The Vein Agreement

Name: The Vein Agreement
Author: Hearing Lanterns Beneath the River

矿脉协议

by Hearing Lanterns Beneath the River (江底听灯)

Status: Completed
Length: 293k Words
Genre: Mystery
Subgenre: Mystery & Supernatural
Updated: 2mo ago
Source: Fanqie

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Synopsis

What lies buried deep underground is not ore, but a forbidden secret no living person should ever touch. In the mountains of the middle and lower Yangtze River region, Qingyan Phosphate Mine in Y City, H Province, is a flagship provincial mine owned by one of the area’s pillar industries. It has comprehensive procedures and advanced equipment, and in more than twenty years of operation, it has never had an accident. During the War of Resistance, a Japanese geological survey team entered an old mine tunnel in Qingyan Mountain and mysteriously disappeared. Decades later, Zhou Jianshan, a fresh graduate of the engineering university in A City and a former soldier, arrives at Qingyan Phosphate Mine to work as a safety officer. On his seventh day at work, a sudden inrush of water strikes the 312 excavation face at the +320m level underground. The mine and regulatory authorities quickly launch an emergency response, and everything proceeds according to protocol. But Zhou Jianshan realizes this is no ordinary flooding accident. The Y-312-B7 pressure sensor has been issuing alerts for a long time; locator tags occasionally appear in places no one has reached; and drones crash as soon as they fly into the fog behind the mountain. The Japanese tunnel, the old locust tree’s crying, the mine truck trapped in a ghostly loop, two pangolins, and knocking sounds from the mined-out area also gradually come to light. At first, everyone tries to explain the anomalies as heavy rain, geological formations, equipment incompatibility, human error, or folk legends. As the investigation deepens, Zhou Jianshan realizes that Qingyan Phosphate Mine is facing not a failure in its procedures, but a deep underground anomaly that neither modern technology nor folk explanations can adequately describe. In the end, the accident is classified as an incident caused by an unknown deep underground anomaly. After returning from below, Zhou Jianshan is no longer the same person. Meanwhile, the monitoring charts at a hydropower station in the river gorge somewhere in Y City begin to show low-frequency anomalies similar to those at Y-312-B7.

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1.7kReads · all time

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