89: Chapter 90 This prosperous age is as you wished

The scene took three seconds to load.

It was slower than any time before.

Colors emerged from the pure white void of Su Yun's vision,

like an old photograph being colorized layer by layer—gray walls, green locust trees, red couplets, and then sunlight.

He was standing in an old alleyway.

The pancake stall at the alley entrance was still there, the batter on the iron plate 'sizzling' with oil bubbles.

The stall owner, wearing a blue apron, was spreading sauce for a child carrying a schoolbag.

The locust trees had been replaced; the trunks were two sizes thicker than in his memory,

yet the shade was still the same shape, spilling over the old stone bench at the foot of the wall.

A colorful cultural wall had been painted on the wall, depicting the Core Socialist Values.

The 2024 version.

The alley where he had lived with Grandpa when he was a child.

Three meters away, a person stood in the middle of the alley.

Patched cotton clothes.

Straw sandals.

A type 38 rifle was slung over his left shoulder, the strap digging a deep mark into his collarbone.

His right hand gripped something dark and hard as a stone.

A frozen potato.

He was much younger than in his funeral portrait.

A prickly buzz cut with hair standing on end, a face tanned dark by the sun, and a shallow scar on his forehead that was still a pale pink, not yet fully healed.

Su Zhenbang, twenty-one years old.

Su Yun's heart skipped two beats, and the third one failed to come out.

Then it gave a compensatory thud, beating so hard his chest ached.

Su Zhenbang saw him and froze for a moment, then leaned his upper body slightly forward,

twisting his neck forty-five degrees to scan both ends of the alley, his left hand already resting on the rifle strap.

A soldier's instinctive reaction.

Only after confirming there was no threat did he turn his gaze back to Su Yun's face.

"Comrade, where is this?"

Su Yun's Adam's apple bobbed.

Two words started from his heart, crawled up his trachea past his throat, and reached the root of his tongue.

"Grand—"

A line of small, blood-red text exploded across his retina.

[Kinship term detection activated. If triggered, the scene will be permanently terminated within three seconds.]

Su Yun swallowed those two words back down.

His vocal cords vibrated once, turning into an extremely light cough.

He took two seconds to return his breathing to normal, then spoke in a voice so flat he didn't even recognize it himself.

"Domestic. A safe place."

Su Zhenbang's gaze moved from his face to his clothes, then to the pair of white sneakers on his feet, his brow furrowing slightly.

Then he looked up at the surrounding buildings, looked at the asphalt road beneath his feet, and looked at the weather forecast scrolling on the LED screen at the alley entrance.

He didn't make a scene.

A few seconds of silence passed.

"Is the fighting over?"

Su Yun nodded.

"Did we win?"

Su Yun nodded again.

Su Zhenbang looked down at the frozen potato in his hand, paused for a moment, and stuffed it back into the breast of his cotton coat.

Then he smiled.

The smile of a twenty-one-year-old man, clean and without a single impurity.

"That's good then."

He brushed the dirt off his hands, his tone becoming very relaxed, as if asking a Comrade in his platoon where they were going for sentry duty today.

"Take me for a walk around?"

Su Yun said okay.

The moment he turned to walk forward, tears slid down both sides of his face simultaneously.

He didn't wipe them.

The April wind happened to blow in from the alley entrance, drying them in three seconds.

They walked out of the alley.

Su Yun hailed a taxi.

The driver rolled down the window; Su Zhenbang took half a step back, his hand touching the rifle strap again.

"Need a ride?" The driver poked his head out and glanced at Su Zhenbang's outfit. "Filming a movie? The props look pretty realistic."

Su Yun pulled open the rear car door.

"Get in."

Su Zhenbang bent down and climbed inside; his whole body tensed when his back touched the seat back, as if he wasn't used to soft things.

He held the type 38 rifle upright by his leg, muzzle pointing up, his left hand always supporting the buttstock.

The car started moving.

Su Zhenbang kept looking out the car window.

The asphalt road flowed under the wheels, traffic lights turned on and off one by one, people pushed strollers on pedestrian bridges, and glass-walled office buildings were blindingly white in the sunlight.

He didn't speak, just watched very carefully, his lips occasionally moving as if he were silently counting something.

Counting streetlights, counting cars, counting the number of floors in the buildings.

As the car passed an intersection, he leaned forward a bit.

His palm pressed against the car window glass with a smack.

"Stop the car."

Su Yun patted the front seat, and the driver stepped on the brakes.

Su Zhenbang pushed open the car door, his straw sandals stepping onto the asphalt surface; he stood in the middle of the intersection and looked up.

A large LED advertising screen was mounted on the roof of a building at the northeast corner of the intersection, at least five stories high.

The screen was playing a commercial for the domestic large aircraft, the C919.

The white fuselage pierced through the clouds, the engine sound was mixed into the background music, and the propellers sliced a golden arc through the sunlight at ten thousand meters.

Su Zhenbang's neck was tilted back nearly ninety degrees.

He watched it once.

He watched it twice.

When the third time finished and the advertisement looped back to the beginning, he was still standing there, his straw sandals not moving an inch.

Then he turned his head.

That expression was one Su Yun would never forget for the rest of his life.

Half of it was disbelief—brows furrowed, eyes wide, lips slightly parted.

The other half was a desperate desire to believe—light swirling in his pupils, like someone who had fallen into a river seeing the shore.

