On my first day taking over Qinggeng Station No. 0, the control console lit up by itself.
A line appeared on the screen: "Entering Cycle 849."
The coordinates pointed to the abandoned No. 7 mine, 300 meters away.
Old Zhou said the machine had been broken for ten years.
But then he changed his story. He said Station Chief Zheng had locked every password before leaving, and left just one message:
"There's something living in this station. The two of us can't keep it fed."
I started investigating.
A wire in the power cabinet had been welded shut. The weld was charred black, as if it had caught fire.
The ninth item on the equipment list had been accessed six hours before I signed the contract. The person who placed the request was listed as "System Administrator."
And I was the station's only administrator.
Only later did I learn that twenty meters underground lay a chessboard.
Each square was two meters wide, the lines perfectly straight. It hadn't been dug by human hands.
A metal box sat on the board. Inside it was a seed, its coat marked with pale blue patterns.
That was not a color found on Earth.
But it was sprouting.
