119: Dance of Death! A solitary journey through the deep sea, watched by a thousand floating corpses!

Farewell to that hangar filled with insect corpses and stench.

Jiang Ran operated the powered armor, squeezing into a maintenance passage leading to the lower deck.

The space here became even narrower and more oppressive.

Collapsed pipelines lay across the air like tangled hemp, and deformed metal walls squeezed inward.

In some places, Jiang Ran even had to use the Vibration Blade to forcibly cut through obstacles to barely pass.

But as the depth increased, the surrounding environment began to undergo an unsettling change.

The seawater, which was originally pitch black,

began to shimmer with an eerie, ghostly blue light at some point.

At first, it was just scattered spots, like fluorescent powder sprinkled on the ground.

But when Jiang Ran turned a corner

and entered the main corridor of B-deck, the sight before him made him subconsciously stop in his tracks.

The entire corridor was submerged in a deep, thick azure glow that wouldn't dissipate.

On the walls, on the ceiling, and even in the cracks of the floor beneath his feet,

there grew a kind of coral-like, crystal-clear moss.

They greedily stretched out their fine mycelium, emitting a ghostly, cold blue light.

It decorated this steel tunnel leading to the depths like a crystal road to the underworld.

It was breathtakingly beautiful, yet so sinister it was chilling.

“Zzzzzzz—!!”

The moment Jiang Ran stepped into this blue light, the radiation alarm on his HUD interface suddenly jumped an octave.

It turned into a continuous, piercing noise, like electricity breaking through the air.

“Radiation readings have exceeded the threshold.

Current environmental radiation: 120 Sieverts per hour.”

“Warning: This is a lethal dose.

Any carbon-based organism exposed for ten seconds without protection will experience irreversible cellular collapse.”

Su Qingyu's voice sounded in the communication channel, carrying a hint of unconcealed horror:

“Boss, that's the biological enrichment phenomenon of ‘cherenkov radiation’.”

“Those glowing things aren't ordinary deep-sea algae. They are devouring high-energy particles.”

“When the speed of charged particles in a medium exceeds the speed of light in that medium,

this ghostly blue glow is produced... Usually, this light is only seen in the core pools of nuclear reactors.”

“But now, the entire lower level of this ship has become part of the reactor.”

Jiang Ran looked at this poignantly beautiful sea of blue light and reached out to grab a handful in front of him.

Though separated by thick armor,

he felt as if he could sense those invisible high-energy particle streams washing over his body like a rainstorm.

If not for the protection of this lead-tungsten alloy lining, he would be a dead man by now.

“The blue light of Chernobyl...”

Jiang Ran muttered to himself, stepping forward and crushing the glowing moss on the ground.

With his footsteps, those blue fluorescent powders rose in the water like a swarm of startled ghosts.

“It seems we’ve found the right place.”

“The more beautiful something is, the more deadly it tends to be.”

...“Splash...”

A strange sound of water disturbance came from a cabin ahead and to the side.

Jiang Ran subconsciously tightened his grip on the Vibration Blade, pressing his body against the wall and suppressing his breathing to the minimum.

In the depths of those ghostly blue shadows, a massive dark silhouette slowly swam out.

It was a fish.

Or rather, it used to be a fish.

It should have been a common deep-sea grouper.

But under the brush of that mad painter called nuclear radiation, it had become a total nightmare.

Its body had swelled to the size of a millstone, and its originally smooth scales had long since fallen off.

In their place was a mass of festering, grayish-white flesh.

And upon that flesh, it was densely covered with tumors like clusters of grapes.

Those tumors quivered slightly with the current.

Some had already ruptured, leaking dark green pus, while others were translucent, revealing the tangled purple-red blood vessels inside.

It swam slowly, its movements stiff and distorted, every flick of its tail seeming to cause immense pain.

As it swam past Jiang Ran, with the help of the spotlight on his helmet, Jiang Ran saw its face clearly.

On that fish face, three eyes had grown.

They weren't symmetrically distributed but looked as if they had been tossed on randomly—two squeezed on the left, and one hanging on the forehead.

The eyeballs were cloudy and white, with irregular cross-shaped pupils, exuding an irrational chaos and madness.

Its gills were severely everted.

The bright red gill filaments hung outside like a mass of rotten meat, spraying a faint mist of blood into the blue seawater with every breath.

“This is a masterpiece of nuclear radiation.”

Jiang Ran watched as the deformed monster ignored his presence.

Like a walking corpse, it slowly bumped into the wall, then turned and swam away as if nothing had happened.

