Yuan Zhisheng took out his work mobile phone and dialed: "Professor Schneider, this is Yuan Zhisheng from the Japan branch who is reporting. The diving team has arrived at the designated location and is asking for instructions from the Department."

"When I'm done with this cigarette." Professor Schneider's eerie, bellows-like voice came from the other end of the line.

Kassel Academy Headquarters, Central Control Room.

Today this place is cleared, all other work is transferred to another place, only Schneider is alone in the center of the hall, he took out a small iron box from his pocket, which contains golden tobacco, God knows why he has this thing, everyone in the academy knows that for Professor Schneider, tobacco is about poison, but this professor who dragged an oxygen tank cart everywhere he went actually rubbed out a beautiful cigarette, and his movements were swift, and he looked like an authentic old smoker. But after he took a deep breath, he tasted the bitter fruit of the taboo, and his cough was so violent that it seemed to cough out his whole lungs.

"Are you trying to kill yourself?" Someone behind his back said, "Maybe I'm not here at the right time."

Schneider didn't look back, and said lightly, "It's not your turn to be on duty today, Professor Manstein."

Manstein put a pill box on the table and pushed it to Schneider: "If you have to smoke it, take this, at least you won't cough like this."

"That really helped." Schneider took a pill and took another puff of cigarette, and this time his reaction was much easier, and he closed his eyes and savored the smell of tobacco that he had not seen for a long time.

"You didn't come to me just to bring me medicine, did you?" Schneider said.

Manstein threw a fax on the table: "An official letter from the school board demanding an immediate termination of Operation Longyuan."

"The old men of the school board can take care of their own big things, and the small things of the executive department don't bother them." Schneider said.

"The Gattuso family has already taken this as a big deal, because your diving team has the precious heir of the Gattuso family, Frost went crazy when he received the news, and was ready to kill the headquarters, but he thought he was overly excited and had a heart attack, otherwise he should be pointing a double-barreled shotgun at your head right now."

"But wasn't that submersible donated by the Pompeii owner? And I also put on the auspicious livery of the sunrise and the east God bless my son."

"Everyone knows that the head of the Gattuso family is a freak, and when he is not in the Gattuso house, all opinions have nothing to do with the family's opinions. Even his seat on the school board is represented by Frost, so if Frost says no, it's the Gattuso family who says no."

"The list of dives is decided by the principal, let Frost go and tell the principal, I am the principal's subordinate to do things, I have no right to terminate the Longyuan project, even if Frost himself comes and points a gun at my head, I will mean this." Schneider pushes two-five-six, and he is a bureaucrat.

Manstein sighed, took out a black card from his pocket and threw it on the table, "With this black card of the Gattuso family, I have the same authority as the headmaster, I can order Norma to forcibly terminate the Dragon Yuan Project, and there is nothing I can do without Norma's help."

"It's useless, I can delegate the command to the Japanese branch before you give the order, no matter how powerful the Gattuso family is, it can't command the Japanese branch, and the Japanese branch is not within the jurisdiction of the school board." Schneider said, "I was in charge of the overall command of Operation Longyuan, but the execution was completely led by the Japanese branch."

Schneider raised an eyebrow, "I don't see you doing things for the Gattuso family, that perverted dad of yours likes to work against the Gattuso family the most."

"I'm the head of the Discipline Committee, and I'm just doing my job according to the school rules, and I have the right to investigate the professors, and in their eyes I'm someone worth winning over, unlike a die-hard follower of a president like you." Manstein looked calm and had a businesslike expression, "It seems to me that the Dragon Yuan Project is very strange, the "SS" class mission was decided after only two people, you and the principal, and you hurriedly sent three of the best students of the best blood into the deep sea, which is not in line with your style. So I'm going to listen to you explain it to me."

"You're mistaken, the Longyuan plan was formulated by the principal and the senior management of the equipment department, and the list of specific executives was drawn up by the principal alone, and I was only responsible for this process

Execution." Schneider said. "It's an adventure, but some risks have to be taken."

Manstein played with the black card in his hand: "I'm sure you won't like to give up command to someone else, but I need to know a reason why you are in such a hurry to start the Dragon Yuan Project."

"If you want to hear it, it's not a big deal to tell you." Schneider said quietly, "You haven't seen my face, have you?"

"Nope." Manstein was stunned.

Schneider took off the oxygen mask that he had worn on his face all the year round, and moved his face to a shiny place, even when he was smoking, he had been inhaling oxygen, and when he removed the oxygen mask, he lowered his head and hid his face in the shadows, so this was the first time Manstein saw Schneider's face, what kind of face was it! The flesh from the eyes down had completely dried up into a layer of skin clinging to the bones, and the lips and nose had shrunk so that the front teeth were exposed, a face that could only be seen in hell.

"Pretty scary, isn't it? Actually, I'm only 37 years old, but half of my face looks like a decayed corpse, and the students think I'm an old man in my 50s when they hear my cough, but I'm even younger than you." Schneider laughed to himself.

Manstein looked at Schneider and did not speak.

"It's the mark of a mission," Schneider said, "and I haven't been out of the field since that mission, and that was the first time we've heard a heartbeat from the depths of the ocean ten years ago."

"This isn't the first time we've found dragon embryos in the sea?" Manstein was taken aback.

"No, of course not." Schneider said, "Maybe you've heard of the Greenland Ice Sea Case, which was also a diving mission, but the diving team was wiped out, but the school board ordered all the relevant files to be sealed and forcibly terminated all investigations."

"You'll have to be patient if you want to hear this story, because it's a long story, and please order Norma to get out of here for a while, you can do that with a black card now." Schneider said.

