Ban Xia had probably gotten used to failure.

She slowly pushed the soil back into the hole, filled it level, pressed the earth firmly with her palms, then knelt on the grass with her head down, hands supporting her body, staring blankly at her ten fingers sinking into the loose brown soil.

The girl let out a long breath.

She gently crushed the withered yellow weeds caught between her fingers, rolling them into a tiny ball in her palm.

She dusted off her hands, rose from the grass, and brushed off her clothes and pants. The moonlight was bright tonight, silent Nanjing bathed in cold silver light. The sharp silver rays cut the night city into stark black and white. The black moon hung on the other side of the sky—it was called the black moon because it was dim, much dimmer than the white moon, appearing as a gray disc when viewed.

The teacher had warned that one must never go out when both moons rise because the night is dangerous.

The girl stood straight in the moonlight, raising her head to gaze at the stars. Without light pollution in the uninhabited city, the brilliant, deep Milky Way stretched across the zenith, falling below the horizon at an unreachable distance. She wore a light-colored nightgown, revealing clean legs and arms, both arms and jet-black hair hanging freely and softly, ten fingers slightly curled.

This girl’s body was quite slight. Usually, she squeezed strength from her bones to maintain the image of a powerful apocalypse survivor, but without armor, Ban Xia suddenly became delicate—she was still just a nineteen-year-old girl. Without gripping weapons, her hands were much more slender than an adult man’s.

In the moonlight, the girl’s skin was extremely pale; from a distance, she looked like a faint ghost.

Sometimes Ban Xia would wonder if perhaps she was a ghost.

She was just a spirit unwilling to leave this world. When everyone else had left here, only she still stubbornly wandered through the city.

If those animals had intelligence and could communicate, they might take her for a frightening female ghost. When herds of wild water buffalo passed through Muxuyuan Street, they might whisper to each other:

Hey Old Buttocks, did you know there’s a female ghost up in that building?

Dung Bag? What kind of female ghost?

She doesn’t appear often, sometimes shows up on the top floor, then suddenly disappears.

Could it be a living person, Dung Bag?

All the living people died long ago, how could there be living people? It must be a ghost, Old Buttocks.

Wow so scary so scary, let’s hurry away hurry away.

After we finish pooping.

Ban Xia spread her hand toward the moon.

She was still alive.

“Ha!”

The girl shouted, forcefully clenching her fist.

While imagining the moon exploding.

“BG4MXH, dear Mr. BG4MXH, I didn’t dig up anything at all. Didn’t see the time capsule you mentioned. The plan failed again. OVER.”

Ban Xia sat in her chair, upper body sprawled on the desk, headphones on her head, hand-mic in her grip, speaking gloomily.

“BG4MSR, this is good news. OVER.”

The other side replied.

“BG4MXH, why is it good news again? OVER.”

“BG4MSR, because failure is success’s Mother. Through experiments, I’m eliminating possibilities one by one. I believe I’m getting closer to the truth. OVER.”

“What truth?”

“The truth is that you’re fooling me, sister.”

“Hmm—?”

Ban Xia made a sound through her nose, her tone rising higher and higher, eyebrows arching up as well.

“Well, let’s set aside that truth for now. BG4MSR, I have a hypothesis, but I’m not sure if it’s correct yet. OVER.”

“Tell me, I’m listening.”

“Listen carefully. My hypothesis is: any time capsule that I bury will likely never reach your hands.” The young male voice came clearly through the headphones. “Understand? I don’t know if this is right—it still needs verification, but I have this intuition—in time delivery, if I as the sender personally bury it, the delivery will fail. OVER.”

Ban Xia pondered for a moment.

“BG4MXH, why would that be? OVER.”

“BG4MSR, because given enough time, no one can be trusted, including myself. OVER.”

“You mean you’ll dig it up?”

“Not just that. You know how perverse humans are—the more you can’t touch something, the more you want to touch it; the more you can’t think about something, the more you must think about it. So the person who buries the time capsule interfering with it is just a matter of time. Today I asked Uncle Zhao, and he directly said to put the capsule somewhere neither I nor anyone else could reach. So I bought white glue and poured it into the hole, but evidence shows even glue isn’t enough—it’s not sufficient to resist interference from yourself or others over the next twenty years.”

“Uncle Zhao?”

“That’s the really big expert.”

“Okay, the really big expert. Then what?”

“So I concluded further: relying on my abilities, it’s very difficult to put the time capsule somewhere truly unreachable by anyone unless I take a boat and throw the time capsule into the middle of Xuanwu Lake—but then you wouldn’t be able to find it. That’s the problem. The time capsule’s burial location must ensure you can dig it up; blindly throwing it far away is meaningless. But if I can dig it up, then I definitely can’t know the time capsule’s exact location!”

Ban Xia paused.

“You can’t know the location?”

“Yes, I can’t know the location.”

The headphones paused briefly, then that voice continued:

“I think this world won’t let our plan succeed so easily. In the grand scheme of things, it will surely set up many obstacles. So we have to deceive it, not let it discover us. But to deceive the world… we must first deceive ourselves.”

The next day.

On the last day of the National Day holiday, Bai Yang’s second-time capsule and tritium tubes arrived.

He didn’t touch the glue-sealed buried time capsule. Even though he already knew that capsule hadn’t successfully reached BG4MSR’s hands, he wouldn’t dig it up—if his hands got itchy again they’d deserve to be chopped off.

Let that time capsule be.

In the turbulence and wandering of the next twenty years, wherever that time capsule would ultimately end up would be up to fate.

Bai Yang spent the morning installing the tritium tubes. This time he used the picture “Ma Baoguo Attacks Pearl Harbor.”

Then he copied the letter exactly as before and drew a big smiley face on the back of the paper.

After putting the medicine, letter, and time indicator all into the stainless steel capsule, Bai Yang wrapped it layer upon layer with opaque waterproof plastic, wrapping many layers and tying it tight with rope, making it look like a package.

With all preparations complete, Bai Yang took out his phone.

He scrolled through his contacts and then dialed Yan Zhihan’s number.

“Hello? Brother Yan? Do you have time now? Could you come help me with something?”