Chapter 335: Ancient Village at Lake Bottom

The deep blue lakebed had given me many fantasies, but I never imagined I would see these things at the bottom of the lake.

These wooden buildings were completely covered in sediment, resembling parts of a sunken ship. In this light, I couldn't examine them closely, but I was certain that what I saw was an ancient Yao village submerged at the bottom of the lake.

Deeper down the slope was pitch black, with shadowy figures below. There must be more things, and I guessed they were all stilted wooden buildings.

What was going on? Why were there these things at the bottom of the lake? Could there have been a massive flash flood that caused the mountain to collapse and submerge the original village? Staring at these eerie bluish-green ancient buildings, my mind went blank. I even forgot my surroundings, just dumbfoundedly looking at the scene before me.

As I was dazed, my body suddenly jolted and I started to float upward. I tugged at the umbilical-like rope and found that the rope I had been gripping tightly had finally broken. Only then did I again feel the suffocating water pressure rushing at me. With no time to care about the scene, I struggled desperately upward.

It was an indescribable feeling. With buoyancy, I rose very quickly. Darkness surrounded me, and above was a gradually brightening circle of light. My brain began to lack oxygen, and the circle of light became more and more hazy, as if I were swimming towards heaven.

This was probably the last scene drowning people see, I thought. In the final seconds, my breath reached its limit. My mind went blank, and I saw a white light. Then suddenly my face felt free, the white light around me contracted, and I heard water sounds and other indistinguishable noises. I saw the shimmering surface of the lake.

I barely had the strength to take that first breath. That inhalation was almost an explosion of all my energy. When I finally filled my lungs with air, I nearly passed out—God, in decades of life, I had never felt that breathing could be so comfortable.

Then I started panting heavily, almost frantically gulping air. Gradually, everything around me calmed down.

When I fully regained my senses, I raised my hand to check my watch. From the time I dived to when I surfaced, only a little over a minute had passed, but it felt like several hours. The underwater environment and what I had seen were so shocking that my perception of time was distorted.

Normally, my breath-holding time wasn't this short. It seemed that swimming pools and deep lakes were completely different. I had been too naive. Fatty and the raft were about thirty meters away from me; probably when I burst out of the water, I had used the wrong force and deviated. I swam towards Fatty, back to the raft. Fatty asked me why I came up so quickly.

I was about to speak when I suddenly felt my upper lip burning. I touched it, and found I had a nosebleed. Then my ears and whole body started to ache, and I began to feel dizzy. I nearly let go of the raft and sink. In a daze, I felt Fatty grab me and vaguely heard him say, "Damn it, you surfaced too fast! Your blood vessels burst!"

Fortunately, the dizziness passed quickly, and I soon recovered. I'm not a professional diver; it seemed my body structure really wasn't suited for this kind of free diving. I lay on the raft again, watching the continuous nosebleed flow down my face to my chin and drip into the water. I was vaguely worried that my internal organs might also be damaged.

Fatty used his handkerchief to temporarily plug my nostrils and asked me what happened. Why did I come up so urgently.

I tilted my head back to let the nosebleed flow back, and told him what I had seen. Fatty listened, stunned, and then didn't believe it. For something like this, unless you see it with your own eyes, you can't imagine the scene. He said he wanted to go down and have a look. I stopped him, telling him that the depth there was definitely more than what we measured, and it was too dangerous for one person to go down.

At that moment, there was another splash. Poker-face surfaced, taking a deep breath. He emerged only about two meters from the raft, clearly much calmer than I was.

I checked my watch. He had dived about a minute longer than me. He swam laboriously to the raft, holding on with one hand. Fatty was about to ask how it went, when Poker-face's other hand suddenly lifted something out of the water with a splash and threw it onto the raft, splashing water all over our faces.

Before I could see clearly, Fatty exclaimed in shock, "Holy shit, what the hell is that thing?"