73: Chapter 74 A Monument Forged in Flesh and Blood

Xiao Guang rushed toward the spewing muzzle flash, slamming himself directly into the bunker's firing port.

There were no extra movements. Only the skin-crawling sound of flesh being pierced.

Time seemed to stop at that moment.

Jack's pupils contracted to pinpoints.

He watched the figure lunge forward, like a roc spreading its wings, or a meteor crashing down,

carrying an aura of absolute resolve, of destroying everything,

pressing down hard against that firing port which was madly spitting fire.

"Puff! Puff! Puff! Puff!"

The sound changed.

It was no longer that crisp explosion tearing through the air.

It was the sound of bullets entering flesh.

Muffled.

Dull and heavy.

Like a heavy hammer striking rotten leather,

or a dull blade hacking into old wood.

Every sound struck Jack in the heart.

Every sound made the souls of five hundred million viewers tremble.

That m2 heavy machine gun was still roaring, still vibrating.

The American shooter was screaming,

pulling the trigger in terror,

trying to smash and shatter whatever was plugging the muzzle.

But the figure did not budge an inch.

That was a chest!

That was flesh and blood!

What kind of will,

could make a person, under a barrage of more than ten large-caliber bullets per second,

not retreat,

not tremble, but resolutely use his own bones and flesh

to plug that gate to hell?

Xiao Guang's hands

gripped the sandbags on the bunker's edge tightly.

His knuckles turned white,

his fingernails dug deep into the sand.

He was exerting force.

He was using every last bit of strength in his life,

turning himself into a nail,

pinning himself to that muzzle.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

The gunfire changed.

From the muffled "puff puff" sound, it turned into intermittent jamming sounds.

It was blood, it was flesh, it was bone!

Scalding fresh blood flowed into the firing port,

gushing into the scorching hot gun barrel,

choking the bolt mechanism.

Finally.

The world fell silent.

The machine gun barrel glowed red,

the intense heat touching the flesh on his chest,

releasing a pungent smell of burning.

The machine gun's curtain of fire stopped.

His body was jammed tightly into the firing port between two giant rocks.

His only remaining right hand desperately clung to the edge of the rock,

his jaw clenched against the searing hot gun barrel.

No matter how hysterically the American machine gunner inside pushed and screamed,

this body, riddled with bullet holes,

refused to yield even half an inch.

He blocked all light from getting out.

He pinned Death inside the bunker.

The firing port was sealed,

the field of fire turned into a pitch-black dead zone.

On the battlefield,

the industrial meat grinder that had crushed countless lives

went silent.

A brief stillness.

Only the rustling sound of the wind sweeping up frozen soil and gravel.

"Charge!"

A beast-like roar erupted from the mud pit.

The Company Commander stood up.

He ripped off his helmet, already battered by gunfire,

and violently smashed it into the blood-soaked ground.

He gripped his bayonet,

without bending his waist,

and charged straight toward the ruined bunker.

Behind him,

Xiao Dengliang got up, dragging a bleeding arm.

Brother Bao dropped his empty gun,

and grabbed an entrenching shovel whose blade was chipped.

Jack lay prone in the mud and water,

his eyes wide open almost to the point of splitting.

Two streams of murky tears mixed with blood and mud flowed into his throat,

tasting both salty and bitter.

His mouth hung wide open,

a heart-wrenching roar burst from his chest.

His left leg was completely numb from the knee down.

But he still had his hands.

His ten fingers dug fiercely into the hard frozen earth,

his fingernails ripped back to the root, bloody and raw.

He used all the strength in his body to crawl forward,

dragging that useless leg,

leaving a dark red drag mark on the slope littered with corpses.

"Kill—"

Five hundred meters away, the main peak defense line,

the bugle sounded the charge.

Hundreds of figures covered in mud and blood

crawled out from tunnels, shell craters, and scorched earth.

They had no tactical formation,

no covering fire,

holding stones, broken gun stocks, and wooden poles strapped with explosives.

This was a group of mad ghosts climbing out of the depths of hell.

Behind the rubble halfway up the mountain,

Dai Dai covered her cheeks tightly,

blood-stained fluid and tears seeping between her fingers.

As a Medic, she didn't even have a single clean piece of gauze left,

watching helplessly as those young people, who should have been playing games and drinking milk tea in peacetime,

turned themselves into piles of mangled flesh to fill the enemy's wall of fire.

The scene of Xiao Guang sealing the machine gun with his chest

completely crushed the last vestiges of delicacy in her heart.

No screaming, no retreating,

she tremblingly picked up a mud-caked carbine beside her,

and stumbled after the charging remnants of the army.

She had to witness all of this,

to carve these images deep into her bones.

