54: Anhui River Mist

After the river water flowed through the Wuhu section,

the flow speed became eerily sluggish, as if some kind of viscous grease were crawling along the riverbed.

On the originally wide river surface,

a layer of thick, grayish-white fog spread across the water's surface like a living thing, completely devouring the embankments on both sides.

Visibility instantly dropped to less than fifty meters.

Even the high-powered searchlights of the black iron

cast beams that seemed to stab into a pile of cotton, only able to diffuse a patch of ghastly white scattered light.

Jiang Ran stood before the main control console.

The oil-stained hand-drawn defense map had been spread out on the tactical table, next to a real-time pulsing sonar image.

"Warning: High-density metal reaction detected ahead."

The mechanical synthesized voice of the ship's main computer suddenly rang out in the deathly silent cockpit.

On the sonar screen, the originally smooth riverbed scan line suddenly bulged.

Dense clusters of light dots, like a swarm of venomous insects lurking underwater, lay quietly in wait in the middle of the channel.

According to conventional navigation logic, this was the main channel, where the water depth was most suitable for submarine submerged travel.

But at this moment, Jiang Ran's gaze was fixed firmly on a red skull mark on that hand-drawn map.

Beside the mark was a line of scrawled small characters: "Decoy Zone, touch and die."

"Left rudder fifteen, maintain diving depth at twelve meters, hug the shoals on the right."

Jiang Ran's finger swept heavily across that shoal route, which seemed like a dead end, as he issued the command.

The massive hull groaned with the sound of metal.

Defying common sense, it veered toward the right, into that dangerous water filled with reefs.

At the very moment the black iron deviated from the main channel,

a surge of undercurrent occurred, and a long-corroded magnetic induction mine beneath the main channel was disturbed by the flow, breaking free from its anchor chain.

Although it didn't explode, its hideous casing, covered in barnacles, slowly floated up, brushing past the edge of the sonar detection.

If they had hit it at their previous speed, the bottom of the ship would have been torn wide open in that instant.

Jiang Ran watched the light dot that had narrowly missed on the screen, his eyes turning slightly cold.

That map was real.

This seemingly calm stretch of the Wan River had actually long been transformed by The Stubborn Old Man into a massive underwater minefield.

As the black iron broke through the final barrier, the grayish-white curtain was finally torn apart in front of the bow.

The river surface before them was no longer empty; instead, a suffocating field of steel remains stood tall.

Several heavy gantry cranes, dozens of meters high, were stuck askew in the murky river water like the skeletons of dead giants.

They were covered in reddish-brown rust, and broken steel cables hung in mid-air, swaying silently with the river breeze.

As if ready at any moment to hoist non-existent ghost ships.

Further away, rows of factory chimneys showed only half of their charred tops, looking like massive tombstones planted in the water.

This was the core heartland of the Wan River Industrial Zone, which was once not only a shipbuilding center but also the most important heavy industrial corridor along the river.

Jiang Ran stood before the observation window, his gaze sweeping over those semi-submerged factory domes.

It was excessively quiet here, with no roars of mutated water beasts and no cooking smoke from survivors struggling to stay alive.

Even the sound of waves lapping against the embankments was swallowed whole by these massive metal structures.

This deathly silence was completely different from the chaotic, noisy atmosphere full of primal desires at the Dragon King's stronghold upstream.

If the Dragon King's water stockade was a barbarian's carnival, then this was the solemn morgue of the old civilization.

"The sonar echoes are too cluttered."

The First Mate frowned as he stared at the tangled mess of lines on the screen. "It's all metal ruins underwater; it's impossible to tell what's a path and what's a shipwreck."

"This is exactly a natural cover."

Jiang Ran had no intention of slowing down. He stared at the steel ruins standing like a forest:

"Maintain silent navigation. We'll pass between those two toppled cooling towers."

The black iron was like a deep-sea behemoth swimming into a forest of reinforced concrete.

The massive hull nimbly slid past the edge of a collapsed dock, less than two meters away from those sharp, broken steel bars.

"Enable full-band passive reception. I want to hear what's going on here."

Jiang Ran's fingers tapped rapidly on the console, pushing the sonar system's sensitivity to the limit.

A piercing screech of electric current instantly erupted from the speakers.

That was the electromagnetic radiation emitted by industrial equipment remains that hadn't been powered down for decades.

Mixed with the whistling of the wind through hollow buildings, it was like a pot of boiling asphalt—chaotic and noisy.

Su Qingyu frowned and reached out to lower the volume, but Jiang Ran raised his hand to stop her.

He closed his eyes slightly, catching a faint discordant note within this chaotic white noise.

Three seconds.

Five seconds.

Ten seconds.

"Stop."

Jiang Ran snapped his eyes open and locked onto a faint waveform in the ultra-low frequency band. "Isolate this frequency and increase the magnification."

As the background noise was filtered out layer by layer,

a monotonous, cold, and highly rhythmic tapping sound echoed clearly in the cockpit.

Thump—Thump—Thump.

The interval was precise to the millisecond, looping every fifteen seconds.

This was definitely not a distress signal from a survivor hitting a pipe with a wrench, nor did it sound like the heartbeat of some mutated creature.

It was a mechanical repetition, a cold declaration meant to keep people at a distance.

"This is an automatically looping broadcast of an expulsion code."

