“How long have we been down here?”
Zong Hang had no concept of time. “Probably an hour or two.”
An hour or two…
It seemed that each time they unlocked the Golden Pool, it also took about one to two hours. After all, for a group of water puppets to go underwater just to place or retrieve some items, even with the complex entry procedures, an hour or two should be more than enough.
But what if they exceeded that time?
It would probably be like that time at the Old Master Temple – after this time passed, Ding Yudie would wake up, and once awake, figuring out how to get out would become an insurmountable problem.
Yi Sa quickly let go, while reminding Zong Hang: “Keep up, don’t fall behind.”
Though Ding Yudie’s movements remained stiff, his pace had quickened considerably. After entering the corridor, he was practically running frantically. Yi Sa followed closely behind, while Zong Hang was even busier – running while pressing the camera in various directions, click after click, determined not to stop until the film was completely used up.
Finally, they reached the end of the corridor. On the stone wall directly ahead, a vortex was already faintly churning: not of water, but like a vortex formed from softened stone, spinning like a mixer, getting faster and faster.
Ding Yudie lunged forward with a quick step, pressing his forehead against the ancestral tablet at the same time, and crashed headfirst into the vortex. Half his body was immediately sucked in.
Yi Sa shouted: “Grab him! Grab me!”
Zong Hang was confused by her instructions – should he grab Ding Yudie or her?
But time was pressing, and there wasn’t time for a second command. Fortunately, humans have two arms. Zong Hang steeled himself, rushed forward, and wrapped one arm around Ding Yudie’s legs and the other around Yi Sa’s waist.
Then everything went black, and his whole body was plunged into endless rapid spinning. Zong Hang wanted to pass out – if he fainted, he wouldn’t have to endure this torment – but oddly he couldn’t: one moment he was upside down, the next his body was twisted like a rope, what he was holding seemed about to slip away, what he was embracing seemed about to fall loose, there wasn’t a moment of peace.
Who knows how long it lasted, but suddenly there was a surge from below, and Zong Hang’s head broke through the water’s surface, breathing in air that smelled of mud.
The night was still pitch black. From the high embankment above, searchlights crossed back and forth, and someone cried out in shock: “They’re out, over there!”
Out of the water?
Before Zong Hang could get excited, a wave like a heavy hammer struck directly at his head. The force was incredibly strong – his vision went black, both hands let go at once, his body was thrown into the air spinning, then fell back down. Before he could land, the whirlpool below spun him around several more times. Before he could finish his little Swan Lake ballet routine, he plunged headfirst downstream in the rushing current.
Damn, was the flow below Hukou Falls this fierce? It wasn’t this dangerous underwater. And what about Yi Sa? And Ding Yudie? Where did they get swept to?
Zong Hang futilely grasped at nothing, his body like a leaf, at the mercy of the current’s random twisting. The voices above grew more chaotic, shouting: “Catch them! Catch them!”
What catch? Before he could react, he had already crashed into a large net.
As the net slowly hoisted him up, Zong Hang spat out the muddy water in his mouth and wearily looked down.
He was the first one to be caught in the net.
Ding Panling and the others had set up several huge nets across the water – even if they, unfortunately, missed the first one, there were second, third, fourth, and fifth nets behind it. In midair, he could see clearly: Yi Sa was curled up, caught securely in one net, bobbing up and down in the churning waves; while Ding Yudie had drifted even further than Yi Sa, spreadeagled like a spider clinging to the net, fluttering like a kite, looking like he might fly away any second.
At least… they all made it up.
Of the three who came up, two were unconscious, and the only conscious one was injured and extremely weak. Ding Panling couldn’t immediately ask about what happened in the Golden Pool – that would have seemed too inconsiderate.
So they first cleared the scene and returned to the hotel to rest. Besides, developing the photos would take time – once the photos were ready and people had rested enough, they could sit down and discuss them in detail.
Zong Hang was exhausted. He nearly fell asleep sitting up while getting his wounds bandaged. After returning to his room, he didn’t even bother to shower, hastily downed some medicinal wine that had been boiled and cooled three times to take his medicine, then collapsed into bed and fell asleep.
It was a rare deep sleep, completely dreamless. When he woke up, the sun was setting, with gentle warm rays slanting into the room.
Zong Hang thought he had slept for one day, but when he saw the date on the digital clock, he realized the second day was almost over too.
