HDRDTH -Chapter 78 The Frozen Depths — A Forbidden Zone for the Living

Splash!

The heavy sinker entered the water with almost no splash at all, instantly swallowed by Heilongtan.

Yu Xian gripped the rod handle tightly, his thumb gently resting on the drum reel’s spool.

One second. Three seconds. Five seconds.

The spool began spinning wildly. The tungsten sinker was plunging at a terrifying speed.

Fifty meters. One hundred meters. One hundred fifty meters!

The depth of Heilongtan far exceeded everyone’s imagination. It was a bottomless pit that seemed to connect directly to the earth’s core.

Captain Liu Jianjun’s face turned deathly pale.

“The sonar limit is 120 meters… what kind of structure is down there?”

Click!

Yu Xian suddenly pressed his thumb down, locking the spool. The descent stopped.

And in that instant—

A terrifying, unstoppable force surged up through the special PE line, violently transmitting to the rod tip.

This was not a fish struggling.

This was nature itself, violently tearing back.

Creak—

The 28,000-yuan handcrafted T1100 carbon rod bent into a perfect U-shape in a fraction of a second. The tip nearly touched the water’s surface.

“The underwater current grabbed the sinker!” Liu Jianjun shouted. “Cut the line! He’ll be dragged in!”

Yu Xian’s feet were forced forward on the slippery rock—half of his foot was already hanging over the black water.

“Dafu!” Yu Xian roared, veins bulging on his forehead.

“I’m here, Dad!” Wang Dafu charged forward like a bull, wrapping both arms around Yu Xian’s waist and bracing his legs deep into the rock crevices.

Together, they barely managed to withstand the first terrifying impact from below.

The bandage on Yu Xian’s left hand instantly tore open. Blood mixed with rainwater ran down the black rod, dripping into the dark lake below.

But he did not retreat.

Yu Xian closed his eyes, focusing all his senses into the fishing rod.

The underwater feedback was chaotic.

Leftward violent pulls. Rightward brutal impacts. Multiple currents intersecting into a massive underwater vortex.

The tungsten sinker, carrying the school uniform, was moving through a maze of submerged caverns.

“Flow speed… 6.5 meters per second… this is impossible to withstand…” a rescue technician stammered while staring at his portable instrument.

Yu Xian suddenly leaned backward, using his core strength to crank the reel.

Creak… creak…

The full-metal drum reel emitted an unbearable grinding sound. Every meter retrieved cost enormous physical effort.

He wasn’t fighting a fish.

He was fighting a mountain.

A river.

Ten minutes… twenty… thirty…

Time passed.

Three full hours.

Under the heavy rain, no one spoke. Every villager stared at the man on the cliff like a wrathful deity holding back the abyss.

Wang Fei stood in the rain without an umbrella. She watched Yu Xian’s bleeding hand, his soaked back facing the storm.

And suddenly—she understood.

This man talked about lying flat, about being lazy, about doing nothing.

Because most things in this world were simply not worth him standing up for.

But once he stood—

Even this frozen abyss had to yield.

Suddenly.

The violently trembling rod tip stopped for a split second.

It felt like a galloping wild horse had been locked by an iron chain.

The pulling force of the current was still there—but within it, a new resistance appeared.

Heavy. Dense. Unnatural.

Yu Xian’s eyes snapped open.

Bloodshot.

He felt it.

Not rocks. Not weeds.

Something soft… water-resistant… stuck tightly by the tungsten sinker.

“I found it,” Yu Xian squeezed out through his throat.

Captain Liu Jianjun rushed to the cliff, shining a flashlight into the water.

“Pull it up! Quickly!” he shouted, voice cracking with excitement.

“I can’t!” Yu Xian gritted his teeth. “It’s stuck in a reverse funnel formation! If I pull straight, the line will snap!”

The body had been trapped in a collapsed underwater cave pocket. Outside was a six-meter-per-second torrent. If it was dislodged, it would be sucked into the underground river forever.

Yu Xian was holding it at the edge of the abyss with a single line.

No way forward. No way back.

“Let it go…” Liu Jianjun closed his eyes in pain. “This is a dead end. No human power can fight this terrain.”

Under the shelter, Chen Qingshan’s mother suddenly stood up.

She couldn’t hear anything—but she understood everything from their expressions.

She did not cry.

She simply walked to the lake and gently placed the red cotton jacket she had sewn into the water.

It was instantly swallowed by the black depths.

Yu Xian stared at the fading red.

“To hell with physics,” he spat rainwater from his mouth.

He released Wang Dafu’s support and shifted the rod’s fulcrum onto his right shoulder.

“Even if the King of Hell came personally to claim this soul—I’ll fish him out of hell today!”

He abandoned the reel entirely.

In this deadly funnel terrain, mechanical force would only snap the line instantly.

He turned the rod sideways, resting it like a rope over his shoulder. The rough fabric tore against his skin as the rod pressed directly into his flesh.

“Dafu! Hold my legs down! Push me into the ground!” Yu Xian barked.

Without hesitation, Wang Dafu threw himself into the mud, using his 200-pound body to anchor Yu Xian.

Yu Xian grabbed the PE line with both hands, leaning forward at a forty-five-degree angle.

He began to walk.

Centimeter by centimeter.

Each step carved a white mark into the rock beneath his boots.

Deep underwater—

The tungsten sinker and school uniform had miraculously caught the waistband of Chen Qingshan’s body. Under Yu Xian’s brute pulling force, the corpse was slowly dragged out of the collapsed cave pocket.

The current sliced at the body like countless frozen blades.

“He’s resisting the pressure of the entire underground river…” the rescue technician slumped to the ground, staring at the overloaded instrument. “This exceeds 200 kilograms of instantaneous force…”

Creak— CRACK!

The second section of the fishing rod emitted a horrifying breaking sound.

A thin crack appeared across the carbon fiber surface.

It was reaching its limit.