Jiang Ran stared at the green ripple on the screen, which pulsed as steadily as an electrocardiogram, a cold smirk playing at the corner of his mouth:

"No voice, no warning, only this dull frequency.

It means—

I know you're here, stay away."

This kind of signal, which not only required power to maintain

but also a sophisticated automated control system to keep running, was a form of showing off in this wasteland world.

The Stubborn Old Man from the diary was indeed still alive.

And just as the rumors said.

He had locked himself in that iron shell, putting up a "No Trespassing" sign to the entire world.

"Lock on to the signal source's location."

Jiang Ran ordered, "Whether he welcomes us or not, he's definitely receiving guests today."

As the black iron followed the signal toward a deep-water harbor, its speed was forced down to idle.

On the sonar screen, a red high wall spanned the center of the riverbed, completely cutting off the path forward.

That wasn't a natural reef.

It was a grand defensive line man-made from over a dozen sunken barges of several thousand tons, large containers, and precast concrete blocks.

"There's no way through."

The pilot stared at that airtight underwater Great Wall of steel, cold sweat breaking out on his forehead:

"This looks like it was intentionally blocked off."

"It's not blocked off; it's a sieve."

Jiang Ran pushed the pilot aside and grabbed the manual control stick himself.

His gaze swept sharply over the seemingly haphazard angles at which the shipwrecks were stacked on the screen.

Laymen look at the surface, while experts look at the mechanics.

The placement of these shipwrecks was extremely precise, forming a subtle mechanical support structure between them.

If one tried to use torpedoes to violently blast a gap like the Dragon King would, the shockwave of the explosion would instantly trigger a chain reaction collapse.

Tens of thousands of tons of scrap iron would tumble down like a landslide, burying the intruder completely at the bottom of the river.

This wasn't a roadblock at all; it was a massive engineering trap.

"Retract the horizontal wings, reverse the left thruster by 30%, and full speed on the right."

Jiang Ran's hand was as steady as a rock.

He maneuvered the massive black iron into an extremely dangerous large-angle tilt.

The submarine's massive hull slid past the keel of a sunken freighter, almost touching it.

The metal hull and the corroded edges of the shipwreck rubbed violently.

A screeching sound rang out, and sparks flashed momentarily in the pitch-black water.

In the bottom-left corner of this seemingly impenetrable defensive line,

between the third shipwreck and the riverbed, a "dog hole" had been left that only a single submarine could pass through.

This was the only way through, a blind spot that only an extremely precise sonar operator could discover.

Accompanied by a dull impact sound,

the belly of the black iron brushed against a concrete slab,

the entire ship shuddered violently, then suddenly felt lighter as it passed through this death labyrinth.

The red high wall on the screen was instantly left behind.

Jiang Ran let go of the control stick and looked at the suddenly open water ahead.

Someone who could set up such a scheme certainly had the right to be arrogant.

After passing through that lethal shipwreck defense line, the water became deep and empty.

At the end of the searchlight's ghastly white beam, a suffocatingly large shadow gradually revealed its true form.

It was a giant semi-submersible dock inverted on the riverbed, like a lurking steel beast.

It had buried most of its body in the silt, leaving only a moss-covered alloy gate exposed.

The gate was over twenty meters high, with an estimated thickness of over three meters.

This was a fortification designed in the old era to withstand the shockwaves of a nuclear explosion.

On that tightly closed gate, the mottled characters for "Restricted Area" could still be vaguely identified.

"This is The Stubborn Old Man's tortoise shell."

Su Qingyu looked at the images transmitted back to the screen, a hint of shock in her voice: "If we don't blow it open, we won't be able to get in at all."

"It can't be blown open."

Jiang Ran dismissed it flatly: "For a protective door of this level, unless you have a tactical nuclear bomb, ordinary torpedoes wouldn't even be enough to scratch it."

He walked to the sonar console, his finger hovering over the transmit button.

If brute force doesn't work, then use a 'key'.

The frequency that had been looping the expulsion signal was actually an ancient Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) inquiry mechanism.

By returning a signal at a specific frequency and specific intervals, the underlying handshake protocol could be triggered.

Of course, Jiang Ran didn't have a formal key, but he knew how to make noise.

"Charge the main sonar array, frequency 440 Hz, maximum power directional impact."

A cold smile played on Jiang Ran's lips as he slammed down the transmit button.

"Vroom—!!!"

A burst of high-energy sound waves, invisible to the naked eye, instantly slammed into the thick alloy gate, stirring up a visible circle of water ripples.

This wasn't a gentle knock; it was like using a battering ram to smash the door.

This frequency would cause a specific resonance in the metal structure.

Although it wouldn't destroy the gate,

it would sound harsher inside than a hundred alarm clocks going off at once.

After a few seconds of dead silence, that monotonous expulsion signal suddenly came to a screeching halt.

Immediately after, a dull, thunderous sound of gears engaging came from deep underwater.

That massive gate, which had been silent for who knows how many years,

slowly cracked open a gap amidst the hiss of hydraulic rods.

A dim yellow induction light shone through the gap.

It cut paths of light through the pitch-black riverbed, like stairs leading to hell or heaven.

"The door is open."

Jiang Ran straightened his collar and turned back to the command position, his eyes burning with intensity:

"Let's go. Let's head in and see what this ghost of the old era actually looks like."