Into the Abyss

"Imagine a Chinese version of Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones series, and you’ve essentially discovered Xu Lei, one of China’s biggest rising stars” – Tor.com

In 1962, as post-war China's first generation of geological prospectors, we were ordered to travel to the forests of Inner Mongolia to carry out a mission of national secrecy. Our task: to find a Japanese warplane buried over half a mile underground. Together with Wang Sichuan, Old Cat and the rest of the team, I descended beneath the earth. There we discovered a sprawling Japanese base from the 1940s, perched on the edge of an endless abyss. As we soon realized, the Japanese had flown a heavy-duty bomber into the void. What were they looking for? To find out, we retrieved the film recording they had taken of the flight. We believed that after watching this terrifying film, we could return to the surface and resume our normal lives. But our superiors had other plans. They ordered us to undertake a new mission. This time the task was suicidal. We were to fly a plane into the abyss, using the same methods as the Japanese. After writing a final letter to our families, we climbed aboard that fatal flight. For me, however, things were different. and I were soon to part, and I knew that somehow this mission might give me the chance to change our fates. Still I had no idea: what kind of ending awaited me in the darkness ahead? My sweetheart Yuan Xile had previously shown me a strange sentence, "Inevitability Begets Inevitability," carved onto the wall of a flooded room.