Dragon Clan: Thought So Far

This is obviously a city with obvious human traces. Its layout is so symmetrical. The residential buildings are all two- or three-story red houses. The part close to the street is liquor shops and small stores, and the outermost part is power plants and factories with chimneys reaching into the sky.

The circular building in the middle of the city surrounds a bronze statue of Lenin, its surface has long been eroded by time, and mottled verdigris is all over the great man's clothes and face.

It overlooks this building complex that was once full of high hopes, with a gaze as firm as it was a hundred years ago. A huge red five-pointed star is inlaid on the base of the sculpture, surrounded by the sickle and hammer symbols, symbolizing an era that has long gone.

When Bunin led them to the vicinity of the building, a brand new red carpet had been laid from the asphalt road under their feet to the front of the Lenin statue. Lu Mingfei looked up and saw dense white steam seeping out of the gaps in the winding and twisted pipes on the outer wall of the circular building.

Either this is the cooling pool of the super-large nuclear fusion device that Bunin mentioned, or someone had already restarted the equipment left in the city before Lu Mingfei and his team arrived here.

The red carpet felt soft and solid underfoot, as if walking on solidified clouds. Everyone in the group stopped talking. Valoga and Sonya looked at the huge sculpture with complicated eyes, and the eyes of the others were filled with guilt and timidity.

They climbed the stairs and found a round airtight door embedded in the base of the statue. Bunin brushed away the dust from the scanning device on the airtight door. After searching the iris, the doors forged by King Kong opened one by one in front of them.

Behind the gate was indeed a structure going all the way down. The real core area of ​​the city was not on the ground but underground, and the statue of Lenin was the only way to that core area.

There are curved pipes and valves of all sizes everywhere, as well as "Danger" signs everywhere.

The lighting was not that bright, but the heating system was turned on very high. As we walked, everyone took off their coats at the same time.

When passing by a Soviet-style office, Bunin asked Valoga, Sonya and the others to stay there, and then continued down through the secret passage behind the bust of the great man on the wall with only Lu Mingfei, Ling, Susie and Christina.

"Further down is the restricted area, where the boss's secrets are buried. These secrets cannot be seen by too many people, not even our allies. Some people will go crazy." The cold lights embedded in the wall were completely ineffective, and Bunin had to lead the way with a kerosene lamp.

The temperature got higher as he went down, and now he felt light all over. Lu Mingfei touched the uneven wall, which was made of cement.

"This place is built according to the standards of a top-secret military air-raid shelter. It can withstand nuclear explosions of tens of millions of tons. Lead mesh and graphene are buried in the walls. The entire underground space can eventually be connected to a river valley dozens of kilometers away through an underground river for the return of reactor coolant. It can accommodate tens of thousands of people for refuge when necessary." Bunin's voice was sometimes far and sometimes near, but in fact the distance between them had never become farther.

"There's something wrong with the metal in here," Susie said.

Bunin explained: "This is already very close to the Tokamaco device. The metal on the wall has been magnetized in the fixed magnetic field for many years, so you will feel palpitations... In more serious cases, you may even have hallucinations, which are all normal phenomena."

"Is that also an illusion?" Lu Mingfei pointed ahead and stopped at the last step leading down.

They had already walked to a height of almost ten floors, and what appeared before them was a semi-embedded church building.

The church was a typical onion-shaped building, showing a huge outline in the dim gray light.

Half of it was embedded in the crust behind the underground structure, and the other half seemed to be completely cut open and displayed to everyone.

A huge concrete trestle connects the platform below the stairs to the entrance of the church, and steam forms light gray wafts on the dome.

Groups of girls stood in the thin steam, waiting at the end of the pier.

When the steam fell on the girls' shoulders, it looked like pear petals in early spring.

"The boss's treasure...beauties from Belarus, Mr. Lu, look, the stockings they wear on their calves are not made of chemical fibers mass-produced in stores, but are made of silk from silkworm cocoons on the banks of the Dnieper River." Bunin whistled softly.

