Chapter 54 Both Lost Their Parents

Shen Jiang casually tossed her empty can into the brushwood in the distance, earning a side-glance from Shang Lu. "No littering."

"Mind your own business." Shen Jiang rolled her eyes, resting the back of her head against a pillar with her arms crossed behind it. "Hey, Supervisor, you scientists—"

"I am not a scientist," Shang Lu said.

"Then what are you?" Shen Jiang asked.

Shang Lu thought for a moment. "Strictly speaking, I should be a project manager. Building the MEG-BCI system is essentially no different from developing a real estate property on a construction site. If it's theoretically feasible, we break ground. As for whether it will actually work out in the end, that's not up to us; it's up to fate. Compared to theoretical work, coordinating the team and allocating resources are far greater challenges. I know outsiders always have some strange, ingrained impressions of this kind of work, as if you just hand us a piece of paper and a pen, and after a bunch of incomprehensible calculations, we can find the answers to all problems in a vast ocean of numbers and symbols..."

Shen Jiang blinked.

"If a person like that exists, he should be a shaman, and his answers are given by the gods," Shang Lu said.

"You mean the outside world has mystified your work," Shen Jiang said.

"Yes, mystified," Shang Lu said. "People who could solve problems with just a pen and a piece of paper did exist, but they should have lived two hundred years ago. In reality, what we do is no different from a construction site, only the application scenarios are different. Teacher Ji giving me this white hard hat is quite fitting; I'm just a foreperson. A lot of things, if I were to explain them to you, you'd think they were foolish—you'd think we're just people hiding inside ATM machines, crunching numbers and spitting out cash."

Shen Jiang pulled up her legs and hugged her knees. "No need to explain. You sound pretty foolish right now."

"Leader, you're a genius. You need to realize that your brain is something not everyone is blessed with," Shang Lu dropped his expression, twisting a small wooden stick back and forth in his hand. "If you use yourself as the baseline, then the whole world is a bunch of idiots."

"Yeah, they're all idiots," Shen Jiang nodded.

"If you have the guts, say that to the leaders of the Military Commission."

Shen Jiang fell silent for a moment. "I don't dare."

"For all your toughness, there is still something you're afraid of, huh, Leader?" Shang Lu sneered. "I thought you considered yourself second only to the heavens."

Shen Jiang got up, walked over, and kicked him hard, sending him sprawling.

"Damn it!" Shang Lu tumbled into the withered bushes and weeds, hurriedly scrambling back up. "What are you doing? I'm warning you, corporal punishment is forbidden! In our People's Liberation Army, officers and soldiers are equal. Even if you're the leader, you can't kick me—"

"You're not even a real soldier, you don't even have military registration!" Shen Jiang stepped up, pressed her foot against Shang Lu's shoulder, and gave a forceful push, sending him tumbling back into the brush.

"Then it's the army and the people as one family! The army and the people as one family!"

"Family! Family! I'll show you family! I'll let you be family!" Shen Jiang mercilessly ground her hard boot soles against Shang Lu.

Covered in leaves and dirt, Shang Lu crawled back up, sat down, and vigorously brushed the dust off his clothes, muttering under his breath, "What's gotten into you, Leader?"

"I don't think I have any special talent. Before participating in the selection for the mecha pilots, I was just an ordinary college student studying at Sichuan University," Shen Jiang added wood to the campfire and said slowly, "Logically speaking, this kind of work should start from childhood. Every child should be tested at five or six years old, gathering those with potential for years of specialized training. But the Great Collapse came too abruptly, so they had no choice but to look among adults, and after searching around, they landed on me."

"The physical examination was done at Daping Hospital. The doctor there said there were five people in this batch who met the screening requirements, and if I wanted to quit, there was still time. But I didn't quit."

The young woman let out a faint sigh.

"The leader has a high ideological awareness!" Shang Lu immediately buttered her up.

Shen Jiang gave him a blank look. "It has nothing to do with ideological awareness. I was just scared... I didn't know where I could go if I quit. I had nowhere to go, no place to belong."

"Well, we finally found our first commonality," Shang Lu said.

"What commonality?"

"We both lost our parents," Shang Lu replied.

"Do you dare to set fire to the mountain?" Shen Jiang poked the campfire in front of her with a stick. "There's dry grass all around here, it'll catch instantly. With the wind blowing so hard at night, it'll spiral out of control in just a few minutes."

"What's the consequence?" Shang Lu asked.

"Crimes against humanity. At best, a life sentence," Shen Jiang said. "They won't be willing to execute you by firing squad, after all, you're a scarce talent right now. They'll make you do hard labor in prison and keep working."

"Go ahead and light it," Shang Lu said.

Shen Jiang was stunned for a moment, then pursed her lips. "The two of us bastards really couldn't cobble together a single set of parents between us."

The night grew deeper. The dry wood burned out, leaving dim embers buried in the ash, glowing and fading as if breathing. Shang Lu thought to himself that this might be a life form. It was born in the scorching flames, consuming wooden fuel to emit light and heat. Its life would last only a dozen short minutes. Now it was old, decayed, aged, and on the verge of death, able only to lie feebly in the ash and gasp. Shang Lu blew a breath onto it, and the glow brightened again, as if there was still hope.

However, Shen Jiang pulled out a bottle of water and poured it over the ashes, completely killing this fragile life. She fished her phone out from her back pocket, pressed the screen to light it up, and took a look.

"It's getting late, almost eight o'clock... Huh?"

"What's wrong?"

"My phone has no signal again." Shen Jiang stood up, held her phone high, and walked in a circle around Shang Lu. "Damn it, this frustrating cellular network. Ever since the carriers merged, it gets worse by the day..."

Before she finished speaking, the streetlights along the road suddenly all went out. The night descended abruptly, and the surroundings plunged into darkness.

Both of them froze for a moment.

"What happened?" Shang Lu looked around. "Power outage?"

They looked further into the distance. It wasn't just the streetlights; all the lights in the base had gone out, and the entire Nanshan Park was shrouded in pitch-black night. Shang Lu and Shen Jiang simultaneously realized something was wrong.

"What's going on here? Did the transmission lines fail?"

"Contact the headquarters and ask."

A few minutes later, facilities equipped with backup generators began to light up one by one. Shang Lu and Shen Jiang returned to the main road, still rummaging through their pockets trying to find a way to contact the headquarters duty room.

"Has the base ever had this kind of problem before?"

"Rarely. Logically speaking, the power supply of Base 151 is—"

Shen Jiang suddenly stopped talking.

A dark red light illuminated the side of her face. It wasn't artificial light, but the light of the sky. That dark red celestial light pierced through the air, illuminating the entire Nanshan Base, the entire Chongqing City, and the entire Sichuan Basin all at once. Shang Lu and Shen Jiang stood on the mountain road, slowly turning their heads at the same pace, staring westward with identical, dumbfounded expressions. In the extremely distant west, a thin pillar of red fire pierced through heaven and earth, shooting straight into the clouds and deep into the cosmos.

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(Author's gossip: I'm back. I saw some students discussing the Qidian Morning Star Award buyout of two million, I've already turned that down.)