Beyond the Zenith

This time, their transport was a passenger bus, no tarps necessary. They were told the trip would take about ten hours, so leaving after lunch, they’d arrive close to midnight.

In the front row on the left, Zhang Dao’an sat down after yelling at the dog. He sat with his back straight, eyes forward, and did not utter a single word.

The bus was quiet.

This batch of recruits was different from previous ones. Due to certain revelations, nearly everyone knew that the dog’s name, 34473, was actually Zhang Dao’an’s official serial number in the Erasers. The implications ran deep.

Still, if Head Instructor Zhang wanted to use that name, that was his business. None of them dared to say a word about it.

Suddenly, in the last row, also on the left side, a big fellow leaned over the person sitting by the window, craned his neck awkwardly to poke his upper body out, and waved enthusiastically toward the rear, grinning.

“Goodbye, 34473! Goodbye, Big Yellow!” He Tangtang called out.

Eventually, he pulled himself back in and sat down, looking like an eager young man setting off on an adventure for the first time. As he rubbed his hands together, he met the shocked and sympathetic gazes of everyone on the bus.

Chuckling sheepishly, he said, “I’m gonna miss that dog.”

Everyone was silent.

“Honestly, at the very beginning, I was thinking about catching it and sneaking some dog meat,” he continued when nobody responded, directing his words to the two people in the back right, Wen Jifei and Han Qingyu. “Good thing I didn’t. I’ve gotten attached.”

Han Qingyu and Wen Jifei had nothing to say.

The bus was quiet.

After a while, He Tangtang folded his arms and started to snore.

The white noise of the engine and the rattling windows were the only sounds in the otherwise silent bus, and quite a few people fell asleep despite the bumpy road.

Han Qingyu spent some time quietly thinking about Grave Robber. The injustice and lack of compassion in Grave Robber’s life were undoubtedly contributing factors. However, it was ultimately that “someone” from Grave Robber’s story who had guided and indoctrinated him into joining Pure Purgatory.

So perhaps this was actually the best outcome for him. He had chosen to step off the path of senseless destruction against innocents, and frankly, nobody had the right to force him to fight for a world that had treated him so poorly.

As for Han Qingyu and the vast majority of the people on this bus, they had, to varying degrees, reasons to fight. There was no longer any point in asking, “Why me, out of everyone in the world?” Since this misfortune had already befallen them, it was better not to linger on it.

Then Han Qingyu started thinking about the “urine theft” problem.

I’ll need a large volume, which means drinking more water. Depending on the situation, it might need to reach pretty far, but that’s not a problem. I’m still young. It also needs to be sustained and continuous for a certain period. Then the source energy gets conducted through from...

Never mind, forget it.

As Han Qingyu gave up on that train of thought, he looked up and caught Platoon Leader Mira hastily averting her gaze from the right side of the front rows.

Her expression was certainly not one of admiration.

Han Qingyu’s expression while diving to retrieve corpses from the reservoir had been intense enough to leave an impression on her. Mira didn’t think he’d gotten excited from the prospect of touching dead bodies, so, God help her, that left one other possibility in her mind. This man had gotten excited because he was imagining the reservoir water as her bathwater.

He was trying to sneak a look at me just now, she thought to herself. He’s probably still imagining me in that bikini right now! Well, I admittedly did look pretty good. Is this what it comes down to? Is this the last hope for becoming a district platoon leader with an A-rank platoon member?

Mira couldn’t help but feel conflicted.

That evening, when they stopped to set up stoves for a meal, Wen Jifei spotted He Tangtang wandering alone at the edge of the woods and said to Han Qingyu, “We should check on him when we get back on... He might just disappear.”

He Tangtang did get back on the bus. A little while later, he pulled a snake from inside his jacket. It had been pinched unconscious.

“I’ll roast it when we arrive,” he told them. “You want some?”

Han Qingyu took it, looked it over, and shook his head. “This kind of snake doesn’t taste good. It’s got a strong earthy smell.”

“Really?” He Tangtang peered at the snake’s head.

“Yeah.”

