The Platform 3

Xiao Chun shuddered, his scalp prickling—if the man before hadn't been alive in the first place, there had been no need to feel guilty about anything done to him. But the man in front of them was undeniably alive.

Though Xiao Chun had prepared himself for the worst when he took the shard, still...

Wait. Was he really alive?

How could a living person's blood smell so rank?

The bald man's impassioned speech cut off abruptly. He crashed to the floor, a shard of glass embedded in his eye, and convulsed without stop. At the same time, the space around them fell suddenly quiet.

As though sensing something, Xiao Chun looked up. At the opening on the thirty-third floor, the bald man's cellmate was staring at them, trembling. The moment their eyes met, the other man backed away several steps.

Heads had poked out from the openings on the thirty-second, thirty-first, and thirtieth floors—some fearful and bewildered, some disgusted, some gloating, some enraged, some unable to believe what they saw.

Every person, every face, was filled with a strange incongruity. Countless faces peered out of those vertical openings, drained of all color beneath the ghastly white lights. No one spoke. The abrupt silence sent a chill down Xiao Chun's spine and raised goosebumps all over his skin.

"Thirty-fourth floor."

At last, someone began whispering.

"There are barbarians on the thirty-fourth floor."

"The short-haired man on the thirty-fourth floor, dressed in black, with a red mole on his right ear—tell the others..." Someone suddenly shouted, "He killed an enforcer!"

"Where's his companion?"

"What floor did he come from?"

"I heard it was the eleventh floor. He even killed his own cellmate!"

Listening to the shouts pass down from one floor to the next, Xiao Chun suddenly understood what they meant by "communications must not be interrupted."

It made his skin crawl. In such brief words, in information relayed floor by floor, the truth was bound to be omitted, distorted, blurred, and misunderstood.

In the end, Yu Gu, who had saved him, would instead become a target for all, a "murderer" in everyone else's telling.

"Shut up!!" he shouted toward the opening. "That's not what happened! He saved me! My original cellmate was..."

Yu Gu only tugged at his sleeve, his tone even. "I'll treat your wound. Come here."

Without even looking up, Yu Gu used a glass shard to cut up the bedsheet. He wrapped Xiao Chun's palm, then checked the tightness. "Make a fist. Can you move it?"

"I can... Thanks." Xiao Chun hesitated. He studied Yu Gu's expression and, seeing that he truly did not care, asked, "That bald guy... was he alive? I mean..."

"No." Yu Gu shook his head. "He was an NPC."

"An NPC?"

"You can think of this place as a game you have to clear. NPCs are responsible for explaining the rules." Yu Gu said, "If your cellmate had been a normal NPC, you'd know all the rules by now."

Yu Gu pointed upward. "The enforcers are NPCs too. If we break the rules, they'll kill us without hesitation. Of course, there are ordinary people like you and me here as well. Players."

Players...?

Xiao Chun was speechless. What kind of players were they? Players getting played to death?

"Then what does barbarian mean?"

Yu Gu looked at Xiao Chun and temporarily took on the role of an NPC, explaining as simply and clearly as he could—

"There are two The Platform films. The first tells of order collapsing throughout the prison. No one followed the rules, there were no enforcers, and everyone became savage and brutal, willing to do anything to survive. Not only would they betray their cellmates, but whenever they had a chance to survive and reached the upper floors, they would gorge themselves, consume and ruin all the food, and keep those below from getting any—making them feel the same way they had. A vicious cycle."

"The second is a prequel to the first. After some people's efforts, they used rules and laws they established themselves to restrain human nature. Everyone was allowed to eat only the portion that belonged to them. If someone died, their portion had to be thrown away rather than distributed freely to others. The rules were harsh, but they could restrain everyone and achieve fairness."

"Every floor has the right to monitor the floor below and keep communications open, so every voice can be passed along. That way everyone knows which floor has a violator—a barbarian—and the enforcers can make them pay, preserving fairness. Through this group's efforts, the food platform was able to reach the 176th floor. But a later internal conflict wiped out all the enforcers, and humanity's instincts and greed gained the upper hand again. That's the plot of the first film—then the food platform could reach only the fortieth floor, and everyone below it could only starve to death."