Lu Mingfei looked over and saw only the girls' calves wrapped in stockings, glowing with the color of mother-of-pearl in the dim light under the dome.

The sound of more than a dozen pairs of high heels hitting the steel plates was like the rhythm of waves biting through the thin ice on the Black Sea coast.

The girl in the lead reached out to lift the hair from her forehead. Her crystal white forehead reminded people of the birch bark on the outskirts of Kiev in late May.

"The starlight of Dnipropetrovsk runs in the blood of these girls' ancestors, so the depths of their pupils are always condensed with the steel blue color unique to the permafrost," said Bunin.

Ling pinched Lu Mingfei's wrist.

"Under the pier..." Her lips moved slightly. Before Lu Mingfei could look down, the girls at the end of the pier had already come up to him.

"Be careful on the steps, comrade!" The girls' voices were sweet and cold. As they stepped aside to make way, the hem of their black uniform skirts swept across the rusted handrails, revealing the light red marks two inches above their knees caused by their stockings.

This vivid warmth was even more eye-catching than the torch in the hands of the bronze statue of Lenin that just passed by the office door.

The wind they created as they moved carried the scent of Minsk's first snow, but it strangely blended with the steam leaking from the pipes.

The two girls stopped behind the pier. They bent down together to adjust the air pressure valve. Their white stockings slid down half an inch along the line of their calves, exposing the light blue blood vessels on their calves, like vines climbing all over the white wall.

It is indeed a hybrid, or rather, an artificial hybrid.

They were incredibly beautiful, each one of them could rival Sonya in looks, but it was too unreal.

The dragon bloodline can change a person's temperament and appearance, but the unstable evolutionary medicine is eroding their bodies at any time.

When the girls came up to them, Lu Mingfei noticed that the red five-star hairpin pinned behind one girl's ear had faded, but the fresh scratches at the base of the pin showed that this badge of honor was carefully wiped every morning.

This honor should be given to war heroes who have made certain achievements in the Great Patriotic War, but now it has been bestowed on a little girl who looks only eighteen years old.

Could it be that he is also an immortal who has regained his youth like Okinez?

When the girls turned around and saluted collectively, the arc created by the waist-hugging uniforms was heart-stirring.

For no reason, it reminds me of the waves of the Moscow River in the evening. Those breathtaking curves are a gift from the East Slavic genes.

Because Ling was right next to him, Lu Mingfei didn't dare to look too closely at the girl passing by him. He looked straight ahead, but suddenly turned back when he passed the pier.

I don’t know if it was an illusion, but it seemed like a girl suddenly raised her eyes and smiled.

Lu Mingfei's figure was reflected in the gray-blue pupils. In an instant, the eyes returned to the silence of the Siberian tundra.

The steam pipes hissed at this moment, and milky white mist flowed over the girls' hair. They followed Bunin like a guard, and walked deeper into the church together.

Lu Mingfei reached out and brushed Ling's cheek, a drop of condensed water was sliding down her plump cheek, passing through her slender collarbone and lonely neck, and finally sliding into the deep lapel of her white lace tweed shirt.

Ling deliberately slowed down his pace, and it was not until this time that Lu Mingfei finally had the chance to look back at the space under the pier behind him.

He gritted his teeth and his eyes almost popped out of his head in surprise.

It was deep down there, but not damp. A huge black creature was crouching on the cold concrete ground.

It was a huge black snake that could fill a corridor when it stretched out. Its scales were dull and lifeless, like moss that had died many years ago and dried up in the wilderness.

When it comes to the dragon features on its body, it may not even be as good as a severely mutated dragon subspecies, but the lower half of the black snake's body is completely dead, leaving only a bronze spine.

Countless metal chains were nailed into its body, dragging into the depths of darkness. Each chain made a sound as it rubbed against the ground as the black snake slowly moved.

The black snake had no eyes, its eyes had been gouged out. As if it felt some stimulation from the outside world, it lowered its bony head and looked towards the end of the pier.

Lu Mingfei and Ling looked at each other.

