I looked carefully at the chart.
The map didn’t even draw a small reef, let alone land.
It was an open sea with nothing rising above the sea level.
It was full of contour lines and numbers.
And on the map, circles were drawn with a ballpoint pen.
‘I don’t know.’
To be honest, I don’t know the Dokdo method of the sea chart.
Because I never saw anything in my life.
But don’t worry.
President Park will arrive soon.
On my way back to Seoul from Hongcheon, I told President Park over the phone to learn how to do Dokdo.
But he already knew how to read charts.
In addition, he had acquired and held a ＜small ship pilot’s license＞.
So it can steer ships under 25 tons.
President Park was also a person who was highly useful in many ways.
“I am here!”
Just then, President Park arrived.
He smiled at Director Kim.
“long time no see?”
“President Park…”
Come to think of it, the two used to be business partners.
Because President Park supplied the cannon phone to Chief Kim.
“Let’s do well together again.”
When President Park asked Director Kim to shake hands, he asked, holding his hand with a shy expression.
“But where are you coming from?”
“Somewhere, on the way home. I commute.”
“J-Really!?”
My eyes widened when I heard from President Park that manager Kim, who lives locked up in the inventory, commutes from home.
“And I also get a monthly salary. The president also pays a lot of bonuses.”
“i envy you···.”
A genuinely envious expression was evident on the man’s face.
I smiled and told Director Kim.
“Treatment changes as much as you prove your worth. I am a person with a certain reward and punishment.”
“I will do my best! President!”
Chief Kim let out a snort with his eyes sparkling.
After knowing that hard work will be rewarded, I must be motivated.
“Is this what you said?”
As I nodded, President Park began to examine the chart carefully.
“Looking at the edge of a map, you can tell the latitude and longitude. And if you know that, you can know the location and distance of the sea area marked on the map. Because 1 degree is 60 nautical miles…”
President Park explained the basic method of Dokdo while looking at the chart.
Then, I took out my phone and opened an internet map app to check where the latitude and longitude were.
“37 degrees north latitude, 131 degrees east longitude… Here it is! It’s halfway between Ulleungdo and Dokdo.”
Then, Chief Kim asked President Park.
“Then the East Sea? Isn’t the East Sea deep?”
President Park answered by pointing to the number on the chart.
“The number written here is the water depth, so it’s about 2,000m.”
Between Ulleungdo and Dokdo was a deep-sea plain with a depth of 2,000m.
Upon hearing President Park’s words, Chief Kim exclaimed with his eyes widened.
“The water is 2,000 meters deep?!”
Then, his face turned red and he told me.
“I said earlier that Cheon Tae-soo would have retrieved gold from the sea, but I don’t think so!”
“why?”
“I have been interested in treasure ships for a long time, so I know a little about that, but even if the water is only 4,500m deep, it is difficult to search or salvage. So, the depth of the water is 2,000m!”
There are many treasure ships all over the world that cannot be salvaged due to the depth of the water, even though Chief Kim’s horse confirms the ship’s location.
Even if the depth of the treasure ship is only 4,500m, depending on the state of preservation of the ship, salvage costs will cost tens of billions to hundreds of billions of won.
So, before salvage, you have to search every nook and cranny of the hull to see if there are more gold and silver treasures in the treasure ship than the cost of salvage, but even that is not easy.
“It’s a water depth that is difficult for divers to enter.”
The world record for diving using standard scuba equipment was about 300m.
And the depth at which the Republic of Korea Navy’s Marine Rescue Unit (SSU), which is said to have the world’s best skills, can breathe special gas to dive from 400 to 600m.
So, the depth of 2,000m was a depth that divers could not enter.
“Can’t we use something like an unmanned submersible to check the inside of the hull?”
Director Kim shook his head at President Park’s question.
“It is possible to search outside the hull, but it is not possible with current technology to enter the ship and inspect every nook and cranny.”
In order to search the inside of a sunken ship full of obstacles, you have to pass through a gap so small that even a person cannot squeeze through.
Of course, the size of the unmanned submersible must be designed to be small, but then a large-capacity battery cannot be installed.
Then, the start-up time would be shortened, making meaningful exploration impossible.
Even if it solved the battery problem, there was another problem.
When entering the deep sea, electromagnetic waves and light waves cannot be used, so there are many difficulties in wireless remote control.
So what many countries are developing recently was ‘autonomous unmanned submersible’.
This is because the self-driving submersible can go into the deep sea and move on its own without external control to gather necessary information.
However, there were still many areas for improvement.
In any case, the conclusion is that it is close to impossible to retrieve gold bars from the sea at a depth of 2,000 m.
“uh?!”
President Park, who looked at the map once again, found something.
“There is only one place on the map where the water is shallow!”
“Where is that?”
In response to my question, President Park pointed to a point on the map with his finger.
“Here you go! It is circled here.”
It was one of the many circles drawn on the map.
“Only here the water is shallow. The shallowest point is about 450 m. uh? Is this by any chance?”
President Park searched the Internet as if he remembered something.
“Right! This is the ‘dissolution of Anyongbok’!”
Haesan (海山) was a highland in the sea that rose sharply due to underwater volcanic activity.
In the middle of the vast deep-sea plain between Ulleungdo and Dokdo, there was a high seamount soaring.
＜Anyongbok Dissolution＞ was named after Ahn Yongbok, a fisherman who caught fish on Ulleungdo in the 17th century.
Anyongbok tried to reprimand the Japanese fishermen who trespassed on Ulleungdo, but were caught by them and taken to Japan.
Surprisingly, however, he showed great verbal skills there and obtained a letter from the Japanese shogunate confirming that Ulleungdo was the territory of Joseon.
