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Crimson Typhoon slowly disappeared beneath the surface, and the people on the sea lost sight of it entirely.
The national broadcaster had originally arranged for undersea tracking footage, but with the rain falling now and the sea conditions unstable, they'd had no choice but to cancel it temporarily for safety's sake.
After going into the water, Crimson Typhoon soon reached the end of its route.
"Master control, we've reached the designated task point." Dean habitually opened the radio to report.
Only after he'd finished did it occur to him that radio communication couldn't function normally underwater. The words he'd just spoken wouldn't reach the master control room at all.
"We just need to make sure the instruments aren't damaged and record this dive's data well. We can transmit it back to master control once we're ashore." At the crucial moment, the eldest brother, Jake, spoke up.
"Mm." The two younger brothers answered in unison. Ryan had told them about this too. Dean had simply forgotten for a moment.
---
Inside the master control room.
Ryan watched the livestream footage of Crimson Typhoon diving beneath the water. Almost the very instant the mech submerged, all the data concerning the mech on every computer in the master control room ceased transmitting.
But no one panicked. After the mech entered the water, a communication interruption was perfectly normal.
The people at the computers all relaxed for the time being, waiting for communications to resume once the mech surfaced.
At this point, though, Ryan suddenly recalled the mech's communication method from the film.
In the film, the mech could maintain low-latency, high-bandwidth communication even at a depth of seven thousand meters underwater. The technology implied in those few short shots was, in fact, quite terrifying.
It was worth remembering that of the radio waves people commonly used for communication at sea, apart from extremely long waves, essentially no band could penetrate even thirty meters underwater, let alone seven thousand.
Currently the most commonly used method underwater was acoustic communication. Put simply, the information to be sent was first converted into an electrical signal, then into an acoustic signal. The acoustic signal then propagated through the water to the receiver, who converted and decoded the signal in reverse to obtain the sender's content.
But this method came with no shortage of headaches. Sound waves could only propagate at a bit over a thousand meters per second, which meant slow propagation and long latency. High noise in the water, heavy signal interference, and many other problems had long been thorny challenges in this field.
To achieve the film's effect through acoustic communication, the propagation latency of the sound waves alone was an unsolvable problem.
Unfortunately, however, the system hadn't provided a solution for the underwater communication system in the mech's technical documentation. Or rather, it hadn't provided one directly.
Crimson Typhoon's technical documentation contained only the technology for the underwater communication signal receiver and transmitter. It hadn't directly provided the technology for the entire underwater communication system.
This was because the underwater communication system was a vast, independent system. It didn't belong to mech technology. Its only point of direct connection to the mech was the signal receiver and transmitter installed on the mech itself.
And the system wouldn't provide anything unrelated to the project's technology.
From these two devices, the signal receiver and transmitter, Ryan had roughly inferred that behind them lay a space-based system. A communication system based on satellite transmission.
But this inference couldn't immediately help him reconstruct the entire system. So in his initial technical outline, he'd deleted the mech's underwater communication system, to be added in later.
There was no rush on this. In any case, if they later needed to dive to seven thousand meters in the deep sea, they could just borrow the high-speed underwater communication technology from the Pioneer project next door.
Both were seven-thousand-meter-class, and the two were brother projects. Borrowing a little something was no big deal.
The mech carried out its task underwater, though it could hardly be called much of a task. It was just a stroll along the seabed to test the sealing system. The possibility of a problem occurring was essentially zero.
So the people in the base were quite calm.
---
The mech stayed underwater for over twenty minutes, during which the dark clouds in the sky dispersed and the weather finally gradually cleared.
The people on the distant sea surface finally had good visibility too.
"Such a shame the mech's underwater."
Danny Price and his roommates held binoculars in their hands, but they still couldn't see the underwater Crimson Typhoon. The Redcliff Islands' waters weren't clean enough for that.
So they kept watching the official footage in the livestream. The Redcliff waters' surface had been on the yellowish side to begin with, and after Crimson Typhoon went into the sea, it had clearly grown murkier.
"There's so much silt down there. Will sand get into the mech? The parts inside the mech should be pretty delicate, right?"
"The mech can just walk straight into the water, and you're telling me sand can get in?"
"Don't be afraid, everyone. This is just our country's newest fishing robot. Our country has a lot of people and eats a lot of fish, so it's perfectly reasonable to need a fishing robot this big, isn't it?"
"Right, right, it's part of the same fishing fleet as the three frigates up on the surface."
The people in the livestream, looking at the murky surface, were all just riffing on memes.
But some, looking at the silt churned up from the seabed, suddenly thought of a certain someone.
"This really isn't very environmentally friendly. How dare you."
"After this scene in the dark, you won't believe what this young woman did."
"Ha, I'll be waiting for her news tomorrow."
---
Down on the seabed, the three brothers had been keeping an eye on the mech's status the whole time, and seeing that the time was about up, they walked up from the seabed at once.
The gradually calming sea surface suddenly stirred with wind and waves again. The mech's shadow gradually took shape on the surface. The behemoth was about to walk out from underwater.
"Viewers, Crimson Typhoon should have finished its task on the seabed by now, and is about to return to the surface."
In the helicopter, the reporter who'd been watching the sea the whole time grew excited at once, practically shouting the words out.
The cameraman pointed the lens at the sea surface the first chance he got, as the mech's underwater outline grew clearer and clearer.
The audience in front of their televisions and in the livestream all grew excited.
Sure enough, in the very next moment.
The enormous mech walked up the gradually rising seabed, its upper body thrusting out of the water.
Splash.
The streams of water it carried up cascaded like waterfalls down from every part of the mech's upper body.
Crimson Typhoon made a head-shaking motion, flinging off all the water droplets left near the observation window.
Yet it was precisely this seemingly normal action that gave a number of attentive viewers a jolt.
It was far too nimble.
This action looked perfectly ordinary to the average person, but it had to be remembered that the one performing it wasn't a person. It was a seventy-six-meter mech. There was no telling how much that head weighed.
The three frigates on the distant surface, seeing the mech back on the water, soon drove over again to continue navigating ahead.
Sunlight pierced through the clouds. Ahead lay the road home.
On the surface, the tourists on the pleasure boats finally saw Crimson Typhoon's true appearance clearly in the sunlight. Even having just emerged from the murky seabed, not the slightest trace of filth showed on its surface.
"So beautiful. This trip really wasn't wasted after all. Heaven loves me after all."
Danny Price had his binoculars jammed right up against his eyes, wishing he could hang his very eyeballs onto the mech.
And his roommates, the other tourists on the boat, and indeed this entire stretch of sea, every single person, whether tourist or pleasure-boat crew, held binoculars in hand, watching in excitement as Crimson Typhoon made its return, its figure growing more and more distant.
In the master control room, after celebrating the experiment's smooth progress, everyone immediately got busy. Communications had been restored, and the mech's operating data from the seabed had transmitted back.
Everyone stared at their computers, not letting a single detail on them slip past.
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