Chapter 1017 – Finding a Needle in the Sea (II)

When Zhuang Rui drove the bearded captain out, he said that he wanted to assess the work of the ship’s employees based on the monitoring to see if he was competent as a captain, which scared Clyde to run back to the captain’s room and use internal communication to warn the crew.

After closing the door, Zhuang Rui will be in front of the flashing more than ten monitors are turned off, sitting quietly in the window place, eyes slightly closed.

The invisible and colorless aura overflowed from Zhuang Rui’s eyes, extending downward through the deck, and after a while, Zhuang Rui only felt a coolness in his eyes, but the aura had already entered the seawater.

“Eh? A shark? Not right.”

Zhuang Rui suddenly sensed a few swimming creatures within the range of his aura, all of which were over one meter in size.

“Khan, so they are divers?”

“After seeing” clearly the situation within the aura mass, Zhuang Rui was dumbfounded, it was a few divers from the Maritime Bureau who had already descended into the sea, and were marching towards the tens of meters deep seabed with the help of propellers.

Aura from a few people around, continue to seep into the seabed, a group of swimming fish seem to be able to sense the presence of Zhuang Rui, has been hovering around the aura shuttle, just Zhuang Rui control of the aura to prevent it from overflowing, those fish can not get what benefit.

A few divers following behind, looking at the colorful fish gathered together, under the sunlight, showing an exceptionally beautiful scene, couldn’t help but take an underwater camera and shoot it.

Not to mention these divers who were not doing their job, Zhuang Rui’s aura had already touched the bottom of the sea at this time, but he couldn’t visualize the bottom of the sea, so he could only take the cruise ship as the center and overflow his aura in all directions.

“There’s something.”

Zhuang Rui had just seen the range of his senses spread out when he sensed an aura, but it wasn’t big, only the size of a small fingernail, and although the aura was abundant, it shouldn’t be a shipwreck.

“This is a pearl, right?”

Zhuang Rui froze for a moment, slightly overflowing some of the aura wrapped around the object outwards, immediately felt a trace of less aura, and understood in his heart, this should be a sea pearl in the body of a sea mussel.

“If I’m free later, I’ll dig it out.”

Now the task is to find the wreckage of the shipwreck, Zhuang Rui can only let the pearl put aside, after remembering its location clearly, continue searching along the seabed.

“Ten meters …… thirty meters …… fifty meters ……”

Because at that time the shipwreck was exploded and disintegrated and sank, the objects on board were likely to have become scattered as well, so Zhuang Rui searched very carefully, and any place that slightly felt a bit of aura would be carefully surveyed.

There are endless treasures in the ocean, this does not only refer to the thousands of years of shipwrecks, those sea mussels contained within the pearl, is also very collectible.

“Hm? Found it.”

In Zhuang Rui surveyed to a place more than two hundred meters away from the cruise ship, before his eyes suddenly sensed a rich aura, Zhuang Rui’s heart was happy, retracted the aura dispersed in all directions, and wrapped the object in that position.

“This …… should be a box of gold, right?”

That object was about a meter long and wide, the aura inside was very familiar to Zhuang Rui, not long ago he had also sensed it in the Burmese gold mine, there was absolutely no mistake.

“According to the records at that time, on this Awa Maru ship, there should be at least forty tons of gold, and it’s definitely more than just this box.”

Zhuang Rui remembered the location of this box of gold, and then the aura spread out, in the gold around the survey up, if there is still, it should not be far from here, after all, these objects were all placed together at that time.

Zhuang Rui guessed correctly, more than ten minutes later, he found another 16 or 17 boxes scattered around, but there are many boxes seem to be rotten, chunks of gold diamonds scattered on the seabed.

Fortunately, these chests had all settled under the silt of the seabed, or else I’m afraid that it would have been difficult to preserve this gold, and it would have long since been washed away somewhere by the ebb and flow of the tide.

“Where is the skull? Is it really not on the Awa Maru ship?”

What makes Zhuang Rui depressed is that although he found more than ten boxes, and it is not all gold, but some of the boxes contain some ceramics and gold and silver, although it is a curio, but Zhuang Rui did not find the imaginary Peking man skull fossil.

Now Zhuang Rui’s search range has been expanded to as much as two kilometers, basically no more wreckage of the shipwreck was found, which also indicates that the hope of finding the fossilized skull of Peking Man has become more and more remote.

“Xiao Zhuang, where are you? Come down for a moment.”

Just as Zhuang Rui wanted to expand his search further, the walkie-talkie on the table rang, and Professor Meng’s voice came out from it.

“Teacher, I’ll go down immediately.”

Zhuang Rui promised and reopened all the images in the monitoring room, he found that several divers had already become the bottom of the sea and returned to the deck, and were disarming their equipment.

