Dragon 3: Tide of the Black Moon (1)

"This is the imprint of a certain mission for me," Schneider said, "It was 11 years ago when we first heard the heartbeat signal from the deep sea."

"It wasn't the first time we found an embryo in the sea?" Manstein was taken aback.

"No, it wasn't. 11 years ago, it was in Greenland, and we found a similar embryo." Schneider exhaled a full smoke ring, "As you should have guessed, I'm talking about the unsolved case in the Greenland Ice Sea, where the dive team was wiped out, but the Council ordered all files to be sealed and the investigation forcibly terminated. You'll have to be patient if you want to hear this story, because it's a long one, and please order Norma out of this room. You now hold the black card, you can do it."

"Why do you want Norma to leave?"

"Because Norma doesn't know either. So-called top secrets can't be kept in systems and hard drives, only here." Schneider nodded his head, "And you can't leave it in written form after hearing this story, not even in a memo for yourself. It's a hard and fast rule of the college, you can only do your best to remember every detail of what I said firmly, and there's nothing you can do if you forget."

"You can remember every detail of what happened 11 years ago today?"

"Of course, I can," Schneider said quietly, "it was the only trip to hell I ever took in my life, how could I forget?"

A bone-chilling coldness permeated Schneider's words. Manstein vaguely felt the mention of 11 years ago, the ugly and powerful man in front of him ignited a rage, which was not extinguished for a full 11 years.

"Norma, leave this room and leave us both alone for a while," Manstein said.

"Understood, for 15 minutes from now, the central control room will be out of my monitoring range." Norma finished, all the equipment in the central control room stopped functioning, the cameras and recording equipment locked up, and the lights went out one by one. Norma left, the surveillance was lifted, and at the moment the central control room was independent of the campus, the shadows of the trees waved on the high windows, and the place looked like the depths of an old church.

"It was the fall of 2001 ......," Schneider slowly began to narrate.

"It was the fall of 2001 when a man with the id 'Prince' posted on the Internet that his trawler had caught strange bronze fragments in the depths of the Greenland Sea. He posted photos, and from them, it appeared that the fragments had intricate ancient writing on them that matched perfectly with the Academy's secret collection of 'Ice Sea Bronze Pillar Tables'."

"The Ice Sea Bronze Pillar Table is believed to be a rare ancient artifact passed down from the Dragon Age to the present day, and it once stood in a city built by dragons, who were accustomed to using pillars to record their history, with a giant pillar standing at the center of the city. But the Ice Sea Bronze Pillar Table is just a part of a pillar that broke off, presumably less than 13 of its original length. it is the most detailed dragon text material that humans can find today, recording the history of dragon warfare, but we still can't decipher it because there is no text for comparison, and those words are just meaningless patterns to us. I was still just a young assistant professor with a passion for deciphering dragon texts. I thought that if there was another bronze pillar deep in the Greenland Sea, then comparing the texts on it might be able to decipher the real history of dragons. So I contacted 'Prince' anonymously, saying that we were an institute of ancient writing and wished to purchase the fragments.

"At that time, someone offered a staggeringly high price, but the 'prince' said he was willing to donate those fragments to a research institute rather than sell them to a merchant. He sent the fragments to us without taking a penny and attached the coordinates where he caught those fragments. We immediately sent an elite team to that area and scanned the seafloor with sonar. What we had hoped to find was a giant column on the seafloor, but instead, we caught a strange heartbeat signal right on the sea bed.

"The Greenland Ice Sea is not as deep as the Japan Trench, which is home to large animals like beluga whales and tiger sharks, so initially we didn't think it was a dragon embryo. But we watched for months, and the thing on the sea bed never moved out of position. We had to focus our attention from the pillar to this heartbeat signal, which was so bizarre that if the thing was a whale or a shark, then it should be hunting around for food. If it was a giant sea turtle of an unknown species in a dormant state, then its heartbeat shouldn't have been that strong. Someone came up with the amazing idea that it was a dragon embryo. The sea bed was its burial place, and it was undergoing a long incubation as an embryo after reincarnating after its death and cocooning.

"The idea was too bold, but that heartbeat signal was so bizarre and tantalizing that each of us was fascinated by the speculation. Since the establishment of the Secret Party, we have only obtained one dragon embryo or a weak one outside of the three-generation species, and its bloodline is already weakened. If we could get a powerful embryo, analyzing it would teach us more about this ancient life."

"So you decided to dive?" Manstein asked.