The Platform 6

"I... I'm not very good at this." Xiao Chun had Yu Gu lower his head. "Tell me if it hurts."

"Mm."

Yu Gu sat down cross-legged. Xiao Chun held up the strips of cloth and measured for a long while before clumsily starting to bandage him. The first time, the wrappings came completely undone as soon as he finished, so he had no choice but to steel himself and start over.

Bit by bit, the cloth covered the wounds. Xiao Chun's feelings were impossible to put into words—he was both impressed and distressed. For some reason, his chest felt heavy with a persistent, sullen unhappiness.

They had obviously escaped death. They had obviously won a fight he had thought they were certain to lose. Just thinking of that terrifying monster, Xiao Chun was amazed that he hadn't passed out on the spot.

His hands never stopped moving as he glanced down. Yu Gu hadn't even furrowed his brow. He really did seem unafraid of pain, his expression calm, even... faintly pleased?

Xiao Chun couldn't understand it. Shaking his head to himself, he looked up and caught sight of his reflection in the shattered mirror across from him—

His trench coat was beyond saving, thoroughly smeared with blood from top to bottom. The white shirt underneath had become a dark red one.

The blood on his face looked as if someone had splashed it there. Without the context or the smell, people might believe he'd attended an exhibition of human-face art paintings.

The "Mr. Xiao" from before yesterday had vanished completely. How strange. A person's former course of life and every trace they left behind could be erased so easily, as if they had never existed at all.

Xiao Chun thought again of his unexpected "reflexes." His hands paused. Could that have been an ability like precognition? Some kind of special power? A superpower?

"What do we do after this?" Suppressing his doubts, Xiao Chun turned to Yu Gu. "Will it come again tomorrow?"

To travel between floors here, they had to use the food platform, and the platform that delivered food appeared only once a day.

"Logically, it shouldn't." Yu Gu let his hands hang naturally before his knees, his tone even. "According to the film's premise, the floors rotate once a month. Once it goes down, it can't come back up this month. If it randomly rotates to a floor below us next month, it still can't come up."

Xiao Chun raised a brow. "Doesn't the platform return to the top floor afterward? Can't it ride the platform back up?"

"The platform returns very quickly."

"So?"

"No one can stay on it during the return trip."

Xiao Chun wanted to say, But that isn't a person.

Yu Gu lifted his eyes to him. "It falls outside the film's established rules, so it won't follow the monthly floor rotation rule. It's like an NPC that respawns at random. If it respawns above our floor tomorrow, it'll show up again."

Xiao Chun was stunned. "What do you mean, it falls outside the film's rules?"

"There are no ghosts in The Platform, nor monsters like that grotesque thing. The Platform is about human nature."

Only then did Xiao Chun remember that Yu Gu had said The Platform was a sci-fi thriller.

But everyone knew that sometimes people were more frightening than ghosts or monsters.

"The cellmate NPCs and temporary enforcer NPCs you encountered before," Yu Gu said, "should all have been living, breathing people in the film, not a monster. But when it comes to human nature alone, there's only a fine line between people and monsters."

Xiao Chun had no interest in discussing philosophy with Yu Gu. Frowning, he asked, "What if it comes again tomorrow?"

"We keep fighting."

"...You can't kill it, can you?"

"It's the collective form of countless enforcers. It's a symbol." Yu Gu seemed tired and closed his eyes. "Symbols never die."

For a moment, Xiao Chun had nothing to say. What was he supposed to say to that? Fight the same thing every day, like some endless death loop? Keep it up for ninety days? And endure hunger on top of it? Even video games didn't make you grind through a roadblock like this.

"Do we really have to last ninety days?"

"Mm."

"There's no shortcut?" Xiao Chun felt like he had asked this once already, but he asked it again anyway.

"No."

For some reason, Xiao Chun felt that Yu Gu's answer was like a sigh drawn from the depths of his body—long and helpless, enough to leave one's chest tight and weighed down just hearing it.

Of course, maybe that was simply because it wasn't the answer Xiao Chun wanted.

Xiao Chun looked again at Yu Gu's head, covered in strips of cloth and wrapped like a mummy. "...It's kind of ugly."

