Beyond the Zenith

Up in the cadre building of Regiment 425, Lao Jian stood before the window of his room and listened for a while to the familiar song drifting through the night sky, even subconsciously singing along for a few lines.

So, it was Tradition Night. He had been so worn out that he had forgotten.

All of a sudden, Lao Jian heard the same song coming from nearby, only very softly.

Turning his head, he found an old acquaintance, now a regiment advisor, standing at the window of the room next door.

The two looked at each other, smiled, and nodded.

“It’s Tradition Night. You didn’t go?” Lao Jian asked with a smile.

“I went, but came back a little earlier than the rest,” the advisor said, turning his head to gesture into the room behind him, his eyes warm. “See, my third is only two months old. In another month or so, I rotate back to the front lines, so... I want to watch her grow a little more.”

Lao Jian nodded a few times slowly.

“And you? By my count, it’s about time you rotated back to the regiment headquarters, isn’t it?”

“Ah, I...” Lao Jian faltered briefly, then changed the subject. “Right, how was Tradition Night this year? Did those four kids I brought go? How did they do?”

“Hm?” The regiment advisor thought for a moment and said, “Among the ones you brought... There was one surnamed Han, wasn’t there? Han Qingyu?”

“Yes, did he go?” Lao Jian asked, tone somewhat delighted and eager. “How did he do?”

“He... It’s hard to explain.” The regiment advisor himself didn’t quite know how to describe the events that had taken place earlier that night.

Lao Jian misread his hesitation and, in his anxious concern, assumed something had gone wrong with Han Qingyu. “No, surely not? He’s a good kid. Honest, filial...”

“Is... that so?”

A knock came at the door.

Lao Jian waved at the regiment advisor to signal his departure, then turned from the window and went to open it.

The first two or three days back, he had been taken around for all sorts of questioning and tests, but aside from that, he hadn’t exactly been imprisoned or interrogated. For the past ten-odd days or so, he had simply stayed in this suite in the cadre building, waiting for the results.

The door was not locked, and no one stood guard. He simply had not applied to go out.

Lao Jian opened the door to see Regiment Commander Li Wangqiang.

Pretending not to notice the beef and yellow wine in his hands, and feigning ignorance about the fact that it was Tradition Night, Lao Jian asked his old superior in an aggrieved tone, “Commander? Why have you come to question me in person? It really did just go missing. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve said the same thing. You don’t think I’m making something up for the sake of it, do you?”

Li Wangqiang had been Lao Jian’s platoon leader for nine years before being promoted and was naturally aware that the man was playing dumb. Entering the room, he set down the beef and wine.

As it happened, he had another matter to address, so he simply went along with it and said, “It’s not about the source energy core. There’s precedent for that abroad. Once you and the platoon each finish the procedures, it’s basically settled. The higher-ups won’t have much to say after that.”

It was useless for the soldiers to take the metal cores. On the contrary, handing them in to be refined netted them a reward in return. This was a common understanding.

Lao Jian nodded, though he had never been all that concerned to begin with. He had always trusted Regiment 425.

“Shall we talk while we eat?” Li Wangqiang asked, raising an eyebrow.

“You’d better speak first.” Lao Jian glanced at the beef with a smile. “Otherwise, my heart will be in knots, not knowing what I’ve gotten mixed up in this time, and I won’t be able to eat.”

“That works too,” Li Wangqiang said flatly, opening the wine. “The night before you came here, you went to relieve Supply Depot 700, didn’t you?”

It had been quite a while since then, so Lao Jian was surprised at the seeming randomness of the question. “Yeah, what about it?”

Li Wangqiang said, “Something came up.”

“Oh, do you mean the traces of Wiper activity at the time?” Lao Jian asked seriously. “Did they find something? What’s the situation now?”

“Mm, it’s been traced back to Pure Purgatory.”

“Oh, those idiots.” Lao Jian scoffed.

Pure Purgatory, politely put, was a crude and low-grade Wiper organization. The Azure Coalition had never thought much of them. It was another faction within the Wiper organization that truly worried the Coalition.

“Right, so there’s no trouble there.” Li Wangqiang lowered his head to pour the wine. “What’s troublesome is... Let me ask you, did you kill anyone else besides the Sharpies?”

In truth, he had come to investigate the person responsible for that merit, but as per the rules, Li Wangqiang could not say so outright.

This sudden remark felt like an enormous accusation on Lao Jian’s head, and he couldn’t help getting worked up.

“How could that be? I, Commander...” he said, sounding slightly aggrieved. “I was helping cut down the Sharpies back then, pushing myself to hold the front. Afterward, I even coughed up all that blood. If you don’t believe me, go ask—ask the people at the medical station!”

“If you didn’t, you didn’t. What the hell are you getting worked up for? Injured but still pushing to hold the front, and you’ve got the nerve to mention coughing up blood afterward. Do you want me to praise you or scold you?” lectured Li Wangqiang, bringing out his authority as Lao Jian’s old platoon leader.

This had been a cursory process of elimination to begin with. If Lao Jian claimed it wasn’t him, then he believed him.

After a pause, he looked at Lao Jian and asked, “Then did you see anyone else around at the time?”

