17: Chapter 17: A Train Heading Towards New Life

The night in Andong was as black as an oil-soaked shroud.

The wind wasn't blowing; it was slamming.

The north wind, carrying Siberian ice shards, battered the pockmarked train platform, whistling like a siren.

There were no spotlights on the platform, only a few dim, yellow lanterns swaying wildly in the wind, tearing the elongated shadows into shreds.

Su Yun sat before the pitch-black screen, his fingers hovering above the Enter key.

He didn't rush to send these three hundred million 'new recruits' onto the train; instead, he first lowered the ambient color temperature.

Minus twenty degrees Celsius.

This was just the starting point.

The platform at Andong Station was packed, yet not a single sound of human chatter could be heard.

There were only footsteps—the sound of rubber soles scraping against the frozen earth—and the occasional metallic clang.

Jack stood among the ranks, his teeth chattering uncontrollably, making a faint, rattling sound.

The haptic suit transmitted the needle-prick chill without reservation.

He had thought that after experiencing the snow at Chosin Lake in the previous chapter, he had built up some resistance, but now he realized that the damp, cold river wind was drilling in through his collar and cuffs, like countless icy little hands touching his spine.

"Name."

The quartermaster in front of him didn't even lift his head. He held a dog-eared ledger, his hand frozen crimson, the knuckles thick and covered in cracked, oozing wounds.

"Wang... Wang Jie." Jack gave his real name.

The quartermaster wasted no words, not even sparing him a glance. A coarse cloth sack was flung over, hitting Jack in the chest.

Next came four stick grenades and a type 38 rifle whose stock was polished smooth from use.

Jack fumbled to catch them. The gun felt genuinely heavy; the smell of oil grime mixed with the cold hardness of the steel rushed straight into his nostrils.

He glanced down at the coarse cloth sack. Inside was a lump of yellowish-brown powder—this was all his rations in the game: roasted flour.

No scope, no tactical vest, no night vision goggles.

Even the belt for the bullets was just a blackened strip of coarse cloth.

"Next."

The quartermaster's voice was hoarse, as if he were swallowing gravel.

Jack, clutching the shoddy equipment, was pushed aside.

He looked at the rifle in his hand; it wasn't even a new gun.

There was a distinct scratch near the bolt, perhaps left by the previous owner or caused by a scrape on the battlefield.

"This data is wrong."

Brother Bao's voice came from nearby.

This tech-savvy streamer was currently squatting on the ground, staring intently at the shoes on his feet.

He ignored the gun in his hand, focusing all his attention on his feet.

They were a pair of rubber shoes. Single-layered.

In this era, they had a nice name: 'Liberation Shoes,' but on the Gema Plateau in minus thirty or forty degrees Celsius, these things were no different from stepping barefoot onto a metal plate.

Brother Bao pulled up the system panel, his fingers flying across the void, his expression growing uglier.

"The physics engine shows that the thermal conductivity coefficient for this material is too high."

Brother Bao looked up at Dai Dai, who was organizing the first-aid kit, and then at Jack. The light in his eyes flickered.

"This game is in hardcore realistic mode. If we stay still outdoors for more than ten minutes, this rubber layer will freeze through. The blood circulation in our toes will necroses due to hypothermia."

He stood up and rushed to the quartermaster.

"Officer, I need to change shoes!" Brother Bao held up the rifle in his hand and pointed at his feet.

"Give us cotton shoes! Even ones stuffed with cattail fluff will do! Going out in these rubber shoes is suicide—it’s attrition! Non-combat attrition!"

The quartermaster finally raised his head.

It was an excessively young face, perhaps only eighteen or nineteen, with two heavy patches of high-altitude redness on his cheeks and frost crystallized on his eyebrows.

He glanced at Brother Bao, then at the shoes on Brother Bao's feet.

Then, he silently moved his own feet out from behind the desk.

Brother Bao's voice caught in his throat.

The quartermaster's feet were also wearing single rubber shoes.

Not only that, the seams of the shoe tops had split, crudely wrapped with two pieces of grass rope, revealing a heel already frozen black.

"We don't have enough cotton shoes," the quartermaster's voice was calm, showing neither shame nor anger.

"Only the severely wounded in the whole regiment get cotton shoes. Are you severely wounded?"

Brother Bao opened his mouth but couldn't utter a word.

He looked back.

Along the long platform, thousands of soldiers stood ramrod straight in the cold wind, all wearing single-layer uniforms and single rubber shoes.

They carried their ration bags and shouldered their rifles. Not a single person complained; not a single person cried out about the cold.

They were like a group of silent sculptures, waiting to be loaded into the carriages and transported to the destination named Destruction.

"Board! Quickly! Everyone board!"

The military police whistle blew.

That was not a passenger train.

It had no windows, no seats, and even the ventilation holes were pitifully few. They were 'boxcars' used for hauling livestock or coal.

The iron door was pulled open with a rusty screech.

Jack, Brother Bao, Dai Dai, and countless other players were stuffed like sardines into that pitch-black metal can.

"Squeeze in! Everyone squeeze in! There's still room!" The military police below desperately shoved people inside.

The carriage was so dark that one could not see one's hand in front of one's face. Jack felt himself squeezed into a corner, his back pressed against the icy metal wall, facing the back of another person.

The stench of sweat, the smell of dry tobacco, the scent of moldy straw, and the human musk fermented by dozens of people crammed together mixed into a nauseating aroma.

Clang.

The heavy iron door was shut from the outside.

The last sliver of light was cut off. Darkness completely enveloped the narrow carriage.

Everyone held their breath. That sense of oppression was more suffocating than the cold.

In this sealed metal box, they were no longer the favored sons of heaven from that other world; they were no longer streamers with millions of fans. They were merely screws in this massive war machine—insignificant and ready to be consumed at any moment.

