Jiang Yue looked at Zhong Lai, and Zhong Lai looked back at her. After a long stretch of silence, Zhong Lai snapped his fingers.
“Don’t make the atmosphere so tense. I’m just curious, that’s all. With a body like yours, the amount of energy you consume every day must be enormous. Without absorbing white crystal energy, you couldn’t have lasted this long. But Zhang San said you’ve never ingested any white crystal.”
Zhong Lai tilted his head, studying her. A faint gleam flickered in his eyes as he spoke with certainty: “So you have absorbed white crystal, just in a different, more discreet way than most people.”
She must never let anyone know about the existence of those two eyeballs.
Jiang Yue said, “I secretly swallowed a piece. Zhang San just didn’t see it, that’s all.”
Zhong Lai nodded, his gaze meaningful. Then, out of nowhere, he said, “Your skin is very smooth.”
Jiang Yue let out a cold laugh. “Thanks for the compliment.”
She straightened the collar of her prison uniform and turned to leave the office.
Jiang Yue returned to Cell 888. Before opening the door, she wisely covered her nose. Even so, an utterly revolting stench still assaulted her senses; a smell like moldy stinky tofu and rotting sea fish fermenting for a month in spoiled pickled cabbage soup.
This place was nothing like the prisons in the Eastern District. The stench there came from the inmates’ own depravity. Here in the Western District, every prisoner came back from the mines utterly exhausted, their physical condition leaving them no energy to care about personal hygiene.
Zhang San was sitting on his bed, scratching at his neck. His nails hadn’t been trimmed in a long time, and he’d scratched so hard that the skin on his neck was torn, leaving several glaring streaks of blood.
Jiang Yue admitted that she was full of anger right now, but when she thought about it carefully, she realized it wasn’t fair to take it out on Zhang San. After all, they were all criminals in the same situation, each more or less driven by circumstances. Besides, Zhang San hadn’t actually done anything to harm her.
Jiang Yue covered her nose and got into bed. Just as she lay down, someone in the cell called out, “Zhang San, turn off the light!”
Zhang San switched it off.
The stench in the room was so overwhelming that Jiang Yue couldn’t fall asleep. She had no choice but to pull the musty blanket higher to cover her nose.
In the silence of the cell, the sound of Zhang San scratching his neck went on and on. Jiang Yue’s hearing was exceptionally sharp, and to her, the sound was no different from a metal spoon scraping against a pot.
She turned over and lay flat on her back, reaching under her pillow to pull out the pair of earplugs she’d bought from the prison commissary, back when she was still in the Eastern District. They were of terrible quality: while they blocked out sound fairly well, the material was so hard that once she put them in, her ears would ache and throb, and by morning, they would hurt terribly.
Jiang Yue hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep in a long time. If this went on, the lack of rest might really kill her. She finally took out the earplugs and put them in.
The world fell completely silent.
Jiang Yue let out a long, steady breath.
The next morning, it was time to go mining again. Yawning, she headed to the empty washroom to wash up. Cold water splashed against her weary face.
Two eyeballs quietly slipped out from her sleeves, dangling from the faucet like they were playing on a swing. They extended their pale, threadlike tendrils, flicking a few pitiful drops of water toward Jiang Yue.
These days, Jiang Yue was quite indulgent toward the two eyeballs. She rubbed them gently, her expression stern as she scolded, “Stop fooling around.”
When she finished washing up, the two eyeballs dissolved into countless fine threads and merged back into her wrists.
Another day of mining was about to begin. She had no idea when this kind of life would ever end.
They carried their shovels and pushed their carts, entering the mine one after another. Zhang San walked ahead of Jiang Yue. Seeing the bloodstained scratches all over his neck, Jiang Yue asked, “What happened to your neck?”
Zhang San clutched his neck and drew in a breath. “It itches like hell.”
Jiang Yue said, “Try not to scratch it. The conditions here are terrible, your wounds could get infected easily.”
“I just can’t help it,” Zhang San sighed. “The environment here is awful. I used to live on Aquarius Star, our whole planet’s covered in water, with only three percent land. The air there is really humid. The air on this garbage planet is way too dry.”
