Deep Sea Embers

Listening to Tirian's story, Duncan fell into thinking for a short time. After half a minute, he raised his head and spoke thoughtfully: So, in order to satisfy her desire to explore, she started an abyss diving plan. , and the essence of this plan is not to explore subspace at all, but just...literally 'dive into deep water,'?

Having said this, he paused and felt that this matter was quite strange: But if that was all, how could this plan be related to the Lost Home? The subspace that the Lost Home went to and the deep sea that the Frost Queen wanted to explore are completely different concepts. Those rebels should not be able to distinguish between them...

Tirian did not answer directly, but suddenly asked a question: Don't you find it strange? If you just dive into the water and explore the sea conditions deep in the city-state, what can be called "taboo"? City-state port builders and offshore fishermen often need to dive into the water for work. It is very common to dive more than ten or even tens of meters in safe waters. Why did the Frost Queen's plan to dive into the abyss become taboo? ?

Duncan's eyes gradually became serious: ...how deep did you dive?

Very, very deep. I don’t know to what depth the Queen finally dived, because I am not a scholar myself. I only participated in some peripheral assistance as a naval commander, and I no longer directly participated in the operation in the second half of the plan. But as far as I know, before the plan started to go... awry, their manned submersible had reached a depth of at most one thousand meters underwater, and was still breaking that record.

One thousand meters underwater...

Duncan quickly sorted out the knowledge he knew in his mind - on earth, that seemingly inconspicuous number actually does not reach the ultimate diving depth of many advanced military submarines, and the diving depth of most military submarines is only four Five hundred meters. As for these extreme deep diving records, which are often thousands of meters or even nearly 10,000 meters, they are basically completed by special deep submersibles over a long period of time. The requirements for equipment are extremely high, and often they can only be used underwater. people equipment.

At that time, the Frost Queen's manned submersible had not yet touched the threshold of one thousand meters. Considering the industrial level of that world half a century later, even with the assistance of some extraordinary power, this was an astonishing figure.

And behind this astonishing number... there is obviously something even more amazing.

Tyrian just mentioned that the plan gradually became wrong in the later stages, and Duncan did not ignore this word.

Duncan expressed his doubts, but Tirian just shook his head: We also had doubts about this, but in the end we couldn't figure it out. And compared with what happened later...'How did the city-state drift? At sea, this problem is irrelevant.

A huge city is placed on this round cake.

Of course, up to this point, this is what we expected - exploring the unknown inherently requires facing challenges in terms of will, and scholars who explore the spiritual world and remote sea areas often encounter this problem, so We are still continuing, but strengthening the explorer's mental protection to the most meticulous standards.

The No. 8 submersible suddenly sent out a signal to slowly surface, and then emptied the pressurized water tank like crazy and rushed up. The explorer inside seemed completely unconcerned that this rapid surface behavior would kill him, and was rushing up. After getting to the surface, the explorer went crazy. The hatch was opened and he screamed in the sun. He seemed to be desperately trying to describe something terrible to us. After a lot of incomprehensible and confusing words, he said The only clear sentence came out:

What happened next? Duncan couldn't help but become curious, what happened next? What did they see in the deep sea?

Hanshuang frowned tightly. I didn't speak. Instead, I slowly outlined the entire knot in my mind according to Tirian's description.

Structure--

As Tirian described it: The entire structure is floating in the sea.

Of course, compared with the radius of the city-state itself, this pillar is at least four hundred meters long. In fact, it is still very long in proportion. It is not so much a pillar as it is like a regular disk. end

The base holds an island.

Yes, at least that's not the case with Duncan. Tirian nodded, what's the problem? But after imagining this model, Duncan was filled with huge doubts——

...Except for Duncan's submersible plan, the conventional diving depth recorded by humans, or 'individual water depth,' is one hundred and seventy meters, and is limited to the offshore range - our plan also initially ended at this depth. And until the 800 meters, the plan went smoothly.