Yu Gu seemed to smile, but when Xiao Chun looked over, he still wore that unruffled expression. "It's fine."

As Xiao Chun gathered the remaining strips of cloth beside him, he asked, "Is there any way to make it stop hunting us?"

Yu Gu said, "Have a more troublesome violator than us show up."

Xiao Chun's heart crashed hard into the ground—great. Now he didn't need to cling to any hopes or feel anxious. If it came, they fought. If they couldn't win, they died. There was nothing else. What else could they do? At least he no longer had to constantly fear whether it would come or not. Compared to living with the anxiety of having no answer, a definite outcome at least gave him a direction.

Xiao Chun looked once more at his bedraggled reflection in the mirror. After a moment of silence, he simply sat cross-legged beside Yu Gu. He casually took off his trench coat and tossed it aside, then pulled off his one remaining shoe along with the sock. He began undoing his shirt buttons, peeled off the sticky shirt, and slowly wiped himself down with damp strips of cloth.

First his face, then his ears and the backs of them, his neck, collarbones, and chest. Bloody water ran down his body, staining the cloth red, and he switched to another strip. His skin was fair, and regular workouts had made his physique firm and lean. Perhaps because of the intense fight just now, the muscles throughout his body were flushed and swollen, making him look exceptionally sexy. His eight-pack was sharply defined, his waist narrow and taut. Blood had soaked the waistband of his pants, and his V-lines disappeared into the dark red shadows below.

Sweat and blood mingled. With every movement, his stretching muscles cast sculpted shadows, and the scent of hormones and blood assaulted the eyes and nose.

Yu Gu opened his eyes. His gaze landed on Xiao Chun's body, then he closed them again.

"What do you do, anyway?" Xiao Chun changed the subject. "I saw that you're pretty skilled. Have you trained?"

Yu Gu kept his back straight, growing a few degrees unnaturally stiff. "Mm."

"You really have? In what? Kickboxing? Muay Thai? Sanda?"

"What do you think?"

"I don't know much about that..." Xiao Chun shook his head and wrung out the cloth. His flexed bicep formed a curve that made one want to pinch it. It was hard to imagine that beneath those refined shirts and trench coats was a body like this. "It feels like you have your own style. Are you a fighting coach?"

"Semiconductors."

Xiao Chun froze mid-wring. "???"

Yu Gu seemed about to open his eyes. One eyebrow lifted before he restrained himself and kept them tightly shut. "Surprised? I studied engineering. You can think of it as me just being fairly good at fighting."

Just Fairly Good at Fighting.

Xiao Chun was speechless. His gaze slowly traced the man's face—peach-blossom eyes that looked amorous but were actually cold, a trace of blood still left on his bold, swordlike brows, thin lips pressed together; fierce and coolly beautiful, a face no one could possibly dislike.

Xiao Chun clearly remembered how cleanly and decisively he had dealt with the flesh mass. Those movements, without the slightest hesitation or wasted motion, could not be developed overnight.

Even people who practiced martial arts or combat sports year-round might not be able to perform so precisely without flinching in a true fight for their lives. It had nothing to do with skill. It was all about mentality.

Yu Gu's killing intent was utterly real. His indifference to life and death, to pain, was not something an ordinary person could possess, either.

He was full of contradictions, mysterious and unfathomable, yet Xiao Chun couldn't bring himself to question him outright.

No matter how Yu Gu treated other people, at least where Xiao Chun was concerned, he had given him no cause for reproach so far.

"...If you're only fairly good at fighting, what kind of person would count as exceptionally good at it?" Xiao Chun barely managed to wipe the blood off himself. Rising to his feet, he took a bundle of bloodstained cloth strips to wash, intending to wipe himself down again. "Mr. Yu is far too modest."

"Yu Gu. Call me Yu Gu." Yu Gu opened his eyes amid the sound of water and looked at the man with his back to him. Xiao Chun's back was straight. His shoulder blades shifted slightly as he washed the cloth; the nape of his neck was slender, the muscles of his back taut, the groove down its center distinct, as though a pair of wings were hidden there. Below that, his waist was wiry and lean, without an ounce of excess flesh.