"Is this also our own?"

Su Yun's fingernails dug into the flesh of his palm inside his pocket.

"Yes."

Su Zhenbang turned his head back again.

The fourth time.

When the advertisement finished and the screen switched to a laundry detergent commercial, he finally slowly straightened his neck.

"The planes are built by ourselves."

He murmured it once.

He wasn't asking Su Yun.

He was using his own voice to confirm that this sentence was true.

Then he crouched down.

Crouching beside the crosswalk at the intersection, he covered his face with both hands.

Su Yun stood a step away to his right.

Passersby walked past them—high heels, sneakers, leather shoes, slippers—the 'tap-tap-tap' sounds merging together.

A delivery boy on an electric scooter brushed past two feet behind Su Zhenbang, the milk tea in his basket wobbling twice.

No one noticed a young soldier in straw sandals crouching at the intersection.

Su Yun wanted to crouch down.

He wanted to reach out and pat his shoulder.

His hand was halfway out of his pocket.

The system's red text flashed on his retina.

He stuffed his hand back in.

He was afraid that if he touched him, he would shout those two words.

He stood there, motionless, like a roadside tree at the intersection.

Su Zhenbang crouched for about two minutes.

When he lowered his hands, his eyes were red, but his face had regained its calm.

He straightened up, wiped his nose with his sleeve, and looked back at Su Yun.

"Let's go, Comrade."

His tone was exactly the same as before, relaxed.

As if nothing had happened.

They returned to the taxi.

Su Yun gave the destination.

"High-speed railway station."

Su Zhenbang turned to look at him.

"What station?"

"High-speed railway station. A kind of train."

Su Zhenbang nodded and didn't ask further.

The marble floor of the high-speed railway station was bright enough to reflect people; the straw sandals made a slight rustling sound as they stepped on it.

Su Zhenbang noticeably slowed his pace when he entered the waiting hall.

The indicator lights of the automatic ticket gates flashed red and green, and train information scrolled on electronic display screens.

The air conditioning vents hummed; surrounded by these things, he turned his head left and right like a young eagle placed in an unfamiliar cage.

Su Yun took out his phone from his pocket to buy tickets.

The moment the screen lit up, Su Zhenbang's upper body sprang back half a step, his hand reaching for his waist again.

"This is..."

"A phone, also a map, and can also write letters," Su Yun turned the phone over to let him see the screen, "it can do anything."

"Anything."

Su Zhenbang stared at the ticket purchase page on the screen for five seconds, leaning his head in close and then pulling back, looking it over like a villager looking at a propaganda poster.

"It's even smaller than a radio station."

Su Yun taught him how to scan the code to enter the station.

When the gate popped open with a beep, Su Zhenbang's entire spine arched, his left foot took a step back, and his hand already gripped the rifle strap.

"It's okay," Su Yun's voice was steadier than he felt, "it's just a door."

Su Zhenbang stared at the gate for two seconds, slowly relaxed his shoulders, and walked through sideways.

They boarded the train.

The seats of the Fuxing train were gray-blue, soft and wide; when Su Zhenbang sat down and his back touched the cushion, he looked a bit uneasy.

It was too soft.

He wasn't used to soft things.

In his three months in Korea, he had slept on frozen mud and snow.

The train started.

The first three seconds were very smooth; Su Zhenbang didn't react much.

Then the acceleration came.

The feeling of being pushed back pressed him against the seat; his hands suddenly gripped the armrests, his ten fingers gripping so hard his knuckles turned white.

The speed increased.

One hundred, two hundred, three hundred kilometers per hour.

The fields and hills outside the window turned from concrete shapes into rapidly receding blocks of color, utility poles became a single line, and villages became a dot.

Su Zhenbang pressed his face against the car window.

His breath hit the glass, creating a thin mist; he wiped it away with his sleeve and pressed against it again.

Su Yun sat in the seat to his right.

He didn't look out the window.

He only looked at his Grandpa's profile.

Illuminated section by section by the sunlight flashing past the window, bright then dark; the angles of his cheekbones were sharp, his lips were slightly parted, and his eyes held the entire World receding at high speed.

Su Yun was remembering.

Remembering with his life.

Su Zhenbang watched for a long time.

Then he pulled his face away from the window and turned his head, his lips moving several times before a sound came out.

"Comrade, how long does it take to get from here to Beijing?"

"A little over two hours."

Su Zhenbang's eyes widened.

"A little over two hours?!"

His voice went up a notch, causing a passenger in the front row to look back.

He sat up straight, hands resting on his knees, the veins in his neck clearly bulging.

"It took us two months of walking! We walked for two months from Antong!"

Su Yun smiled.

A very light smile, just a curve at the corners of his mouth.

Then he turned his head to look out the window.

Because his eyes were red again.

His own face was reflected in the window glass; the rims of his eyes were red, and tears swirled under his eyelashes but didn't fall.

Su Zhenbang didn't see it.

He had already pressed his face back against the window, watching the World outside flash by, muttering in a low voice.

"A little over two hours... a little over two hours..."

Su Yun looked at himself in the reflection of the glass and grit his teeth.

The fields outside stretched to the horizon; the April wheat seedlings were still green, piece by piece forming a green carpet.

Peaceful, quiet fields where napalm would not fall from the sky.

The fields that Su Zhenbang and his Comrades had traded their lives for.