It should be noted that Jinyue was someone who rarely felt fear. If anything, he had always been the protector type, who'd bravely swoop in and save the day. However, at this exact moment, no semblance of bravery or false bravado was in sight.
As the strange robot took some casual, cranking steps towards him, he wanted nothing more than to hide and run away. Every fibre of his being demanded it. He didn't even care that the robot had somehow done him a favour and healed him partially. For all he knew, the robot could have been healing him to take over his body or force him to become its personal servant, considering its sorry state.
He backed away from it, his tail still flicking aggressively. With every step the robot took forward, Jinyue took two steps back. This went on for a sorry 20 seconds till Jinyue tripped and fell back-first onto the pod he had just been in. He could feel his heart beating loudly in his chest; it must have been an illusion, but he genuinely heard it beat loudly in his ears.
The robot stopped in front of him.
They stared at each other silently, neither knowing what to make of the other. Both of them seemed intent on not taking the initiative to communicate, each studying the other intently.
Jinyue took a good look at the supposed robot saviour-cum-kidnapper. It was undeniably a robot, not some random creature. It clearly had some level of intelligence and reasoning since it had brought him to heal in the strange pod. Additionally, it seemed old, weary and abandoned, just like him.
"What do you want?" he asked
The words fell flat, swallowed by the echoing chamber.
The robot made a sound in response, something between static and speech, its voice deep and distorted, like a broken transmission trapped in metal lungs. Jinyue couldn't make out a single word. The tones rose and fell as though mimicking language—measured, deliberate—but all he heard was the mechanical rasp of meaning lost in translation.
Its eye flickered.
Jinyue flinched before he could stop himself. The robot tilted its head in what might have been curiosity or confusion. Then it spoke again, longer this time, garbled phrases spilling out, each syllable scraping like sand through gears.
It was attempting to communicate.
And he couldn't understand a damn word.
"I genuinely don't understand you," Jinyue said, softer now. His throat ached. His voice sounded too soft, too fragile, against that machine rasp; it unsettled him.
The robot stepped closer.
He braced instinctively, pressing his palms further to grip the pod. His tail curled tight behind him, betraying every bit of unease his face tried to hide. It leaned slightly, its single lens narrowing, scanning him. The beam of yellow light swept over his face, chest, and arms, humming faintly as if cataloguing him.
Jinyue's pulse climbed. His mind raced with scenarios, none of them good. Was it scanning for weaknesses? Searching for a signal? Measuring him for parts?
The machine said something again, short and clipped, and then stopped.
Jinyue's stomach growled. Loudly.
The sound startled them both.
It came again, a low, angry rumble that made his face burn with humiliation. The robot's head twitched, the yellow glow flickering as though it were processing the noise. Then, without another sound, it turned away and began to walk toward the far end of the chamber, dragging one broken leg behind it.
"Wait!" Jinyue hesitated, halfway between relief and confusion.
The machine didn't stop.
It disappeared into the dim corridor, leaving behind only the faint echo of its grinding joints.
Jinyue blinked.
Did I… chase it off?
He chased after it, uncertain whether it had left in offence, confusion, or purpose. For a robot that was practically falling apart, it was surprisingly fast…or maybe his body was just too slow.
By the time he reached the door, it had already disappeared, and the outside of the room…chamber…whatever this place was, seemed straight out of a horror movie. He exhaled shakily, tension draining out of him all at once. The silence returned, thick and oppressive. He was definitely not going to risk anything without a solid plan.
For a long moment, he simply stood there, catching his breath, before curiosity finally pushed past his fear.
The room was... definitely something unique. Panels of dark metal curved into one another with perfect precision, their surfaces reflecting faint light like oil on water. Strange markings, circular, fluid, almost organic, ran along the walls in patterns he couldn't decipher. Every surface was smooth and seamless, unlike the industrial steel he'd known on Earth.
He ran his hand along one wall. The texture was almost alive, metal that pulsed faintly beneath his fingertips, reacting to warmth. He snatched his hand back, unnerved.
The technology here was beyond anything he'd seen. It wasn't human, that much was obvious. Even in his old world, with its skyscrapers of glass and power at his fingertips, nothing came close to this.
