Tales of the End of the Century

It was still dark when the jeep rolled over the last gravel slope.

Tie Niu parked the car next to the derrick and turned off the engine. The derrick was still the same as before—the rusty red steel beams stood in mid-air, a small piece of kite string hanging from the lightning rod, swaying silently in the morning breeze. But there were two more tire tracks on the ground around the well, not the ones they left last time—they were too new, the tire treads were still clear, the edges hadn't weathered, and they looked like they'd been there for two or three days at most.

Tie Niu crouched down and probed the ruts with his thumb, then looked up and compared the direction of the ruts with the faint outline of the old mine tunnel on the other side of the hillside. He stood up and dusted off his hands. "Someone got here before us. It wasn't a heavy vehicle; the tire marks are shallow—it was carrying people, not equipment."

Bai Ye walked to the wellhead and placed the enamel mug on the iron fence. He had personally closed the fence slightly when he left last time, and now it was pushed open a crack, just wide enough for a person to squeeze through sideways. It wasn't the wind—the wind couldn't move such a heavy iron fence. Someone had gone in. He closed his eyes, letting his senses probe deeper into the mine shaft.

After entering the resonant realm, his ability to distinguish specific signals from background noise was much stronger than before. The noisy feeling he had during his last mine trip was gone—not because the mine tunnels had become quieter, but because he had gotten used to it. The sounds of flowing water, residual current, and the howling of the wind in the cracks of the rock strata were still there, but they no longer bothered him. Above all these background sounds, he perceived three slow signals with independent frequencies. The outermost one was from Lao Wei coming from the direction of the main mining area, slightly weaker than last time, but the furnace was still lit; deep inside were two resonants approaching each other, one of which was the faint response that Lan Susu had newly captured on the oscilloscope after his last mine trip, and the other was completely new, with a deeper and slower frequency, like a person crouching in the dark tapping the rock wall with an extremely slow and deliberate rhythm—not a cry for help, but a message.

"Three paths." Bai Ye opened his eyes. "Old Wei is still in the same spot. There are two other people inside. One started responding after we left the mine last time, and the other arrived earlier than we expected—he came out of another pile of ruins and has been waiting here for a long time."

Lan Susu connected the oscilloscope to the external antenna, and after the screen lit up, she stared at it for several seconds before speaking. "The third signal isn't in any of the directions we scanned last time—it comes from further north of the mining area. It first appeared in the Yushugou records a few days ago, and its location hasn't changed. The frequency is too low, like someone in the dark using a slower hand to relight a reflection." She pointed the antenna to north-northeast, and the waveform emerged from the background noise, rising and falling with long intervals, like someone breathing slowly at the bottom of extremely deep, still water.

Tie Niu tied the reflective rope to the steel beam of the derrick, this time using two ropes: one end to the main beam, and the other threaded through the latch hole in the iron gate of the wellhead, wrapping it around the base of the derrick with an extra knot. He tucked the axe behind his waist and switched the gloves to his left hand. The headlamp lit up, a beam of white light piercing the wellhead and illuminating the gravel road. He looked back at Bai Ye. "Three signals. You lead the way."

Bai Ye pushed open the iron gate, bent over, and went in first. The mine tunnel still smelled of rust and wet lime, and water droplets seeping from the walls gleamed coldly in the beam of his headlamp. He didn't take the same path as before—last time he was tracking a spark, which had already been collected. This time, he was looking for that deeper, slower response, deeper inside, in the northernmost fork of the tunnel. He reached the first fork and didn't stop; at the second fork, he stood for a few seconds in front of the collapsed section on the left, letting his senses probe into the cracks in the rubble. The signal wasn't behind the collapse. He continued north.

When he reached the third fork in the road, he saw a symbol on the cave wall.

It wasn't chalk writing; it was a fingernail mark. Very shallow, carved into the cement splatter layer of the cave wall. The shape wasn't an arrow, but a curved arc, like the arc repeatedly traced by a fingernail in the reflection mirror. One end of the arc pointed to a deeper branch, while the other end of the mark stretched straight down into the cave wall. He recognized the direction of the symbol—it perfectly matched the mark he'd found on the back of the reflection mirror in that cave chamber.