Yu Gu's throat bobbed. In an unreadable tone, he said, "I've met someone better than me. He adapts quickly, stays positive and optimistic, and is smart and considerate of others. He learns everything quickly—fighting too. He's exceptionally gifted."

Xiao Chun looked up in surprise. He could hear Yu Gu's admiration for that person in his voice, and their eyes met in the mirror. "Who is it? Your friend?"

Once Yu Gu met his gaze, he closed his eyes again and said nothing more.

......

After two days without food, compounded by the exertion from the intense fight, Xiao Chun was truly hungry.

He touched his flattened stomach and looked at himself in the mirror, a faint doubt rising in him—he worked out regularly, but when had his muscles become this pronounced? He lifted an arm. Even the hard-to-train area beneath it showed a faint tension of muscle. Pinching a bit of skin, he found his body fat was extremely low.

He stepped back a few paces, looked himself over from side to side, and simply took off his pants as well.

Behind him, Yu Gu asked, "What are you doing?"

Xiao Chun didn't notice the tension in his tone. As if it were obvious, he said, "They're too dirty. I need to wash both my clothes and my pants."

When he turned around, Yu Gu had directly turned his back to him this time. Xiao Chun blinked. "We're both men... Are you not used to it? Are you from the South?"

Yu Gu only said quickly, "Just wash."

"Do you want to wash too? I can help you."

"No!"

Xiao Chun took off his underwear too, standing completely naked. Veins stood out on the tops of his feet as they planted firmly on the concrete floor, though his ankles looked slim. From the side, the lines of his moving joints were clearly visible.

There was no soap, much less body wash. Xiao Chun could only use water to scrub the bloodstains from his clothes. They were difficult to wash out, and soaking the blood made the foul, fishy smell even more obvious. The stench hit him in the face, and Xiao Chun nearly threw up again.

He rinsed them several times. The bloodstains faded a little, but they would not come out any further. He spread the clothes flat on the floor to dry, then continued washing himself with the strips of cloth, finally washing his hair as well.

His wet hair looked even blacker and shinier, clinging to his forehead in little curls. Its lustrous darkness made his skin appear paler and his eyes deeper. His round, puppy-like eyes blinked softly, innocent and obedient, making him seem much younger than others his age.

He wiped the water from his face. The slight bend in his body revealed two dimples at his lower back. His firm, high buttocks were exposed to the air without concealment, while the heavy thing below remained hidden in a shadow untouched by the light. Looking at himself in the mirror, he thought: surviving was what mattered now. Nothing else was important. From today, from this moment onward, he would say goodbye to his former self. He should have said goodbye long ago, he thought with self-mockery. From the day he left the Xiao family, he had no connection whatsoever to the former "Xiao Chun."

After roughly drying himself off, he pulled over his sheet with his wet hair still dripping and wrapped it around himself.

When he met Yu Gu's eyes again, he forcibly buried the confusion in them and his fear of the unknown deep inside.

"We're in the same boat now, Yu Gu." He sat on the edge of the bed and crossed one leg over the other. His long, powerful leg showed beneath the sheet, his toes pointing toward Yu Gu. "Now we need to talk seriously. First, what else are you hiding from me? Second, I don't believe you're just some engineering student. Third, we have to find a way to deal with that flesh mass."

Yu Gu looked at him, his eyes filled with fervor, as if he saw something else through him. He rose to his feet and walked toward Xiao Chun step by step.

"What do you want me to tell you?" Yu Gu asked.

Xiao Chun was uncomfortable with that look in his eyes and frowned. "Everything I need to know that can help us get out of here. Everything."

Yu Gu shook his head. "There are things you can't handle yet."

"How do you know I can't if you don't tell me?"

"You can't." Yu Gu tilted his head, his sharp, thick black brows lifting slightly. "If you're willing to trust me, I'll tell you everything I can. As for the rest, the time isn't right yet."

Xiao Chun studied him, appraising, suspicious, and wary, as if evaluating an extremely important investment project.

"What if I say I can't trust you?"

Yu Gu leaned slightly forward, the red mole by his right ear seeming even more vivid. "You don't have a choice."