He took a quick shower and changed into clean clothes before coming out. The hotel wasn’t large, and this floor seemed to have been booked by the Ding family. Several familiar faces from the Golden Pool lockdown were slouched on sofas in the hallway playing cards, though he couldn’t remember their names.
But they all knew him. One with dyed yellow hair nodded towards the room next door: “No movement from Yi Sa’s room yet.”
Then he gestured to the room diagonally opposite: “Ding Yudie is awake, just went down to the restaurant to eat. Want to go?”
He didn’t want to go and wasn’t very hungry either. Zong Hang pointed at Yi Sa’s room: “Can I go in and check on her?”
Yellow Hair gave him a sideways glance: “She’s a single woman sleeping in her room, and you’re a man – what are you going in there for? What if you do something bad in there?”
The words were crude but the logic sounded. There were indeed some male-female boundaries that needed to be respected. Zong Hang hesitated: “Ding Yudie went to eat, I’ve showered, but Yi Sa still hasn’t woken up. I’m worried something might be wrong.”
This hit the point. All the card players stopped.
Yellow Hair also became a bit uncertain: after sending her to the room, they had taken turns guarding outside but hadn’t gone in to check. Though it seemed unlikely anything would go wrong, now that Zong Hang mentioned it, they weren’t sure.
Then again, this guy had quite an innocent face – he probably wouldn’t do anything criminal.
So he threw him the room key: “Go ahead in, but if anything’s wrong you better speak up.”
Zong Hang thanked him and opened the door.
The room wasn’t very dark, with curtains carelessly drawn and soft red sunset light filling the room. Yi Sa was still sleeping, curled up on her side on the bed, her dirty clothes now dried from her body heat.
Perhaps girls were just like this – physically weaker, so they needed more rest.
Zong Hang sat cross-legged on the carpet, resting his hands on the edge of the bed, watching her intently.
Yi Sa didn’t seem to be sleeping peacefully at all.
Her eyelashes trembled constantly, her breathing would suddenly become rapid at times, and under her tightly closed eyelids, her eyeballs seemed to be constantly moving.
Was she… dreaming?
When leaving the Golden Pool, Yi Sa had deliberately hugged Ding Yudie again. After all, she had experienced it once when entering the water and gotten some fragments of information in her mind – she wanted to try the same method again.
Sure enough, after the initial chaos, images appeared again.
This time, it was in a dim basement.
There were both men and women, all well-dressed, looking every bit like big city elites – people who should be sitting in modern offices with panoramic views, computer on the left, phone on the right – but now they were all crouched on awkward little stools, holding notebooks or pencils, with no electronic devices in sight, every face grave.
A woman with neat ear-length short hair, whose manner should have been equally efficient, was instead hesitant and stammering: “I still think there are too many uncertainties.”
A man in a suit beside her sneered: “Uncertainties? Look at the situation outside now, do we have any choice? If we hadn’t discovered the secret behind the Reincarnation Disc, we wouldn’t even have this opportunity!”
The short-haired woman bit her lip in silence.
An elderly man with graying hair cleared his throat: “Now is not the time for choices, but to discuss execution – and how to execute. How is progress in the laboratory?”
A scholarly-looking man with glasses quickly responded: “The experimental data isn’t very promising. Previously, our technology could save patients who had been dead for up to six hours. By combining new substances extracted from the breathing soil with somatic cells, there was hope of saving those dead for up to twenty-four hours, but the activity of the breathing soil is very difficult to control, the malformation rate is too high…”
The old man impatiently interrupted him: “That’s not what I’m asking about. I’m asking about the implantation of memory-carrying heterologous cells.”
The bespectacled man stammered: “This… the success rate is even lower.”
The old man’s brows furrowed, his tone harsh: “We must speed up, time is running out. Under the circumstances of total collapse, this is our only chance for a counterattack, this is our secret battlefield. Although the battle line is drawn long, as long as we build Noah’s Ark, humanity will not perish. Our discovery of the Reincarnation Disc’s secret was no coincidence – this secret will be our achievement!”
Secret? What exactly was the secret of the Reincarnation Disc?
Yi Sa’s thoughts drifted, and she found herself standing before that cement-colored, minimalist wall again. On the wall hung a modern-designed clock, its face a head-to-tail Yin-Yang Tai Chi disc, with the hands moving along the S-shaped curve that divided the face.
Tai Chi diagram, Reincarnation Clock.
The Tai Chi diagram had been mentioned during water ghost training.
