420: Chapter 420 This is the Price of Peace

The comment section was closed. The number of shares was still ticking up, increasing by tens of thousands every second.

The communicator vibrated.

A message from Zhao Tianyang.

"Brother, the school notified Lin Yao and me to return to the team early. We've been entered into the combat training sequence and assigned to the reserve personnel echelon. Lin Yao... she's doing okay, she stopped crying. Don't worry."

After Lin Yu finished reading, he replied with three words.

"Follow the arrangements."

Sent.

He turned off the communicator and stuffed it back into his pocket.

The sky outside the cabin began to darken. It wasn't because of sunset, but because the transport plane was descending, diving into a massive fissure in the earth's surface.

The rock walls on both sides of the fissure had been artificially cut, their surfaces smooth, with an emergency light embedded every fifty meters. Orange-yellow light streaked past the porthole one after another, casting a rhythmic alternation of light and shadow inside the cabin.

The roar of the engines was amplified several times over in the narrow space.

The transport plane slowed down, the landing gear deployed, and the moment the tires touched the ground, the entire fuselage jolted violently.

The hatch opened.

Subterranean air flooded in, carrying a scent of mixed rock and engine oil.

Lin Yu walked to the hatch and stopped.

Before him was a massive underground cavity. The rock layer at the top had been hollowed out and reinforced with a steel frame structure, reaching a height of over two hundred meters. Hundreds of transport planes were parked neatly on both sides of the runway, their propellers still spinning slowly.

At the end of the runway, tens of thousands of soldiers in logistics uniforms stood in square formations.

They didn't cheer, they didn't wave, and they made no unnecessary movements.

The moment the hatch of Lin Yu's transport plane fully opened, the soldiers in the front row were the first to turn their heads, their gazes locking onto the aircraft.

Then, the entire formation, from front to back, turned their heads row by row.

A salute of attention from tens of thousands of people; in the subterranean silence, there was only the unified 'click' of boot heels snapping together.

The moment Lin Yu's foot stepped onto the runway, his sole felt a dull, elastic feedback. The high-strength alloy floor was polished extremely smooth, but the surface was covered in dense scratches—traces of use left behind by countless pairs of military boots and heavy vehicles.

On both sides of the runway, thousands of non-combat personnel in gray logistics uniforms were moving supplies. Their movements were practiced and silent; boxes passed from one pair of hands to another without extra communication. Lin Yu noticed that a significant portion of these people had obvious physical disabilities. Severed arms, missing fingers, limps, and some even had entire legs below the knee replaced with metal prosthetics that made a slight hydraulic sound as they walked.

Retired Professionals.

They had lost their ability to fight, but they hadn't lost their right to stand here.

An old veteran who had lost both legs sat in an adaptive wheelchair, the levitation module at the bottom of the chair emitting a low-frequency hum. Parked in front of him was a fully enclosed heavy power armor, its back maintenance hatch open to reveal dense wiring and energy conduits inside.

The veteran leaned his upper body into the chassis, his hands quickly sorting through the wiring. His fingers were thick and short, with engine oil embedded under his nails that couldn't be washed away, yet every movement was precise to the millimeter.

"Click."

The last nuclear battery was pushed into the slot. Blue indicator lights lit up in sequence, spreading from the bottom to the top, and the heat dissipation patterns on the armor's shell began to emit a faint thermal glow.

The veteran backed out of the chassis and reached out to pat the armor's breastplate twice.

"Passed."

With that single word, a young soldier waiting nearby immediately stepped forward and began the donning procedure.

As Lin Yu walked past him, the veteran's wheelchair turned slightly. Their gazes met briefly. The veteran didn't salute or nod; he just swept a glance over him before turning back to continue inspecting the next suit of armor.

Lin Yu had seen that kind of look before. It wasn't scrutiny or curiosity; it was the simplest confirmation from someone who had survived the battlefield to another about to step onto it—you're still standing, so go on.

Banners were strung up along both sides of the runway.

They weren't beautifully printed propaganda slogans, but large characters brushed directly onto coarse cloth with white paint. The handwriting was crooked, and several strokes were clearly written by a trembling hand.

"Come back alive."

Just those three words, appearing repeatedly on every banner.

Volunteers stood beneath the banners; to be able to appear here, they were basically all military families. They lined up in two rows, holding packaged high-calorie synthetic rations, handing one out whenever a soldier passed in front of them. There were no cheers or slogans; they didn't even speak when handing them out, only bowing slightly.

A standard send-off ceremony.

Wen Yan walked half a step behind Lin Yu to the right, a dense stream of data scrolling across the screen of his mobile terminal. His thumb slid quickly across the screen, pausing every few seconds to zoom in on a specific data node.

"All civilian industrial capacity on Blue Star has currently completed its conversion," Wen Yan stated quickly, with a dryness characteristic of processing reports. "Military factories are operating at full capacity, and all civilian factories have switched to wartime production lines. Food processing, textiles, electronics manufacturing—all have been halted, with capacity unified and allocated to ammunition, armor components, and medical supplies."

He paused, his finger stopping on a number.

"The conversion efficiency is forty times that of peacetime."

The number itself possessed no emotional color, but it meant that every factory, every assembly line, and every worker on the entire planet had been integrated into the same goal at the same moment.

Lin Yu didn't respond. His gaze moved past Wen Yan's shoulder, falling on Yan Pojun not far ahead.

Yan Pojun's left arm was still in a fixation sling, his right hand hanging at his side as he walked with steady steps. As he passed the line of volunteers, a child of about seven or eight years old squeezed out from a gap in the crowd, standing on tiptoe to hold a folded piece of paper up to him.

Yan Pojun stopped.

He looked down at the paper. It was hand-drawn and colored with crayons, showing a blurry figure holding a shield larger than its body, with the words 'Win the Fight' written crookedly on the shield.

Yan Pojun didn't speak. He took the card with his right hand, looked at it for two seconds, then folded it and tucked it into a layer of his tactical vest over his left chest.

That position was exactly over his heart.

The child was pulled away by an adult behind him. Yan Pojun straightened up and continued forward, his pace half a beat faster than before.

Qin Zhan walked at the very front, the hem of his trench coat sweeping the dust on the ground. He didn't look back, but he spoke.

"The people you saw at the Top of the Firmament—the contestants in the arena, the audience, the gamblers placing bets—those are the products of peace."

Lin Yu followed behind him, with a distance of three steps between them.

"And what you see now," Qin Zhan's boot stepped over a deep groove crushed by a heavy vehicle, "is the price of peace."