Chapter 13: Whale
In the beam of the flashlight, at the last moment before the massive silhouette disappeared, Zhang Wenda saw a row of things flying up.
It was a row of five black Go pieces. Or rather, they weren’t game pieces; they were five eyes in a single row—the eyes of the Youth Palace.
The view outside the window was gradually covered by dirt again, but Zhang Wenda remained frozen in place, his mind reeling. The scene he had just witnessed replayed over and over in his head. The Youth Palace was alive. It was a living thing.
He understood that this world was strange, but he couldn’t comprehend how an underground building could actually move.
Yet, Zhang Wenda felt no surprise. He was past the point of being surprised. It didn’t matter how much stranger this world became, because he knew he was about to die.
The Youth Palace was alive, and it was carrying them, trapped within its body, deeper underground. The rising temperature and the thinning air both indicated they were now very, very far below the surface.
There could be no way out of the Youth Palace now. Even if there were a door, the pressure from the surrounding earth would crush them instantly. The so-called Teacher Rabbit couldn’t save them, either. If he had the power to rescue them, he would have done so long ago instead of dawdling until now.
His body scraping against the wall, Zhang Wenda slowly slumped to the floor, his eyes filled with profound despair.
Suddenly, he lowered his head and let out a self-deprecating laugh. ’What even is my life? I get muddle-headedly sent back here, get beaten senseless by who-knows-what, and now I’m going to die hundreds of meters underground?’
He had thought this was just the beginning, but he never expected it to be the end. Recalling the grand ambitions he’d had when he first came back, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of profound irony.
’Maybe I already died back then in my rented room. Did Fate think my death was too comfortable, so it decided to give me a different way to go?’
"Sigh..." Zhang Wenda lay sprawled on the floor and heaved a deep sigh.
The Black Cat at his side walked a few circles on Zhang Wenda’s chest before settling down right on top of him.
"Thanks, little kitty," Zhang Wenda murmured. "Thanks for letting me die knowing the truth."
Zhang Wenda was beginning to feel the effects of oxygen deprivation; he felt himself on the verge of blacking out.
As he was drifting off, he suddenly heard someone calling him. "Haozi!" "Wenda! Don’t be scared! We’ve come to rescue you!"
A hand reached out from the darkness, shooed the Black Cat away, and a flurry of other hands clumsily pulled him to his feet.
Soon, the flashlight was picked up from the floor and switched back on, illuminating several faces slick with sweat. They were his classmates, every single one of them looking at him with concern.
"Fatty, what are you all doing here? Weren’t you supposed to listen to the teacher and wait?" Zhang Wenda asked, his face ashen.
"We’re brothers! You saved my life! How could I abandon you just because of something the teacher said? I’m not that kind of guy!" Fatty said, hoisting Zhang Wenda onto his back and turning to leave.
The other classmates formed a protective circle, fearfully swinging their schoolbags to drive away the hissing Little Black Cat.
Watching his classmates, Zhang Wenda felt a warmth spread through his chest. It had been a long time since anyone had cared for him so genuinely.
The same kids who had been crying in terror earlier had actually come looking for him in the dark. He knew how incredibly hard that must have been for them.
Looking at their innocent faces, a sudden surge of strength welled up inside Zhang Wenda.
’I won’t give up. I absolutely cannot give up! It doesn’t matter if I die, but what about them? These kids’ lives have only just begun. They absolutely cannot die here for nothing!’
Zhang Wenda suddenly leaped off Fatty’s back, startling Pan Dongzi. "Haozi, are you okay?"
"Let’s go! Everyone, follow me! I’ll find us the way home!" Zhang Wenda declared with a powerful sweep of his arm. Gritting his teeth, he started toward the unexplored rooms. He knew perfectly well that they were hundreds of meters underground, but he had to try!
Every door he opened revealed a classroom more bizarre and grotesque than the last. Yet Zhang Wenda refused to give up. Even when he reached the model airplane room, which was filled with some kind of painful gas, he gritted his teeth and pressed on with the search.
’What if there’s a portal or something?’ he thought. ’In a world this strange, anything is possible!’
He stopped at nothing in his search for an exit. He even made the cat tag along, sending it into each newly opened room first in a desperate search for a miracle.
When Fatty’s watch read six-thirty, Zhang Wenda, now struggling for breath, finally stopped. There were no portals. The Black Cat that had started following them hadn’t found any way out, either.
He glanced at his classmates, who were starting to slump against the walls, but he still refused to give up. He wiped the sweat from his face and struggled back to his feet. "I’m not beaten yet," he muttered. "I can’t give up! I’ll search one more time, more carefully."
"Haozi, let’s just stop looking," Fatty pleaded. "Let’s go back and wait. We just need to do what the guide says. Teacher Rabbit will definitely come and save us."
