59: Ants Under the Crimson Sky (Part 5)

Early the next morning.

Section Chief Han Zheng sat in a tent at the temporary camp on the outskirts of the War Zone, a satellite phone pressed to his ear, the line hissing with static.

"Section Chief Han, diplomatic negotiations are still ongoing. The other side is demanding specific academic grounds for the ruins investigation and will not accept internal security matters as a reason. It will take at least forty-eight hours."

"I cannot wait forty-eight hours."

"Section Chief Han—"

"The bronze piece has reacted."

There was silence on the other end of the line for two seconds.

"...What level of reaction?"

"Fifteen seconds of golden light resonance. It occurred near the refugee settlement, not inside the ruins."

"And the direction?"

"No clear direction. The duration was too short."

Another silence.

"We will accelerate the negotiations. But Section Chief Han, you cannot re-enter the War Zone without official permission."

"Understood."

Section Chief Han Zheng hung up and tossed the satellite phone onto the cot.

Outside the tent, dull thuds continued intermittently on the distant horizon.

Artillery fire.

It hadn't stopped since the moment the convoy left last night.

Wang Hao sat on an ammunition crate at the tent entrance, his right hand clutching the bronze piece.

It was ice-cold.

The warmth from those fifteen seconds yesterday felt like a dream; nothing remained after waking up.

But his heart was beating too fast.

The frequency was one-third higher than normal; there was no reason, it was purely instinct sounding an alarm.

The unease spreading from his chest to his limbs was like an undercurrent beneath a layer of thin ice—invisible, yet he could feel it accelerating.

---

The heart of the War Zone.

The shelling had started since last night.

A mortar position from one side had adjusted its coordinates to the edge of the refugee settlement—not intentionally, yet not unintentionally either.

In war, refugee areas are natural bunkers. Both warring parties knew the enemy would hide there.

So, artillery shells were thrown there.

The first round landed by the side of the road.

Forty meters south of the spot where the boy with the compressed biscuits was crouching, the blast wave blew away two rows of shanties.

The boy was hit by shrapnel.

It wasn't an instant kill.

The fragment cut in from his right ribs and lodged at the edge of his lung lobe.

He fell onto the gravel road, still clutching the bag of compressed biscuits in his hand.

The plastic packaging was soaked through with blood, turning a dark red.

The surrounding refugees began to flee.

But flee to where?

To the east was the line of fire, to the west was a minefield, and the road to the north had been blown apart in two places.

Most people could only crouch down.

Crouching in craters, at the base of walls, behind anything that offered even the slightest cover taller than their own bodies.

Someone knelt on the ground.

Hands raised above their head, lips moving, reciting some kind of scripture.

Someone next to them grabbed their arm, their voice raspy and distorted.

"God? If there really is a God, how could this happen! Run—"

"Run where?"

The person kneeling looked up.

Their eyes were dry. Their tear ducts had lost their function during a bombing raid three months ago.

"This is my home."

They knelt back down.

No longer praying.

Just kneeling, looking at the sky.

The trajectories of the shells dragged white smoke across the sky.

The sun had risen, but the sunlight was neither dazzling nor warm.

It was as if something had drained away all color, leaving only gray-white and dark red.

---

The center of the refugee camp. A corrugated iron operating shed.

The vibrations from the shelling made the iron ceiling rattle, causing dust and rust flakes to fall.

An elderly male lay on the operating table with a comminuted fracture of the leg.

Henry's hands controlled the hemostatic forceps amidst the tremors.

Every time a shell tore through the air—not the sound of the explosion upon impact, but that tearing screech overhead—his forceps would shift by a fraction of a millimeter.

The speed of his correction was faster than the shift.

Forty years of muscle memory achieved extreme precision in the most extreme environment.

Isaac stood by, handing over instruments.

His hands were shaking.

It wasn't a technical issue; it was fear.

He had worked in this camp for two years and had experienced no fewer than twenty shelling incidents, but never had shells landed this close.

The tremors in the ground were no longer intermittent.

They were continuous, becoming increasingly dense.

"It's bad!"

A local nurse rushed in from outside, face covered in dust and ash, lips trembling, shouting a string of words in the local language.

Isaac's expression changed.

He turned to look at Henry, his voice cracking—

"The artillery is adjusting its trajectory—it's aimed at the camp!"

Henry's hands did not stop.

He didn't even look up.

"This surgery has three minutes left."

The forceps clamped onto the last bleeding point.

"Two minutes."

Outside the iron shed, the screeching exploded.

It wasn't the dull thud from the distance.

It was overhead.

The second Henry looked up, he saw a rivet on the iron ceiling pop off from the vibration, spinning as it flew away.

Then all sound disappeared.

The explosion landed thirty meters outside the iron shed.

The shockwave overturned the iron wall panel on one side of the shed, sending the metal plate flying.

The blast of air surged in through the gap, sending the instrument tray, gauze, and iodine bottles flying.

Henry was pushed.

Isaac lunged over.