Here, there was no natural law of 'survival of the fittest'.

This was a violent genetic laboratory.

High-energy particles indiscriminately bombarded every cell nucleus, breaking DNA strands and forcibly splicing gene fragments.

Every life born here was an infinitesimally small, pain-filled error of probability.

“It's not just this one.”

As Jiang Ran's gaze swept across the surroundings, he saw more.

moray eels with two heads were biting each other;

Crabs with only half a body and internal organs dragging on the floor were crawling with difficulty;

And there were plankton as transparent as jellyfish but filled with sharp teeth.

“This isn't the deep sea.”

Jiang Ran withdrew his gaze and stepped over that deformed large fish twitching in the corner:

“This is a Shura Field abandoned by God.”

...Passing through that nauseating corridor of deformed creatures, Jiang Ran stopped before a severely deformed cabin door.

Although the doorplate was covered in grime, the title set into the brass plate was still faintly discernible—‘CO’ (Commanding Officer).

This was the Captain's Lounge.

The lock had long since been damaged, and Jiang Ran operated the Mechanical Arm to give it a gentle push.

With a dull sound of metal grinding, this door, sealed for a hundred years, slowly opened.

The furnishings inside the room were unexpectedly well-preserved.

A heavy mahogany desk was bolted to the floor, and on the wall hung a long-faded Star-Spangled Banner and several family photos.

In a drawer of that desk, Jiang Ran found an orange waterproof emergency box marked ‘Classified’.

This military-grade polycarbonate box had excellent sealing properties.

Even under the high pressure of the deep sea, it remained dry inside.

“Click.”

The latch popped open.

Inside were no gold bars or banknotes.

Only a leather logbook with a slightly moldy cover and a long-dried fountain pen.

Jiang Ran flipped open the log.

The earlier entries were very dull, nothing more than routine patrol records, exercise scores, and supply lists.

The handwriting was neat, exuding the rigor of a professional soldier.

But when he flipped to the last few pages, the handwriting changed.

It became scrawled and messy, with some strokes even tearing through the paper, exuding a bottomless despair and fear.

[20XX, December 21st, 14:30]

“Crazy... everyone's gone crazy.

Pacific Command has lost contact, and Washington is just a dial tone.

Satellite signals are all cut off.

On the radar screen, there are massive energy fluctuations centered here everywhere.”

[14:45]

“It's not a tsunami.

Repeat, not a tsunami!

The observer reports the sky has turned blood red.

The clouds are burning.”

[14:52]

“My God... I see it.

It didn't come from the sea; it fell from the sky.”

“A beam of light.

A pure, silent spear of light pierced through the clouds.”

“It wasn't a nuke, no mushroom cloud.

But the ‘USS Ronald Reagan’ vanished in an instant... it was directly vaporized by that light.”

The log broke off here for a moment.

A few dried stains were left on the paper, looking like blood, and also like tears.

The following words were almost illegible, like the final mad screams of this captain before his death:

[14:55]

“space-based kinetic weapon... it's the ‘Rods from God’!

Someone is firing at us from orbit!

This isn't a natural disaster at all; this is an execution!”

“They are clearing out human armaments.

They are...”

The writing stopped abruptly here.

A final long ink mark streaked across the paper, the trace of the captain being unable to hold the pen during a violent impact.

Jiang Ran closed the log.

He put it back into the waterproof box and then solemnly stored it in the storage compartment of his powered armor.

He looked up.

Through the massive, terrifying hole with melted edges above this cabin, he looked at the ghostly blue seawater overhead.

“As expected.”

Jiang Ran's voice was as cold as if he were reading a verdict:

“The Great Flood wasn't the only culprit.”

“Before this ship sank, it had already been pinned to the sea surface by a ‘spear’ from the zenith.”

This wasn't just a natural disaster.

This was a premeditated, targeted elimination of the backbone of old era human civilization.

The so-called apocalypse was merely a script already written by the ‘Harvesters’... Stowing away that heavy truth, Jiang Ran continued deeper down the corridor soaked in ghostly blue light.

The closer he got to the bottom, the heavier that eerie silence became.

Those deformed fish and mutant crabs that were wandering the corridors earlier had all vanished at some point.

It was as if an invisible field existed in this area.

It made those bloodthirsty radiation species instinctively feel fear, not daring to take a single step further.

“This is the so-called ‘territorial effect’.”

Jiang Ran looked at the empty passage, the string of vigilance in his heart tightening even more.

