80: Chapter 81 Sweet Potatoes and Medals

Dawn comes slowly in Bitong.

The sandy track on the playground had been sprinkled with water and packed down,

The white lime lines were drawn at four in the morning, perfectly straight.

Bamboo flagpoles stood on the north side of the playground, flying twenty-two national flags.

To be precise, they were twenty-two dyed bedsheets.

On the United States flag, the blue was indigo juice, the red was water soaked from sorghum husks, and the stars were dotted one by one with white lime.

The count was wrong, with three extra—the young soldier responsible for dyeing the flag had a hand tremor when he reached forty-eight and added a few more strokes.

The British one was even more absurd; the cross lines of the Union Jack were skewed by fifteen degrees, and the red and blue colors relied entirely on medicinal liquid and soot, looking like a dirty rag from a distance.

But of the twenty-two flags, not a single one was missing.

The Translator stood behind a wooden table, holding a tin megaphone to his mouth, his voice cracking: "The Bitong Prisoner of War Camp Olympic Games are now officially open."

There were no fireworks, no balloons, no symphonies.

The background sound of the opening was the wind in the valley and the bubbling sound of the cooking squad boiling sweet potatoes in the distance.

Jack stood by the side of the command platform. Calling it a command platform was a stretch; it was just three ammunition boxes stacked together, the top one printed with "7.62mm",

The wooden boards creaked underfoot. He clutched a copper medal in his hand—cast from recycled bullet casings, its edges rough and scratchy.

Flipping it over, four characters were carved crookedly on the back.

Long Live Peace.

"You call this a medal?" Duncan leaned in to take a look, grinning with a mouth missing its front teeth. "That's the crudest blacksmithing I've ever seen."

Jack ignored him. He was looking at the barefoot prisoners on the playground.

No running shoes. No spikes. Not even a decent jersey—just the camp-issued shorts and vests, cut from white cotton cloth,

The stitches were so coarse you could fit a pinky finger through them, but they were washed clean and folded neatly.

Three Black U.S. soldiers stood behind the hundred-meter starting line, their bare feet treading on the sand, toes digging into the ground.

The leader was named Wilson, a private who had been shot in the left shoulder when he was captured at Chosin Lake; he still couldn't raise it above his head.

The starting gun was two stones being struck together.

With a muffled "bang," three dark figures lunged forward.

Wilson ran the fastest. The sound of bare feet slapping the sand was rapid and dense, kicking up dust into the faces of those behind him.

His stride was so large it didn't look like he was running, but escaping—as if fleeing from something.

As they crossed the finish line, everyone on the playground applauded. The prisoners clapped, and the Volunteer Army administrators clapped too.

Wilson bent over, panting, the soles of his feet worn bloody and mixed with sand. A bowl of hot water was handed to him.

The person handing the water was a young Chinese soldier, his arm wrapped in bandages, not yet twenty years old, with frostbite scars still visible on his face.

Wilson stared at the bowl of water for three seconds.

His fingers trembled as he took the bowl. Not from exhaustion, and not from the cold.

The bullet chat in the livestream went silent for a full five seconds—for a room with tens of millions online, this was more abnormal than a total uproar.

Then someone typed a line:

"In Alabama, he wouldn't even have the right to sit next to a white person and drink water."

The bullet chat was instantly flooded. Line after line, the same sentiment in different languages: English, French, Spanish, Korean.

Su Yun sat in the studio, the emotion panel on the screen jumping rapidly. "Warmth" surged from 9% to 13%.

He didn't move. The coffee by his hand had long since gone cold.

—

The boxing match was scheduled for the afternoon.

Duncan went up against a Greek prisoner who was two sizes larger than him.

The rules were simple: no hitting the face. Three rounds.

In the first round, Duncan took two muffled punches to the ribs and nearly doubled over. In the second round, he got smart, slipping under the opponent's armpits to play hit-and-run, poking the Greek's soft spots three times in a row and making him hop with frustration. By the third round, both were exhausted, clutching each other and spinning in circles, as Duncan put it—"Boxing without hitting the face is just dancing while hugging."

The referee raised Duncan's hand; he was the runner-up.

The Translator hung the tin medal around his neck. The piece of tin was smaller than a palm, strung on a hemp rope, dangling and bumping against Duncan's protruding collarbone.

Duncan grinned, revealing two black holes—his front teeth had fallen out during his first week in the POW camp, chipped off while gnawing on frozen radishes.

He held up the medal and shouted to Tony, "Hey! This is the first medal of my life! Back in the alley behind the Leeds pub, winning only got me half a bottle of beer!"

Tony cursed at him, his eyes turning red.

—

Meanwhile.

On the foreign internet, the article from Jeffrey's team had been pushed for six hours.

The headline was blunt: "The Communist Circus: The Truth Behind the Brainwashing at the Bitong 'Olympics'."

It was accompanied by three AI-generated photos. Prisoners were tied to wooden stakes with the Chinese national flag in the background.

