Metal Seed No. 12, after being remotely activated by the Reflection Crystal, found that there were divers all around the body.

And the point is, these divers are looking for things with a purpose.

The newly activated metal seed, a small movable silver ball, stood out in the seawater so much that it was quickly spotted by divers.

When two divers spotted No. 12, they immediately pounced to catch it.

After turning into a mini-submarine, the metal seed reaches a maximum speed of 100 knots, but that is the maximum speed, which requires a period of acceleration to reach.

No. 12, who didn't have time to accelerate, was not fast, and was very clumsy to avoid the capture of the divers.

In the chaos, the No. 12 seed was almost caught, and he had to jump onto the sea, only to find that there were more people on the surface.

When it was encircled in the middle of a small circle, the reflection crystal originally thought that No. 12 would definitely be caught.

As a result, at this time there was an accident, two patrol boats collided together, and one of them had a large hole in its hull.

The multiple layers of paint on the outside were all torn apart, revealing fresh steel stubble.

The No. 12 seed saw the opportunity and jumped straight into the stubble, his body changing as fast as he could, merging with the steel near the stubble.

After turning into ordinary steel, the No. 12 seed disappeared from everyone's eyes.

Then, No. 12 immediately began to quietly devour the iron element on the ship, and at the same time used his natural ability to melt the steel on the ship, so that the ship's cabin would break holes one after another.

Because it was on the surface of the sea, the absorption speed was much faster than that of the bottom of the sea, and there were more and more holes on the patrol boat, and finally it gradually sank into the water, and the people on the boat had no time to repair it, and finally had to jump into the water to escape.

When most of the patrol ship entered the water, No. 12 itself detached from the patrol ship again, and by the current caused by the sinking of the ship, it accelerated in a circle in the space near the cabin.

After reaching the limit of speed, No. 12 suddenly jumped out and sped away towards the eastern trench at the fastest speed.

At this time, in the sea, no one can catch up with it.

Compared with the thrilling escape of No. 12, the fate of No. 13 is relatively peaceful.

In the southeast corner of the South China Sea, in the deep sea near the Philippines, after the 13th woke up quietly, he followed the guidance of the reflection crystal to the nearest shipwreck, and began to absorb iron and expand itself.

Meanwhile, further south, somewhere in the eastern waters of Malaysia, a specially modified crane barge is quietly parked on the sea.

On the brightly lit deck, a middle-aged man with typical Southeast Asian characteristics, wearing a plaid shirt and beach pants, and a cigar in his mouth, said to the large group of people in front of him:

"The buyer is urging the goods again, and I can't help but come out to work, and after this time, we will go to Kuala Lumpur for a week! Without further ado, let's get started! ”

With the man's order, dozens of people on the entire ship shouted the trumpet and moved.

Some people put on wetsuits, others drive cranes, and the steel cables with huge hooks are lowered from a special place into the sea.

Ten divers put on full diving equipment, connected to oxygen tubes, and carried bags with explosives on their backs, gestured to the people on board, jumped into the water together, and then quickly dived.

In World War II of the last century, the battleship Prince of Wales, the flagship of the Z Fleet from the United Kingdom, was sunk by neon roadbed aviation in the waters east of Malaysia during the Battle of the Malay Sea.

During the sinking of the Prince of Wales, the entire hull of the ship reversed in the water and eventually fell upside down on the bottom of the sea.

Originally, because it was upside down, although the superstructure of the ship was flattened, the hull was not damaged in a large area, and it was not broken like Yamato.

However, the current Prince of Wales is no longer what it was when it sank.

The four propellers and propulsion shafts have all been stolen, and the hull has been greatly damaged.

This is clearly the result of targeted, targeted theft.

And the thieves are the people who are now busy working on the sea.

Divers dive to the bottom of the sea with explosives and place them in the cracks of the hull where they were blown up several times.

After the explosives were planted, the divers surfaced again, and when they returned to the ship, the people on board who had been prepared for a long time pressed the switch on the explosives.

The explosives placed in the cracks in the hull exploded, and the huge opening in the hull of the Prince of Wales, which had been broken, was torn again, and countless large and small steel plates were torn off from the hull.

The divers waited on the surface of the sea, estimating that the shock wave of the explosion had largely dissipated, and then sank to the bottom of the sea again, tying the steel plates that had been separated from the hull of the explosion to the hooks of the crane's steel cables.

After being tied, the diver sends a signal to the people on board.

So the crane winch on the ship started, and the steel cable slowly dragged the blasted steel plate out of the sea.

The ship's movers were ready for a long time and immediately used special tools to haul the steel plates into the hold.

Divers and ship's workers, working together, repeated the process of using explosives, getting steel plates from the warship, and then dragging them out of the water with steel cables and moving them into the cabin.

The first target of the thieves of the shipwrecks of World War II was, first and foremost, the precious metal parts of the ship, such as copper cables and propellers.

The propeller, as a phosphor bronze scrap metal, is worth more than 17,000 per ton, while the propeller of a ship weighs 15 tons, and the copper cable, which is also a large number, can be sold for 44,000 tons.

In addition to these limited quantities of special metal materials, on the shipwrecks of World War II, even ordinary steel plates are rare good things, and in some special markets, there is a lot of demand.

This is because from 1945 to the sixties and seventies, the unprecedented scale of nuclear weapons testing caused the background radiation of the entire earth to rise rapidly.

After the 70s, the overall radiation of the Earth's atmosphere was several orders of magnitude higher than before 1945.

For this reason, steel produced after World War II was contaminated with radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere.

The amount of radiation from ordinary steel has no effect on ordinary industries at all.

However, it is very important for special industries that are sensitive to radiation.

For example, Geiger calculators used to detect nuclear radiation, such as nuclear medicine, such as some special instruments in nuclear power plants, such as radiation-related laboratories, all require steel with low background radiation.

The steel plates on the warships of World War II were produced before the first atomic bomb exploded, before large-scale nuclear tests.

As a result, these plates are not contaminated with radioactive isotopes and are one of the few sources of low-background radioactive metals in the world.

In fact, not only shipwrecks, but also warships built before World War II and retired normally after the war, a large part of the steel after dismantling will be provided to various laboratories and nuclear facilities.

The USS Indiana, the South Dakota-class No. 2 ship of the United States, provided 210 tons of steel for use as a radiation shield for laboratories after it was decommissioned.

And the people who are now working on the sea, the steel salvaged from the bottom of the sea, is used for the same purpose.

Otherwise, after staying at the bottom of the sea for 70 years, it will be entrenched by various marine organisms, and the scrap iron on the sunken shipwreck, which is corroded and disfigured, will not be enough for salvage costs if it is only salvaged as ordinary steel.

And as such a special steel, the income that can be obtained by selling it through special channels and completely dismantling a cruiser is more than eight million yuan.

Although almost all of the shipwrecks have been decorated with hundreds or thousands of dead people, this is almost a dead man's business, no different from tomb robbing.

But wealth moves people's hearts, and as long as it is profitable, someone will do it.

There have been many World War II shipwrecks, which have been dismantled by these people in the way of ants moving, and have flowed into the low-background steel market.