Chapter 7 To the Treasure  

In the dark night, Chen Fan couldn’t see that Xie Xiaoya looked as though she wanted to swallow him alive. Right now, he only wanted to get the electric eel into the sea. Putting actions to his thoughts, Chen Fan dragged the plastic bag to the shoreline. He stepped on the soft sand, letting the cold seawater hit his ankles. For the past few days, Chen Fan had been mixing salt into the water in the fish tank until it had the same salinity as the ocean in the hopes that the eel would be used to its surroundings when it finally entered the sea.

When Chen Fan let the eel swim from the suffocating plastic bag into the ocean, he felt refreshed and comforted at once. "Woohoo!" Chen Fan had almost suffocated on the way to the beach in that poorly ventilated environment. Now that he could finally make his way into the sea, he was going to have a good swim.

After swimming freely for a while, Chen Fan started toward the stone shelf on his left. The electric eel had complete control of itself now, so it had to find a safe place for hiding. Afterall, he could not concentrate on the eel 24 hours a day.

After the eel found a crevice to hide in, Chen Fan rode his bicycle home. Laying on his bed, Chen Fan quickly shifted his consciousness to the electric eel. The eel could now release electricity to around ten meters, which meant that any movement within ten meters would not escape Chen Fan’s electromagnetic induction. The dark waters would not be able to hide anything from Chen Fan’s awareness.

It would be absolutely correct to say that the ocean has the richest life in the world. Chen Fan only took a casual glance and discovered dozens of species of organisms, some of which even a person who grew up near the seaside like him had not seen before.

Chen Fan’s electric eel avatar was already famished from the long night, and the most important thing now was to fill its stomach. Among the dozens of species of fishes nearby, Chen Fan chose a fish commonly seen on local dining tables. Its scientific name meant "small golden sardine," but locals usually called it "small sardine." It had a cylindrical body that was slightly flat at the sides, and both sides of its belly had a pale yellow line. Its body length was generally around twelve to fifteen centimeters. It was very popular with locals due to its tender flesh and few bones.

A school of over twenty small sardines was resting around a deep red coral shelf, totally unaware that death was approaching. Controlling the eel’s body, Chen Fan secretly swam closer until he was about six to seven meters away from them. Seeing that he could not go any nearer, Chen Fan immediately used the nerve center in his brain to command the electricity-producing muscles at the sides of the belly. At once, a charge of up to six or seven hundred volts rushed from the electric eel’s tail to its head. After both positive and negative charges collided, they spread out to the surrounding water.

A human being would faint from being electrocuted in that range, let alone the sardines that were only ten centimeters long. Over twenty pitifully small sardines lost their lives to the overbearing voltage before waking up from their dreams. It happened so fast that they didn’t have time to struggle even once.

Chen Fan did not bother with how his "food" and the surrounding electrocuted fish felt. Seeing that his dinner had all turned upside-down, he quickly swam forward and took a big mouthful of the nearest fish.

"Hmm, not bad, just too salty!" An animal’s taste buds are different than that of a human being. Chen Fan did not think the raw fish tasted horrible, but he had the mindset that he just needed to be more courageous.

Chen Fan swallowed seven or eight fish at one go, and let out a satisfied burp before blowing a few air bubbles out of the corner of his mouth. Having nothing else to do after filling his stomach, Chen Fan used electromagnetic induction to fix in his mind the image of that wrinkled oval shaped pituitary gland. Due to environmental and dietary restrictions at home, Chen Fan had not dared to limitlessly stimulate the eel’s growth hormones. Now that he was in the ocean, he had to make good use of his time to increase his body size. Since he could never eat all the fish in the ocean, Chen Fan would not worry even if he grew to 10,000 meters.

Chen Fan’s avatar of course could not grow to be 10,000 meters. Growth hormones were limited. If they weren’t, everyone would be able to grow to Yao Ming’s height by consuming growth hormone drugs. Be it human beings or animals, there was a fixed period for the bones to grow. After the growth period ended, the epiphyseal plate slowly merged and closed up, and the body would stop growing. At this time, if there was an oversecretion of growth hormones in the body, it would stimulate the growth of the distal phalanges, facial bones, soft tissue, and so on, thereby causing the limbs, facial organs, and internal organs to grow asymmetrically. For example, people with dwarfism can only take growth hormones for treatment when they are still in puberty. There would not be any effects when they were adults, even if they took in a truckload of hormones.

The electric eel’s development period was around three years. Chen Fan had less than two years at the most to prompt growth. After spending half an hour stimulating the pituitary gland, Chen Fan withdrew his mind from the hidden crevice and returned to his thoughts. Chen Fan rubbed his forehead, took off his clothes and threw his blanket over his face before passing out. After concentrating intensively for half an hour, Chen Fan was way too exhausted to think of other things.

The next morning, Chen Fan skipped class yet again. Now that he had this avatar in the ocean to find treasure, how could such an insignificant thing like going to class be more important? At the thought of finding treasures in the ocean, Chen Fan could not help but grin. In today’s society, finding treasure underwater was much more difficult than working on an archaeology dig on land. Retrieving something out of the water was dependent on the underwater environmental conditions, such as water visibility and undercurrents in the ocean. It was extremely difficult to operate; just finding the shipwreck location was not sufficient.

First of all, it was extremely unrealistic to depend on machine operations for underwater retrieval, and it was necessary to hire specialized and experienced divers. If the water was not too deep, just people with diving experience could still do the job. However, if it was a shipwreck deep under the ocean, it would be necessary to spend large amounts of money to hire expert divers who had deep sea pressure and decompression training all year round.

However, deep waters meant that the divers only had very limited working time underwater. Otherwise, the divers’ bodies would suffer from irreversible harm. Besides that, it would cost hundreds of thousands of RMB to rent a professional fishing boat just for a day, and this amount wouldn’t include the advanced detection equipment. Anyway, this was not an issue for Chen Fan. As long as he could find the shipwreck location, he could control the electric eel to go inside the ship through the gaps, and then use its teeth to bring up small valuable items from the wreck.

Chen Fan had read on the internet that archaeologists reckoned that there were close to three million shipwrecks in all the oceans in the world waiting to be explored. Many of those shipwrecks would have priceless artifacts or treasures on them. Although Chen Fan doubted the number of shipwrecks, he had to admit that they really were countless. Just in the local news, Chen Fan had seen no less than a hundred stories on the discovery of ancient shipwrecks. Other than the few situated in shallow seas, most of them remained undisturbed on the deeper seafloor.

Zhongyun City sits north of the Yangtze, bordering the East China Sea. In ancient times, it was once on one of the main water routes leading to Japan and Korea. Its number of ancient shipwrecks had accumulated over the dynasties and was definitely in the quadruple digits. Ten days ago, Chen Fan had targeted a key search area in the sea. At over twenty nautical miles northeast of the electric eel’s hiding place, the seabed there was more than 230 meters deep. That area was also one of the ancient water routes with numerous shipwrecks.

How to conceptualize 230 meters? Only five percent of divers in the world could work in waters that deep, and they could stay down no longer than one could eat a meal. After shifting his thoughts to the electric eel and electrocuting some small fish to eat, Chen Fan put his belly on the seafloor and started swimming northeast. He had eaten a few more fish than he had the night before. He was bloated, making him look like a pregnant female eel.