular portholes appeared before him.

These windows, made of aviation-grade bulletproof glass, were not all shattered.

Although covered in algae and grime, they still stubbornly isolated the seawater inside and out.

But on a few of the windows, obvious cracks and holes could be seen.

As if possessed, or perhaps out of some hunter's instinct, Jiang Ran stopped.

He turned slightly.

He adjusted the angle of the tactical spotlight on the side of his helmet, letting the intense beam shine through the grime-covered glass into the cabin interior.

In that moment, even Jiang Ran, who was accustomed to mountains of corpses and seas of blood in the apocalypse, couldn't help but have his breath hitch.

It was a huge soldiers' mess hall or recreation room.

The cabin wasn't filled with silt as expected; instead, it was filled with eerily clear, stagnant seawater.

Under the illumination of the beam, countless white shadows came into view.

They were skeletons.

Hundreds, thousands of skeletons.

They weren't piled on the floor;

instead, due to the gases from decay or the buoyancy of the water, they floated quietly in mid-air.

Even more chilling was that these skeletons were still neatly dressed in the iconic deep blue camouflage fatigues of the old era navy.

That kind of polymer synthetic material was extremely difficult to degrade in a deep-sea environment.

Even though the flesh had long since been devoured by microorganisms,

the clothes still perfectly wrapped the white bones, maintaining their postures from when they were alive.

Because of the holes in the hull, an extremely weak but never-ending undercurrent had formed within the cabin.

This current moved the floating corpses, causing them to slowly rotate and sway in the enclosed space.

Some had their arms spread as if embracing the void, some were curled up as if fast asleep.

Others collided with each other along with the current, making dull soft thuds.

It was like a grand, silent, never-ending ball.

"Time has stopped here."

Jiang Ran looked at the skeletal faces that turned to face the light at this moment, as if grinning at him.

He felt a chill crawl up his spine.

At the moment the disaster occurred, this ship might have been holding some celebration, or it was just a normal dinner time.

Then, death descended from the heavens.

There was no escape, no struggle.

These thousands of souls, along with this giant steel ship, were instantly sealed in this cold seabed.

Maintaining their final postures, they had danced the dance of death for a full hundred years.

"Rest in peace."

Jiang Ran withdrew his gaze and turned off the spotlight on that side, unwilling to further disturb this gathering of ghosts.

He turned his head and looked at the massive breach in the hangar not far ahead, which was torn open like a monster's mouth.

"I hope the things inside are as quiet as you are."

Jiang Ran released the lock on his magnetic boots and kicked hard against the vertical hull.

The thrusters emitted two brief bursts of gas, pushing him to draw an arc in the water.

He dove precisely into the massive elevator shaft on the broadside, which was originally meant for launching fighters... "Thud."

The heavy metal soles of his boots slammed onto the hangar deck, kicking up a ring of murky dust.

This was the largest space inside the aircraft carrier—the hangar.

Even in the dim glimmer of the deep sea,

this massive cavity, the size of three football fields and over eight meters high, still appeared grand and empty.

But the moment Jiang Ran landed, a strange sensation instantly enveloped his body.

It was too quiet.

Not a deathly silence, but a kind of... silence that suppressed some sort of restlessness.

"Zzzt..."

Suddenly, the thermal imaging radar in the upper right corner of the HUD flickered without warning.

In the cold blue background that represented the low ambient temperature, a faint red spot suddenly lit up.

Then came a second, a third, a tenth... In just two seconds, the radar screen looked as if a bucket of blood had been splashed onto it.

Densely packed red dots surged out from dark corners in all directions like a plague, instantly filling the entire display.

"This is..."

Before Jiang Ran could react, a dense, scalp-tingling sound began to echo in the empty hangar.

"Crackle... crackle... crackle..."

It was the sound of countless hard shells rubbing against each other, and the sound of numerous limbs scurrying across the metal floor.

Jiang Ran whipped his head around, the powerful spotlight on his helmet sweeping across.

Wherever the beam of light reached, the once-empty hangar floor, walls, and even the ceiling were now covered in a layer of grayish-white "carpet."

That "carpet" was wriggling.

