Axolotl Translations

The once noisy room had fallen into an eerie silence. What had been a relatively tidy space was now utter chaos. The heavy stench of blood hung thick in the air. One of the men, completely naked, lay sprawled across the bed, his face a bluish-black mask of death. Two others were crumpled on the floor in a pool of crimson—one still, unconscious from a massive abdominal bleed, the other’s skull caved in by the brutal force of a blunt weapon. Alive or dead, it didn’t matter; he wasn’t getting up.

It all felt like a nightmare. Gu Mengran had been crouched on the floor for what felt like an eternity, ten minutes perhaps, his mind still struggling to grasp the enormity of what had just transpired. Flecks of red danced before his eyes, and when he finally looked down at his hands—sticky, coated in thick, half-dried blood—his fingers trembled uncontrollably.

He’d lived two lives, seen his share of conflict, but stabbing a man? Ending someone’s life with his own hands? This was a horrifying first.

He wasn’t alone in his shock. Xiao Dong sat curled up on the floor, his back pressed against the cold metal of the bed frame, his face a mask of pale terror. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, staring blankly at the floor as if his very soul had detached. His expression was a silent scream: Who am I? Where am I? What the hell just happened?

They were all just kids, barely out of their teens or in their early twenties. Normal people. Living ordinary lives.

Yet, Zhou Jing—who looked even younger than the other two—was disturbingly composed. He’d strangled the large man with his bare hands, then crushed another’s skull with a hammer. Now, he looked as if he’d merely butchered a chicken or gutted a fish. No panic, no fear, just a grim sense of business as usual. As soon as their attackers were incapacitated, he’d calmly dressed and begun rifling through the room.

The space was small—just a bed and a couple of wardrobes. While the others remained frozen in shock, Zhou Jing rummaged through one of the wardrobes and pulled out a coil of hemp rope. Then, he knelt beside the bed, reaching under the lower bunk’s thin mattress to retrieve a steel pipe and two folding knives.

Slowly, Gu Mengran began to resurface, his awareness returning as he watched Zhou Jing move with a chilling efficiency. He watched him sit back on the edge of the bed and methodically search the dead man’s clothes. Finally, he extracted a room card and a key from the man’s pants pocket.

Preparations complete.

Zhou Jing’s eyes met Gu Mengran’s, and he offered a small, almost imperceptible nod before turning and walking quickly to Xiao Dong. He extended a hand to his dazed cousin.

“Come on. Snap out of it. We’re leaving.”

Xiao Dong jolted as if physically yanked from a deep sleep. His stiff neck turned slowly, and he looked up at Zhou Jing with utter confusion clouding his eyes. “Go… where?”

Zhou Jing’s hand hung in the air for a moment before he withdrew it with a sigh, a hint of helplessness in his shrug. “We’re going to regroup with my brother. Finish our plan.”

“…What plan?”

“We’re going to—”

“What kind of plan involves you sleeping with someone?! Does Zhou Zhiqi know?! Was it that bastard who made you do it?!”

Xiao Dong’s voice suddenly cracked, rising in pitch, his eyes now red with raw emotion. He glared at Zhou Jing, his face a mixture of heartbreak and helpless fury.

“You’re still just a kid… How could they do this to you?” Xiao Dong’s voice cracked with emotion. “What the hell is Zhou Zhiqi even good for? He insisted on taking you with him, fine—but he couldn’t even protect you! If I’d known this would happen, I never would’ve let him take you away…”

His carefully held emotions shattered in that single instant. Xiao Dong clutched his head in both hands, tears welling up and falling in heavy drops. His furious shouts dissolved into choked, helpless sobs, and with a frustrated grunt, he slammed his fist against the floor.

“Alright, alright, it’s not that big of a deal,” Zhou Jing said, crouching beside him and gently patting his back. “It’s not my brother’s fault. The moment we boarded that cursed ship, we stopped being people. They treat us like animals—yell when they want, hit when they want, and when they want to…”

His tone remained light, almost casual, yet only someone who had endured the same horrors could truly grasp the profound hopelessness hidden beneath his words. “You know, when we first got on this ship, there were over eighty of us. Now? Not even twenty are left. If you don’t obey, you die. Even if you do, you still might die—beaten to death, used until death.”

