War Beyond the Obelisk

Chapter 7: Smiling Gas — 04

After a quick wash, each prisoner received breakfast: a cup of grayish-white paste resembling flour stirred into hot water.

At first, no one drank.

Everyone bowed their heads in prayer.

The prayers varied, but Yu Feichen listened carefully and found that most revolved around Yoryarla.

The story, in essence, went like this:

In a distant age of storms, ice had frozen all things. The ancestors known as the Yoryarla cut through thorns as hard as steel, crossed walls colder than frozen earth, climbed jagged rocks sharp as blades, and waded through rivers half water and half ice.

At last, they reached the sacred land of Korosha, where spring was eternal and flowers bloomed.

It was a land overflowing with bread, milk, and blossoms.

There, the people finally found happiness.

Crack!

The sharp report of a whip split the air.

A cry rang through the barracks, and every prayer stopped at once.

Everyone turned.

The overseer had returned. A prisoner had been struck to the ground, and the man curled inward beneath the punishment while the overseer stood above him with his barbed whip.

Another c***k echoed through the hall.

“I don’t want to hear any prayers!” the overseer shouted. “This is pig slop bestowed upon traitors by the faithful children of the God of Truth! Food you Koroshan bastards receive without earning it!”

He swept the whip toward the prisoners.

“Now every one of you will labor to atone before the God of Truth!”

Combining what he had heard from both sides, Yu Feichen could more or less reconstruct the history between the two nations.

Long ago, one group had abandoned a bitter, frozen homeland and migrated to Korosha, where they settled and multiplied.

Those who stayed behind continued worshiping the God of Truth and continued living as they always had.

They had also watched Korosha grow steadily richer.

Eventually, the Koroshans acquired valuable coal deposits and left their former countrymen far behind.

Whether the God of Truth or Yoryarla truly existed—and whether either version of the story was accurate—was almost irrelevant.

Coal alone had started more than enough wars.

Bai Song stared at the cup of paste for a moment, pinched his nose, and swallowed it.

“Tastes like dishwater,” he said.

This time, Yu Feichen ate as well.

Dishwater was still preferable to coal. He needed to maintain a minimum level of strength.

After breakfast, the prisoners climbed onto trucks according to their four assigned labor groups.

Every section of the camp was divided by high walls. There was no way to see into the distance, and once the truck doors closed, tracing their route became even harder.

Every movement was tightly controlled.

They could see only fragments of the whole.

Yu Feichen stayed close to the side of the truck and estimated their direction from the turns.

When the vehicle stopped, he judged that they were somewhere in the northeastern section of the internment camp.

The brickyard was not large, but it was extremely busy.

Of the seven men from their cell, Grode, the monk, and the smaller man were assigned to cut and arrange raw clay bricks. The large-nosed man was sent to tend charcoal.

Yu Feichen, Bai Song, and the broad blond prisoner were assigned to the kilns.

Together with roughly twenty other able-bodied men, their job was to remove freshly fired bricks and load them onto trucks for transport elsewhere in the camp.

To save time, the prisoners had to rush into the kiln the moment its doors opened.

They endured waves of scorching air and clouds of brick-red dust, pulled out bricks that were still painfully hot, then stacked them onto metal carts.

At first, many hesitated.

The guards’ whips quickly cured them of that.

Anyone who slowed down was punished.

By midday, nearly every prisoner had blistered hands.

Yu Feichen fared better than most.

He moved faster. The bricks remained in his hands only briefly before being transferred to the cart.

A young guard passed him with a whip, contempt and suspicion in his eyes. He was clearly searching for an excuse to punish him.

Unfortunately, Yu Feichen gave him none.

In the end, the guard could only lash the ground beside his feet and move on.

Perhaps the camp lacked proper manpower. Many of these guards were not trained soldiers at all, merely locals wearing uniforms that did not quite fit.

That particular young man had looked awkward and uncertain in the morning.

After a few hours, his expression had changed.

Now he prowled the worksite with growing enthusiasm, looking for opportunities to use his whip.

Fire.

Heat.

Shouts.

Blisters.