They were tens of thousands of fist-sized arthropods.

They looked like lice magnified dozens of times, or like shrunken deep-sea giant isopods.

Their backs were covered in hard calcified shells, and their abdomens were covered in dense hooked claws.

Although the pair of vestigial eyes on their heads couldn't see anything, their two antenna-like thermal sensors were trembling frantically.

They had smelled heat.

In this cold and silent world, Jiang Ran's powered armor, powered by a micro-reactor and constantly emitting warm heat,

was like a freshly baked, fragrant cream cake.

"Screech—!!"

It was unclear which insect let out a piercing shriek.

The next second, the wriggling "carpet" exploded.

Countless "Deep Sea Corpse Lice" launched themselves.

Like a grayish-white rainstorm, carrying a nauseating stench, they pelted toward Jiang Ran from all directions.

"Is this your welcoming ceremony?"

Jiang Ran watched his vision get instantly overwhelmed, feeling a massive impact strike his armor.

Then came the teeth-gritting grinding sound of countless sharp mouthparts gnawing on the carbon fiber shell.

He was surrounded.

"Warning: External pressure shield integrity dropped to 92%."

"Warning: Left knee joint flexible seal layer is undergoing physical gnawing; trace water ingress risk detected."

On the pale green HUD interface, red warning boxes popped up frantically like spam ads.

Jiang Ran looked extremely disheveled right now.

He was like a statue splattered with asphalt, his entire body covered in those grayish-white corpse lice.

Those disgusting arthropods were using their sharp mouthparts to frantically tear at the relatively soft bionic muscle materials at the armor's joints.

"Crackle... screech..."

The dense gnawing sounds were conducted through the armor shell.

They were amplified countless times inside the enclosed helmet, as if thousands of rats were grinding their teeth in his ears.

Any ordinary person would likely have had a mental breakdown by now due to claustrophobia and trypophobia.

But Jiang Ran only frowned slightly; the sensation of being covered by countless insects was indeed unpleasant, but it was merely unpleasant.

"Had enough?"

He whispered coldly, his right hand slowly reaching for the mounting point on the outside of his right thigh.

His fingers gripped the hilt.

"Hum—"

As his thumb pressed the activation switch,

a high-frequency vibration that could only be felt through bone conduction instantly spread from his arm throughout his body.

It wasn't a sound, but a frequency enough to make one's teeth ache.

The blade of this specially made tactical knife was vibrating frantically at a terrifying frequency of twenty-four thousand times per second.

In the high-pressure environment of the deep sea,

this high-frequency vibration would instantly create countless tiny vacuum bubbles on the blade's surface.

Then the bubbles would burst, unleashing startling micro-shockwaves.

This was called the cavitation effect.

"Get lost."

Jiang Ran swung his arm violently.

There was no fancy swordsmanship, just a simple horizontal sweep.

But in this instant, a miracle occurred.

A visible semi-transparent ripple,

centered on the blade, like a spreading wave, instantly swept through the surrounding waters within three meters.

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!"

The corpse lice that were originally biting the armor disintegrated like tomatoes thrown into a blender the moment they touched the ripple.

Their hard shells crumbled instantly, and their soft internal organs burst under the impact of the high-frequency shockwaves.

No blood splattered, as they were in the deep sea.

A thick, sickly green fluid mixed with white minced meat instantly exploded around Jiang Ran,

forming a murky "blood mist."

With just one strike,

the originally dense swarm of insects was directly cleared out.

The corpse lice further away seemed frightened by this terrifying blow and instinctively stopped their movements.

Their antennae trembled frantically, as if hesitating whether to continue to their deaths.

Jiang Ran walked out from the slowly dispersing green blood mist.

All the insect remains had been shaken off his armor by the previous shockwave.

The pitch-black carbon fiber shell glinted coldly under the searchlights.

He casually flicked the blade, shaking off the remaining slime; the knife emitted a faint hum in the water, like the whisper of the Grim Reaper.

"The path is clear."

Jiang Ran didn't even look at the still-twitching severed limbs.

Taking heavy steps, he trampled over the scattered shells on the ground and walked toward the containment door leading to the reactor deep within the hangar.