Inside the bunker, the Americans tossed Xiao Guang's mangled body aside

and reset the machine gun.

When the shooter looked out through the aiming slit,

the image branded onto his retina would never be erased.

Across the entire mountain,

those Chinese soldiers, plowed by artillery, bombed by aircraft, swept by machine guns all night,

who should have long since died out,

were stepping over the shattered bones of their comrades,

under the morning light,

swarming up like a tidal wave.

"Fire! Fire!"

The American Second Lieutenant shrieked over the radio.

The machine gun roared back to life.

The first few Infantrymen charging at the front fell.

The players and soldiers behind them didn't even look,

stepping over the corpses and continuing to crash forward.

Brother Bao's entrenching shovel sliced into the neck of an American Infantryman.

Blood sprayed across his face,

he laughed, letting an enemy's bayonet stab into his own abdomen,

clutching the opponent tightly,

and biting down on the enemy's carotid artery.

Xiao Dengliang picked up a rock weighing several dozen pounds,

enduring two pistol shots,

and smashed the American Second Lieutenant's steel helmet flat.

Jack crawled to the edge of the bunker.

An American soldier fleeing from the bunker stepped on Jack's hand.

The pain of the bone breaking shot straight to his head.

Jack did not retreat at all,

clutching the American's ankle tightly with one hand,

lowering his head and fiercely tearing a piece of flesh from the man's calf with his teeth.

The American soldier screamed and fell,

smashing Jack's back hard with his rifle stock.

"Die!"

Jack spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva,

snatched the dagger from the opponent's waist,

and stabbed it backward into the femoral artery.

Warm blood gushed out,

drenching Jack's face.

This was no longer modern warfare.

It was all beasts tearing at each other, the collision of the most primitive violence in human nature and the most extreme will.

The defense line collapsed.

The American psychological defense line cracked the moment they saw Xiao Guang plug the muzzle;

when they saw this charging crowd that felt no pain and wouldn't even surrender their lives,

it completely crumbled.

"Madmen... They are all madmen!"

The remaining dozens of American soldiers threw down their carbines,

turned, and fled down the mountain.

They abandoned even the immobilized tanks, wishing only that their parents had given them two extra legs.

The wind stopped.

A riddled red flag

was planted by the Company Commander on the highest ruin of the bunker.

On the eastern horizon,

a red sun pierced through the thick lead-gray clouds,

golden dawn light spilling over the entire Position Zero.

Illuminating the ground littered with shell casings,

illuminating the young faces forever fallen in the frozen earth,

and illuminating the conspicuous five-pointed star on the red flag.

Jack leaned against the scorching outer wall of the bunker,

gasping for breath in large gulps.

He raised his head,

looking toward the bunker's firing port.

Xiao Guang's body was still hanging there.

That tattered padded coat was soaked through with blood,

frozen into a hard, rigid red iron plate.

His right hand remained in the posture of gripping the rock,

his head bowed.

Jack struggled to crawl over,

wanting to bring the body down.

The moment his fingers touched Xiao Guang's shoulder,

the system notification sounded by his ear.

[Campaign Objective Achieved.]

[Position Zero has been recaptured.]

[Combatants: 127. Survivors: 11.]

There was no celebratory music,

no cheers of victory.

The entire position was deathly silent,

only the low gasps of those who survived.

Outside the game.

The entire real-world internet

was also plunged into an unprecedented silence.

The comment sections of several major live-streaming platforms

were eerily cleared for a full minute.

No one spammed, not even a single punctuation mark was sent.

On everyone's screens,

it was frozen on the same frame:

the moment Xiao Guang spread his arms,

sealing the machine gun fire with his chest.

The background was the cold light of flares,

and the crimson flames of death spewing from the bunker.

In this intersection of ice and fire,

that NPC Communication Runner, whose full name was never recorded in history,

used his flesh and blood

to shatter the invincible filter of Western mythology.

After the silence, foreign internet forums erupted.

They were filled with hysterical questioning and denial.

"Fake! It's all fabricated code!"

"Human carbon-based bodies cannot withstand the bullets of the M2 Browning heavy machine gun! The kinetic energy of the bullets would instantly shatter a human body; plugging the muzzle is completely baseless!"

"Dongda's game designers have gone mad! To brainwash players, they fabricated such fairy tales that violate common sense physics!"

"Protest! Boycott this form of mental control!"

The Lighthouse Ambassador posted three consecutive updates on social media,

accompanied by a test video of an M2 machine gun penetrating steel plate,

mocking with an arrogant tone:

"If Eastern flesh were harder than armored vehicles, why didn't they just march across the Pacific back then? Covering history with lies is an extremely despicable act."

That arrogance vanished in an instant.

Domestic players did not respond with vulgar insults.

