Latitude 4.19, longitude 153.0, local time 8AM.
After four days of the voyage, the electric eel had already reached the north of East Caroline Basin, and was still 2,600 nautical miles away from Tonga Trench. If everything continued as planned, the eel would reach its destination three days later.
Next stop, Chen Fan decided to target the Solomon Islands more than 700 nautical miles away. Of course, this Solomon Islands is not the place of origin of King Solomon's treasury recorded in the Bible. Nonetheless, the Solomon Islands is still associated with King Solomon's treasure. When Spanish navigator Mendana arrived in 1568, he saw that the inhabitants were all extremely rich, wearing gold accessories. With another two more coincidences, he mistook the place as the place of origin of King Solomon's treasure, hence naming it Solomon.
This history had nothing much to do with Chen Fan. His priority now was to get some sleep. After sleeping for six to seven hours, Chen Fan shifted his thoughts to the ocean again. The sky was gradually getting dark as Chen Fan controlled the electric eel at around 300 meters under the sea, swimming forward like an arrow.
The eel continued swimming monotonously, like a car on the highway which does not require any skills other than just moving forward.
The next day at dawn, Chen Fan reached the destination, Solomon Islands. After eating, Chen Fan encountered a problem when finding a place to rest. The surrounding water was so deep that electric eel at 500 meters deep could not detect the seabed even when it released the maximum discharge.
"Don't tell me it's some trench again?" Chen Fan mumbled to himself. Ocean trenches are usually near islands and at borders of mainlands. The electric eel was now only over ten nautical miles away from Solomon Islands, so it wasn't too surprising to encounter an oceanic trench.
"I'll just go take a look to find out!" Chen Fan decided and controlled the eel to face down before dashing toward the dark deep sea. After such a long period of training, the electric eel's diving limit had reached 2,700 meters, which meant that it could swim freely around ninety-five percent of the oceans on earth.
700 meters…
900 meters…
1,200 meters...
Finally, when the eel dived to almost 1,500 meters, it finally touched the seabed. It was a seabed occupied by white sand, and the smooth, even sand bed had no other protruding objects.
The icy cold seawater and the invisible pressure made the eel feel a little uncomfortable, but there was no other better place to stopover, so Chen Fan could only choose to rest on the sand bed. After swimming a few rounds, Chen Fan decided to find a comfortable place in the sand to sleep. Just when he swam a few hundred meters forward, the electromagnetic induction in his brain suddenly met with a wall.
"What's that?" Chen Fan went closer out of curiosity. He saw a 180-meter long, twenty meters wide, steel ship lying quietly on the sand. There was even a big black hole on the left side of the ship which could fit the electric eel if it were to slip in.
"Isn't this an aircraft carrier?" Chen Fan's jaw almost dropped. Although the tonnage of this aircraft carrier was a little small and the plane inside was a propeller aircraft, the steel-plate runway on top gave its identity away.
"Japan's Ryujo aircraft carrier?" Chen Fan looked around it closely and came up with this conclusion. During World War II, Japan and the United States had numerous naval battles at the waters near Solomon Islands, with the one in 1942 being the most tragic. Just Japan alone lost an aircraft carrier here plus a quasi-aircraft carrier and also numerous smaller warships.
Chen Fan had read about that phase of history a few times on the internet. Inside the aircraft carrier was the impressively famous Japanese zero fighter, hence he was able to figure out the origin of the aircraft carrier based on its location. However, the look of the aircraft carrier was a little tragic. Not only was there a large hole in the middle, there were also two huge holes caused by bombs on its deck. Also, the surface of the hull was bumpy due to corrosion by seawater, and the electric eel was able to dig out a large piece of iron scurf easily with its front claw.
"Oh precious…" Chen Fan mumbled. With such a huge ship, just selling the junk on it could make one rich. However, Chen Fan did not intend to be the "King of Junk". Compared to this humongous thing, Chen Fan was more willing to touch those ancient wooden shipwrecks. After admiring it, Chen Fan wanted to leave and find a place for the electric eel to take an afternoon break.
"Ah…" the electric eel suddenly widened it eyes, blowing a string of tank-size air bubbles from its mouth before shooting to the side like a mattress, giving out a series of movement sounds with its 60-meter-long body.
The center of the aircraft carrier behind the eel suddenly caved in and then spread like radioactivity in less than 0.2 seconds.
Boom! A strong shock wave smashed the hull into pieces. A ball of water mixed with steel and sediments spread outward at a speed of more than 300 meters per second.
Boom! Boom! Boom! The aircraft carrier exploded one time after another in less than five seconds.
