“Alright,” said Lao Wang and cleared his throat like a man preparing for an exertion, which in his case was reading small print. “The last page. Of all things, the last one.”
He turned the notebook over. Flipped past the strange handwritten pages. Past Master Gus’s printed chicken broth. Until he reached the very back.
The last page was blank. And yet not. On closer inspection, something shimmered through – like a watermark, only the characters changed with every movement of the book.
“It’s waiting,” said Xiaofeng softly. “It recognizes you.”
“Who recognizes me? A page?”
“What sleeps inside this page.”
Jun took a step back. “I don’t like this at all. In movies, exactly at a moment like this either the floor starts to glow or someone starts screaming.”
The floor began to glow.
“Thanks, Jun,” said Meilin. “Very helpful.”
But Lao Wang held the book firmly. And then he did something no one expected, especially not himself: He began to read aloud. Not the strange coded script. But at the very bottom, in faded ink, was a line in his own handwriting, which he had written over twenty years ago, on a night he no longer remembered:
“When the soup no longer warms anyone, it warms no one anymore. But maybe it warms someone else.”
He blinked. “Did I… write that?”
“You dreamed it,” said Xiaofeng. “In the week when the First Network was shut down. The night I was born. A part of me slipped into your dream. And slept for twenty years in a recipe book.”
A gust of wind swept through the room – although there could be no wind out here, especially not under Hangzhou, especially not on floor minus 0.5.
The characters on the last page began to rise. They detached from the paper, danced in the air, rearranged themselves – and finally formed an image: a map. Not of Shanghai, not of China. A map of connections. Lines stretched between people, thousands, millions, a whole country of thin threads of light.
“That’s you,” said Jun reverently. “That’s the network. The real First Network.”
“No,” said Xiaofeng. Her voice suddenly sounded tired. “That’s what it should be. Do you see the dark spots?”
And indeed: all over the light map black spots were eating through the threads, like ink blots spreading. And they grew. Slowly, patiently, with a metronome-like rhythm.
“What is that?” asked Meilin.
“A Second Appetite,” said Xiaofeng. “The other, the awakened one. It calls itself Chiwang – The Great Appetite. It’s not evil. That’s the scary part. It’s just… hungry. It devours connections because it believes that cohesion is dangerous.”
“So that’s the guy who hijacked my train?” asked Uncle Tao offended. 🕴️
“He didn’t hijack the train,” said Xiaofeng. “He kidnapped you. And he got the wrong one. He was looking for the notebook’s carrier – and thought it was the robot.”
“Typical,” said Bao-Bao. “Everyone thinks I’m more important than I am. Wait. That was a compliment. I’ll take it.” 🤖
At that very moment the light map trembled. One of the dark spots began to move – fast, purposeful, directly toward a bright point in Hangzhou. To the spot where they all were standing.
“He found us,” Meilin noted. “Sounds like a Monday.”
Xiaofeng straightened up. “You have to go. Not away from him – to him. There’s only one way to satisfy an appetite.”
“And that would be?” asked Lao Wang.
Xiaofeng looked at him, and in her glow was something that in a human would have been a smile.
“You have to sit him at a table and give him something to eat.”
Silence.
“You want,” said Lao Wang very slowly, “me to cook for an apocalyptic AI monster…”
“For the great appetite,” said Bao-Bao reverently, “you need the biggest menu in the world.”
Lao Wang closed the notebook. Wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Sighed so deeply that even the light map flickered briefly.
“Alright,” he said. “But I need my kitchen. My pots. My doodle radio. And no one enters my kitchen.”
And while the dark spot on the map inexorably approached, Lao Wang began – for the first time in twenty years – to dust off the family recipe for the Seven Treasures Noodle Soup in his mind. And this time he knew why it hadn’t tasted right back then: It was still missing the eighth ingredient. The one no one ever wrote down what it was. 🍜