The quality of the synthesis was absurdly poor—the shadow of the pillar pointed east while the Sun was in the west;

the number of stars on the national flag was different from the real one;

the most ridiculous part was in the third image, where a prisoner's wrist was tied with rope; the texture resolution of the rope was higher than that of the face, clearly a direct paste from a stock library.

The comment section was one-sided: "A performance by barbarians."

"These prisoners must be forced to smile at gunpoint."

"Communist brainwashing."

Su Yun looked at these comments and put down his coffee cup.

He didn't type, didn't issue a statement, and made no rebuttal.

He opened the control panel of the global livestream and embedded the real-time footage from the game in a picture-in-picture format.

On the left: the AI-generated photo of prisoners tied to pillars with distorted expressions.

On the right: live footage from the Bitong playground, where Wilson stood barefoot on the podium, holding the shell-casing copper medal, his grin stretching from ear to ear. The young Chinese soldier who had handed him water was helping him wipe the blood from his feet.

The two images were side by side.

No text explanation was needed.

Three minutes.

The tide of the foreign comment section turned visibly.

"Wait a minute, the lighting in the photo on the left is wrong..."

"I zoomed in; the rope's resolution is 4K while the face is 720P. This is fucking photoshopped!"

"The Black man on the right is smiling; you're telling me he's being forced?"

"Deleted, it's deleted! CNN took down that article—"

Su Yun leaned back in his chair, expressionless.

Truth needs no defense. Truth only needs to be seen.

—

The closing ceremony was in the evening.

The setting Sun dyed the playground orange-red, and the bedsheet flags on the bamboo poles rustled in the wind.

The Translator stood behind the table reading the results. When he reached the long jump champion, a French prisoner stepped onto the stage.

He stood on the podium made of ammunition boxes, opened his mouth, then closed it again.

The audience went silent.

The Frenchman clenched his fists, his Adam's apple bobbing twice, and spoke a sentence.

In Chinese.

The tones were all wrong, three of the four initials were mangled, and his tongue was so tied it could be heard throughout the venue.

But everyone understood.

"Xiè—xie."

The playground was silent for two seconds.

Then the applause exploded. The clapping of the prisoners and the clapping of the Volunteer Army mingled together, indistinguishable from one another.

On the screen in Su Yun's studio, the "Warmth" value jumped past 17%.

He reached out and touched the medal on the corner of the table. The copper surface had been rubbed shiny by him, reflecting the light from the screen.

—

On the night the games ended, the camp cafeteria had an extra meal.

Everyone was given an extra boiled egg.

The eggs weren't large, with traces of straw and chicken droppings still on the shells, but they were hot.

Most of the prisoners held them in their palms, carefully peeling the shells.

Some cracked them with their front teeth, others picked at them with fingernails.

The cafeteria was filled with the warm steam of protein, mixed with the smell of cheap soap and sweat.

A U.S. Army sergeant held his egg, sitting motionless on the long bench.

His name was Green. From the artillery company, captured at Chipyong-ni.

Green slammed the egg onto the table; the shell shattered halfway, revealing a yolk that wasn't fully cooked—runny.

"This is it?"

His voice wasn't loud, but the cafeteria was so quiet that everyone heard him.

"At the Busan Base, I'd have four fried eggs and bacon for breakfast."

Green pushed the shattered egg aside and tilted his chin at the administrator walking over,

"I want meat."

The administrator was an officer in his forties with an old scar on his face; he said nothing after hearing the Translator's relay.

Jack sat in the corner.

Beside him was a young soldier, about eighteen or nineteen, responsible for cafeteria duties. In the bowl before the young soldier was only half a bowl of thin porridge and two salted beans.

No egg.

The eggs were for the prisoners. The Volunteer Army management and service personnel didn't get any.

The young soldier put down his bowl and looked up at Green.

That gaze was very calm. Not angry, not aggrieved, not restrained.

It was something bottomless, something Jack had never seen on anyone's face before.

Restraint.

Jack's fingers slowly tightened around his chopsticks.

The chopsticks were carved from bamboo, uneven in thickness; when he gripped them tight, splinters poked into his palm, a biting pain.

Green was still shouting.

The young soldier lowered his head, picked up his bowl, and finished the last sip of thin porridge.

Then he stood up, walked over to Green, took something out of his pocket, and placed it on the table.

A small piece of dried sweet potato.

It was palm-sized, shriveled and blackened, hard enough to hammer nails.

That was the young soldier's entire ration for the day.

Green was stunned.

The cafeteria No one spoke..

No one in the livestream spoke either.

Su Yun stared at the "Warmth" value on the screen—18%. Then he noticed another indicator was skyrocketing.

"Anger."

Not anger at the Volunteer Army.

But at Green.

Su Yun took his hands off the keyboard.

He knew that the aftereffect of this egg would be more powerful than a thousand artillery shells.