Xiao Dong clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles turned white, his eyes burning with a fierce rage as he glared at the lifeless figure on the bed. He growled through gritted teeth, “That monster. That scum. Worse than a dog. He did that to you right in front of everyone… I swear, I’m going to kill him.”

Fueled by his fury, he surged to his feet, ready to charge.

Zhou Jing’s hand shot out, gripping his arm firmly. “It’s over. He’s dead. Really dead. Don’t worry, brother, I came to terms with it a long time ago. What’s the big deal? Just think of it as being bitten by a stray dog. And honestly, it wasn’t a total loss—we got something out of it. You’re here now, aren’t you?”

“…What do you mean?” Xiao Dong froze, his anger momentarily suspended by confusion. “You arranged for us to be sent here?”

“More or less. New arrivals today were mostly going to be housed with long-term residents—that’s how they keep us under control. There are lots of rooms on the ship, and usually no more than four people to a room. By all logic, no one else should’ve been added to ours. But I couldn’t take all three of them on alone, so I needed backup.”

Zhou Jing gestured towards the large corpse with his chin. “He had some pull on the ship, so I made a deal with him. Got him to assign a few villagers to this room. I figured they’d send over some older guys, maybe uncles or something. Never thought it’d be you two. But hey, you really came through.”

One against three—Zhou Jing’s odds were terrible. He desperately needed help, and at that point, he couldn’t afford to be picky about who they sent. Even with past grievances, they were all from the same village. When push came to shove, he had to trust that his people would have his back.

It sounded like a well-thought-out plan on the surface, but the underlying risks were enormous. What if they sent someone old and frail, someone utterly useless in a fight? What if only one person showed up instead of a much-needed group? Zhou Jing made it sound like a simple calculation, but in reality, he was gambling with his very life.

Gu Mengran looked at the boy—someone even younger than himself—and a sharp pang of unease went through him. After a moment of heavy silence, he finally asked, “So… you planned to make your move today? What exactly was your plan?”

“We’ll talk later. Let’s go first.”

Zhou Jing slung the coil of rope over his shoulder, tucked the metal pipe securely under his arm, and handed the two clean folding knives to Gu Mengran and Xiao Dong. Then, he bent down and retrieved the bloody knife from the floor, his grip tightening around the stained handle.

Just as Gu Mengran had suspected, the door had indeed been locked from the outside. But Zhou Jing seemed to have anticipated this obstacle. Without a moment’s hesitation, he led them directly to the cramped bathroom.

One door. Three walls. No windows. Gu Mengran’s eyes darted around the confined space, trying to fathom where they were supposed to go—when Zhou Jing suddenly slammed the toilet lid shut, stepped up onto it, and began fiddling with the exhaust fan embedded in the ceiling.

The whole process took less than five minutes.

He dismantled the fan with surprising ease, using nothing but his bare hands, revealing a neat, square opening in the ceiling. Then, he reached up inside the dark recess, groping around until a distinct click echoed. Clang! A large ceiling panel shifted, coming loose, and Zhou Jing effortlessly lifted it out.

As he passed the heavy panel down, the hole in the ceiling seemed to widen dramatically—expanding from the size of a book to the size of the toilet bowl below. The edges of the opening were rough and jagged, forming a crude but wide circular escape hatch.

Unlike the flimsy, removable tiles found in regular buildings, the ceiling panels on this ship were solid metal sheets—sturdy, seamless, and seemingly permanently fixed in place.

Yet, somehow, Zhou Jing had managed to carve out a hole that large in solid steel, then concealed it so effectively that even when both Gu Mengran and Xiao Dong were staring directly at it, they hadn’t noticed a thing.

That wasn’t just skill. That was bordering on insane.

Gu Mengran’s mind was a whirlwind of questions, but now was not the time for them. He and Xiao Dong wordlessly took the heavy metal panel from Zhou Jing and carefully set it down on the floor.

The escape route was now open.

It just wasn’t going to be an easy climb.

Zhou Jing was the first to attempt the climb—and it went surprisingly smoothly. With someone providing assistance from below, the ascent became significantly easier. Gu Mengran didn’t hesitate to step in, effectively becoming a human ladder. He steadied himself on the toilet and boosted Zhou Jing upwards, ensuring his head and shoulders cleared the jagged opening. Once halfway through, Zhou Jing used his upper body strength to pull himself the rest of the way onto the ceiling panel.