His arms clamped around Henry's shoulders, his whole body pressing down on him, pinning him into the gap between the operating table and a half-collapsed brick wall.

Simultaneously—

Two patients who could still move rolled off the bed.

One blocked the direction of the gap with their body.

The other lay on top of Henry and Isaac.

Flesh and blood.

No body armor, no helmets.

Just flesh.

The second shell landed twenty meters away.

The entire iron shed collapsed.

Iron sheets, wooden planks, and bricks crashed down.

Henry only felt Isaac's arms tighten once, deathly tight, like an iron hoop.

Then, the weight.

A heavy, dull, dusty, and blood-scented weight pressing down from above.

His eardrums were buzzing.

He couldn't hear anything.

Darkness.

It was very hot.

The iron was baked scorching hot by the thermal radiation of the shell, pressed against Henry's back through two layers of human bodies, the burning pain seeping from his skin into his bones.

He couldn't move.

Isaac's weight combined with the weight of the ruins pressed him into a bowed posture.

He could feel Isaac's breathing—rapid, shallow, the rise and fall of his chest transmitted through their clothes.

It was getting lighter and lighter.

"Professor..."

Isaac's voice was right against his ear, too faint to form words.

"You must... live on."

"You... are worth it."

That faint rise and fall stopped.

Henry's fingers clenched onto Isaac's sleeve.

The body heat beneath the fabric was still there.

But the chest was no longer moving.

---

At the same time.

Three hundred meters away, on the east side of the refugee camp.

Lin Xiaoman was knocked over by the shockwave into a crater.

Her ears were buzzing; she couldn't hear the sounds outside.

When she scrambled up, her left knee hit a broken brick, tearing her pants, and blood seeped out from her knee.

She didn't feel any pain.

Because the image reflected in her pupils overwhelmed all other senses.

In front of her eyes—craters, ruins, flames.

Lying prone, curled up, facing the sky.

Human shapes, but they no longer looked human.

She remembered the images on the murals in Torch Base.

Figures charging one after another toward monsters in the torrential rain.

The murals were beautiful.

They had filtered out the blood, the pain, and the stench.

What was before her was not a mural.

Every body, every pool of blood, every fading breath was real, warm, and had a name.

She crouched on the edge of the crater, her hands pressing hard against the ground, fingernails digging into the mud.

Her lips were trembling.

Her teeth were chattering.

A tremor rising from the base of her spine was uncontrollable; she was swaying in the rubble and mud.

The iodine bottle in her arms was half-broken, the liquid soaking the front of her hoodie, mixing with the muddy water and her own blood, turning a murky brown.

She looked down at her hands soaked in iodine and muddy water.

These hands had hacked into the firewalls of thirty-seven countries.

These hands had reversed a national-level cyberwar in three minutes.

Now, they couldn't even lift up a single injured person.

Because her hands were shaking.

Her entire arm, from shoulder to fingertip, was shaking.

But she stood up.

She didn't know how she stood up.

The blood from her knee mixed into her pant leg; every step made her head swim with pain.

She stumbled toward the nearest figure that was still moving.

She crouched down.

She poured the remaining half of the iodine from the broken bottle onto that person's wound.

Her hands were still shaking.

But she poured it accurately.

That person looked at her.

The light in their eyes had already faded.

Their head lolled to the side.

Lin Xiaoman's tears fell.

She knelt beside that body that had just lost its warmth, the blood from her knee mixing with the mud beneath her feet.

Her mouth was left with nothing but the astringent taste of dust and rust.

"Three years later..."

The voice was so thin it was shredded by the wind.

"Even more miserable than this?"

---

Just then.

The ground sank violently.

It wasn't the tremor of artillery fire.

It was deeper, more massive.

A shaking originating from deep within the Earth's crust.

It was as if the entire earth had been shoved from beneath by something, then crashed back down heavily.

In the distance, at Section Chief Han Zheng's camp, all instruments simultaneously emitted ear-piercing shrieks.

The bronze piece in Wang Hao's pocket instantly became so hot that his whole hand recoiled.

On the surface of the bronze piece, golden light surged madly from the engraved characters for "Kindling".

It wasn't fifteen seconds.

It wouldn't stop.

Beneath the ruins, Henry Bernstein felt the weight pressing on him lighten for an instant.

It wasn't because of a rescue.

It was because the entire earth was experiencing weightlessness.

Lin Xiaoman knelt on the ground and jerked her head up.

The sky.

The sun was still there.

But its light was covered by an eerie dark red, as if viewed through a layer of blood-colored glass.

The clouds were rotating at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Converging into a massive, bottomless vortex.

The center of the vortex was neither blue nor black.

There was nothing.

Complete, pure nothingness.

In the refugee camp, everyone stopped.

Those fleeing stopped fleeing, those screaming stopped screaming, and those praying stopped praying.

Tens of thousands of eyes looked up simultaneously, staring at the fissure that had split open in the sky.

The edges of the fissure curled outward, like a piece of paper being torn open.

On the other side of the paper, something was moving.

Space—had cracked open.