Brick dust.

Sweat mixed with red powder until it clung to the prisoners’ skin. Dust worked its way into their injured palms, making every movement sting.

Most of these people had lived respectable, comfortable lives only a few days earlier.

Now they were being systematically reduced to laborers without freedom or dignity.

At noon, the prisoners gathered to eat bread.

Yu Feichen wandered toward the edge of the area.

Both the eating ground and the latrine behind the kiln were guarded, but the narrow passage connecting them was not.

He estimated the height of the kiln wall.

Then he backed up, took several running steps, planted one foot against the outer wall, and launched himself upward.

The rough surface gave him plenty of purchase.

After several quick movements, he reached the top and slipped behind a chimney.

The brickyard already stood on relatively high ground. From the roof, Yu Feichen could finally see the entire internment camp.

It was enormous.

High walls divided it into five major sections.

The brickyard occupied the northeastern corner. Nearby stood kitchens, kennels, and several vegetable plots.

The soldiers’ quarters lay to the northwest.

The central sector contained several long concrete buildings that looked like prisoner barracks.

Construction was underway in the southwest.

The southeastern sector was the largest.

It contained numerous low gray buildings and a massive cylindrical tower. Pipes crisscrossed the ground around it, probably remnants of the original chemical plant.

Then Yu Feichen saw thick white vapor rising from the top of the cylindrical tower.

It billowed upward like cloud.

Against the gray-white sky, a patch of brilliant white appeared for only a moment before the wind tore it apart.

Yu Feichen memorized the camp’s layout, climbed down, and returned to the others.

Several prisoners were also watching the white plume in the southeast.

“What’s that?” someone asked.

No one answered.

Some looked confused.

Others showed no reaction.

A few stared at the fading smoke with unmistakable grief.

Nearly three minutes passed before one of the guards gave a derisive laugh.

“A furnace.”

Yu Feichen lowered his eyes.

Whatever Oak Valley truly was, there was no possibility that its purpose involved humane treatment of prisoners.

He needed to move faster.

The work finally ended near sunset.

Everyone was coated from head to toe in brick dust, so the prisoners were allowed to wash.

That alone made Yu Feichen decide the day had been tolerable.

He brought back two iron barbs that had fallen from the guards’ whips.

Bai Song surprised him.

He brought back an entire brick.

“I can’t sleep without a pillow, sir,” he told a guard. “Even one this hard is better than nothing.”

The guard looked at his blistered hands and snorted.

“Then consider it your reward for a full day of atonement.”

Kiln smoke had gotten into everyone’s lungs.

The prisoners coughed throughout the evening.

“This place is hell,” the monk whispered, trembling. There was a nervous quaver in his voice. “What did we do to deserve this?”

“Our country will rescue us,” Bai Song said, lying with his head on the brick.

The monk’s lips trembled.

“But do they even know where we are?”

Bai Song pushed himself upright against the wall, intending to pat the monk’s shoulder.

Then he froze.

His entire body began to shake.

He stared at the base of the wall.

Three of his blistered fingers had dragged across the concrete as he stood, leaving three fresh streaks.

They were identical in shape to the mysterious marks that had appeared the night before.

How?

How could that be?

Yu Feichen placed a hand on Bai Song’s shoulder.

The young man drew a long breath and seemed to steady himself.

“You can sleep for a while,” Yu Feichen told the others. “I’ll wake you before midnight.”

“What do you mean?” the blond man asked.

“After midnight,” Yu Feichen said, choosing his words carefully, “something strange may happen.”

He paused.

“You’ll understand when it does.”

Another pause.

“It may help us escape.”

He ignored their questions after that and closed his eyes.

Two nights ago, two prisoners had vanished from this cell.

Last night, something impossible had happened to the room itself.

There was no reason to believe tonight would be different.

At midnight, the bell rang.

Yu Feichen opened his eyes.

He lit his lighter and examined the base of the wall.

The three marks that Bai Song had made only hours earlier now looked ancient.

Bai Song looked as though his nerves were beginning to fray.

Yu Feichen was not good at comforting people.

Instead, he picked up the brick Bai Song had brought back.