What did they say back then…
— It contains all principles and natural laws of everything in the universe, “The universal principle of heaven, earth, people and things, that is what is called Tai Chi.”
— It represents a dynamic balance, symmetry, harmony; yin-yang, sun-moon, black-white, male-female, all can be incorporated within it, mutually transforming, waxing and waning…
— No one could say clearly where it originated. Some believed it arose in primitive times; some believed it was a gift from aliens to Earth’s people; others believed that before this cycle of human civilization, there was a previous cycle, and another before that, and the Tai Chi diagram was an artifact left by the previous civilization when it perished, mysteriously revealing some secret to humanity…
Head and tail connected, cycling endlessly.
Day passes, night comes; night passes, day comes again.
After spring, summer, autumn, and winter, another cycle of four seasons begins.
Flowers fall and bloom, bloom and fall again.
The flourishing evolution tree cannot remain lush forever. When things reach an extreme, they reverse. After the extreme of negativity comes positivity. Perhaps at the end of evolution comes devolution, and after devolution?
A new round of evolution? Another cycle?
This is natural law, applying to both the smallest seed and the greatest universe.
How did the universe come to be? Scientists say it formed when an extremely dense and hot singularity expanded after the Big Bang.
But what came before the singularity – was it perhaps the previous universe reaching decay, constantly collapsing and infinitely contracting?
Yi Sa suddenly opened her eyes, murmuring: “It’s reincarnation!”
Not aliens, not time travel.
It was the previous cycle of humanity. They too had experienced eating raw meat and drinking blood, slash-and-burn farming, the agricultural revolution, and the industrial revolution. They had experienced “flying without wings, facing without meeting face to face,” experienced the explosive rise of technology, and then, faced the predicament of total collapse.
The Drifting Cave was their Noah’s Ark.
The story in Genesis tells that Noah’s Ark was tossed and turned into a devastating flood, and after a long time, Noah released a raven to test if the new world was suitable for survival.
The raven flew for a long time, could not find a place to perch, and returned.
A few days later, Noah released a dove, and this dove brought back an olive branch representing hope and life.
The founding ancestors of the three families were the doves released from Noah’s Ark of the Drifting Cave, and in the new world, they found hope for building nests.
Zong Hang was startled by Yi Sa’s sudden awakening, and after a long pause asked: “What reincarnation?”
Yi Sa’s gaze swept around the room, landing on a hotel-provided computer.
She instructed Zong Hang: “Help me search… about the survival challenges facing modern humans, scientists’ predictions about how humanity will become extinct, that sort of thing.”
Being human, having the same emotions and desires, eating the same grains – the challenges faced should be similar.
Zong Hang was a bit confused but followed her instructions, turned on the computer, and clicked on the search engine.
Yi Sa sat up in bed, holding her dizzy head, listening carefully as Zong Hang read out the results one by one.
“Comet hitting Earth.”
“Zombie virus, biological crisis.”
“Alien invasion, interstellar war.”
“Polar ice caps melting, drowning us all…”
His tone suddenly became excited: “Wow, this one – this scientist is famous, I even know about him… I mean, one who’s still alive.”
Scientists that Zong Hang knew could be counted on one hand, mostly departed giants like Einstein and Madame Curie, so it was indeed rare to have one still living.
Yi Sa asked him: “Who?”
“Hawking,” Zong Hang scrolled down the page, “he’s in his seventies… seventy-five this year.”
Yi Sa sat up straight. She had heard of this Hawking too. Of course, she didn’t understand the theories at all, as she had no interest in astronomy and the universe, but that didn’t prevent the name from being familiar.
“What did he say?”
Zong Hang read word by word, the passage was a bit obscure, so he had to read and digest at the same time: “Humans may ultimately be destroyed by artificial intelligence…”
“Artificial intelligence will be the most powerful intelligent species in Earth’s history. They neither sleep nor rest, evolving every second. Their way of thinking and speed of thought are beyond human capabilities. On the path of evolution, humans will be left far behind.”
“Some scientists conservatively predict that by 2040, artificial intelligence could reach the intelligence level of ordinary people, then trigger an intelligence explosion…”
Zong Hang paused, rubbed his eyes, and looked at that number again.
That’s right, it said 2040, not 2400.
You’ve got to be kidding! In 2040, he would still be alive, and would be… replaced by artificial intelligence?
Zong Hang snorted and said to Yi Sa: “Scientists just like to scare people.”
(End of Volume Three)