However, Li Cu was still too young. Even if he felt something was wrong, he didn’t think deeply about it. After all, he had never encountered such a person before, so he had no basis for comparison.

The person continued, “By the way, since you’ve come in here, will anyone come to rescue you? Can you take me out with you when the time comes? Oh, no, no, no.” After asking this question, the person shook his head vigorously. “Anyone who gets close to here will be caught by those things. Rescuing someone is equivalent to harming them.”

Li Cu said, “I think you can rest assured; it’s unlikely anyone will come to rescue me.” He then told the person everything about how he got involved in this matter. After listening, the person frowned nervously, seemingly deep in thought, but he didn’t say anything. His gaze involuntarily drifted to Li Cu’s back.

Li Cu didn’t pay it any mind and asked him, “I’ve talked so much; why don’t you tell me about your situation? What’s going on with these vehicles?”

The person focused his gaze back on him. Li Cu continued to ask, “How did your convoy end up here? What exactly happened here?”

The person shook his head and said, “How did we get here? We didn’t come here; we’ve been here.” He pointed to the sand dunes outside the vehicle and said, “There used to be many houses and tents. I don’t know why they sent us here; it’s been too long, and I can’t remember the details. It’s been twenty years. I only remember that we were on a mission. We are the permanent convoy for this place, responsible for transporting supplies between a factory and here.”

“These are all trucks; I know they are for transporting things,” Li Cu said.

“It’s certainly not that simple because we are transporting in both directions. Most of what we bring in from the outside factory are daily necessities like gasoline, but the majority are strange containers.” The person said, “There are many strange containers, seemingly covered with rivets. When we brought them in, those containers were empty, but when we took them out, they were full, filled with something inside.”

“Undoubtedly, the things inside those containers should have been produced in this desert. The buildings here should also be a factory, but I can’t ask because whenever I do, they say it’s a top-secret mission. We’re only responsible for transportation. Each of our vehicles has a confidentiality officer. If our vehicle overturns in a populated area, this officer will take out a gun and won’t let any nearby civilians approach. We must wait for our own people to arrive. We keep transporting things here every day, nonstop.”

“Once, we transported a lot of strange containers out of here, and when we returned, we found that the factory here had been shut down. Then we waited at our logistics base, and there were no new missions coming in. My intuition told me that something must have gone wrong.

Even without transporting goods out, our resources and water here are slowly running out; we need to bring in some resources. But strangely, no one received any missions. We have been on standby, and there have been no orders from above.”

“We are an independent automotive team, and this team has been operating continuously. Later, our supplies ran out, and we were convinced that we had nothing to eat. We requested assistance from our superiors and called the factory, but the person who answered the phone at the factory said nothing. We didn’t know what to do.

This matter is serious. Could it be that so many of us would starve to death here? So we discussed it together and found it very strange. If we had nothing to eat, then what were the people at the factory eating? They hadn’t come out to explain anything to us, nor had they requested any supplies.

Our camp is two kilometers away from the factory, so our team leader took us to find the factory leadership to understand what was going on. We couldn’t just sit and wait. When we got there, we found that we couldn’t find the security guard. The factory was intact, and the power supply was fine, but there was no security guard. I stood at the entrance for a long time without anyone answering the door.

We crashed through the fence with our vehicle and entered the factory. Building houses in the desert is very difficult; most of the structures are made of concrete pillars embedded little by little into the sand, hoping to reach the rock layer to secure them. Piling takes a long time, and all the buildings here are not large and not high. We crashed in looking for the person in charge, any living person, someone we usually communicated with, but we found no one at all. The entire factory was completely empty. Had they already started to evacuate without us knowing?

However, we are a team of nearly a thousand people trapped here. With so many eyes, it would be impossible for them to leave quietly. Moreover, there is no reason to keep us in the dark, and no one would make such a huge mistake as to forget us here.

What struck us as strange was that everything inside the factory was brand new. We found the dispatch room that was responsible for contacting us, and upon entering, we discovered that all the phones were disconnected. We used a walkie-talkie to have a colleague two kilometers away call this place, but the phone didn’t ring at all. This meant that the calls we had made earlier were not directed here—where were they going? No one knew.

We searched through the entire factory and found no production equipment, meaning this factory was just an empty shell. We were extremely frightened; I realized that we seemed to have been deceived, but we didn’t know what others were trying to hide from us.

All the documents here were fake and meaningless. So we drove back to our camp and started digging under the sand to find the telephone lines. We hoped to trace the direction of these lines. As we dug, we were astonished to discover that this line actually led to beneath the sand dunes.”