They all died here. It is very dark under the sea. The sunlight on the sea cannot penetrate such a thick body of water. The high-power lamps carried by the submersible can only illuminate a small area. In order to explore the appearance of the city-state island below, but also to try to Perhaps to avoid some individual creatures in the open sea area, such as the descendants of the deep sea, we let the submersible dive along the coast and keep moving close to the offshore range of the island. I still remember the scene described by the explorers at that time after they came up... …

The entire structure floats in the sea water.

People in the Deep Sea Age lived in city-states. Those isolated islands on the sea initially gave Duncan the impression that they were crowded and small, but in fact, as fully functional and self-sufficient residences, these city-states were destined to have a certain size basis, although there were some It is a large island, but most of the big cities that can be named have a basic radius of more than ten kilometers or even dozens of kilometers. As the largest city-state in Lenglie Sea, its scale will not be smaller than this number.

It seemed that because he had answered a lot of questions and was not yet accustomed to this kind of communication, Tirian did not last long this time and fell into memories, and slowly spoke in the memories:

Duncan shook his head: ...No problem, you continue.

You said that the bottom of the island is like a beautiful and smooth pillar, covered with thick calcareous sediments, and there are some strange creatures living in the pits of the sediments. Apart from the pillar, there is nothing around it. There was nothing but darkness.

The pillar below the city-state is actually only 470 meters long, and there is nothing further down.

Subsequently, they built the eighth submersible - due to technical limitations, the improvement of that submersible was far less than that of the seventh submersible. It had to dive carefully to challenge the record of the seventh submersible, and at one meter it was While diving slowly for one meter, they discovered something.

The problem came when challenging the 1,000 meters from 840 meters.

Tirian sorted out his thoughts and continued his previous memories: This was a scene seen at a depth of about 800 meters, which was also the ultimate depth of the first submersible. After realizing that this depth was far from enough to explore the deep sea, Hanshuang The Queen ordered scholars to build a second submersible. This submersible was very successful. It dived into the water to a depth of 400 meters in one breath. Through the high-strength glass half a meter thick, what the explorers saw... Still a pillar, a straight pillar.

Every city-state must be like that, a floating object without a foundation, so how can they be so stable? It must be said that the stability of the city-state itself is due to its large enough scale, but the relative position between the city-state and the city-state is also so stable, so how to explain it?

Tirian stopped and looked up into Duncan's eyes: Now do you know why I just said it is more like a disc base than a pillar?

Is there a pillar under the island? Duncan couldn't help but interrupt Tirian, not the gradually expanding support structure, but a pillar?

Later... the No. 8 submersible continued to challenge the ultimate depth. It took us nearly two years to push the record from 470 meters to 470 meters. As you can imagine, during this dive process , the submersible is gradually moving away from the city-state's base - remember what I said at the end? In order to avoid problems in the open sea area, we let the submersible dive in the offshore dangerous zone near the coast. During the whole process, the submersible was actually close to the city-state and the city-state's underwater structure, but as it went down The potential continues, the explorer moves away from this base, and something is wrong.

He looked at Tirian, his eyes became deep: I hope to know the details of the entire exploration plan.

Situation - tell me how much you were involved.

Corresponding to this huge underwater structure is its base, which is only 470 meters deep underwater. The explorers first saw the underwater part of the city-state extending straight into the deep sea at a depth of 800 meters. Intuitively, I imagine that it is a pillar that reaches the bottom of the sea, but in actual proportion, the shape of this pillar is more like a thin round cake.

Is this the case in every city-state?

Auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, feeling like there are inexplicable lights in the water, feeling like someone is knocking on the hull of the boat inside, and even feeling like someone is turning the handle of the gate inside. The further down you go, the more serious the situation becomes. Even after special training, The tough-minded explorers began to feel tremendous pressure with every dive, and the protective effect of the holy oil, sacred books and scriptures they carried with them became less and less obvious.

The boundless sea is rolling with waves, but these floating islands have never changed their positions. Why is this?