The explanation left Xiao Chun cold to the bone. He looked around, picked up his trench coat again, and wrapped it tightly around himself.

Yu Gu continued, "Keeping communication open is the only way to pass law and justice down. Fairness once reached the 176th floor. If everyone obeyed the rules and protected others' rights from being violated, then everyone had a chance to receive fairness."

"But fairness is difficult to maintain. The enforcers in the second film were too harsh, and in the end people protested and opposed them. After the civil war, no one maintained fairness anymore. Everyone returned to the most primitive state: the strong rule, and the weak are prey to the strong."

Xiao Chun was, after all, a businessman. His mind worked quickly, and he had long seen human nature for what it was. He soon grasped the crux of it. "But there is no absolute fairness in this world."

Yu Gu nodded. "That's right."

Xiao Chun frowned. "Fairness is relative. If one person thinks something is fair, someone else must have paid the price. Which prices must be paid, and which basic rights must be protected—there's no way a handful of enforcers can decide that."

Xiao Chun looked at the bald NPC on the floor, his thoughts racing—

"You said to treat this place as a game? If it's a game, then we need to clear it, and we need clues. Are the plot and rules of this film the clues? What do we need to do? Survive three months without dying? Or is there something else?"

Something occurred to Xiao Chun, and his expression grew grave. "Do you have a countdown over your head? Could it be a death countdown? If we don't escape within three months, will we die?"

Yu Gu shook his head. "I do. The time should be the same as yours. As far as I know, the completion condition is to survive three months without dying."

Xiao Chun eyed him skeptically. "Where did you learn that? Would an NPC say that?"

"I inferred it myself."

"What if your inference is wrong? We need to consider every possibility."

Yu Gu did not argue. "You're right."

"If we're assuming this is a death countdown, then what do we have to do to get out?" When Xiao Chun thought, his speech sped up while his blinking slowed. His mind seemed to enter a statistical arrangement visible only to him: every known clue entered one by one, then arranged and combined in search of a flaw.

The white light of the fluorescent lamp reflected in his eyes, gathering into a tiny point, like a far-off star that would not go out. "You said the enforcers were eventually all killed. Do we have to prevent that war? Or help the enforcers restore order? No—the enforcers already have their eye on you, so... do we need to evade their pursuit? Or simply join the other side and kill the enforcers? Wait. Which film are we in right now?"

Yu Gu looked into his eyes. "It's a combination of both films, and there are many settings here that weren't in the original movies. We can't analyze it entirely according to the films' plots."

Xiao Chun looked at his floor number—34. For now, it was still within a relatively safe range.

He looked back at the NPC on the floor. "He has blood. It stinks, but my former cellmate didn't have blood, so... my former cellmate wasn't an NPC? He was... someone like us? A player from an earlier game?"

Yu Gu nodded. "Players who break the rules and are killed become like that."

Xiao Chun simply could not understand why Yu Gu could be so unruffled, as though life and death had nothing to do with him.

As Xiao Chun analyzed the clues, Yu Gu remained quiet, his expression composed.

"You can only eat food that belongs to you. I understand that." Xiao Chun nodded, his face unpleasantly tense. "But what about not hiding food? And not betraying people? I don't understand."

"Hiding food triggers the detection mechanism on each floor. If food is left on that floor, it will automatically heat up or turn into a freezer. Think of an oven—but it won't take that long. Ding, and in a few seconds, you're cooked."

Xiao Chun: "..."

"The rule against betrayal," Yu Gu said, "is to preserve fairness, to keep communications from being interrupted and food distribution from going wrong."

Xiao Chun thought with astonishment and shock: In a dump like this, there could actually be such meticulous rules—or, as that group of NPCs would put it, laws could be born. It was as though he had seen humanity's first state. In the law of the jungle without any order, someone had proposed protecting the weak and safeguarding everyone's rights. Anyone might descend to the very bottom, so maintaining fairness was protecting everyone.

But how could those randomly sent below the two-hundredth floor obtain that fairness? How could they persuade themselves in that desperate situation: I can't complain. I can't hate anyone, because there's no helping it?

Fairness had reached only the 176th floor. According to Yu Gu, no one knew how many floors this vertical prison held.

