War Beyond the Obelisk

Chapter 8: Smiling Gas — 05

The small man remained seated on his straw mat.

He stared at the open iron door, lips trembling faintly, but made no move to rise.

Yu Feichen did not force him.

Holding the makeshift lamp aloft, he led the other five men down the corridor.

Some cell doors were still locked. Others stood slightly ajar. A few had been left wide open.

Inside, blankets and bedding lay in disarray, as though people had been sleeping there only moments before.

But every prisoner had vanished.

At the end of the corridor, the building’s main door stood open.

That was hardly surprising. If there were no prisoners left, there was no reason for anyone to lock it from the outside.

They stepped through.

Night fog rolled toward them, cold and damp. Ahead loomed the shadow of a high gray wall.

“We’re near the center of the camp.”

Yu Feichen raised one hand and pointed to the right.

“There are several more barracks that way. They may be where the women and children are being held. I need one or two people to investigate.”

No one answered.

They only stared at him.

Yu Feichen continued, “Whoever goes must return to our cell before dawn. I need the exact route, which building they’re in, and whether guards are stationed or quartered nearby.”

Still silence.

After dealing with enough unreliable employers, Yu Feichen had learned one important principle: if you intended to give orders, those orders had to be painfully specific.

You never knew whether the person carrying them out was intelligent or an i***t.

“If you encounter danger, protect yourself first,” he added. “Tell me everything you see. And be back before sunrise.”

The silence lasted another minute.

Finally, the broad blond man spoke.

“You really intend to get us out?”

Yu Feichen looked at their uncertain, frightened faces and slowly exhaled.

Only then did something occur to him.

These people were not employers or temporary teammates accustomed to trusting his judgment without question.

They were ordinary civilians from a world at war.

People who had only recently been stripped of their homes, dignity, and freedom.

And Yu Feichen was nothing more than a stranger sharing their prison cell.

“What is this place?” the large-nosed man asked. “Why has everyone disappeared? And even if we escape, they’ll hunt us down and kill us.”

“Once I have enough information, I’ll give you a plan,” Yu Feichen said. “Then you can decide whether you want to escape.”

“I’m escaping.”

The monk seized Yu Feichen’s arm, his voice trembling.

“They treat us like animals here. I won’t survive another day.”

The endless labor at the brick kilns was far beyond what a man accustomed only to reading, translation, and preaching could endure.

He had already been punished once that day.

Another day might break him completely.

He had to escape.

Still, no one wanted to separate from the group.

Bai Song opened his mouth, apparently about to volunteer, when the blond man spoke first.

“I’ll go. My mother was taken that way.”

He looked directly at Yu Feichen.

“But only if you truly mean to rescue them.”

Their eyes met.

Yu Feichen nodded.

“I’ll go too,” Grode said. His wife was there as well.

“I’m heading southeast to look for an escape route,” Yu Feichen told him. “There’s a chemical plant in that sector. You may be more useful with us.”

The chemistry teacher hesitated.

Finally, the blond man said, “Don’t worry. I’ll handle it.”

Grode nodded and moved behind Yu Feichen.

Unexpectedly, the large-nosed man also chose to investigate the women’s barracks.

The two groups separated beside the wall.

The road southeast was long.

Yu Feichen observed everything around them while guiding the others according to the camp layout he had memorized during the day.

About an hour later, the buildings came into view.

Pipes crossed the ground in every direction.

Seals had been pasted across most of the doors.

When Yu Feichen held the oil lamp against the windows of several low gray buildings, they could faintly see chemical containers and racks of laboratory glassware inside.

“Fluorinated… isopropyl compound,” Grode murmured, pressing close to the glass to read a label.

His expression darkened.

“Highly toxic.”

In the center of the cluster stood a larger two-story building.

Its entrance was locked.

Bai Song’s brick proved useful once again.

After confirming that the area appeared deserted, he simply smashed a window.

They climbed through.

Complex machinery filled the interior.

There was no doubt now.

This had been a chemical production facility.

“Are they making coal gas?” Bai Song whispered, staring at the enormous reaction vessel in the center and the dozen or so metal tanks nearby, each taller than two men. “Have they already seized our coal mines?”

“Perhaps,” the monk whispered. His voice had not stopped trembling. “Gods above… why must sacred Korosha suffer this?”

Coal gas?

Only a child could still believe something so innocent.

Grode’s face had gone even paler.

Yu Feichen said nothing.

They searched the first floor, then climbed upstairs.

In the gloom, forty examination tables stood in ordered rows.

Dark silhouettes stretched across the walls.

Various instruments surrounded them.

Bai Song leaned closer to inspect one, then recoiled sharply when he realized how close his face had come to a pointed metal attachment.

“What are these for?”

“Gods above…”

Grode picked up part of an electrical apparatus and stared at it in confusion and horror.

“They were conducting cruel experiments here.”

Yu Feichen walked past the tables and equipment.

Desks and filing cabinets lined the opposite wall.

He opened the cabinets.

Empty.

Just like the prisoner barracks, the laboratory had been cleared out.

The desk drawers contained nothing useful either.

Only when Yu Feichen opened the last one did a newspaper sheet drift slowly to the floor.

They gathered around the lamp.

The first thing they saw was a photograph.

The prisoner with albinism they had seen on their first day at Oak Valley appeared restrained on one of the laboratory tables, apparently being subjected to an experiment.

The accompanying article declared that divine punishment had begun to manifest among the traitors of Korosha.

According to the report, the prisoner’s hereditary condition was one such sign.