Fatty had just finished speaking when Zhang Wenda, who was about to start searching again, suddenly froze. He slowly turned around to face Fatty, a glimmer of hope dawning in his eyes. "Why?"
"What?"
"Why do we have to follow the rules in the guide?"
"Because everything it says is right! That’s stuff for grown-ups to worry about."
’The problem is, I *am* a grown-up,’ Zhang Wenda thought.
Zhang Wenda pulled out his Youth Palace guide and began to scan the bizarre rules. ’Why do we have to follow these rules? Why is it automatically right to follow them?’
’Why pretend you don’t see the black pieces in the Go room? Why leave if there are three or more? Why tell the teacher if there are five or more?’
’Why tell the teacher if you feel strange emotions in the model airplane room? Why tell your classmates when you see a pit?’
’Why must you not fall into the pit in the calligraphy room?’
In this life-or-death crisis, an idea was taking shape at the edge of his consciousness, but he couldn’t quite grasp it.
Zhang Wenda had never considered this before. He had always assumed the world was simply absurd and that anything was possible.
But now, as he began to analyze the rules with an adult’s logic, he sensed that they weren’t random at all. There seemed to be a pattern to them—a pattern that held a sliver of hope.
"A pencil? Who has a pencil?!"
Hearing his shout, someone dug a pencil out of a forgotten schoolbag and passed it to him.
His forehead beaded with sweat, Zhang Wenda quickly began to categorize all the rules in the Youth Palace guide. He discovered they could be roughly divided into two types.
The first type was for risk avoidance: rules like warning other students about the cracks in the model airplane room or the pit in the calligraphy room. He set those aside.
The second type dealt with reporting anomalies: the five black Go pieces forming a line in the Go room, feeling strange emotions in the model airplane room, and seeing an unknown creature inside the Youth Palace.
Hundreds of meters underground, Zhang Wenda stared blankly at the Youth Palace guide, now covered in his frantic scribbles.
As the Youth Palace sank deeper, the oxygen thinned. Everyone was suffering from hypoxia, including Zhang Wenda. His lips were already starting to turn purple.
Yet, as if he hadn’t noticed, Zhang Wenda kept his eyes glued to the rules, desperately trying to find a glimmer of hope.
Suddenly, the hand holding the pencil moved. He drew a Big Circle around the last part of each rule he had grouped together.
Excluding the risk-avoidance rules, every single one of the anomaly-reporting rules ended with the same ultimate solution: tell Teacher Rabbit and let him handle it.
Suddenly, inspiration struck. He blurted out, "This is wrong!"
"What?!" Fatty, who had passed out nearby, jolted awake for a second before promptly fainting again.
"There’s a contradiction here. This is wrong! Some of these rules are making a mountain out of a molehill! There’s even a specific rule just to warn us about tripping over a small hole in the model airplane room. Teacher Rabbit can’t possibly care about us that much."
"If he cared that much, he’d never let us come to a place like the Youth Palace—a dangerous, living entity—to gather resources. That’s no different from using children as miners! The mortality rate would be way too high!"
As Zhang Wenda laid out the contradiction, he began speaking faster and faster, his eyes growing brighter with each word.
He remembered the individual black Go pieces in the Go room, and the row of eyes belonging to the Youth Palace.
"So there’s only one possibility: the Youth Palaces we were sent to in the past were all dead! Not sleeping, not in some other state—dead. Only a dead Youth Palace would be safe enough for children like us to harvest from! Only that kind of place deserves to be called a ’palace for the youth’!"
At that moment, Zhang Wenda finally seized the thought that had been eluding him. "There are no random rules! Every single rule has a logical reason behind it!"
The only other person still conscious, a skinny boy with glasses, pushed them up the bridge of his nose. "So... what does that mean?"
Zhang Wenda looked out the window at the earth still slowly sliding past. Judging by its color and texture, it was probably no longer soil, but rock.
He watched the rock sliding past, his mind flashing back to the massive silhouette in the cavern and what he knew of the Youth Palace’s general behavior.
"The living ones sink, and the dead ones rise," he said. "You know, I once read about a creature that does the exact opposite: a whale."
"When a whale dies, it gradually sinks to the ocean floor. Once there, its body nourishes the creatures of the deep. It’s called a whale fall; from one death, a world of life is born."
The white Go pieces he had once collected, the "liquid happiness," the image of another Youth Palace—all sorts of details, both noticed and overlooked, now flooded Zhang Wenda’s mind, and his eyes shone with increasing brightness.
"What I’m saying is, what if a Youth Palace is a kind of whale? A sort of subterranean whale that lives deep within the earth? What if they’re the opposite of ocean whales—after they die, the pressure from below gradually pushes them up to the surface, where their corpses then nourish surface-dwellers like us?"