Jinyue wandered the perimeter slowly, his steps uneven. He tried a few of the other doors, if they could even be called doors…but they didn't budge. No seams, no handles. It was as though the walls had swallowed the exits.
He sighed, exhaustion pressing down again. His stomach complained once more, this time with more insistence.
"Great," he muttered. "Stranded in an alien junkyard, nearly crushed by the sky, kidnapped by a robot, and now I'm starving and apparently abandoned."
The metallic hum in the air was his only answer.
He sank beside one of the inactive consoles, rubbing at his forehead. The fever was gone mostly, leaving only the hollow fatigue that came after survival. His head dipped. His thoughts blurred.
A faint sound broke through the stillness, metal dragging against metal.
He jerked upright.
The robot was back.
Its single eye glowed softly in the dark, less menacing now, almost muted. In its remaining hand, it carried something: a small, silvery satchel, slick and flexible like liquid metal frozen mid-motion. It approached him with deliberate care, stopping a few paces away.
It raised the satchel and made a motion, pushing it slightly forward, then pointing toward Jinyue. It pointed to its mouth, then immediately gestured towards its stomach area, then held out the sachet once more.
It wants to give me food?
He blinked. "You… want me to take that?"
The robot tilted its head again. The lens flickered once in what might have been an acknowledgement.
Jinyue hesitated. His mind immediately supplied half a dozen reasons not to touch whatever it was holding. Poison. Tracking material. Some kind of experiment. But his stomach had other ideas.
The silence stretched. The robot gave another quiet, broken burst of sound, tone slightly higher, for some reason, it gave him the feeling that it was coaxing a child to eat as it gestured lightly once more.
Finally, Jinyue exhaled, defeated. "Fine. You win."
He reached out cautiously and took the satchel. It was warm to the touch, heavier than expected. The surface rippled faintly, reacting to contact. With a wary glance toward the robot, he tore it open.
Inside was a pale, viscous paste. It didn't look or even smell like food, but at this point, he didn't care. He dipped a finger and tasted it.
Nothing.
Well, almost nothing. A faint and distant sweetness, like the ghost of strawberries long since forgotten. The rest was bland, metallic, oddly sterile. He grimaced, but forced down another mouthful.
"It's… food, I guess," he murmured.
The robot said something low and static that almost sounded pleased.
Jinyue gave a weak laugh under his breath, exhaustion softening his edge. "You're lucky I'm too hungry to argue."
He sat back, finishing the tasteless meal in silence. The robot remained where it stood, its single glowing eye fixed on him, not threatening, not quite curious either. Watching. Waiting.
And for the first time since waking in this strange world, Lan Jinyue didn't feel completely alone.
The paste had settled warm in his stomach, spreading a heavy calm through his limbs. It wasn't pleasant—too bland, too strange—but it dulled the gnawing emptiness that had lived in his gut since he woke in this world. He sat with his back against the curved wall, the silver satchel limp in his hand, eyelids drooping as lethargy crept in.
Across the chamber, the robot stood in its usual rigid stillness, that single yellow eye watching him like a cautious guardian. Its body occasionally sparked at the joints, small bursts of light flickering in the dim room.
"Staring's rude, you know," Jinyue muttered, rubbing at his face. He wasn't sure if he was talking to it or to himself. The warmth in his belly made him sluggish, his sharpness dulled, though some small part of him found comfort in the machine's presence.
The robot twitched, then spoke.
The sound startled him enough to sit up.
A stream of metallic tones flowed from its speaker. It was trying again. He realised that much. Trying to communicate.
He blinked slowly, pushing himself upright, the haze of fullness making his movements languid. "You really don't give up, huh?"
The robot's voice shifted mid-sentence, the tone changing, rhythm breaking. It paused, then spoke again…but differently this time. The syllables didn't sound the same as before. It was cycling through languages, switching patterns, changing sounds as if running through every tongue it knew.
He recognised none of them.
Some sounded like fragments of old recordings, crisp consonants swallowed by static, others fluid and soft, almost melodic. One version was clipped and sharp like military code, another deep and guttural.
