In the mountains, the night was pitch-black and moonless. The earthen slope stood high, though the distant overlapping peaks loomed even higher.
A breeze blew in from the darkness, whipping lush summer grass against his face and body. The awns of wild grass seeds pricked at his skin. The red earth, baked by the sun all day, still held its warmth, and the pebbles beneath him pressed uncomfortably into his flesh.
The conical dagger with four fullers was drawn free. Blood clinging to the edges slid off quickly, soon dripping away until the last drop was gone.
Han Qingyu now lay prone in the grass at the crest of the slope, right beside the two corpses.
Thinking back on that moment just now, when that thought had surfaced in his mind... between making his decision and taking action, there had been virtually no interval, not even a transition.
He hadn't dared give himself room to think or hesitate, terrified that a single hesitation would cost him his courage.
And so, in that split second: thought became action. Han Qingyu had pushed off the dagger embedded in the ground, leaping forward while simultaneously wrenching the dagger free and sweeping the blade across...
The result now lay before his eyes.
In truth, had his pounce been delayed by even half a second, allowing the source energy apparatus on either of them to finish activating... the person lying dead on the ground right now would have been him.
One thing was undeniable: the casual remarks Lao Jian had made in the car had played a crucial role throughout this entire ordeal. That was something Lao Jian himself would probably never have imagined...
As in stories, the speaker had spoken carelessly, but the listener had gone out and killed.
And then, there was the power of source energy.
One drop, two drops... Han Qingyu held a blue crystal source energy block in his hand. Source energy, warm as a natural spring, flowed from his palm into his body. A third drop, a fourth drop...
Gone. Empty again. So little.
"Besides, it shouldn't be like this. If I join the army later and end up absorbing every piece the moment it's in my hands, what will I do?"
With that thought, he turned to open the remaining person's metal case.
The third block. The last one. He had already searched the bodies just now; neither corpse carried any spare source energy blocks.
Han Qingyu held his breath, focused his senses, and began attempting to exert control...
One drop... Stop. It stopped.
Han Qingyu could clearly sense that there was still another drop of source energy within the blue crystal surging toward him, but he had deliberately restrained it, and succeeded. This brought him a surge of delight.
Then he also tried to see if he could send the source energy back into the blue crystal, but failed.
After a brief moment of thought, Han Qingyu decisively gave up on this last drop of source energy.
Putting the blue crystals back into the metal cases of the two corpses without touching anything else, he climbed down the earthen slope, returned the blade and dagger to the fallen soldier, and closed the case he had opened earlier.
After finishing all this, Han Qingyu found a mountain stream, washed his hands and body clean, and only then ran off to another hill in the distance.
He found a new depression and lay prone once more.
Everything returned to calm in the darkness. Only now did Han Qingyu finally become clearly conscious of one fact: *I killed people.*
*Yeah, I need to get used to it.*
"...Because I have to survive." Then he quietly, carefully began to feel the source energy inside his body.
From the moment Han Qingyu decided to climb the slope to take a look, barely twenty minutes had passed.
...
Another ten-odd minutes later.
Han Qingyu finally heard the sounds of a group passing by the mouth of the valley in the distance. He made no sound, however.
"Kid Han! Where are you? Where'd you go? Come on out!"
Lao Jian had returned alive. After he shouted along the valley several times, Han Qingyu finally crawled out from a small hillside at the far end of the valley.
"Time to go," he said.
Han Qingyu jumped down and asked, "You won?"
"Yeah. Most of Squad 764 showed up."
Lao Jian nodded, then walked ahead in silence... The battle he had just lived through, both in its sheer brutality and the casualties sustained, was rare in his ten-year combat career.
Seeing this, Han Qingyu said nothing more and followed silently.
He did not tell Lao Jian what had just happened, based on three considerations:
First, he hadn't yet figured out how to explain why he was able to kill those two people; second, he had "eaten" two blue crystal source energy blocks; third, in the off chance of off chances, what if he had misjudged friend from foe...
...
On the way down the mountain, Lao Jian suddenly coughed up a mouthful of blood. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he turned and gave Han Qingyu an easy smile. "Nothing major."
Then he vomited a second mouthful... and a third...
Blood pooled on the ground.
Lao Jian braced both hands firmly against his knees, stood up rather unsteadily, and waved a hand. "I'm fine."
Han Qingyu: "..."
"I'm a squad leader after all. With three squads present, I couldn't humiliate 752," Lao Jian explained further.
With that, he straightened his back and strode down the mountain.
Not until they were back beside the jeep, with Lao Jian gripping the car door handle, did he fall silent for a few seconds before turning to look at Han Qingyu, saying a bit awkwardly, "I might not be able to drive you back... I think I need to hit a medical station first."
Han Qingyu glanced at his pale face. "Alright."
"Will you be alright on your own?"
"No problem. I'm a kid from the mountains."