This made Zhuang Rui a little surprised, his search time was just a little more than an hour, can’t it be that these divers have already found something?

“Teacher, have you found anything?”

Zhuang Rui came to the deck, a group of people were turning on the video in front of the monitor that was temporarily set up, seeing Zhuang Rui, the deputy commander-in-chief, arrived, the crowd made way.

“Xiao Zhuang, come and take a look.”

Professor Meng gave Zhuang Rui a wave and pointed to the screen on the monitor, “It seems that finding the wreckage of the Awa Maru by hand is unlikely.”

Zhuang Rui sniffed to the screen, this look, the scene on the screen, let him also a little dumbfounded, where is the bottom of the sea ah? It looks like a garbage dump.

In the strong light under the shooting screen is very clear, the first revealed, actually all water plants, Zhuang Rui carefully observe, dare to say that this water plants are long in a fishing net.

In the middle of the fishing net, there are countless rocks and silt, the most dazzling is that it is also mixed with many disposable lunch boxes, I do not know how these things are rolled into the seabed, into the fishing net?

In such a situation, the divers naturally could not make any discoveries, and could only photograph the scene on the seabed and bring it to the boat.

“Old …… teacher, what …… is going on here? How did this seabed become like this?”

Zhuang Rui really couldn’t figure it out, in this place that wasn’t very far from the coastline, the general high and low tides were enough to wash away this garbage, but the fact subverted his cognition.

“This …… I also don’t know what the reason is.”

Prof. Meng was also looking puzzled, he was an archaeologist, not a marine expert, and could not give an answer to the question raised by Zhuang Rui.

“Cough cough …… Xiao Zhuang, let me explain this problem!”

Standing next to a person opened his mouth to speak, Zhuang Rui turned his face to see, dare to be the Maritime Affairs Bureau’s Wu Director, this and his own, are the deputy commander-in-chief of the wreck salvage, but others have more real power than their own, but also professionals, the Ministry of Transportation on the ship’s highest representative.

“This is not quite the outer sea, usually the fishermen on the Fujian side fish in these waters, so over time, it has become like this.”

After hearing Director Wu’s explanation, the group of people realized that all of this was caused by man-made disasters.

Nowadays, fishing is no longer done with small sampans and wooden boats, but with extremely modernized fishing boats, and there are usually more than two of them when they go out to sea to fish.

The two fishing boats spread a distance of hundreds of meters, spread the two nets, and then move forward in parallel, and then use the lifting system on board to pull the nets out of the water after pulling them out for a certain distance.

In this way, the huge pulling net can basically catch all the fish in this water, but there are special cases that happen, that is, the water is not deep enough, and the net is entangled by the undersea reefs or the wreckage of the shipwrecks, in which case the fishing boat has no choice but to throw the net away.

Such things are not a few, the sea fishing people can often encounter, year after year, day after day, the seabed of the fishing nets have accumulated a thick layer, plus and silt mixed together, making the seabed environment has become worse and worse up, even the ebb tide can not take it away.

As for those disposable lunch boxes, Wu director’s explanation let Zhuang Rui and others are relatively speechless, dare to say that this thing is in the trawl in progress, those on board the crew finished eating casually thrown into the sea.

“Ahem, Director Wu, this is for the protection of the marine environment, you have to pay attention to publicize ah!”

Prof. Meng didn’t expect that the culprits for obstructing the salvage to proceed were actually these fishermen along the coast, and couldn’t help but whine a few words to the leader of the Maritime Bureau in front of him.

After hearing Prof. Meng’s reproach, Director Wu smiled bitterly and said, “Ahem, Prof. Meng, where is it that we don’t pay attention to ah! But …… it’s just too difficult to supervise, now that the ban on fishing has begun, maybe it can get better!”

“Or the quality of the country’s people ah!”

Prof. Meng shook his head and looked at Zhuang Rui, saying, “Xiao Zhuang, do you have any more ideas?”

Zhuang Rui froze at the words, scratched his head, and said, “Teacher, actually it doesn’t matter if there are fishing nets covering it, this metal detector is good enough to detect a depth of seven or eight meters, so if there really is a shipwreck wreck, it can still be found.”

The metal detector that Zhuang Rui said was the next one that those divers had just taken off their backs, it was a diving metal detector specialized in marine salvage, and it was first applied to the battlefield, to put it bluntly, it was used for digging mines.

Later, metal detectors were used in battlefield archaeology, where most of the evidence is metal, such as musket slugs, cartridges, bullets, artillery and shells, durum bullets and swords, etc., depending on the historical period in which the battle took place.

Therefore, the most important tool of the battlefield archaeologist was the simple metal detector, which in later decades became the “weapon” of the grave robber!