Inside the command center of the crustal drilling project "Deep Eye VII," the air hung thick as solidified asphalt. It was heavy with the stench of overheated machinery, stale coffee, and a tension that clung to every technician's shoulders like a second skin.
Banks of monitors cast a cold blue glow over haggard faces. Most had been glued to their stations for twelve hours or more. But Li Zhe was in a league of his own.
He stared at the errant data string flickering across his screen. His eyes burned, dry as desert sand, from seventeen straight hours without so much as a blink. His jaw was set, muscles taut, as if willing the numbers to rearrange into something logical.
The faint hum of the mainframe was the only sound that dared pierce his concentration—until the synthetic voice cut through it, flat and unemotional.
"Depth: 127 kilometers. Temperature reading anomalous. Rock sample density 38% below theoretical values."
"Impossible."
Academician Wang pulled off his wire-rimmed glasses, his fingers trembling slightly as he polished the lenses with a crumpled handkerchief. The older man's face, lined with decades of geological research, was ashen.
"The mantle at this depth should be uniform peridotite—dense, stable, unyielding."
The final feed from the drill bit flickered on the main screen for three heartbeats. It showed no roiling lava, no compacted rock—only a vast, hollow expanse glowing with an otherworldly cerulean light.
Then, with a sharp crackle, the signal died. The screen went black, leaving only the ghost of that blue glow burned into everyone's retinas.
Li Zhe's fingers flew across his keyboard, pulling up every backup sensor log. Sonar data painted a chilling picture: a massive spherical cavity lay beneath them, its diameter at least 200 kilometers.
Gravimeter readings plummeted by 9.7% in that zone, as if the very core of the Earth harbored an anti-gravitational bubble—something that defied every law of physics they knew.
"Prepare the eighth drilling plan." Academician Wang's voice was parched, as if he'd swallowed a handful of the desert sand outside the facility. "This time, we're going to—"
An earsplitting alarm cut him off, shrill enough to make everyone in the room flinch. It wasn't the drill's warning system—this was the highest-level alert from the Global Geological Monitoring Network, a sound no one in the center had ever heard before.
On the holographic star map, seventeen red dots blazed to life along the Pacific Ring of Fire, all at depths exceeding 100 kilometers.
Li Zhe leaned in, his brow furrowed as he analyzed the seismic waveforms—they were almost perfectly synchronized, a pattern no natural earthquake could ever produce.
"This isn't an earthquake," he said, his voice low with disbelief. "Something's moving down there. Something big."