"Why?"

"Because the details of this matter cannot be recorded by Norma, top secret means that there can be no other form of backup than the original record, so it can only be kept here except for the original report." Schneider tapped his head, "After listening to this story, you can't leave it in the form of words, pictures, recordings, etc., not even the memo you wrote to yourself, this is the rule of the academy, the only way is to remember all the details as closely as possible, if you forget, then there is no way."

"What happened ten years ago, and you still remember every detail of it?"

"Of course I can," Schneider said, as if suppressing something, "it was the only trip to Hell in my life, how could I not remember it?"

Manstein felt a chill to the bone from Schneider's words, and Manstein vaguely felt that this topic had ignited the long-stored anger of the man in front of him.

"Norma, get out of the central control room first, and leave the two of us alone for a while." Manstein put the black card *** card slot, ordered.

"Understand, within fifteen minutes from now, the central control room will be out of my surveillance range." Norma replied.

All cameras and recording equipment in the central control room are locked, and Norma has released all monitoring of this area, and the central control room has become a blind spot for monitoring.

Schneider lit another cigarette and talked about the past......

"It was the autumn of 2001, when a person with the ID "Prince" posted a message on the Internet that we retrieved, saying that his tugboat had caught strange bronze fragments in the depths of the Greenland Sea. He released the photo, and it can be seen that there are complex ancient characters on the fragments, which are completely consistent with the "Ice Sea Bronze Pillar Table" in the secret collection of the college."

"After all, the Ice Sea Bronze Pillar Table is the most important antiquity for the study of dragon history, it is the most detailed dragon inscription information that humans can find today, recording the history of the dragons' wars, but we still can't fully interpret it, because there is no text to compare, and those words are just meaningless patterns to us. I was at the time

He was just a young assistant professor who was keen to decipher dragon texts. I think if there is another bronze pillar in the depths of the Greenland Sea, then we may be able to decipher more of the true history of dragons compared to the text above. So I contacted the Prince anonymously and said that we were a paleography institute and wanted to buy these fragments."

"There was a staggering price to buy the pieces, but the prince said they were willing to donate the pieces to research institutes rather than sell them to merchants. He sent us the pieces without taking a penny, and kindly attached the coordinates of the pieces he had caught. We immediately sent an elite team to the sea, and we scanned the seabed with sonar with hope, expecting to find another copper watch, but to our surprise, there was no shadow of the copper watch on the bottom of the sea, but a strange heartbeat signal was captured, which was on the seabed."

"The Greenland Ice Sea is not as deep as the Japan Trench, the seabed is less than 300 meters deep, and there are large animals such as beluga whales and tiger sharks living in this part of the depth, so at first we didn't think about the possibility that it was a dragon embryo, but we watched the sea for a few months, and the heartbeat signal on the seabed was surprisingly stable, it never moved the slightest position, we searched for the bronze watch column to no avail, and our attention gradually became attracted to this heartbeat signal, which is too weird. If it was a whale or a shark, it should be hunting for food, and if it was a giant turtle of unknown species, dormant, there was no reason for its heartbeat to be so strong. So someone came up with the astonishing idea after ruling out all speculation, that it could be the embryo of a dragon, that the seabed is its bone, that it has undergone death and cocooning and then re-transformed into an embryo, and is undergoing a long period of incubation."

"It's too bold an idea, but that heartbeat signal is so weird and too tempting, it's so close to us, it's like Pandora's box to open it, we've only had one dragon embryo since the establishment of the Secret Party, and it's only three generations of weak dragons, its bloodline is already very weak, if we can get a strong embryo, we will learn more about this ancient life by analyzing it."

"So you decided to dive?" Manstein asked.

"No, we don't take anything to do with dragons lightly, and it's all just speculation, and we took the safest approach before we got the exact news - remote control underwater robots to investigate, but every underwater robot that approached the seabed somehow burned out the circuit, which added to the evidence that the thing on the seabed was a dragon embryo, because legend has it that ancient dragons would spread out some kind of field to protect themselves during the hatching process, and those who stepped into it would have deadly hallucinations. Biologically, it may be that a bioelectric current stimulates the cerebral cortex."

"So it's the field of the embryo that burns down the underwater robot's circuitry?" Manstein said.

"We think this is the most likely, but we still haven't considered sending someone to dive, because the current that can burn the circuit of the underwater robot will also be quite terrifying to stimulate the cerebral cortex, although the elite team we sent out is all A-class, but without preparation, none of us can be sure if they can fight against the field of embryos. In the illusions created by the dragons, only the most powerful hybrids can maintain their self-awareness, but if there is a crack in the psychological defense, they will be directly crushed by the illusion, which has been recorded in the archives of the secret party." Schneider said this, and paused, "But at this time, the school board intervened, and they ordered us to dive down as soon as possible to identify the target, and the reason they gave was that we couldn't wait for the embryo to hatch, and we had to take action even if we took a risk."

"Sound familiar?" Schneider said.

Manstein imagined an ugly sneer on Schneider's horrible face under the oxygen mask, and nodded, "Is the dive a decision of the school board?"

"That's right, they made the Greenland Plan with their own hands, and now they have sent you to stop the Dragon Yuan Project." Schneider said.

"I wasn't sent by anyone, I'm just here to investigate the reason why you set up the Dragon Yuan Plan, and to do something that can be done or not." Manstein said.

"Since it's something that can be done or not, then

Don't do it, do you?" Schneider said lightly.

"Then it's up to you to convince me with the answers you give me." Manstein said, "Go on."