After the young captain had casually picked the previous iron lock, the overseer had replaced it with a much tighter-looking brass one.

Yu Feichen struck the lock with the brick.

The local clay produced exceptionally hard bricks. After several blows, he heard something shift inside the locking mechanism.

“What are you doing?” the monk hissed. “They’ll hear us!”

Yu Feichen stopped.

The absolute silence surrounding them answered the question for him.

He set the brick aside, twisted the two iron barbs together, and inserted them into the keyhole.

After several attempts—

Click.

The brass lock opened.

Yu Feichen pulled the iron door aside with a soft creak and stepped into the corridor.

Silence.

The neighboring cells were silent as well.

He entered the washroom and held his lighter beneath a tin soap dish beside the basin.

Inside lay a communal block of cheap tallow soap.

The heat gradually softened it into translucent grease.

Next, Yu Feichen tore a narrow strip of cloth from his clothes and soaked most of it in the melted tallow, leaving only a short end exposed.

The coarse fabric burned slowly enough to function as a crude wick.

He lit the exposed end.

The soap dish became an improvised oil lamp.

Its dim light spread across the empty corridor.

Yu Feichen looked into the neighboring cell first.

Empty.

So was the next.

And the next.

Bai Song followed him outside.

“Those marks…” he whispered. “The three streaks must have been made by my fingers. But last night, they appeared before I ever made them.”

He looked around the abandoned barracks, visibly struggling to form the thought.

“So this place… right now… is this what it looks like later?”

His wording was confused, but Yu Feichen understood.

After midnight the previous night, three old marks had appeared on the wall.

Tonight, Bai Song had created those same marks with his injured fingers.

That suggested that after midnight, the barracks somehow became the barracks of a future point in time—while the people inside remained unchanged.

“I think so,” Yu Feichen said.

“Then, Jens… what do we do?”

Yu Feichen had almost forgotten that Jens was supposed to be his name here.

His memory for names was nearly as poor as his memory for faces.

“Yu Feichen” was one of the few names he had somehow managed to remember through his travels from world to world. Eventually, he had simply kept using it.

“You can call me something else,” he said.

He had purchased a translation orb in Paradise, so language was never an obstacle regardless of the world he entered.

After thinking briefly, he chose a sound that would be easy for people here to pronounce.

“Yu.”

“Yu,” Bai Song repeated.

Then he asked, “What are you planning?”

“No one is here right now,” Yu Feichen said. “Maybe there’s no one outside either. We can leave the barracks.”

“Escape?”

“First, we learn the route.”

Yu Feichen lifted the improvised lamp.

“Once we know the way out, we can wait for an opportunity. I’ll get you out during the day.”

Whatever happened to time inside the camp after midnight was unnatural.

Trying to escape during those hours might carry consequences they could not predict.

That was precisely what bothered Yu Feichen.

He had worked in countless kinds of worlds before, and those worlds had always been internally consistent.

If a world was ordinary, it remained ordinary.

If ghosts existed, they existed openly within its rules.

If time could be altered, the principles governing that alteration were usually as familiar to the inhabitants as nursery rhymes.

But this world had advanced only to the age of firearms, and now its timeline had abruptly begun to shift.

It was like discovering a lace bow sewn onto the chest of a military dress uniform.

It did not belong there.

Worse, it was ugly.

If every world beyond the Gate of Eternal Night was this inelegant—and if he had to guess his own objectives as well—then perhaps distancing himself from the High God had been a poor decision.

“You’re going to get us out?” Bai Song asked. “There are seven of us. That won’t be easy.”

“Not seven,” Yu Feichen said.

“I mean everyone.”

Bai Song stopped speaking.

Yu Feichen turned toward their original cell and the five prisoners still inside.

“Are you coming?”

The broad blond man hesitated, then became the first to follow.

The large-nosed prisoner came next.

Grode, the chemistry teacher, followed after him.

With only two people remaining, the cell suddenly looked much larger—and much more frightening.

“I’m leaving,” the monk muttered. “I’m getting out. May the gods protect us.”

He hurried after them.