They chatted idly as they worked. The squad leader glanced their way but, seeing that they were still keeping up the pace, didn’t bother to intervene.
Jiang Yue tossed the chunk of white crystal she had dug up into the cart. She brushed the dust off her clothes and said, “I’ve never met anyone from Aquarius Star before.”
Zhang San asked, “Which planet are you from?”
“Beta Star,” Jiang Yue replied.
“Beta Star! That’s one of the richest and most powerful planets out there. You’re so young, what kind of crime did you commit to end up here?”
Jiang Yue replied in a low voice, “I accidentally killed a lot of people.”
Zhang San asked, “How many?”
Jiang Yue sighed. “Don’t ask. What about you, what crime got you exiled here?”
Zhang San hesitated for a moment before answering, “Because of some experiments I conducted.”
Jiang Yue said, “Oh, there’s always a mad scientist like you in every piece of literature.”
Zhang San shook his head with a wry smile. “You wouldn’t understand.”
After six days of mining, the prisoners had a day off. Everyone in Cell 888 slept in until noon, then lazily got up, grabbed their toiletries to wash in the washroom, and finally went to the cafeteria to eat.
On rest days, the cafeteria served much more abundant meals, including frozen meat that, while not very tasty, was still edible.
Jiang Yue woke up late. When she got out of bed, she saw Zhang San with a towel soaked in water wrapped around his neck. At this time, everyone else had gone to the cafeteria to fight over the meat, leaving only the two of them in Cell 888. Jiang Yue walked over and asked, “How’s it going?”
Zhang San’s face twisted in pain. “It still itches like hell.”
He let out a weak hiss and said feebly, “Can you pour me a cup of hot water?”
Jiang Yue took his cup, filled it with hot water, and handed it to him. Zhang San reached out to take it, and as he moved, the sleeve of his prison uniform slipped slightly, exposing a small section of his wrist.
“Wait!”
Zhang San looked up in confusion as Jiang Yue grabbed his wrist and rolled his sleeve back up.
His skin was extremely rough, especially on the inner side of his arm, where thick, hardened patches had cracked like white, weathered tree bark.
“What’s going on here?”
Zhang San’s expression remained calm. “It’s a side effect of consuming white crystal. For ordinary people, the skin becomes rough and dry about a week after ingestion, but cracking and peeling usually don’t appear until the second year. We’ve consumed it too many times, so the side effects showed up early.”
“Do the other prisoners in the prison have the same symptoms?”
Zhang San smiled faintly. “Some of them do, to a certain extent. Why, scared? Being scared won’t help; you can’t escape it, no one can.”
Suddenly, Jiang Yue understood why Zhong Lai had said her skin was so smooth.
The white crystal energy she absorbed through her eyeballs was easily tens of times more than that of other prisoners, yet her skin had always remained smooth.
Jiang Yue felt a chill run through her heart again. She lowered her head, lost in thought, standing silently to the side. Suddenly, Zhang San said, “Jiang Yue, you’re not quite like the rest of us.”
Jiang Yue looked up. “What’s different? Do you mean I’m younger? I haven’t seen any prisoner in this prison younger than me.”
Zhang San shook his head. “I mean your body isn’t like a normal person’s.”
Jiang Yue’s eyes narrowed instantly, her pupils shrinking into vertical slits. A powerful, oppressive aura poured from her all around. Zhang San instinctively recoiled.
He raised his hands. “Don’t do this! I mean no harm. After all, in your current state, I don’t even pose any real threat to you.”
Jiang Yue spoke in a low voice, “What exactly do you want to say? Say it quickly before the others come back.”
Zhang San clutched his neck and glanced toward the door, lowering his voice. “Do you know the history of Garbage Planet?”
Jiang Yue shook her head. Zhang San continued, “What I’m about to tell you is a very ancient history, you won’t find it in ordinary history books.”
“Garbage Planet wasn’t always called Garbage Planet. It was once called Sacrede. The name comes from an ancient form of Earth writing and means ‘sacred.’ It was once the place where human science was most advanced.”
Jiang Yue only knew that Garbage Planet was an enormous dumping ground, essentially the space landfill for the other six planets.
She asked, “Then how did it end up like this?”
