Novel Bin Chapter 36: Have you heard of “fragmented space”?
Chapter 36: Have you heard of “fragmented space”?
Translator-Rhapsodite
Editor-PerpetualMreow, Proofreader-Ghostie
Friday, June 4th, 4:35 pm.
Bei Quan, Wei Fuyuan and Tian Jia Xin arrived at Xuanmen village, which had been abandoned for a long time.
Wei Fuyuan parked his car at the entrance of the village, where the search and rescue team had found two empty cars left behind by the missing teachers and students from the photography department.
After confirming that there was no trace of the missing teachers and students in the village, the search and rescue team evacuated Xuanmen village in the afternoon. However, after such a large-scale search, the dilapidated village was left looking even more dilapidated and messy than before.
Before it became completely dark, Bei Quan decided to take a walk around the village and observe the environment.
Xuanmen village was built along the river valley, facing the water in the East and the mountains in the West. If viewed from above, the entire village presented a long and narrow “J” shape from south to north with north being the tailhook of the “J” letter shape. This was the cemetery where the villagers buried the remains of their dead.
Xuanmen village used to make a living by planting and harvesting, but even at its peak, its population did not surpass three hundred.
In the past 20 to 30 years, a large number of young and middle-aged workers had fled. Only the elderly, women and children remained in the village and this population also gradually declined. Finally, due to the problems with sourcing and funding water, electricity and road conditions, the whole village sought help from the government and moved to the plain at the foot of the mountain, more than 100 kilometers away. This left the village deserted and abandoned as no one cared about it anymore.
According to the information Bei Quan had obtained, there were 72 large and small houses in Xuanmen village. The search and rescue team inspected them all one by one and found that 34 were still well preserved.
The two rooms selected by the eight students and teachers from the Photography Department of Fengxing University for the night, were located at the head of Xuanmen village, that was, the peak of the letter “J”. The terrain was slightly higher. By standing behind the house, one could see the parking place.
Bei Quan decided to take a look at the two houses where the teachers and students lived first.
“These houses have to be tens of thousands of years old?”
Wei Fuyuan looked around as he walked.
“Every room looks like a dilapidated house, even worse than your ‘Santuchuan’… The weather forecast says it will rain tonight. There will definitely be water leaks inside the house, right?”
“Comrade Xiao Wei, you are too delicate. That’s not going to work!”
With his precious cup in his arms, Tian Jia Xin swung his two short legs quickly and trotted all the way. Unexpectedly, he was able to keep up with the pace of the two grown men.
“Look at me, I usually eat wind and drink dew, get scorched and drenched by sun and rain to practice asceticism! You at least have some tiles to cover your head now, and yet you’ll scream when there is a little rain leakage in the house. What a scandal!”
Wei Fuyuan thought, “Of course, that is because you prefer the open air, or you wouldn’t sleep on the rooftop every day.”
However, he was too lazy to argue with an 800-year-old immature child. He simply reached out to pick up Tian Jia Xin by his collar, lifted the whole person up, and clamped him under his arm, saying, “When adults speak, children shouldn’t interrupt!”
Two people—— or (to be more precise) one human and one fairy argued, until they arrived at the door of the two residential houses where the teachers and students of the Department of Photography had taken shelter.
The two courtyards were adjacent to each other and had a concave structure common in the mountainous areas of southern Henan, but because they were situated south and facing north, the eastern and western rooms’ positions had been switched.
However, Compared to other dilapidated houses with only broken tiles and walls, the two adjacent courtyards were relatively intact because of their high location and the shielding of the cliff at their backs, which could slightly block the wind and rain. Only the roof of the east rooms had damage, but apart from the obvious collapse of the roof of those rooms, the west rooms can be used to live.
The two small courtyards were open, and there were fresh and messy footprints remaining from the search and rescue team’s efforts.
Bei Quan didn’t go in directly. He first released Su Ying and then asked it to search the village by itself.
Then he waved to Wei Fuyuan and Tian Jia Xin, motioned them to follow before turning and entering the small courtyard on the left.
Unlike the gloomy and mysterious village that could be used as a scene for the ghost film as imagined by Wei Fuyuan, it was not dark at this time. The sun was high in the sky in the early part of June. There was no sense of gloom or mystery, only dilapidated and scattered surroundings.
The yard was full of old furniture that couldn’t be removed. Plastic products and broken packaging bags used for packing were also scattered everywhere. Over the years, they had long been covered with dust, mud and water.
When Wei Fuyuan walked through the front yard, he carelessly stepped on a rotten woven mat, causing the sewage to splash everywhere, leaving a large wet and greasy mud mark on his Martin boots. Just as he was building up his excitement about the ghost investigation and was eager to give it a try, he was suddenly pulled back down into a depressed state.
The house was at least— probably because the teachers and students of the photography department had cleaned up— much cleaner than the courtyard. The floor and some usable furniture had been hastily wiped. But the search and rescue team had taken away all the things they found to be the belongings of the students. All Bei Quan could find was garbage, such as leftover food.
“What on earth are we looking for?”
