According to calculations, the mysterious, radiation-contaminated sea area had a depth of roughly 600 ters.
At that depth, the water pressure was already extrely high. Ordinary divers could not possibly descend; they would need professional manned subrsibles.
But that certainly couldn’t stop the Aricans who loved courting death.
The strange infectious disease that had erupted in Gilosha City was simply too bizarre. Its popularity was unprecedented. Whether it was to ride the traffic wave or to satisfy excessive curiosity, exploring that mysterious sea area was the best option.
So, before the investigation team managed to contact an offshore oil company that owned deep-sea manned subrsibles and borrow the necessary equipnt, more than one group of civilians had already visited the mysterious waters under the banner of “exploration and truth-seeking.”
Of course, these people still valued their lives.
At most, they only had ordinary diving suits and oxygen tanks. No one possessed professional-grade subrsibles with pressure-resistant cabins. As a result, their dives were limited to within 100 ters of the surface; most of them only went down to around 40 ters, circled briefly, fild so underwater scenery, and then returned to shore.
Even so, any diving video tagged with #MysteriousSeaArea or #RadiationSea attracted a huge audience. A diving influencer nad Herbert even once made it onto the weekly top-viewed videos list of the platform.
Out of curiosity, Everly opened his famous video.
It was very long. The early parts—introductions of the crew, casual banter, preparations, and so on—were all skipped. She dragged the progress bar to about one-quarter in, where Herbert’s rented fishing boat finally passed through a thin layer of mist and entered the mysterious sea area.
As the old soldier had said, this stretch of sea was indeed perpetually shrouded in a faint haze.
Outside, the sun was blazing fiercely, its bright rays hot enough to sting the skin. But once they entered the mysterious sea area, the environnt imdiately darkened by a degree due to the fog absorbing and scattering the light.
Herbert had specifically brought a compass. He brushed at the exposed skin on his arms, complaining that “the fog feels all cold and creepy when it sticks to you,” then took out the compass and pointed the cara at its wildly spinning needle to show the audience.
“I suspect there might be an ultrabasic rock belt or magnetite deposits beneath this sea area. In many cases, these geological factors are the culprits behind compass failure.”
This influencer was actually going down the route of “using science to explain supernatural phenona”!
The fishing boat continued moving inward. Not only the compass, but also the onboard radio began to malfunction. Even though their companion vessel was waiting just outside the fog—less than fifty ters away—they could not establish any communication with it.
Instead, the radio was filled with constant “static—zzzt zzzt” noise, occasionally mixed with extrely harsh scraping sounds, like fingernails dragging across glass.
As the boat went further in, it felt as if they had crossed so kind of boundary. The eerie scraping noises suddenly disappeared. Within the static, faint murmurs began to erge—vague, indistinct whispers that sounded like soone speaking underwater while blowing bubbles. Every syllable was drawn out unnaturally, like sighs or sobs, strange and unsettling.
Even Herbert, who prided himself on his courage, couldn’t help but break out in goosebumps.
“Ah… th-this might be electromagnetic interference, or cosmic rays, or solar activity?” he stamred, trying to explain the strange phenona, though his voice lacked any real confidence.
In truth, by this point, Herbert was already starting to feel afraid.
But he had spent a long ti preparing for this trip, and had invested a large sum of money hiring diving partners, renting the fishing boat, and acquiring equipnt. There was no way he was willing to simply turn back and leave now.
Skipping over a long section filled with psychological analysis, diving preparation, and team mobilization—finally, Herbert and his companions went underwater!
Since underwater sound is difficult to record, subtitles were added from this point onward in the video.
[Just after entering the water, we discovered that the seawater was extrely cold, only about 20°C… this is very abnormal. It’s midsumr right now; surface seawater should be around 25°C. Even without direct sunlight, this temperature is still far too low.]
[The cold feels like needles, piercing straight through our wetsuits into our bones. I think this dive probably won’t last very long…]
There were five people in total on this descent: one was Herbert’s regular partner, Marno, and the other three were diving assistants he had hired. Their job was to set up decompression points underwater and support the two of them.
Perhaps because of the fog covering the sea surface, after only three to four ters of descent, the surrounding environnt quickly darkened.
Herbert turned on his flashlight. The trapezoidal beam cut through the water. Inside the illuminated area, the seawater looked clear—but completely empty. Outside the beam, however, everything appeared even darker and deeper by contrast, as if swallowing the light.
Strangely, despite the large number of dead fish drifting toward shore earlier, there wasn’t a single fish to be seen once they went underwater.
At a depth of 50 ters, the surroundings had already plunged into absolute darkness. Only when looking upward could they faintly see a dim green glow from the surface.
As they continued descending, the divers gradually separated from one another, until each was swallowed alone by the bottomless darkness.
This oppressive descent lasted about seven or eight minutes.
To avoid ear damage from pressure changes, Herbert and Marno could not descend too quickly. Throughout the entire ti, they saw nothing except the bubbles they exhaled and the unfathomable ocean below.
Everly, bored by the monotonous descent, followed the comnts and dragged the video tiline forward to seven minutes later. According to the dive depth gauge, they had now reached 100 ters—reportedly close to the limits of their dive.
In the empty, hollow seawater, sothing finally appeared.
Countless floating dead fish.
At around the 100-ter depth, the fish were still only scattered here and there. But the deeper they went, the more fish appeared in the water.