176 compared to 40 was tremendous progress—but compared to the bottomless abyss beneath it?

The more Xiao Chun thought, the more terrified he became. It was as if he could already hear those randomly sent below the two-hundredth floor, endlessly consoling themselves until they could endure no longer, howling in despair and unwillingness—Why me? Why am I the one who has to die?!

Xiao Chun's head buzzed, as though struck hard by something heavy. He groaned and clutched his head.

—I protect other people's rights! I respect the enforcers!

—I help put down the other barbarians, eat only food that belongs to me, and have never broken the rules!

—Why am I the one who has to die!!

The voices stabbed at his eardrums. Xiao Chun even began seeing double. It was as if someone he knew had fallen into that pitch-black bottom level, where not even light remained. No one cared for him. Every day, the platform that descended carried no food at all.

He wailed in despair and smashed every empty plate in fury. He prayed and begged upward, until hunger left him skin and bones. He collapsed onto the floor, breathing with difficulty, staring up at the faint light at the very top of the vertical opening.

It was light cast down from the upper floors, yet in his field of vision it was only a dim, blurry speck.

He was on the lowest floor, where even light could not reach. How desperate must that be?

Xiao Chun breathed hard, his chest heaving. An indescribable terror flooded his heart. His hands began trembling despite himself. The thoughts that had been so orderly moments ago all stalled, and boundless fear seemed ready to engulf him like waves.

A pair of hands reached out and held him steady.

Yu Gu's voice was as calm and even as ever, yet it firmly supported Xiao Chun's thoughts as they neared collapse. "Don't let your imagination run away with you. Breathe slowly, Xiao Chun."

Dizzy and disoriented, Xiao Chun could not distinguish illusion from reality. Yu Gu's voice said gently by his ear, "It's all right. Don't be afraid. I'm here."

Xiao Chun looked up. Yu Gu held him in a half-embrace. "I'll get you out of here."

......

Here, day and night could only be told apart by the lights. When the white lights came on, it was day; when dim red lights came on, it was night.

In the gloom, everything became more eerie and terrifying. Xiao Chun slept alone in one single bed, watching Yu Gu in the other bed across from him. The man seemed to sleep peacefully, unaffected in the slightest. Yet the vertical prison was filled with wailing, furious cries, and sobbing from every direction. Aside from NPCs, Xiao Chun did not know how many normal people like himself were here. Everyone was full of fear, and at night that feeling grew even more pronounced, spreading layer by layer through the openings. Some people had even gone mad, laughing wildly all night long.

Xiao Chun tried to force himself to rest, but every time he closed his eyes, his former cellmate, thick with muscle, stared at him with those whitened eyes and an expressionless face.

He broke out in a cold sweat and snapped his eyes open. In the darkness, Yu Gu gently turned over in the bed opposite.

Xiao Chun could not stop himself from calling out, "Yu Gu?"

Yu Gu answered immediately, "Hm?"

"...You weren't asleep?"

"I was." Yu Gu's tone was matter-of-fact. "Didn't you call me?"

Xiao Chun had no answer to that, so he asked, "You... aren't a newcomer, are you?"

"Why do you say that?"

"You're too calm," Xiao Chun said. "And you seem to know what's going to happen."

And there was his own precognition. Even now, he had not figured out what was going on with it. It seemed to appear only automatically and at random; he could not control it himself.

"I came in a little before you," Yu Gu said. "My crazy cellmate had already explained most of the rules."

"...Why did you kill him?"

"Because he wanted to kill me."

Xiao Chun did not know whether to believe him. After hesitating, he asked, "If we end up below the two-hundredth floor next month, will we starve to death? Is there no other way?"

"We won't."

Xiao Chun froze. "What?"

Yu Gu did not explain. He turned over again, facing Xiao Chun. In the dimness, Xiao Chun could not make out his expression, but he could feel that Yu Gu was watching him the whole time.

"We won't starve to death. If I say we won't, we won't." Yu Gu spoke quietly. "Don't overthink it. Go to sleep. We need to conserve our strength."

Xiao Chun was still caught up in Yu Gu's confident, unwavering tone and had not quite recovered. Instinctively, he asked, "Conserve our strength?"

"Tomorrow, the enforcers will come," Yu Gu said.