Those young people who once only knew how to type in comment sections

now displayed astonishing restraint and execution.

An account named "ice and snow world Documentary"

uploaded a ten-second short film to the largest foreign video platform.

There was no game recording.

Only a yellowed black-and-white photograph,

and a scanned image of a declassified archive stamped with the Ministry of National Defense's top-secret seal.

The photograph showed a tattered military uniform riddled with holes,

with a massive charred hole in the chest area.

The text in the archive was translated into eight languages,

bolded and enlarged,

occupying the entire screen.

"Special Grade Hero, Huang Jiguang. Morning of October 20, 1952, at Position Zero on Hill 597.9 of the Battle of Triangle Hill, he blocked the enemy bunker's machine gun port with his chest and heroically sacrificed himself. Only 21 years old."

Following the short film was an excerpt from the military doctor's autopsy report scan:

"The chest cavity was emptied by bullets; no blood flowed out (as it had all drained along the way). The spine at the penetrating wound on the back was completely shattered. Both hands remained in a gripping posture. Due to prolonged scorching from the machine gun barrel, the flesh on the chest showed extensive carbonization."

This short film surpassed twenty million views less than ten minutes after being posted.

When Jack saw the frame of Huang Jiguang's archive in reality,

he locked himself in the bathroom,

frantically washing his face with ice-cold tap water.

When he thought of those comic book characters wearing star-spangled bodysuits,

who needed super serums, mutated constitutions, or pay-to-win armor to be heroes,

and then thought of the real person in the archive named Huang Jiguang,

who was only twenty-one,

a little over 1.6 meters tall,

who had been eating frozen potatoes for days,

wearing only a thin, tattered padded coat,

relying solely on a mortal body of flesh and blood,

he single-handedly withstood the strongest output of the pinnacle creation of human industrial civilization.

Who exactly was the God!

Which civilization deserved to be called unbreakable!

The physics experts, weapons enthusiasts, and retired soldiers on foreign forums who clamored about "violating common sense physics" were collectively silenced.

The evidence was irrefutable.

This was not a fairy tale fabricated by Su Yun.

This was the real, brutal history that had occurred on that land, history that surpassed the limits of human physiology.

Carbon-based flesh could not stop heavy machine gun bullets.

The will called "Faith" could.

In Jack's live stream,

a high-level account with an American IP floated a comment.

"My God... They were all people like this. What kind of monsters were our forefathers facing back then?"

This sentence became the true reflection in the hearts of millions of Western players.

Those young people who grew up watching superhero comics,

imagining saving the world with high-tech bodysuits,

had their worldviews violently shattered,

and scattered onto the scorched earth of the Battle of Triangle Hill.

They finally understood

why, in this game 'ice and snow world,' despite wielding advanced American equipment, they were still beaten to a pulp.

They were facing not a set of NPC data,

but the soul of a civilization that had once beaten arrogance into the mud in reality.

In Su Yun's studio.

The data panel on the big screen flashed wildly.

[Emotion Value Surge: +1 Billion]

[Emotion Value Surge: +2.5 Billion]

[Total Emotion Value has broken the ten-billion mark. Player Awakening Progress: 65%.]

The red numerical bar representing the "Western Cultural Filter"

was collapsing at a visible rate.

Su Yun picked up the now-cold tea on the table

and drank it all down.

His gaze swept over the drastic reversal of foreign public opinion on the holographic projection,

but there was no smile on his face.

Only a cold solemnity, like that after completing a rite of memorial.

"This is cruel?" Su Yun murmured softly,

his fingers stroking the edge of the keyboard,

"It's just getting started."

He looked at Ambassador Smith's social media account, which had been flooded by millions of angry netizens,

and typed a new set of code commands.

[Civilization Reenactment System Highest Authority Activated.]

[Historical Replay Material Library Loaded.]

Since you think plugging a machine gun with your chest is a miracle that defies common sense,

since you think it was fanaticism and impulse.

Then I will show you

what inhuman discipline under extreme rationality looks like.

Su Yun heavily pressed the Enter key with his fingertip.

[New Campaign Unlock Preparation: Hill 391.]

[Scene Generation: Withered Grass Plain.]

[Temperature: 25 degrees Celsius. No wind.]

[Special Weapon Loading: M47 White Phosphorus Incendiary Shell.]

On the big screen, the ice and snow of the Battle of Triangle Hill gradually faded away.

A stretch of withered and dense wild grass

unfolded under the scorching sun amidst rolling heat waves.

Su Yun closed his eyes,

the smell of Soon igniting fuel oil already entering his nostrils.

"You don't believe the upper limit of human will?"

"Go to Hill 391, go lie down in that grass for a day and a night."

"Go and feel what absolute stillness is."