No matter it was the illusion he had experienced or the past events that Zero had revealed to her in Moscow, they all showed that Black Swan Port was hiding many unspeakable secrets, and Black Snake was one of the countless secrets that had been revealed.

It is the body left behind after Li Wu Yue turned into a dragon and died. All rights and powers have been stripped away, leaving only the beast-like instincts and the indecipherable genetic programming buried in the blood.

Bunin's boss has been using Li Wuyue's corpse to make that powerful evolutionary medicine. Did he get this thing from the ruins of Black Swan Port?

Lu Mingfei only had time to take a quick look before he was immediately surrounded by the girls and walked towards the church in the distance.

"Did you see that thing? It's shocking, right?" Bunin walked very fast. He was a tall type, and the Belarusian girls had to jog to keep up with him.

"It came from another project called 'Study of God,'" Bunin said.

Lu Mingfei was stunned. “It doesn’t look like a god. Instead, it looks more like some ancient reptile species... maybe a distant relative of dinosaurs,” he said.

"There are many things in this world that are inaccessible to people like us, but I know Kassel College, so there is no need for you to deliberately hide it, Mr. Lu." Bunin said seriously, "In the beginning, we thought that the project was a joke. God does not exist. If God existed, then he would have jumped out and cut off Copernicus's head when he proposed the heliocentric theory... But then the boss told us that the Soviet Union was composed of a group of atheists. If a group of atheists began to seriously set up a project to study God, then they must have found traces of God."

Any normal person who sees this thing would not think it is a god, unless that person himself is also a member of the gods, and can feel the call from the depths of his blood even through a corpse.

"They found it in 1992. That winter, all the whitefish and pike disappeared in the Yana River. The fishing company thought there was a leak in the nuclear power plant upstream, and the nuclear pollution caused the reduction in production." Bunin's eyes showed a trace of fear. "When the government found it, they thought they had caught a dinosaur that survived the Jurassic period, but when I took over, I knew it was raised by someone because it was chained with Soviet symbols at the end of the chains: sickle, hammer and red five-pointed star."

Lu Mingfei was almost certain that this thing was Li Wuyue's body, and also the black snake in his and Ling's memory.

The recorded time of the destruction of Black Swan Port was 1991, on the eve of the disintegration of the Red Empire.

Thermobaric bombs powerful enough to completely wipe concrete buildings from the ground failed to kill the thing, or rather could not clean it up.

It looked like the black snake was only seriously injured and still retained some energy, but Lu Mingfei was sure it was dead.

The one who is alive is just a zombie.

The Yana River is in northern Siberia, which coincides with the location of Black Swan Port.

"It should be dead." Sure enough, Bunin said, "A scan of its skull will reveal that the god's brain has shrunk or rotted, but its vitality is too strong, its heart is still beating, and its hematopoietic stem cells are still working after losing its nerve center."

Susie, who was following closely behind Lu Mingfei, was so frightened that her face turned pale.

As the only ordinary hybrid like Christina, she is neither like Lu Mingfei and Ling who have a natural resistance to the majesty of pure-blooded dragons, nor like Bunin who is a pure and uncontaminated human with a weak sense of the existence of dragons, nor like those hybrids who have been transformed by evolutionary drugs and have unstable bloodlines so that they will not even be affected by pure-blooded dragons.

Susie was the person who most intuitively felt the terrifying majesty of the black snake.

She had never been a fearful person, but the oppression in her blood was like a dark cloud over the mountains that was about to bring a rainstorm, making it hard to breathe.

Lu Mingfei hesitated for a moment, then reached out and held Susie's hand.

Susie was stunned for a moment, then looked at him, a hint of shock flashing in her pupils.

Lu Mingfei made a gesture to silence her and took his hand away from Susie's.

The door of the church opened automatically in front of them, and the melodious sound of mass and the sound of the organ being played flowed out.

And the laughter of children.

Bunin's expression changed immediately.

"What's going on?" Lu Mingfei asked.

"Boss, he's in there." Bunin said through gritted teeth.