They looked as if they had been soaked in bleach—entire bodies a deathly pale white. So were rotted in half, others remained intact. So were as large as surfboards, others as small as scalpel blades. A few still vaguely resembled fish, while others looked like the sea monster that had drifted onto shore—grotesque shapes with tentacles, crab legs, and all sorts of bizarre, mismatched appendages.
In the live comnts, viewers familiar with marine life began explaining to others: this one was a shallow-water fish, that one a deep-sea species, this one looked unfamiliar—possibly mutated—and that one was common, but why had it grown so large…
Everly paused the video and carefully read through the comnts before continuing playback.
The video resud.
Herbert clearly also found the sudden appearance of these fish corpses extrely strange—and potentially great for sensational content. So he moved the cara forward, bringing it close to the fish’s pale, lifeless eyes, filming each one in extre close-up.
Regardless of size, habitat, beauty, or ugliness, all of the fish corpses shared one thing in common: they were all suspended head-up, tail-down, mouths open, floating vertically in the water. It looked as if countless invisible fishing lines were pulling them upward, or as if they were collectively fleeing from the seabed…
While filming, Herbert continued descending.
Perhaps startled by the scene before him, or perhaps too absorbed in recording it, he gradually drifted farther away from his companion Marno without noticing.
The beam from Marno’s flashlight grew dimr and dimr in the distance. With only Herbert’s own light remaining, the illuminated area shrank further.
The depth continued to increase, and the surrounding dead fish grew denser and denser. At tis, Herbert even had to reach out and push them aside to avoid having them brush directly against his face during the descent.
When he stirred them like that, the seawater began to churn violently, and all the dead fish swayed left and right along with the movent.
As the flashlight beam swept across them, the pale silhouettes of the fish swayed like seaweed in the water. Light and shadow flickered and spread outward, only to be swallowed by the pitch-black darkness beyond the reach of the beam. At first glance, it looked as if, within the shadows cast by those dead fish, there were pitch-black, barely perceptible entities lurking—hidden presences impossible to see clearly with the naked eye.
They seed to be encircling him from all directions, watching hungrily, waiting for an opportunity—ready to tear him apart and devour him completely.
Herbert was clearly frightened.
This was reflected in the fact that his descent slowed more and more. Whenever it wasn’t absolutely necessary, he no longer dared to casually push the dead fish aside.
At a depth of 110 ters, Herbert’s air supply had already dropped to one-third. According to the “rule of thirds” in diving, he should have already begun ascending.
Marno, who had caught up from behind, swam up to Herbert’s side. He signaled for Herbert to ascend together. The cara captured Herbert shaking his head and then pointing downward.
Subtitles appeared again after a long absence:
[Marno told to surface, but I refused because I discovered that not far below us, the density of the fish suddenly and strangely decreased… I think there may be sothing special waiting to be discovered down there, and all I need to do is go a little deeper, just a little further.]
[I swear, this is one of the stupidest decisions I’ve ever made…]
As the subtitles continued, Herbert moved downward ahead of Marno, slowly descending with his cara equipnt.
He wasn’t wrong.
After descending another two ters, the area illuminated by the light clearly showed that the dense mass of dead fish was thinning out. Going further down, the flashlight even cut into a stretch of darkness where not a single fish could be seen anymore.
Why was it like this…
Driven by intense curiosity, Herbert hesitated for a mont—then decisively kicked downward, diving straight in.
At a depth of 114 ters, he brushed past the last few dead fish.
At 115 ters, he entered a fishless vacuum zone.
At 116 ters, his flashlight swept around, revealing nothing but endless darkness.
Herbert paused here for a mont, likely hesitating over whether to continue descending.
Up to this point, he had never gone this deep before. Deep diving was an extrely dangerous activity—like walking a tightrope. Even a minor accident could send a person plumting into an irreversible abyss.
At that very mont, however, his downward beam faintly revealed the outline of sothing directly below.
What could it be?
In such a bottomless sea, after the sudden disappearance of the fish carcasses, what could possibly be suspended more than a hundred ters underwater?
Driven by overwhelming curiosity, Herbert’s breathing grew more rapid, and the bubbles he exhaled beca increasingly dense.
Finally, unable to resist, he kicked his legs and descended a little further.
The darkness retreated layer by layer under the pressure of the approaching light. As the shadows receded, Herbert finally saw clearly: what awaited him below was a massive, irregular sloped structure with a funnel-shaped depression at its center.
The outer slope of the funnel was not a perfect circle, but instead ford by two differently curved, flat white slopes joined together—resembling a fish clip.
This fish-clip-like slope had no visible edges. It stretched upward like a mountain into the extre distance beyond sight, rising into the heights where vision could no longer follow. Left and right, it enclosed Herbert—now the size of an ant—at its center.
The flashlight beam swept to the left and, by chance, illuminated several “rods” embedded in the slope.
Each of those rods was more than a person’s height. Their tallic surfaces were decorated with bizarre half-human, half-octopus totems, and were covered in thick layers of rust. Their sharp, barbed tips were deeply driven into the slope, evoking the image of fallen war banners on an ancient battlefield.
Herbert’s movent suddenly stopped.
An indescribable chill wrapped tightly around him, and his once steady breathing turned rapid and shallow.
[Yes. From frequent activity at sea, I recognize that thing.]
[Those are harpoons used by whalers… And so, I finally realized what this boundless, towering slope that had surrounded actually was.]
[It was the open mouth of a dead baleen whale…]
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