"He made a mark here. Not for himself—he no longer needed a mark. It was for those who came after him."

Lan Susu bent down to clear away the rock debris around the mark, and found several similar shallow marks on the nearby rock wall. The arrangement was the same as the marks on the iron gate of the ventilation alley, but this time the last stroke of the seven deep and one shallow mark was not crooked—it was complete. She no longer needed to compare the rubbing with the pages in her notebook; she simply moved her finger gently along the arc, lowering her voice as if confirming to someone who couldn't understand her: "When he reached the seventh week of the fissure period, he no longer needed to count."

Tie Niu gently tapped the wall of the side passage indicated by the arc with the back of his axe. The wall was solid, with no echo, indicating that the alley was carved into a complete stratum of rock and there would be no collapse. He tied a reflective rope to the fork in the road and walked down the side path. The alley narrowed as it went north, and at one point the ceiling suddenly dropped, forcing the three of them to walk with their backs bent. The beams of their headlamps were compressed into a flat white band of light in the narrow space, illuminating less than two meters ahead. Bai Ye walked in the middle, bent over, with only a few centimeters of space between his backpack and the ceiling. He heard Tie Niu push something open in front of him—a wooden partition door, the planks were very thin and opened with a push. Behind the door was a straight, flat alley, at the end of which a very faint light shone. It wasn't the reflection of his headlamps, but a warm yellow light, very steady, swaying gently in the darkness, like a lit kerosene lamp.

Tie Niu stopped and gripped his axe. "Someone's there."

Bai Ye stepped through the wooden door and walked along the alley. The light grew brighter, revealing old experimental records from Project Aurora pasted at intervals on the cave walls, pressed flat, some with curled corners, others taped back together multiple times with adhesive tape. The handwriting on the records wasn't the chalk writing in the cave—it was a different kind of handwriting, smaller and more cramped, as if someone had crammed all their thoughts into a single sheet. He recognized the sentence on the last piece of paper—"Fellow travelers. Fear not. The path is open." Blue ink, Russian, steady handwriting. It wasn't Sergei, but he had seen the same handwriting on Sergei's list of test subjects. The ballpoint pen in the tin box was the one this person had left for Sergei.

He walked to the end of the alley and pushed open the last slightly ajar wooden door. Behind the door was a small cavern, much smaller than the last one, with a low ceiling and several rows of evenly spaced grooves carved into the walls, each holding a kerosene lamp. The lamps were empty, but the wicks still held oil that had dried up over the years, and the lampshades were polished to a shine. In the corner of the cavern, a man sat on a straw mat. He wore a faded old Aurora Project work uniform, a silver badge pinned to his left breast pocket, and frayed cuffs. A mirror rested on his knees. The mirror was clean and facing upwards, with a burnt-out kerosene lamp in its center. He himself radiated light—not from a disturbance caused by an activated energy field, but from a natural resonance emanating from within after his consciousness frequency stabilized to a certain critical point. He sat there quietly, his head slightly bowed, his hands folded on his knees, like a lamp placed on a straw mat.

He raised his head, looked at Bai Ye, his lips moved, and his voice was very soft, but in this almost silent cave, every word was like the crisp sound of a kerosene lamp wick being lit.

"You've found her," he said.

Bai Ye pulled the enamel mug from the side pocket of his backpack and gently placed it beside the straw mat. He took out the faded old work clothes from his satchel, folding them neatly with the badge side facing up; the photograph was pressed on the pocket of the work clothes, in which a woman and a child stood for a long time in front of a birch tree. Old Wei stretched out his thin fingers, straightened the photograph, and his fingertips lingered on the edge of the photographic paper for a moment, as if returning to a warm old quilt.

"This is my brightest light." He handed the mirror to Bai Ye. "Take it. I don't need it anymore."