Zhang San replied, “Because of an unprecedented experiment that caused catastrophic contamination on the planet. The details of the experiment are unknown, but I do know that every single person on Sacrede died because of it. That’s why I’ve made quite a few guesses about what the experiment might have been.”
Jiang Yue listened intently. “You’ve gone through all this just to tell me, are you implying your guesses have something to do with me?”
Zhang San waved his hand. “Don’t interrupt me. Let me finish, young people need a little more patience.”
“The directions I’d guessed before never seemed quite right, until I was exiled to Garbage Planet and saw the white crystal mines.”
He raised his arm, reached under the bed, and took out a basin, from which he pulled a toothbrush with a sharpened tip. Just as he was about to press it against his arm, one of the other prisoners suddenly returned to the cell.
Jiang Yue and Zhang San exchanged a glance and, in silent agreement, closed their mouths.
The returning prisoner asked, “Why didn’t you two go to the cafeteria to eat? The meat’s almost all gone.”
Zhang San pointed to his neck, and Jiang Yue said she felt dizzy. After a while, the other prisoners gradually came back as well. Some, having finished eating, even took a bath and returned shirtless.
Their skin showed multiple patches of cracking and peeling, looking remarkably like white tree bark.
Jiang Yue remembered clearly that on the previous day off, none of them had shown these symptoms.
Some of the prisoners also noticed the changes in their skin. They furrowed their brows, then resigned themselves grimly to the fact.
Some even reached out to scratch at the lifted patches of skin, white flakes falling from their fingertips.
Jiang Yue’s mind was tangled with frustration over the words Zhang San hadn’t finished. At one o’clock in the morning, everyone in the cell was fast asleep. In the darkness, Zhang San gently pushed the door open. Jiang Yue understood immediately and quietly slipped out of bed, following him to the washroom.
“I knew you’d follow,” Zhang San said, a hint of pride in his expression. His eyes shone with a bright, almost fanatical light; nothing like the pale, weak, and listless middle-aged miner he appeared to be during the day.
Jiang Yue noticed that he was holding the blue toothbrush with the sharpened tip; something every prisoner did, because in the first prison, a sharpened toothbrush might be their only weapon.
She glanced around like a thief and whispered, “Don’t keep me in suspense. What’s going on? Why are you holding that toothbrush?”
Zhang San held up a finger to his lips. “Shh!”
Under Jiang Yue’s wary gaze, he used the toothbrush to cut open the cracked, peeling skin on his arm.
Jiang Yue was startled. The scene she had expected, blood gushing everywhere, didn’t happen at all. The arm that had been cut didn’t bleed a single drop.
This was incredibly strange!
She widened her eyes and saw an astonishing sight. All the blood vessels in Zhang San’s arm had disappeared, replaced by numerous white tendrils. These tendrils were connected to his fascia, wriggling slowly within the flesh.
The eerie sight sent chills down Jiang Yue’s spine. Her first thought immediately went to the insectoid creatures she had the most dealings with.
She exclaimed, “Could the white crystal be Zerg eggs? You’ve been parasitized by them?”
Zhang San shook his head. “No, the white crystal isn’t Zerg eggs. It’s a mutated species.”
He paused, then added, “Actually… it’s already dead. Buried deep underground by tectonic movements, it underwent a series of complex physical and chemical changes under extreme heat and pressure, eventually becoming the white crystalline mutant it is now.”
Jiang Yue drew in a sharp breath. “Don’t mess with me… there’s no mutation that extreme…”
She stopped mid-sentence, suddenly frozen.
Wait… there is a mutation that extreme.
Not only that, she had seen it with her own eyes!
She had personally seen the tree-like mutant that occupied most of Liyue City!
Zhang San’s words struck her like a heavy blow to the head, and Jiang Yue felt herself growing dizzy.
She took a moment to steady herself, then said slowly, “So, you’re saying that deep beneath Garbage Planet lies a massive mutant.”
After the initial shock, Jiang Yue drew a deep breath, a hint of relief in her voice, as if she had survived a catastrophe: “At least… it’s already dead.”
Zhang San revealed a mysterious smile.
“It is dead, yes—but who said it’s completely gone?”
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Sam Williams On TYMIMA Chapter 152