The temporary chatroom was still being flooded with messages. The cosmic creatures were intensely curious about the many forms of culture found in the chat logs, so they urged each other to push whoever had connections with Blue Planet to dig up more materials. They all wanted a chance to broaden their horizons. Meanwhile, certain creatures were beginning to grow uneasy.

Before long, one creature actually spoke up, claiming it had some connections and had more or less figured out the structure of Blue Planet's official office. It even managed to copy a portion of the Blue Planet Official Novelists' entrance examination papers.

"Who can translate this?"

"The key prompt on Blue Planet's entrance exam is to use your field of research to describe fear."

"Fear again? What else could you even write? I really can't think of anything."

"The name on this paper is... Mingxin?"

The title of Mingxin's short story submission was The Gourd Immortal.

 

[

The story followed a group of university students heading to the countryside for summer break. Much to their disappointment, the countryside offered nothing but withered, yellowed fields, cramped wooden houses, and a cluster of residents who gave off that distinct old-person smell.

Since the money had already been paid upfront, the students had no choice but to grit their teeth and stay for a few days. On the bright side, the air out there was relatively clean, so they held a courage-testing gathering at night, with each person sharing a ghost story they had heard.

At that point, an old man who had been woken by the noise came shuffling out. He listened in for a while, then told them a local legend. According to the tale, there was a Gourd Immortal in this area who liked to paint its outer shell to disguise itself as a human. But one day, a child laughed at the Gourd Immortal, saying it looked nothing like a person and that everyone had just been playing along to humor it.

The Gourd Immortal flew into a rage and swallowed the child whole. The child begged desperately for mercy, so the Gourd Immortal made a deal: if someone could find a human to serve as a replacement, the Gourd Immortal would release the child.

And so, if anyone around here happened to find a small gourd, it meant the Gourd Immortal, with the child still inside, had set its sights on them. They would need to appease the child's resentful spirit in time to make the child willingly remain inside the gourd. Otherwise, the Gourd Immortal would come to claim their life on the seventh day.

The old man told the tale with spittle flying in all directions, and the students' reaction was lukewarm at best. One after another, they said it was time to sleep. However, one of the female students had a deeply uneasy expression. Once her roommates all fallen asleep, she grabbed her friend's hand and quietly crept to the other side of the room. She opened her backpack, and sure enough, inside sat a small gourd caked in garish makeup. Painted across its surface was a distorted human face, as if someone had taken a real face and forcibly rolled it flat before pasting it on.

The female student anxiously said that she'd thought it was a local specialty when she bought it.

Her companion hastily asked where she'd bought it.

The female student said it was from a little convenience store run by the villagers. It had been sitting right there in the glass display case. Now that she thought about it, those wretched villagers must have been trying to transfer the curse to her.

Her companion told her that it was just a story and that she shouldn't worry about it.

But the next day, the female student's body grew even weaker. She kept having nightmares, one after another, and even started seeing the gourd's shadow. She and her companion tried every solution they could think of, but nothing worked. The convenience store had even shut its doors, which only deepened their paranoia. Then, that evening, the female student was suddenly brimming with energy and announced she'd found a solution.

Her companion was about to ask what the solution was when they heard a commotion from the boys' room next door: a small gourd dripping with blood was dangling from the beam in their room!

The female student explained that this was a folk remedy for transferring curses that she'd managed to find out. But at that very moment, another roommate let out a scream. She found a second vividly-colored gourd inside her own backpack.

With gourds turning up one after another, the students set aside their grievances and decided to work together to break the curse. Sitting down together, they agreed that something was deeply wrong with the villagers here. The key to breaking the curse was to make the child's spirit no longer resentful, but what if the child's death had actually been caused by something else entirely? They slipped out of their lodgings under the cover of darkness and searched the nearby dilapidated wooden houses for clues.

The students did, in fact, uncover something suspicious. Over a decade ago, the village had been struck by famine, and multiple gruesome incidents had occurred. In the legend, the child had been devoured by the Gourd Immortal, and that was the source of its resentment. But in reality, what had truly consumed them? After all, wasn't a gourd also an ancient vessel used for storing food?

Following the trail of clues, the students found a mass grave from over a decade ago and dug up the children's remains. They confronted the villagers, exposing the crimes of the past, and set the house ablaze, delivering a long-overdue act of justice. When the sunrise of the seventh day arrived, everyone was safe and alive, and the curse was broken.

Feeling as if a weight had been lifted, the female student returned to the city and called her friend. After a trip that hadn't been exactly pleasant, she'd decided that one of the guys who'd gone along with them was actually quite good-looking and wanted to know what her friend thought.