"Woo—"

A mournful steam whistle sounded from the locomotive—the tragic cry of a steel behemoth.

The body of the train shuddered violently.

Brother Bao lost his balance and slammed into a wooden plank beside him. Dai Dai gasped in fright and tightly gripped Jack's sleeve.

The wheels began to turn. Clang, clang, clang.

The rhythm grew faster, and the carriage shook more violently.

No one spoke. The silence in the darkness pressed down on everyone's chest like a giant stone.

They could only hear each other's heavy breathing and that monotonous, endless clattering sound.

Jack felt his heart contracting with that rhythm.

He wanted to say something to break this damned silence, even if it meant cursing the perverted planner Su Yun a few times.

But his mouth wouldn't open.

"Scrape... scrape..."

In a dark corner, a faint friction sound suddenly arose.

It was rhythmic, one stroke, then another.

Jack looked toward the sound.

Although he couldn't see a face, he could vaguely make out a silhouette.

It was an old soldier NPC huddled in the corner, holding his rifle.

He was wiping the bayonet on his gun with a piece of rag.

The bayonet occasionally caught a faint glimmer of light leaking through the door cracks in the darkness, dazzlingly cold.

"Old Squad Leader?" Jack called out tentatively.

The scraping stopped.

The dark figure moved slightly and slotted the bayonet back into the catch below the muzzle.

Click. A crisp sound that sent a chill down the spine.

"New recruit?" The old soldier's voice sounded very old, as if he had a mouthful of phlegm coating his throat.

"Yeah," Jack replied.

The attention of the other players in the carriage was also drawn over.

Under such extreme oppression, any interaction with an NPC became a lifeline.

"Are you scared?" the old soldier suddenly asked.

The carriage fell into a dead silence again.

Scared? Who wasn't scared?

The place they were going was Chosin Lake, the peak nightmare for human Infantrymen.

They only had four grenades and a broken gun, single rubber shoes on their feet, and only dry roasted flour in their stomachs.

And their opponents had tank clusters armed to the teeth, incendiary bombs that turned night into day, and 'iron birds' flying in the sky.

This wasn't a war at all; in Brother Bao's data analysis, it was called sending themselves to die.

"I'm scared," Dai Dai's voice was small, laced with a sob. "I'm scared of pain... I'm scared of dying too ugly."

No one mocked her.

In the darkness, the old soldier seemed to crack a smile. He pulled out a dry tobacco pipe, about to light it, but hesitated for a moment and tucked it back in.

The carriage was full of dry straw; a single spark could turn these dozens of people into roasted pigs.

"It's right to be scared,"

The old soldier leaned back against the carriage wall, shifting into a slightly more comfortable position.

"I'm scared too. In the last battle at Siping, a shell landed near me and deafened me for half a month. Back then, I kept thinking how wonderful it would be to go home and farm."

Jack was stunned.

This was different from the NPCs he had imagined. In those American games, old soldiers always had cigars dangling from their mouths, spoke tough-guy lines, and looked ready to face death.

But this old soldier said he wanted to go home and farm.

"Then... then why are you still here?" Brother Bao couldn't help but ask.

"If I don't come, the devils will stomp on my mother's grave."

The old soldier's voice was light, so light it seemed it would be drowned out by the sound of the wheels.

"My mother said that the land we just received is the lifeline of our family. If the foreign devils come and fight, the land will be gone."

The old soldier patted the gun in his arms.

"I'm afraid of death, but I'm more afraid that my son will have no land to farm in the future, no food to eat, and still have to work like an ox or horse for the landlord."

In the carriage, the suffocating sense of oppression changed.

It was no longer the fear of death, but a solemnity so heavy it bent one's waist.

Jack gripped the rifle in his hand. The wood grain on the stock dug into his palm.

He remembered Old Man Li, who was burned to death in the previous chapter, and Second Girl, who died over a piece of candy.

It turned out this wasn't about grand slogans.

There was no talk of world peace or saving the Earth.

For every person in this carriage, the reason, even if humble enough to be in the dirt, was as heavy as a mountain: for the hot bowl of rice behind them, for the acre of land at home, for his mother not to be bullied anymore.

Rumble—

The sound beneath the train suddenly changed.

It was no longer the dull vibration on solid ground, but an empty roar with an echo.

The wheels grinding over the rail joints, the sound reverberated over the vast expanse of water.

The wind grew louder and fiercer, pouring in through the gaps between the planks with a sound like ghosts wailing.

Jack suddenly leaned close to the gap in the door and looked out through the narrow slit.

Below was a bottomless black abyss. Giant waves crashed against the bridge piers, churning up ghastly white foam. That was the Yalu River.

That was the national border.

And the boundary between life and death.

"We're crossing the river,"

The old soldier's voice sounded in the darkness. He stopped wiping his gun and held it tighter, as if hugging his own child.

The players in the carriage fell silent in unison.

At that very moment, the system prompt sounded in everyone's ears—cold, mechanical, yet imbued with a sense of finality:

[Warning: You have left the safe zone.]

[Warning: The area ahead—Extremely Dangerous.]

[Warning: There may be no return from this journey.]

Jack ignored the red pop-up windows. He stared fixedly at the widening river surface, at the towering flames visible even in the dark on the opposite bank.

That was a village ignited by American incendiary bombs.

That was the Korean land burning.

"Then don't return," Jack murmured softly.

He pulled the bolt, chambering a round.

The wheels rolled forward, carrying these three hundred million young souls, carrying these mortals wearing single rubber shoes and eating roasted flour, rushing headlong and resolutely into that burning hell.

It was indeed a train bound for hell.

But the people on the train were going to put out the fire.