"Right. Stay safe on the road."
"Okay."
As Han Qingyu unhitched his bicycle from the back of the car, Lao Jian's communicator received a call.
The person on the other end reported a situation: traces of Cleansing Faction activity had been detected near the depot; everyone was advised to exercise caution on their way back.
And so,
"Wait a minute."
Just as Han Qingyu was about to ride off, Lao Jian called out from behind and hurried onto the road.
"How about this—come with me to the medical station first. You're joining us soon anyway... Once I'm patched up, I'll drive you home," he said after an apparent moment of hesitation.
Han Qingyu shook his head. "My parents will be waiting for me for dinner. It's so late, they're bound to be worried sick."
Lao Jian looked slightly sheepish.
"Starting tomorrow, I probably won't be able to eat dinner at home for a very long time," Han Qingyu added.
Lao Jian turned his head away and was silent for a while before turning back.
"Alright. In that case, just focus on riding your bike. Don't stop anywhere along the way, and don't yell or make noise." He paused, fished an epaulet from his pocket, and handed it to Han Qingyu. "If anyone wearing clothes and gear identical to what I wore that night stops you, you can show them this."
Set into Lao Jian's epaulet was a silver star. Han Qingyu took it and nodded. "Got it."
"Now, take another close look at my gear..." Holding his unequipped apparatus in his hands, Lao Jian instructed him, "If anyone's gear looks even slightly different from mine, under no circumstances should you let anything show once you're spotted... Just play dumb. Act like you know nothing and understand nothing. Understand?"
Han Qingyu nodded again, examined it carefully for a moment, then withdrew his gaze and looked at Lao Jian.
Lao Jian: "All set?"
Han Qingyu: "All set."
"Then—"
"Who are those people?" Han Qingyu finally couldn't help asking.
From Lao Jian's words, he could deduce: there truly was another group of people who also had source energy apparatuses, but they were enemies... The two on the slope were probably among them.
This relieved Han Qingyu immensely, though he still chose not to mention the incident for now.
Lao Jian hesitated, his voice dipping low. "They're a bunch of people who think humanity is ugly and ought to be destroyed... Of course, maybe only their higher-ups truly believe that... As for the underlings, most are just blindly following along to vent their malice."
"...Oh." For the moment, Han Qingyu found it hard to comprehend why the kind of people Lao Jian described even existed, so he didn't say much more.
"You should be fine... Just treat yourself as an ordinary person," Lao Jian said in a final reminder. He realized that traveling together with Han Qingyu right now might actually bring greater danger.
Han Qingyu: "Okay."
On the winding mountain road, the two went their separate ways.
...
While Lao Jian and Han Qingyu were each on their way,
Azure Coalition, Area 700 Hidden Storage Depot.
The soldiers, having just endured a bloody battle, still had not had time to clean up anything, nor even to tend to the corpses of their fallen comrades.
The preliminary investigation had just concluded, and dispatched team members were reporting back with information.
"Xiao Wu... he's dead. His body was found at the edge of the valley."
"...Yeah. Xiao Wu was on rear-guard duty today, patrolling the perimeter, right?"
"Yes. And the two Cleansing Faction members who killed Xiao Wu are also dead. They died atop an earthen slope nearby."
"Oh? Did they take each other down?"
"No. From the marks on the battlefield, they were killed by someone else after they killed Xiao Wu. They died from a surprise attack from behind."
"Someone else? Who?"
"Unknown, but definitely not one of ours... Let me bring up something else first, which might be even more crucial... We found an item beside those two Cleansing Faction members." The speaker took out an object and placed it on the table. "This should be a detonator."
"Then that confirms it. We just discovered a high-explosive minefield along... the path we took on our way back," another group chimed in.
The conference room fell into a collective silence.
Only when the deputy depot master, said to have originally been a military writer, broke the silence did he say slowly, "So it turns out we are all survivors of a catastrophe."
Still no one spoke, but everyone present was picturing that scene: in their most weakened state, they had just walked across a high-explosive minefield, only the people lying in wait to press the detonator had been killed.
The underlying logic of what had transpired was quite clear:
Two shuttle craft had landed simultaneously; the depot's garrison squad had engaged, and reinforcements had arrived from adjacent areas. Having obtained intel from who-knew-where, Cleansing Faction operatives had bided their time in secret, intending to kill everyone with a high-explosive minefield as they returned with their gear disarmed after a grueling battle, and then seize the depot.
They had successfully laid a remote-controlled high-explosive minefield, killed the patrolling soldier, and ambushed atop the slope to wait... only to be killed by someone.
After a moment, the master of the depot stood up:
"Put another way... someone, by their own power alone, just saved sixty-three Azure Coalition soldiers, including us, as well as the Area 700 Hidden Storage Depot, all of its source energy and supply reserves, and every single one of its twenty-two non-combat staff members."
Chapter 11