“You don’t have any friends but still manage to have so much fun?” he asked.
“It’s because I don’t have friends that I have to play by myself. When I was a kid, I could roll around in bed all afternoon and not feel bored. My parents always said I was a little crazy because I’d giggle to myself while playing alone.” Xia Mi shrugged. “Anyway, they were always busy taking care of my brother, so I just played by myself.” She lay down on the railing, resting her cheek on her arm. She seemed tired.
Chu Zihang watched her soft hair flutter in the wind. The scent of sunshine and rain seemed to fill the tunnel, and his fingers twitched. He had a strange urge to reach out and ruffle her hair.
Have you ever been a stubborn child, walking quietly through crowds with your head down, never making a sound? Standing at a distance watching others laugh, yet never speaking up? But you had a vast world inside, lying in bed late at night, looking at the sky through the window, suddenly feeling sad or bursting into laughter?
“I hope this all ends by tomorrow afternoon. I’ll go home with you and explain to your family.” Chu Zihang said.
“Mhm,” Xia Mi responded softly, but suddenly her eyes widened. “Don’t joke like that! Are you messing with me? Me staying out all night, then bringing a guy home the next morning to say, ‘Hey, this is my senior, and he wants to explain what happened last night!’ My dad would slap both of us and say, ‘Explain what? No need to explain!’”
Chu Zihang’s expression stiffened, and he lowered his head in silence.
His eye twitched slightly as he straightened up. Suddenly, the birthmark on his shoulder blade seemed like it was about to ignite.
“Can you take a look at my shoulder?” he asked, turning around.
“Hey, are you showing off your powerful deltoid muscle? No need to try so hard; I already admired it on the way here. Hoho, how exciting…” Xia Mi teased, her voice dripping with sarcasm. But she still obediently leaned in to take a closer look.
The birthmark was crimson, like a heated coin embedded in his bones. Xia Mi reached out and poked it. “Does it hurt?”
“No, it’s just really hot.” Suddenly, Chu Zihang’s expression changed. “Did you hear something?”
Xia Mi perked up her ears and listened, shining her flashlight around. “No… I don’t hear anything…”
She swallowed the rest of her words. Right beside the inspection cart, she saw a stone marker, its surface inscribed with simple text and filled with red paint. There was only one number: “100.”
“A hundred?” Xia Mi was confused. “What does that mean?”
“It’s not a hundred,” Chu Zihang replied. “It’s the code for the next station. Every station on the Beijing subway has a numerical code. On Line 1, the numbers increase from west to east. But the westernmost station, Pingguoyuan, isn’t coded as 101, but as 103, because there are two hidden stations, Fushouling and Gaojing, numbered 102 and 101. We just passed those two stations. The next number is 100, which means… Station Zero.” He suddenly froze, his whole body turning cold as a sharp pain throbbed deep inside his skull.
Station Zero? How could it be Station Zero? Even if there were two unused stations, no one would code them as Station Zero or Negative One.
Zero shouldn’t appear in standard numbering. This strange number was invented by ancient Arabs, marking a great breakthrough in the history of mathematics. Rather than a number, it is an abstraction, representing emptiness, the concept of nothingness—it stands for… “nonexistence.”
“Stop! Don’t go any further!” Chu Zihang tried to grab the brake on the inspection cart.
At that moment, he finally recognized the sound from earlier. It was an engine! Bright headlights shone from the tunnel behind them. The battered Maybach had its headlights on, roaring down the tracks at high speed, colliding with the inspection cart. Chu Zihang lunged forward to shield Xia Mi beneath him. The cart, propelled like a bullet by explosive force, shot down the track into the dark depths. The wind roared past Chu Zihang’s ears. It didn’t feel like they were sliding; it felt like they were falling into an endless abyss.
Suddenly, a memory that had been blocked awakened. On the day of the “Dandelion” typhoon’s landfall, in the midst of the storm, that man drove the Maybach and secretly entered a closed elevated highway—a strange entrance, ignored by everyone else… obscured by willow branches. The wind had briefly swept the branches aside, revealing the entry code!
“000”—the entrance to Highway Zero! The Zero Highway entrance!
Everything finally made sense. Why had he always sensed the atmosphere of that rainy night in this series of events? Because that night, he too had been in “Nibelungen”—the Land of the Dead!