It went on to claim that dwarfism, lameness, blindness, and other disabilities appearing among Koroshans were proof that the punishment of the God of Truth had already begun—and would eventually spread to every sinner.

“Do they seriously not have lame people in their own country?” Bai Song muttered.

Empty tables.

Sealed rooms.

Cleared filing cabinets.

Everything suggested that Oak Valley had been abandoned.

Had some unexpected event forced its work to stop?

Or had Oak Valley already accomplished whatever it had been built to do?

“Here.”

Yu Feichen found a metal brazier beneath one of the desks.

Among the charcoal residue were fragments of burned documents.

They sifted through the ash.

Some pieces had not been completely destroyed, and scattered words remained legible.

Most were meaningless conjunctions or technical terminology.

Only a few fragments could be understood.

“Successful… Korosha… conclusion… purification… sin…”

Bai Song slowly read the surviving words.

Then he frowned.

“...smile?”

None of them understood how the words connected.

“In the future, they destroyed the evidence of what they did here and abandoned the place,” Bai Song said as he climbed back through the broken window. “Then what happened to us prisoners? Did they release us?”

One by one, they emerged outside.

And found themselves facing a gray cylindrical structure rising abruptly through the fog.

Up close, the concrete still possessed the pale coloration of recent construction.

Its texture and color were completely different from the older chemical plant buildings.

It had not belonged to the original Oak Valley Chemical Works.

It had been added after the factory became Oak Valley Internment Camp.

Bai Song suddenly began to tremble.

“What is that?”

Grode answered in a low voice.

“An incinerator. Haven’t you ever seen one behind a crematorium?”

Silence.

They all remembered the plume of white smoke they had seen from the brickyard that afternoon.

What could an abandoned internment camp possibly need to burn on such a scale?

There was only one answer none of them wanted to say aloud.

The monk’s breathing grew rapid.

Fear seized him completely.

“This is a warning from the gods,” he whispered. “A prophecy. They’ve allowed us to glimpse the future so that we’ll know to leave—to flee this accursed place…”

His eyes darted wildly through the fog.

Then he suddenly shouted.

“There! A gate!”

At the southeastern corner, where the perimeter wall ended, stood a large iron gate.

Like the other gates in the camp, it could be opened from inside so long as no one had locked it from the opposite side.

With trembling hands, the monk pulled back the bolt.

The gate creaked open.

Beyond it stretched a fog-drowned wilderness.

Oak Mountain stood nearby like an enormous black shadow.

Yu Feichen placed a hand on the monk’s shoulder and turned him firmly around.

“We’re going back.”

He guided him away from the opening.

“It’s night. I don’t know what happens if we cross the boundary now.”

Bai Song and Grode stared at the open gate for several long seconds.

Then they followed.

Yu Feichen looked ahead.

The route had been confirmed.

Now all they needed was—

The improvised tallow lamp sputtered.

Its flame died.

Absolute darkness engulfed them.

At that instant, the monk’s thin body erupted with unexpected strength.

He twisted free of Yu Feichen’s grip and bolted toward the gate, shouting incoherent words as he ran.

The fog swallowed him almost immediately.

“Wait!” Bai Song shouted.

Then the sound of the monk’s footsteps vanished.

He disappeared into the mist so completely that no silhouette remained.

For one impossible moment, it seemed as though the darkness itself had erased him.

Then there was nothing.

The fog beyond the gate continued drifting quietly, as though no one had ever crossed it.

They stared.

A chill crept across their backs.

What had just happened contradicted everything they understood about the world.

How could a living person simply vanish?

What kind of place was Oak Valley?

A faint grayness had begun to appear along the horizon.

Dawn was approaching.

“Move.”

Yu Feichen’s voice was colder than before.

They returned to the barracks before sunrise.

The blond man and the large-nosed prisoner were already there.

The small man still sat exactly where they had left him, unharmed.

The monk, however, was gone.

He never returned.

Just like the two prisoners who had disappeared from this cell before them.

Between five and six in the morning, the prisoners’ day began.

The soldier conducting inspection stopped before their door and counted.

Then counted again.

His face changed.

With an angry shout, he reached for the pistol at his waist.

“Put it down!”

A sharp command rang through the building.

Boots struck the floor.

The platinum-haired captain arrived before the overseer did.

His lips were pressed into a thin line. Pale green eyes swept through every corner of the cell, and for the first time there seemed to be a trace of anger beneath his composure.

One hand slowly closed around the cold iron bars.

“What happened to you?”

Each word was distinct.

Yu Feichen had little desire to answer.

Yet as he watched the young officer, he had the strange impression that his anger was different from the guard’s.

The guard was furious because a prisoner had disappeared.

The captain seemed angry because something might have happened to the prisoners.

“Sir,” Yu Feichen began.

But the young officer spoke first.

“Tonight.”

He turned toward the overseer, who had arrived late with sweat already forming on his forehead.

His gaze was icy.

His voice remained perfectly calm.

“Lock me in here with them.”

Yu Feichen leaned against the wall with his arms folded and studied him.

Interesting.

He had just been considering, in a tone that would not have been entirely sincere, suggesting that if the captain insisted on learning the truth, perhaps he ought to spend the night here himself.

Bai Song moved closer to Yu Feichen.

After everything they had witnessed overnight, his distrust of the Black Crest Army had increased considerably.

“What does he want?” Bai Song whispered. “Is he planning to kill all of us?”

“No,” Yu Feichen said.

“Why not?”

Perhaps it came from a habit developed after spending far too much time infiltrating one side or another.

“Instinct.”

Yu Feichen gave an almost imperceptible sigh.