Wei Fuyuan stuck to Bei Quan like a tail and watched him turn to the east and west of the room, touching here and there, but he just couldn’t figure out what he wanted to do.
“Even the professional search and rescue team has withdrawn. We won’t be able to find the missing person even if we wander around here?”
Seeing that it was getting darker and darker outside, Wei Fuyuan finally couldn’t restrain his curiosity and asked, “Those people shouldn’t be in the village anymore?”
Bei Quan straightened up and shook his head at Wei Fuyuan.
“No, those students and teachers are still in this village and have never left it from the beginning.”
He paused and added.
“If they haven’t all been killed, that is.”
A chill ran down Wei Fuyuan’s spine as he thought, “Thank you for your comment, it was so damn useful!
“You said they are still in the village?”
Young Master Wei looked around and seemed to subconsciously want to visually confirm Bei Quan’s declaration, “But there are so many broken houses in the village. Where else can they hide?”
“They are still in Xuanmen village.”
Bei Quan replied, “But it’s not the Xuanmen village of ‘now’.”
He deliberately emphasized the word “now”.
Wei Fuyuan, “What do you mean?”
Bei Quan smiled at him, “Have you ever heard of ‘Fragmented space’?”
Poor Young Master Wei, a young man who studied business, how could he have heard of these messy things?
He shook his head and felt like a primary school chicken who couldn’t answer the teacher’s question.
“The so-called fragmented space is a cycle of time and space formed by some chance coincidence.”
Bei Quan casually picked up a mineral water bottle left by the students as an example.
“For example, take this bottle in my hand as a fragmented space.”
Bei Quan shook the bottle gently, and about one-third of the water remained in the bottle.
“The bottle body is the ‘shell’ of the fragmented space, and its size determines the size of the ‘space’ that can be accommodated inside, and the water inside is the ‘time’ it contains.”
Wei Fuyuan said “Oh”, but his expression was still very confused.
“I understand that the size of the ‘bottle’ determines how much space it can hold…” He asked, “But what do you mean about the ‘time’ represented by the water inside?”
In Wei Fuyuan’s understanding, time was like a flowing river. It flowed into the sea and never returned. It could only move forward. Therefore, he couldn’t understand how it could be held in a “container”.
Bei Quan smiled. “Because the time in fragmented space is fixed.”
He explained, “The time will be repeated. If you are in it, you will find that you have been in the same period of time— maybe a day, a month, or even a year and a half.”
Bei Quan shook the mineral water bottle in his hand harder, “it depends on how much ‘water’ the bottle contains.”
Wei Fuyuan suddenly realized, “This is like the movie Tomorrow’s Edge!”
In all kinds of soft and hard science fiction, movies and TV dramas the time loop trope was not rare. Wei Fuyuan had seen at least two or three of them.
‘The old groundhog day’, ‘the new day of death’ the core setting of all these movies was that the protagonist repeatedly experiences the same period of time and tries to change their final outcome while trapped in a cycle that repeats again and again.
“So, you mean that the missing teachers and students are repeating the same period of time in a certain place like Tom Cruise?”
“You could say that.”
Bei Quan hadn’t seen “Tomorrow’s Edge” and didn’t know who Tom Cruise was, so he just smiled unfathomably and changed the topic.
“So what we need to find out now is the entrance to the fragmented space.”
He opened the cap of the mineral water bottle, “Then try to get in and get everyone out.”
Wei Fuyuan said, “… It sounds very dangerous…” He murmured, “… won’t this mean we’ll be trapped in too?”
Tian Jia Xin, who followed them, stepped on Wei Fuyuan’s feet, “Bah, bah! Children’s words carry no harm! Children’s words carry no harm!”
The child puffed up his face and shouted angrily:
“Don’t you know the idiom ‘one word becomes a prophecy’? In such a place with heavy Yin Qi, you dared to talk nonsense! ”
Although Tian Jia Xin looked round and a little fat, he still had the normal weight that a three-year-old should have. Stepping on one foot was not painful for Wei Fuyuan, but Young Master Wei was still very unconvinced.
“I’m just telling the truth!”
He stared at the slightly slender mouth of the mineral water bottle in Bei Quan’s hand and argued:
“Before taking a risk, you always have to calculate the consequences involved in advance, right?”
This time, Bei Quan agreed with Wei Fuyuan, “Xiao Wei is right.”
He frowned, rubbed the mineral water bottle with his fingertips, and murmured to himself:
“This fragmented space… I feel… There seems to be something wrong…”
Just then, a white shadow quickly jumped out of? the wall and settled at Bei Quan’s feet.
Guan Hu Su Ying was back.
The little fox rubbed around Bei Quan’s calves several times before jumping on his master’s shoulder, and then rubbed itself against his cheek. It seemed to be communicating in a way that only the two of them could understand.
“Is that so?”
Bei Quan frowned deeply.
“… if the ghost is not in the village, it will be more interesting.”
The author has something to say: the films mentioned here are The Edge of Tomorrow, The Day of the Groundhog, and Happy Death XDDD~