Beyond the Zenith

“If you were my soldier and I wanted to train you, I’d just throw you out and let Pure Purgatory hunt you for two years,” Qi Shantong whispered into Han Qingyu’s ear that afternoon.

Han Qingyu found it hard to judge whether Qi Shantong still held a grudge from his words. At the very least, it was obvious that he had reviewed Han Qingyu’s file after returning.

It was just that, as a Major General of a combat legion with no ties to archival or research projects, he didn’t have the authority to access or review files for the prospective tier of the archival sequence.

***

“That kid? Oh, his sensitivity level isn’t bad, but there’s nothing special about him besides that.”

Meanwhile, Han Qingyu himself wasn’t aware that his name had come up during a discussion at the Oriental Republic Coalition Council, let alone that he was the first person to be classified under the prospective tier of the archival sequence. The rest of the combat personnel either fell under the first tier or the second tier.

The person who answered this question was Chen Bu’e, nicknamed Mountain Goat.

“Why did you suddenly call me here in such a hurry? What’s this about?” Chen Bu’e asked, raising his head. He had already been here a while and was becoming fed up with the small talk.

Seated at the other end of the long table was an old man dressed in a shirt and tie. This old man was actually the Chairman of the Oriental Republic Coalition Council.

“Here’s how things are,” he said, formally opening the day’s agenda. “The young lady from the language department of the research institute, the one in the prospective tier, has just submitted a report with her colleagues. They believe they’ve deciphered something.”

An image was projected onto the wall of the room.

The first sentence read “I can’t get to where you are (location).”

“The Refusers[1] intercepted this from the control signals. It’s the line that the Sharpies repeated most frequently while they were on their spindle-shaped crafts,” the chairman explained.

“Isn’t that just stating the obvious? Haven’t the Refusers been doing this all along? If not, the Sharpies would’ve done a mass landing long ago, escaped our ambushes, or landed in a city.” Chen Bu’e paused briefly, then sighed. “Well, at least, we finally have confirmation.”

“Yes, but more importantly, now that we know the meaning of this phrase, we can analyze its structure. This gives us a path to deciphering the Sharpie’s phonology and linguistic logic. It’ll help with making further deductions.”

As this statement didn’t seem to warrant further discussion, the chairman inclined his head slightly, signaling for the projection to change.

The second sentence read“Miwang will get his revenge (harvest)?”

“This is the sequence of sounds that the front lines of the Witnesses have heard most frequently over the decades, whenever a Sharpie self-destructs,” the chairman explained.

Chen Bu’e frowned in silent thought for a moment, then asked, “What’s Miwang?”

“At present, we’ve yet to come to a conclusion that has garnered majority support. But Yaoqiao, Xin Yaoqiao—that young lady.” The chairman cycled through three ways of referring to her, but never mentioned the fact that she was his granddaughter. “She has a theory that Miwang means War God.”

Chen Bu’e scoffed. “That’s ridiculous.”

The conference room was not particularly crowded, but the buzz of conversation that this exchange brought on was loud enough to be grating. After all, everyone’s instinctive assumption was that extraterrestrial civilizations were technologically superior, be it in literature, film, or science alike. For that reason, the term “War God” was rather difficult for them to accept.

The chairman quietly waited for the conversations to gradually die down. He was about to speak when someone else cut in first.

“Is it a Red Shoulder?” Chen Bu’e hid his tension well, but the apprehension in his eyes gave him away.

He had been the first to dismiss the idea as absurd, but he was also the one closest to the front lines of the Witnesses among those in the room. After mulling it over, he could actually accept this conjecture as a likely truth much earlier than the others.

So far, the strongest Sharpie the Only Witness Legion had ever encountered was one with a red mark on its shoulder, dubbed a Red Shoulder by the Coalition. Its appearance on 29 September was the reason it had been later designated as Memorial Day.

The chairman’s gaze turned somber as he looked at Chen Bu’e.

“It’s just the theory of a young woman,” the chairman said, with deliberate lightness in his tone. “Here’s a document she and her colleagues compiled based on your years of front line observations and recordings of the Sharpies’ vocalizations. It’s a theory they’ve come up with. See for yourself.”

The projection on the wall changed again.

Falimyu: Basic soldiers, most likely the slave class of the civilization. What we know as Sharpies.

Tokkona:Intermediate soldiers; Red Shoulders?

Dai’e:Advanced soldiers; Red Shoulders?

Putaer: Super soldiers.

Miwang: War God.

The conference room was silent for a long time.

“These are just guesses. Wild, fanciful speculation.”[2] The chairman repeated his earlier words, even embellishing them in an attempt to make it seem less plausible.

“But if it’s true, assuming it’s true, then...” Chen Bu’e trailed off before suddenly taking on a confident tone. “Let’s remove that question mark after the Red Shoulders for Tokkona and replace it with a period.”

An uproar erupted in the conference room.

Even the creak of a chair or the sound of heavy breathing would’ve seemed intolerably loud. This was the legion commander of the Only Witness Legion speaking, after all.