He swore he heard some meows thrown in there somewhere; actually, the meows seemed to linger a lot longer. I mean, he had a tail, yes, but that didn't mean he was totally an animal. His tail seemed to disagree and sprang up, hitting his face, and a good portion of the tip stuffed itself in his mouth. He coughed as he fought off the tail.
Another smack in his face, and he had had enough. He grabbed it firmly, and the more it jerked, the more he held on…turns out it was sensitive, and he yelped in pain after a particularly forceful tug.
He gave up, let go of the tail and let it do its thing.
He vowed to find a way to get rid of it... permanently.
It has a mind of its own.
His attention turned back to the robot.
The robot had paused; it seemed to be laughing. Could robots even feel emotions? It angered Jinyue more than the situation he was currently in.
It then went on.
Minutes bled into longer ones. The chamber filled with a thousand false voices, none of which meant anything to him.
Jinyue leaned his head back against the wall, eyes half-lidded. "You're wasting your time," he murmured, too tired to keep up his guard. "I don't understand you."
The robot didn't stop.
Its eye flickered brighter, pulse matching the changing tones. The languages kept shifting, one, two, five, ten, an endless cycle of alien civilisations no doubt echoing off the cold metal walls.
He might have drifted off if it hadn't suddenly—
stopped.
There was silence. A click. Then, in a voice so flat and mechanical it almost didn't register as real, the robot said:
"Do. You. Comprehend. This. Form. Of. Speech."
Jinyue blinked, stunned. The words were slow, deliberate, and English.
He stared for a heartbeat too long, then shot upright, all traces of fatigue burned away. He didn't even care that it did not understand Chinese, as long as the language was from Earth, or something he could at the very least understand, he was content.
"You—you can speak English?"
The robot froze mid-motion, as if processing his tone. Then, in the same voice, "Response detected. Pattern confirmed."
Jinyue let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a groan. "You've been switching through a thousand languages just to land on this? I nearly went insane listening to that."
It tilted its head, he swore it did, like it was confused by his outburst.
He rubbed a hand over his face, equal parts relief and annoyance. "Unbelievable. You couldn't have started with English?"
"English." The robot repeated the word with clinical precision, as if testing it on its tongue. Then its lens flickered again, the yellow glow deepening to amber. "Designation recognised. Origin—anomaly detected."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
The machine went still. Its next words came slower, weightier, as though it were choosing them carefully.
"How," it asked, "do you know the language of the Original Civilisation?"
Jinyue froze. The faint hum of the ship filled the silence that followed, deep and steady.
He met the robot's single glowing eye, the meaning sinking into him like cold water.
Original civilisation?
My civilisation is what now?
He didn't answer. He couldn't. And even if he did, what could he possibly say?
Oh, I speak it because my wife killed me; reason being I'm not into poly relationships, and to steal my money! Then I woke up in this pathetic body!
He'd sound like a psychotic case
The air between them thickened, heavy with a ghost of history neither of them understood.
And for the first time, Lan Jinyue realised he might not have woken in the future or the past but in the ruins of something long dead.
******
Mini theatre
Jinyue (muttering): You know, for a glorified tin can, you have decent taste in rations. (He pokes the satchel open and takes a careful bite.)
The paste is marginally better than before, with faint sweetness, a suggestion of warmth. His expression softens despite himself.
Jinyue (through a sigh): Huh. Not terrible. Almost… edible.
And then, traitorously, his tail flicks once. Then twice. Then it starts wagging—slow at first, then with ridiculous enthusiasm, sweeping lazy arcs through the air.
Jinyue (snapping upright, horrified): What the—no! Stop that!
He clamps both hands around the furry appendage, wrestling it into submission. The more he struggles, the more it thrashes, delighted by its own rebellion.
Jinyue (through gritted teeth): I am not happy. Do you hear me? Not. Happy!
From across the room comes a sound: a short, stuttering burst of static, followed by another. Mechanical, uneven… but unmistakably laughter.
Jinyue (glaring): Are you laughing at me?
The robot emits another crackle, the sound almost melodic now, its version of a chuckle. Its eye flickers with bright amusement, reflecting the ridiculous sight before it.
He finally lets go of the tail. It wags once more, slow and proud, like it knows it's won.