To the Koreans, he was a daring hero, and to the Japanese, he was an international swindler posing as a diplomat.
There is a theory that Ahn Yong-bok’s status was a slave, but if it is true, he was a person who dominated an era beyond the restrictions of his social status.
In any case, within the sea area of the map, the only place where a treasure ship could be salvaged with modern technology was ＜Ahn Yong-bok’s Dissolution＞.
“So, did you mean that Chairman Cheon retrieved the gold ingots from the vicinity of Anyongbok Mountain?”
“It is very likely! No, almost certainly!”
I nodded my head at Director Kim’s answer.
“Then let’s go to Ulleungdo first. and···.”
I asked Park about something else.
“Have you checked the photos I sent you?”
In addition to the map, the wooden box he took from Chairman Chun contained several old photos.
These pictures seemed to have been taken from the deck of a ship.
Among them, there was one photo that caught my attention.
It was a photo of Chairman Chun and a man together.
Chairman Chun’s face in the photo looks quite young, so it seems like it was taken a long time ago.
A man with thick eyebrows taking a picture with Chairman Chun.
I was very curious about the man’s identity.
Since it is the person in the photo that was kept along with the map, his identity may be an important key to getting through the future.
“I’m entrusting it to a trustworthy place to find out, but honestly, it’s hard to figure out who the person is with just one picture. For now, I am contrasting them with people who were close to Chairman Chun.”
“okay.”
Now let’s go to Ulleungdo.
.
.
.
There were several boat routes to Ulleungdo.
It was possible to depart from Gangneung as well as from Pohang.
I boarded a boat in Gangneung.
The fastest way was to depart from Hupo Port in Uljin, North Gyeongsang Province, but since it departs from Seoul, it was more convenient to board from Gangneung.
This time, President Park and I proudly presented our identification cards and bought tickets.
I didn’t have to hide my identity because I wasn’t walking around doing bad things.
Director Kim was in the inventory.
President Park, who was sitting in the seat next to me, asked me.
“By the way, when are you going to go to Europe and South America?”
He was asking when the gold and cash that Chairman Chun had hidden abroad would be collected.
“Let’s leave after this work. I don’t know when that will be.”
Retrieving gold from the sea was not an easy task.
Even for me armed with magic, the deep sea was a harsh environment.
The pressure increases by 1 bar for every 10 m of depth.
The shallowest part of the sea area on the map was 450m deep.
Maybe we should go down to the sea floor at a depth of 2,000m around ＜Anyongbok Seamount＞.
The pressure at a depth of 2,000 m was 200 bar.
And 200 bar was the pressure used in hydraulic equipment.
You have to use your whole body to take the pressure from the hydraulic press at the junkyard that turns cars into bindaetteok.
To survive in such a harsh environment, my magic skills were still lacking.
‘We need a fusion of science and magic.’
My physical abilities far exceed those of normal humans.
So if I use equipment from the Navy’s SSU, I’ll be able to dive much deeper.
It will take some time to obtain special equipment and receive special training.
.
.
.
Departing from Gangneung, it took about 3 hours to arrive at Ulleungdo.
As we got off the boat, President Park spoke to me in a low voice.
“You shouldn’t bring up the story of the treasure ship in front of others here. You are treated like a cheater.”
A few years ago, there was a company that said that a treasure ship loaded with 150 trillion won worth of gold bars was found off the coast of Ulleungdo, and that it was raising investment funds for a salvage project.
In conclusion, it was a complete scam.
There were sunken ships.
However, it is not known whether there is really gold ingots inside.
The scammers drew people’s attention by claiming that they had lifted a box containing gold bars from a treasure ship, but they did not disclose the real thing.
In fact, they hadn’t planned to salvage the sunken ship from the beginning.
The fact that gold bars worth 150 trillion won were on board was also a totally unfounded claim.
They sold cryptocurrencies to investors, saying that if the treasure ship was salvaged, they would return 100 times the investment.
However, the cryptocurrency they sold was also a fake coin that only existed in numbers, not based on blockchain or DAG.
In the end, the main culprit of the fraud case took the investment money and fled abroad.
While talking about it, President Park looked at the sea with melancholy eyes.
“I was also hit by that and lost hundreds of millions.”
I really couldn’t understand that a person as clever as President Park could fall for such a ridiculous scam.
“I know. How stupid to be fooled by such a lie. But at the time, I really wanted to believe it! A treasure ship sunk in the sea! Just hearing it makes me want to be attractive and truthful!”
.
.
.
I rented a large yacht and went out to sea with President Park.
“So you’re saying that right below us is Sea Mountain?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Now that I’ve come this far, I’m going to test how deep I can dive with just my magic power.
hiss-
I took out a swimsuit from my inventory and put it on.
And I’m about to jump straight into the sea,
“President!”
Park stopped me.
He pointed somewhere with his finger.
“A ship is coming this way.”
Indeed, a freighter was coming toward us.
At first, I thought it was just passing consideration.
However, the ship slowly slowed down and came to a complete stop.
I raised my eyesight with the elixir and inspected the ship.
I could see the letters written on the hull.
From noble mtl dot com
[KOBE SHIPPING]
“Kobe Shipping?”
“Are you Kobe? Is Kobe a Japanese place name?”
The cargo ship that suddenly appeared was a Japanese ship.
“Then why did you build a ship in a place like this? It’s not a fishing boat, so it won’t be fishing.”
A Japanese cargo ship suddenly stopped on top of Anyongbok Mountain.
It could just be that the engine had a problem or stopped for some other similar reason.
But for some reason, a strong intuition that there must be a special purpose penetrated my brain.
I looked at the Japanese boat and opened my mouth.
“Perhaps that ship is looking for the same things as we are.”