In nature, if a resource-rich area has no small predators,

it usually means only one thing—a big guy lives here that no one dares to mess with.

Turning the last corner, a massive blast door stood in his way.

That was the final physical barrier leading to the reactor core chamber—the main safety isolation door.

According to design standards, this door was cast from titanium alloy composite armor half a meter thick.

Even in the event of a reactor core meltdown or even a hydrogen explosion, it could lock the lethal disaster inside.

But now, this once indestructible ‘shield’ had turned into a pile of twisted scrap metal.

It had been opened.

Not unlocked by an electronic key, nor blown open by explosives.

It had been ‘torn’ open.

Jiang Ran operated the powered armor to slowly approach, extending the Mechanical Arm to touch the shocking breach on the door panel.

The fifty-centimeter-thick titanium alloy steel plate was like a thin sheet of tinfoil.

It had been forcibly torn apart from the middle by brute force, the edges curling outward violently, revealing the jagged metal edges inside.

And on that curled steel plate, three deep gouges were clearly imprinted.

“Are these... claw marks?”

Jiang Ran placed his mechanical palm against them for comparison.

The result made his pupils contract slightly—each gouge was wider than the thigh of his powered armor.

“Even industrial hydraulic shears from the old era couldn't leave such smooth cuts on titanium alloy.”

Jiang Ran looked at the cross-section that still radiated a metallic luster, imagining the scene at the time:

A massive monster, with just a light swipe of its claws,

had sliced through this door designed to withstand a nuclear blast, as easily as a hot knife through butter.

“It seems we’re facing more than just a leaking reactor.”

Jiang Ran withdrew his hand and drew the Vibration Blade from his waist, pushing the power to its maximum:

“There’s a tyrant living in here.”

“A monster that grew up eating nuclear waste and uses titanium alloy as a chew toy.”

...Stepping over that violently torn metal threshold, Jiang Ran finally entered the heart of this steel behemoth—the nuclear power chamber.

In that instant, the darkness in his vision completely vanished.

In its place was an azure glow so brilliant it was almost blinding.

“Warning: Ambient light intensity is too high; automatic light filtering mode activated.”

Even as the HUD interface quickly reduced light transmission, Jiang Ran still felt a sting in his eyes.

The concentration of cherenkov radiation here had reached an outrageous level.

The entire massive chamber no longer seemed to be filled with seawater, but with liquid blue light.

It was like being inside a blue star.

And in the center of that dazzling sea of light, two massive cylindrical structures stood like two silent temples, towering and majestic.

They were the pressure vessels for two A1B nuclear reactors.

The one on the left was pitch black, like a dead giant.

But the one on the right... its side armor had a hideous gash, a fatal wound left when the hull broke apart years ago.

And now, countless visible high-energy particle streams were like blue lava,

gushing out from that wound, dyeing everything around it with the color of death.

But what made Jiang Ran feel the most dread wasn't the leaking reactor.

It was the thing perched on the reactor's breach.

It was a massive dark silhouette.

Its body was over twenty meters long.

Like a giant gecko, or rather a mutant Sea Lizard, it was deathly clung to the reactor's shell.

Its scale-covered back had two rows of sharp, crystal-like translucent spines growing along the spine line.

At this moment, these spines were like fuel rods inserted into the reactor,

greedily absorbing the nuclear energy overflowing from the breach, emitting a dizzying ghostly blue light.

It was ‘feeding’.

It had turned this leaking nuclear reactor into its own food bowl.

It treated the lethal radiation, enough to instantly kill an entire army, as nourishing sustenance.

“Sizzle—”

As if sensing the arrival of an uninvited guest, the behemoth perched in the light column stopped its sucking.

It slowly turned its head.

On that massive head covered with thick bone armor,

there were no eyes like those of ordinary creatures; instead, there were several cracks emitting heat waves.

It looked at Jiang Ran like an evil dragon guarding treasure, looking at an ant that had stumbled into its lair.

“ROAR—!!!”

Although the deep sea could not transmit sound,

the intense shockwave that erupted in that instant slammed directly into Jiang Ran's chest,

making the entire powered armor let out a groan of being overwhelmed.

And beneath that monster,

deep within the reactor breach gushing with blue light, a speck of crimson light was faintly visible.

That was no.06 spark.

“Found you.”

Jiang Ran tightened his grip on the Vibration Blade, facing this deep-sea tyrant that fed on nuclear energy, a mad curve tugging at the corners of his mouth:

“It seems if I want to get the treasure, I have to get past the watchdog first.”