Gu Mengran, thanks to his height, managed to follow suit after some strenuous effort. But before he could even catch his breath, he and Zhou Jing, lying flat in the cramped crawlspace, glanced back down through the hole—only to realize they faced a significant new challenge.

How the hell were they going to get Xiao Dong up?

The kid was dead weight, like a sack of bricks.

They tried several times, their attempts ending in frustrating failure, until finally, the coil of rope proved its worth. They secured Xiao Dong by tying a double loop around his waist. Zhou Jing pulled with all his might from above, while Gu Mengran pushed and steadied him from below. It was an exhausting struggle, but they finally managed to haul him into the confines of the ceiling.

All three of them were utterly drained. They lay sprawled on the narrow ceiling panel for a couple of long minutes, gasping for air, too winded to even speak. But Zhou Jing’s stillness was short-lived. He soon rolled over and began to move again.

“Let’s go. Follow me. Take it slow, but make sure your movements are quiet.”

“Got it,” Gu Mengran and Xiao Dong responded in unison, starting to crawl laboriously after him.

He’d said “let’s go,” but what they were actually doing was inching forward on their bellies, their bodies pressed against the cold metal.

They were now inside the second floor’s ceiling crawlspace—a suffocating space less than a meter high, a chaotic web of crisscrossing pipes and thick bundles of cables. The lighting was virtually nonexistent, plunging them into near darkness, and the narrow passage felt like a disorienting maze.

There was no sense of direction—no discernible east or west, north or south. If it weren’t for Zhou Jing confidently leading the way, Gu Mengran and Xiao Dong would have been hopelessly lost in the claustrophobic labyrinth.

The air in the crawlspace was stifling, intensely claustrophobic. Aside from the faint scratching sound of their clothes rubbing against the rough panels, the only thing they could hear was the increasingly heavy rhythm of their own ragged breathing.

No one knew how long they had been crawling through the oppressive darkness when, just as Gu Mengran began to feel lightheaded from the lack of air and the exertion, a faint, ethereal glow appeared in the pitch black ahead.

Another opening.

He followed Zhou Jing inch by painstaking inch toward the faint light. As they cautiously approached the hole, before he could even discern what lay below, muffled voices drifted up from the unseen space.

“How many now?”

“Twelve so far. Five more are coming to help.”

“That’s it?” a woman’s voice questioned from below. “Should we keep waiting?”

“Five minutes, max.”

The last word had barely hung in the air when Zhou Jing tapped firmly on the ceiling panel beneath them. Down below, in what was presumably another bathroom, two faces looked up at once.

One was a girl Gu Mengran didn’t recognize. The other—Zhou Zhiqing, his older brother.

With the assistance of the two people below, the descent was relatively straightforward.

But the reunion was anything but warm.

Xiao Dong had barely touched down, the makeshift rope harness still cinched around his waist, when he lunged forward with a primal yell and landed a solid punch squarely on Zhou Zhiqing’s jaw.

Zhou Zhiqing didn’t even attempt to dodge. The force of the blow snapped his head sharply to the side.

“That was for Zhou Jing. And that was for the whole village!”

Before anyone could react, Xiao Dong raised his fist again, fury contorting his features. But this time, Zhou Zhiqing’s hand shot out, grabbing his wrist in a vice-like grip and shoving him back with surprising force.

“Enough. You’ve got that kind of strength? Use it on the real enemies. Why waste it fighting your own people?”

“Your own people? Who says we’re on the same side?” Xiao Dong was breathing heavily, his eyes blazing with unadulterated rage. “You led people away from the village, brought nothing but trouble back with you, brainwashed the others—you’re a traitor!”

Zhou Zhiqing rolled his eyes, a weary expression crossing his face. “I brought them back because I had no choice. And I already explained it back at the village—I wasn’t running away. I was looking for help, for a safer place.”

“Bullshit! You needed help, so you dragged half the supplies and half the people with you? I don’t believe a damn word you say!”

“Believe what you want. I’m done explaining myself.” Zhou Zhiqing turned his back and began to walk away, his shoulders stiff with frustration.

But Xiao Dong wasn’t about to let it go. “What the hell do you mean—”

“Enough!” the girl standing beside Zhou Zhiqing snapped, her voice sharp and commanding. “Do you realize what time it is? Every minute you waste arguing is a minute closer to danger. Move! We need to take control of this ship before we leave!”

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