Just then, there was a knock at the door. She put the phone on speaker as she pressed her friend for an answer, but the signal on her friend's end was poor, cutting in and out. A few seconds later, the call dropped entirely. The female student muttered to herself. She opened the door, and a human-skin gourd as tall as the doorframe toppled straight down onto her.

A few days later, a police officer arrived at the burnt-out village. While sorting through old case files, he'd noticed that tourists died here every year from sudden heart attacks. He got out of his car and looked around. Suddenly, his foot kicked against something. He picked it up: a small gourd, with a child's smiling face painted on it.

 ]

 

"I'll admit that Blue Planet has all sorts of cultures, so why wasn't there even a single horror warning before releasing this story?! I found Ctulrt-type novels interesting, and Gothic novels mysterious, but this one genuinely terrified me!"

"What does the ending mean? Why is there another child?"

"It probably means that the child's resentment was never truly resolved. Once you pick it up, all you can do is wait for your life to be claimed... That was the only part of the legend that was true. All that stuff about appeasing the resentment, about dying after seven days, it was all made up. There was never a way to break the curse. No rules, no logic... If you put yourself in their shoes, the despair is overwhelming."

"Reading it made me so uncomfortable. I don't think a single person in the story is innocent. The female student tried to transfer the curse to the boys' room, and the boys secretly shoved a gourd into the girls' backpacks. Then there were the villagers, who committed crimes during the famine and now deliberately let people buy the gourds. The children are pitiable, but also terrifying. Even watching the students burn the house down, I didn't feel a shred of relief. Instead, the students came across as sanctimoniously hypocritical, the firelight illuminating nothing but the sinister evil of human nature..."

"I genuinely feel awful after reading that. None of the problems that surfaced were ever resolved: the curse, the devouring of children, the tragedy. Everything continues. There's this sense of helpless despair..."

"Did everyone read the self-analysis at the back of the exam paper?"

"I did! It turns out that this type of literature was closely linked to the economic depression, wars, and religion of its era. Society had excessively suppressed the development of human nature, and so even literature took a different turn! It depicted the rigid evil of human nature as a way to release pressure, embraced decadence as a form of resistance for freedom, and pursued liberation through pessimism. After walking into a dead end and confirming there was no way out, the body remained at the end of the narrow path while the soul finally ascended to heaven."

"What kind of thing is that?!"

Mingxin's examination paper was likewise presented on the desks of every species. After analyzing it from every conceivable angle, the creatures ultimately had no choice but to concede: this, too, was a distinct literary school.

"Gothic literature, Japanese literature..."

"Two forms of Blue Planet's historical literature have already emerged, and if you add in the modern Blue Planet web novel materials we've gathered, those are just as diverse. Are there any other leaked exam papers?"

The creatures stared intently at the temporary chatroom, unable to tell whether they wanted to see a new culture appear or not.

As it turned out, the author himself stepped in to speak directly.

 

[

Mingxin: Picking apart someone's job application form over and over again... It's as rude as spoiling the culprit of a detective novel right at the front door...

 —

? It's really Mingxin! Using his real name in chat?

 —

Front row, posing for a photo!

I think the school of literature you research suits me perfectly. Can I send a private message to you?

 —

Mingxin: Being publicly executed wasn't enough, and now you won't even spare my private space?

 —

Jung: Mingxin, mind your status.

 —

Mingxin: Alright. In other words, every person has a limited daily quota for social interaction. Some people have more, some less, and after chatting for this long, I already need an empty room to recharge.

 —

Jung: Mingxin simply doesn't enjoy chatting with outsiders. If you'd like to discuss our research findings, please go through the official channels.

 —

We really do need official channels. I think I've suddenly realized what type of literature I actually like, and I'm desperate to discuss it.

 —

Ms. Jung! I truly love your work. After reading The White Candle, I love it even more. I want to become a Gothic enthusiast too!

 —

Ms. Jung, both your and Mingxin's exam papers mention the term: Second World War. What does that mean?

 —

Jung: As the term suggests, it refers to the Second World War in human history.

 —

So it was a war? Was it a species-extinction-level war?

 —

Jung: No, it was merely humans persecuting other humans. Moreover, the war took place on a single planet, with a large number of visual-range engagements.

 —

That scale of conflict was called a world war?...

 —

The Isolated Planet era really was full of unimaginable things. Perhaps because of war, literature from that period all revolved around fear.

 —

Jung: There is also fear literature that is as warm as candlelight.

]

 

The cosmic creatures watching from the sidelines were stunned. Could the concept of fear still be flipped into something new?

This time, they truly couldn't wrap their heads around it. No matter how hard they tried, they deeply felt the difference between an individual's breadth of thought and the crystallized wisdom of an entire civilization.