Everybody’s attention was on Chen Bu’e.

“Don’t forget, Sharpies have always had rank insignia,” Chen Bu’e reminded.

This fact wasn’t a secret in itself, but was easily overlooked because Sharpies had remained unchanged for so long.

“We called that symbol the shattered star insignia, corresponding to our own star insignia,” Chen Bu’e continued. “A normal Sharpie has a single shattered star, while a Red Shoulder has two.”

This was the basis for his deduction that Red Shoulders were Tokkona, intermediate soldiers. Though this logic seemed crude and simplistic, it also appeared irrefutable.

“Doesn’t that mean...” The speaker trailed off mid-sentence and fell silent. They seemed on the verge of asking how humanity could possibly defend against that, but such questions were not permitted here.

A young man in his forties—younger than his other colleagues in the room at least—stood up. “I have something to say. If we follow this line of reasoning, wouldn’t that mean the Sharpies aren’t the advanced technological civilization we assumed them to be, but one based on individual combat prowess?”

Ridiculous. That was the first thought that crossed the minds of nearly all the members of the research division present at the council meeting, but none of them could think of a rebuttal.

“I mean, aren’t they?” the young man asked rhetorically. “Apart from source energy and dead iron, they don’t seem much more advanced than us in other areas, do they?”

“But they’ve already achieved overwhelming superiority in quantity and application of those two aspects alone,” someone in the room said.

No one had anything to add to that remark.

“Then why did they come here?” Chen Bu’e asked.

“Why? How would I know? Maybe their home planet can’t sustain them anymore. Ever considered that? So they used source energy to embark on a search that spans light-years...” The young man’s tone softened toward the end, trailing off as he turned and realized that it was the legion commander asking the question.

After a moment, his eyes lit up. “What if Azure has dead iron and source energy?”

Everybody’s heart thumped loudly.

Research institutes across the Azure Coalition had hypothesized about and pursued the answer to this question for over eighty years.

But where could it be? They’d even dug tunnels more than ten thousand meters deep in the Bear Alliance Republic in search of it, but found nothing.

The room was silent.

Clearing his throat, the chairman said loudly, “All right, there’s no point continuing this discussion. Let’s put it to a vote. All those in favor of submitting this hypothesis and the two deciphered lines of the Sharpie’s language to the International Coalition Council, raise your hands.”

With that, he slowly raised his own hand.

This wasn’t with the intent to sway the group’s vote. In fact, the chairman’s proposals had been rejected many times over the past decade or so. Such were the rules of the Azure Coalition.

Chen Bu’e raised his hand with a grave expression.

The young man finally let his eagerly raised hand fall, and it struck the table with a thud.

More and more people raised their hands in support.

“Twenty-one to nine, with more than two-thirds in favor. I hereby declare the motion passed. The above content will be submitted in its entirety to the International Coalition Council.”

With that, the chairman, also a member of the International Council’s presidium, brought the meeting to a close.

After the meeting adjourned, an elderly man named Qu Zhongshi stood at the doorway in the hall, watching from afar as Chen Bu’e walked away in silence. That stubborn old farmer had always carried himself with a perfectly straight back, but for the first time, he seemed to stoop ever so slightly. The burden on his shoulders was simply too heavy.

But why did the Only Witness Legion have to adhere to the principle of “We see them, we destroy them?”

It didn’t matter if they were out in the vast, desolate wilderness, where they knew no ordinary person would stumble across them anytime soon. They were compelled to abide by it, even at the cost of their own lives.

In truth, preventing news of the Sharpies from leaking and causing public panic was only a secondary concern. Their primary one was the Sharpies’ missions.

Given enough time and space, the Sharpies would set up signal transmitters to send back precise coordinates and other information. This meant their sporadic, seemingly senseless landings over the past decades were not random at all. They were essentially like worker ants scattered across the vast universe.

As for the whereabouts of that alien civilization, humanity still only had a rough bearing and not a precise fix on their exact location. In interstellar navigation, even a slight deviation could put them off by millions, perhaps even hundreds of millions, of kilometers.

***

“Maybe that civilization’s true military forces are currently undertaking a mass migration that spans light-years out in the expanse of space. Or would it be more accurate to call it a campaign of conquest?”

These words came from a smiling teacher in his fifties addressing a room of new students, a man who almost certainly had no access to the secrets guarded by the highest levels of command.

It was forty minutes before dinner.

“Maybe your generation will end up facing them.” The teacher laughed at his own words, then waved it off. “I digress. Though it’s not entirely impossible, is it? Of course, it’s just as likely that they won’t have arrived even by the time you’re all old. After all, we’re talking about the universe here.”

Among those sitting in the audience and listening to his lecture were Han Qingyu and all the recruits from this Ninth Army training cohort with a high school education or higher.

Theoretical classes were part of their training, and this was one of them. This class had an unusual title: Defying Physics.

1. Nickname for the Second Army ☜

2. The idiom used here is actually 天马行空, which literally means “a heavenly steed soaring across the skies.” It means something bold and imaginative. ☜