"Oh my goodness me…" Chen Fan was almost scared to death. Who would have expected that the bomb carried by this aircraft carrier which had been soaked in the sea for decades had not been corroded by seawater. When the electric eel's discharge swept by from above, the bomb suddenly exploded. Luckily the bomb ignited by the discharge was only a small bomb carried by the zero fighter, and it exploded in the hangar. If it had been those heavy aerial bombs carried by bombing planes, the electric eel would probably be knocked out by the strong impact.
Nonetheless, the electric eel which dashed more than twenty meters away at that moment was still affected by the strong underwater shock wave and still felt dizzy and deaf after more than ten minutes.
After waiting for the sound to stop and the dust to settle, the electric eel slowly swam back to the place. The seabed which the aircraft carrier was initially lying on had become a big burnt hole. Only the wreckage scattered around showed that there was indeed an aircraft carrier here just now.
Still feeling shaken, Chen Fan glanced at the large, four-meter deep hole. He had thought that he could get a fighter plane from inside and bring it back to Zhongyun for the fun of it. Now what? He couldn't even find any aircraft part that was more than half a meter.
The aircraft carrier was gone…
The electric eel laid in front of the large hole and stared at it for a long while before climbing inside. Treating it as its nest, the eel closed its eyes for a rest.
Two days later, the electric eel finally reached the final destination after swimming day and night for a week.
Tonga Trench is situated on the east of the Tonga Islands in the southern central of the Pacific Ocean. On its north is the Samoa Islands, and its south connects to Kermadec Trench, with a total length of over 1,350 kilometers and a width of 80 kilometers. The average depth is over 6,000 meters, with its deepest at over 10,000 meters.
The electric eel laid on the seabed over 800 meters deep and used the electromagnetic induction in its brain to sense the bottomless trench in front which sloped at a sixty-degree angle. It couldn't help but exclaim, Finally here, it hasn't been easy!
After retrieving his thoughts from the electric eel, Chen Fan went downstairs and took in two breaths of fresh air as he stood in the yard. His bones were falling apart after shutting himself at home for the past few days.
"Let me take a good rest and revitalize myself first before catching a few ghost hair jellyfish up!" Chen Fan mumbled to himself after stretching himself and filling his stomach.
At 9.10PM that night, Chen Fan shifted his thoughts onto the electric eel again. Chen Fan had no idea if the sky outside was bright or dark now. Even if there was sunlight, it wouldn't be able to illuminate more than eight meters under water.
Although the place was more than 5,000 nautical miles away, the geomorphological and biological aspects were not much different from the Shimen Trench near Zhongyun. They had the same dark and cold environment.
"Ghost hair jellyfish, I'm coming!" After taking in a deep breath, the electric eel kicked its four claws and lowered its head, and dashed toward the Tonga Trench. As the eel descended along the trench, the surrounding environment changed slowly with the depth. The colorful coral reefs and multi-colored fishes were gradually replaced by bare rocks and white ugly-looking fishes.
At the depth of 1,500 meters, the gentle slope suddenly widened into a ninety-degree right angle. The surrounding fishes also went into hiding, except for the occasional escaping silhouette which flashed past at the end of the eel's electromagnetic induction, which Chen Fan couldn't figure out what exactly it was.
At 1,500 meters, the temperature of the water was already down to zero degrees. Organisms who dared to live here were definitely not easy to deal with. At about 2,000 meters deep, Chen Fan stopped the electric eel from swimming downward but increased the release of discharge instead and let it swim horizontally to see if there was anything interesting.
The electric eel's eyes had already lost its use completely now, so it could only depend on the discharge to sense the environment. However, if it intended to stay in the deep waters for long, it couldn't use high discharge to sense the environment as the eel's discharge tissues would get exhausted quickly if used over long period.
After swimming aimlessly for half an hour, Chen Fab couldn't take it anymore. It wasn't because the electric eel could not withstand the water pressure in this area, but because the search efficiency of the eel was simply too lousy! The electric eel could only sense a range of around 110 meters, but the probability of finding a target in this vast ocean with this 110 meter range was even smaller than bumping into a beauty on the streets.
A ray of bluish-white light flowed from the electric eel's body. The round-shaped power-ball traveled straight out with the seawater for more than 1,000 meters before dying off completely.
After pondering for a long while, Chen Fan decided to use another search method. The method was to let the electric eel release a high-pressure light ball every 1,000 meter. Although this would shorten the time of the eel in the water, it could search within a range of more than twenty kilometers within the time that the discharge was almost used up.