What Jung presented was Fuling's exam paper, which was somewhat different from the previous two. At a glance, it looked rather sparse, with the main text consisting of just a few brief lines.

 

[

"Lest all its vastness cause its beloved's fear,

the universe expresses its love,

by blooming a single flower in its beloved's sight."

] 

 

(Original Chinese: "为了不使人害怕自己的庞大 / 宇宙表达爱意的方式 / 是在爱人面前憋出一朵小花."

Literal translation: "To avoid frightening people with its vastness, the universe expresses love by blooming a small flower in front of its beloved."

T/N: I made significant liberties to make it kind of poetic in English.)

 

[

A bit cute?

—

Was that really it? Did this Fuling get in through the back door or something?

—

The back side of the paper is crammed with reading comprehension questions, and it's packed more tightly than anyone else's. She must have made up for it there.

]

 

Setting aside how Fuling herself had answered, the creatures were first drawn to the questions themselves. Like leaping staircases, there were all sorts of short poems composed of lines of varying length. Although they lacked the most basic plot elements of a novel, the few lines felt like a fresh breeze to the face.

"I don't get it..."

"Do none of these stories have a clear protagonist?"

"I only understood Fuling's poem. A love story between a personified universe and a human? That's just so over the top!"

The majority of the cosmic creatures immediately expressed their confusion. Even with translation, they found it difficult to resonate with these short lines and simply couldn't see what depth they contained. Why did the Blue Planet once revere this literary form called poetry?

Web novels dominated the universe, and most creatures had a reading comprehension level of 2, meaning they could just barely follow the most basic story plots. Anything more sophisticated was simply beyond them.

All they could do was exchange bewildered glances and wait for those species who always prided themselves on being advanced civilizations to weigh in. Their histories were longer, and their cultural foundations richer. Surely, they could understand it?

A small number of creatures with stronger literary instincts indeed understood, and they felt an even greater shock: "This isn't a novel genre. At that time... the Blue Planet had already developed an entirely new literary form! Poetry!"

"Using developed isn't quite right," an alien said solemnly. "Look at this Fuling's reading comprehension answers. Poetry is one of the oldest forms of literature. It is humanity's external eye for describing the world..."

Fuling had answered that, in her field of research, poetry was not confined to any specific plot. Rather, it transcended stories, grounding itself in nature and emotion, and expressed the essence of the world as observed by the author in an abstract manner.

"But this has no real use for mental power. I've read these so many times, and I don't feel any change..." a young alien murmured.

"You really ought to go back and retake your courses!" The leading creature exclaimed furiously.

"This has nothing to do with mental power anymore! The emergence of poetry means that Blue Planet's literary aesthetic has surpassed an entire level! You can't understand it, so you think that it has no story, but that is precisely because it requires a rich capacity for imagination to grasp the author's emotions.

It is highly condensed, and it is also fantastical. In other words, it means that Blue Planet's general aesthetic sensibility has already moved from understanding the concrete to understanding the abstract. Blue Planet's overall reading comprehension level may even be above Level 3... What kind of cultural foundation does it take to achieve that?"

Another creature who had been silent for a long time spoke up: "What's most frightening is that in Fuling's exam paper, there's a passage like this: poetry, due to historical reasons, has branched into numerous schools. She enjoys nature, so she chose poetry with purer emotional expression. However, she has also studied poetry from other traditions, such as graveyard poetry, narrative poetry, and Eastern literary verse. She is open to reassignment and hopes to be given the opportunity to join..."

All the creatures fell silent.

Blue Planet's poetry was not a subordinate branch of novels. Rather, it was a system that stood alongside novels as equals.

Once again, it confirmed just how rich Blue Planet's culture had been during the Isolated Planet era.

What kind of civilization were they even studying?

They recalled the Blue Planet human who folded a paper airplane at the black market. The simple toy meant to ride the wind now seemed more like a luxury item that felt heavier than gold.

They all felt a touch of dizziness, a sense of powerlessness, as though their minds simply weren't enough.

—

Aboard Tidal Peace, Xi Yujin had spent half the day boosting himself with self-planted comments. Then he noticed that the chatroom's message frequency was gradually slowing down, and wondered for a moment if he had overdone his act.

While remaining cautious, he saw an anonymous passenger post: "I just heard about Blue Planet from another species. I really want to see them with my own eyes!"

Xi Yujin pondered.

If he could appear under a different alias, it would certainly help deepen the creatures' impression of Blue Planet.

Under the Navigator Colossus's guidance, every ship's position was fixed. If no one ever encountered other Blue Planet individuals, suspicion might arise.

Therefore, the next step was to personally don a persona and step onto the stage.