“Then never mind.” Worried that tossing something long and thin from the window would cause it to bounce back or hit someone, He Tangtang coiled the snake up and lobbed it out.

After an hour or so of night driving, Zhang Dao’an stood up at the front of the bus.

“Since you all already know about Pure Purgatory,” he said, “let me explain. That organization takes people broken by hatred and despair and remakes them. It’s not particularly frightening. What’s truly frightening is using so-called ideals and philosophy to convince people to choose destruction, like Snow Lotus.

“I once hunted a woman from Snow Lotus. She was from a wealthy family, young, beautiful, and had never known hardship. It seemed to me that she had more reason than anyone here to be grateful for this world and to enjoy it, so I asked her why.

“She told me it was because she found the idea of witnessing the extinction of a dominant species romantic. For her, the idea of her bones being unearthed and put on display like a dinosaur fossil one day in the future was romantic too.

“I cut her down. To hell with romance.”

A few quiet laughs broke out. Most stayed silent. Hearing a bald, brutish, over one-ninety-centimeter-tall man talk about romance was enough to give anyone goosebumps.

“The maneuvering device and the dead iron blade? That’s romance.

“The near-death feeling of source energy crashing against your heart and flooding your limbs with violent power? That’s romance.

“Almost dying, then cutting down a Sharpie? That’s romance.”

With that, Zhang Dao’an sat back down.

“Would you believe me if I said he was definitely reading from a script? Why else do you think he waited until it was dark to talk?” Wen Jifei muttered under his breath, but in the quiet bus, his voice carried.

Oh, I really want to see Instructor Zhang lose it and lunge over here and bite—no, kill the two noisy people on either side of me, Han Qingyu thought to himself.

***

The first training session at the Erasers’—or the Ninth Army’s—combat training base started the next morning.

The foremost thing the recruits had to do was pick up their source energy maneuvering devices. Their devices were managed collectively. Every morning, they signed them out, and after training, they turned them back in.

Each regiment had one officer to handle all the devices, also known as an equipment officer. That was the position Wen Jifei had pulled strings to get.

Every morning, he was to register the recruits and distribute the devices. Every evening, he would collect them and update the log again. Then, he would check the devices and flag any that needed repairs. The rest of his time would be spent attending a device maintenance course and practicing marksmanship.

“What are you looking at, you dumb grunt? Do you want your device or not?” Wen Jifei grinned smugly at Han Qingyu. “Didn’t see this coming, did you?”

Han Qingyu took the device with a smile.

“October 15 is when the full changeover starts,” Wen Jifei said. “They’re giving the new ones straight to the recruits so they don’t have to readjust.”

He was talking about the ninth-generation source energy maneuvering device.

The ninth generation looked far more minimalistic than the eighth-generation device that Lao Jian and the others wore. It had metal bands linked together in two horizontal and two vertical straps, forming a “井” shape, though the horizontal bars didn’t extend past the edges.

Putting it on was simply a matter of slipping one’s head through the center opening, clipping the four ends into four ports on the belt, and fastening the connectors at the heart and shoulders. That was it.

Apart from an extra horizontal bar across the front and back, as well as being slightly thicker, it looked almost identical to the suspenders worn by young gentlemen in period dramas.

The metal source energy case was still a separate attachment. Even so, it seemed smaller than previous versions, and from its design, it was meant to sit vertically on the left side of the back, strapped to the metal band directly behind the heart.

The blade was still carried diagonally on the back, drawn from over the right shoulder.

“No blades today,” Wen Jifei said, pointing at another set of cabinets.

A long row of dead iron blades sat angled in parallel within the cabinets. Black and straight.

“Don’t touch the devices after you pick them up. Wait until you’re at the training ground, and put them on under supervision!” he called out to the crowd.

“Doesn’t this feel a little sad?” Han Qingyu asked.

“What? How could this be sad?” Wen Jifei scoffed, then swept a hand across the vast equipment hall behind him. “Just watch. By tomorrow—No, starting tonight, I’ll be ruling this place.”

Aside from him, almost every other regiment had a female soldier serving as their equipment officer.