“At the time, I... no.” Lao Jian rubbed his nose, sat down in thought, and asked carefully, “Did a comrade die unexpectedly?”

“The soldier’s death came after he fought until his energy core was spent. He died at the hands of the two from Pure Purgatory. That much has been figured out.”

Lao Jian nodded heavily. “And then?”

Li Wangqiang took a sip of wine, drew in a sharp breath, and continued, “Then, those two from Pure Purgatory were taken out as well. Not by the people of Supply Depot 700, or by the District 764 platoon, and now you’re saying it wasn’t you either.”

So, it was not an accusation pinned on his head after all. It was a great merit.

Lao Jian froze for a moment, his mind racing. One possibility suddenly came to mind, and he blurted it out without meaning to, “Impossible. How could it be?!”

“How could what be?” Li Wangqiang had long since caught on that something was off about Lao Jian, and this remark only made him all the more certain. “Don’t you lie to me. We go way back; you can’t fool me. Besides, this is a merit, not a bad thing.”

“I know.” Lao Jian downed a mouthful of wine, tilted his head, and frowned. “But it’s just—It’s impossible.”

“Never mind whether it’s possible. Just talk.”

Lao Jian recounted the events of that night, including the fact that he had brought Han Qingyu along and had the boy lie low in a ditch.

“Impossible,” Li Wangqiang echoed. “How could it be?”

“Exactly.”

An ordinary person—a nineteen-year-old boy—had killed two combat personnel from Pure Purgatory equipped with seventh-generation devices. It was a conclusion that neither of them could make sense of or accept.

“Well then, let’s set it aside and investigate slowly. Let’s drink first. Come to think of it, the two of us haven’t had a proper talk in several years.”

Li Wangqiang filled Lao Jian’s cup for him and clinked it. “Three to start, no problem?”

“Sure,” Lao Jian said with a cocky laugh. “Though I’ll say, Platoon Leader, you might not be able to outdrink me these days.”

This was a very particular phenomenon among soldiers. Even after becoming leaders and commanders themselves, acting mature and steady before their own troops, they often reverted to their childish selves when in front of the old platoon leader of their recruit days.

The two talked about many things, spanning from the past to recent years, and then to the present situation.

“This batch is huge,” Lao Jian said. “I remember when a batch used to be only around two hundred. Now it’s over four hundred.”

“Mm, some other regiments have even more.” Li Wangqiang fell silent for a moment, then looked up. “It can’t be helped. So many have died on the front lines. A lot of the people who were supposed to come back on this rotation never returned.”

Lao Jian nodded silently.

As a platoon leader at the front lines, he understood this well. In the past, his platoon had sortied[1] at most once or twice a year, but in the first eight months of this year alone, they had already sortied four times, with losses approaching a quarter of their troops.

The spindle aircraft were coming more and more frequently.

“Your 752 is currently tied for the most number of sorties in our regiment, but other regiments have even more. Some have already run six missions this year,” Li Wangqiang said.

Lao Jian lowered his voice. “Has there been any word from the higher-ups?”

“Not yet.” Li Wangqiang shook his head. “Oh, right, the higher-ups have recently been calling on officers not actively in front-line combat to donate energy cores.”

“What for?”

“To put together the source energy field for this batch’s recruit test.”

“Are we... already that poor?”

“Probably. Or maybe the old man is just stingy.”

The two said this jokingly, but their expressions were rather solemn. If they truly were that poor, that basically meant they had already been beaten down to their underwear. Were a large-scale Sharpie invasion truly to arrive in the coming years...

“By the way, that hole up north in the Bear Alliance Republic’s territory... How deep have they dug? Have they dug anything up?” Lao Jian asked suddenly.

The hole that he spoke of was publicly known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole.[2]

“Over twelve thousand meters. From what I hear, there’s nothing.”

Li Wangqiang naturally did not mean that nothing at all had been found on the public level—the existence of a gold layer and a diamond layer had been discovered, though large-scale extraction was not yet feasible.

In truth, the Kola Superdeep Borehole was actually the Azure Coalition’s attempt to search near the Azure’s core for dead iron and source energy, though they had yet to see any results.

Nevertheless, this was all hearsay, and Li Wangqiang was quick to add that this topic lay far beyond the scope of his post.

So, the drinking continued, and the two eventually circled back again to their earlier topic.

Li Wangqiang slumped on the table, turned his head to look at Lao Jian. “Suppose, let’s suppose that it really was that boy who took out those two from Pure Purgatory. Can you come up with a single possible explanation for how?”

“Well...” Lao Jian trailed off and thought for a good while. “He’s very good at lying in ditches.”

“How good?”

“He stayed down, even with us right beside him, hacking at the Sharpies till flesh and blood was flying everywhere... He even saved me.”

1. A sortie is a deployment of a military unit such as an aircraft, ship, or troops from a strongpoint on an operational mission ☜

2. The Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3 is the deepest human-made hole on Earth, which attained a maximum true vertical depth of 12,262 metres in 1989. It is the result of a scientific drilling effort to penetrate as deeply as possible into the Earth’s crust conducted by the Soviet Union in the Pechengsky District of the Kola Peninsula, near the Russian border with Norway. ☜