Chapter 118 - A Plea for the Fighter’s Path

C-rank integration level. Qi Rourou. Male. A five-year Eraser veteran.

He had apprenticed with an opera master at the age of three. The master, delighted by how naturally his looks and frame suited the huadan role, renamed him, changed his clothes, and trained him with great care. Fourteen years slipped past in this way.

Then, opera stopped putting food on tables. His master, a former comedic-relief-role performer, switched trades and took up shoe repair. Meanwhile, his senior brother, trained in the martial painted-face role, used those same skills to become the busiest pig butcher for miles around.

Most butchers needed men from their customers’ households to hold the pig and pin its legs, but his senior brother always handled it alone, with a large knife like a mythical warrior’s Green Dragon Crescent Blade.[1]

In short, if he had been born seventy or eighty years earlier, the name Qi Rourou could well have belonged to a famous star of the age, Boss Qi.

But such was life. By the time he set down his opera costume at seventeen, the lines had blurred past all telling, and it became impossible to tell whether he was male or female.

His reason for joining the army in the first place was to win back some manliness. When he failed to make the formal recruitment selection, he had to ask people to pull strings for him.

After asking around and around, he finally found someone. The man had thumped his chest and swore he could arrange it.

When the man asked if Qi Rourou was afraid of dying, he replied no. When he asked about monsters, Qi Rourou simply said it would be good practice for his nerves.

Thus, he was brought to the Azure Coalition.

The enlistment method on his file read voluntary to this day.

“So you didn’t actually know at the start. Were you scared when you got here?” He Tangtang asked curiously. “A little girl like you—I mean, a little woman... a little...”

“Get lost!” Qi Rourou stormed off.

In Han Qingyu’s view, the platoon had ten slots. A C-rank five-year veteran was absolutely worth taking. Moreover, the man was an old connection of Mira’s, and word had it that he went wild the moment he set foot on a battlefield.

His approval was only an informal one, of course. The formal process still went through Platoon Leader Lao, though the man would most likely come back to Han Qingyu to talk it over.

That was probably a fairly difficult thing for Lao Jian. Eldest Gourd was the platoon leader, after all, and had always had a bit of a proud streak.

Still, if he didn’t consult Han Qingyu, he would worry about botching the job. The unease would eat away at him.

This whole situation is probably pretty frustrating for him, Han Qingyu thought as he lay in bed that night. Next chance I get, I should ask him. If he could go back in time, would he still put a blade to my throat to scare me?

Han Qingyu had worries of his own as well.

He wasn’t the type to make close friends easily. Over the course of their recruit training, from the start at Regiment 425 up to their graduation, he had gotten along well enough with his roommates. Still, a few of them always kept some distance, and there was no way he could treat every man he met as a brother.

However, once someone entered his inner circle, he shouldered that bond.

Shen Yixiu was someone he had long since accepted as a comrade. After all, they had even fought shoulder to shoulder through a life-and-death crisis. It would be unreasonable to call her a burden and cast her off.

No, his worries weren’t about what to do about her. It was about securing a supply of energy cores. Securing it wasn’t enough either. There had to be a surplus for improvement and growth, or their little group would slide into a vicious cycle and stagnate.

He didn’t mind Shen Yixiu being aware of his worries.

The best thing this group had done was treat Rust Girl as an equal. Instead of pitying her, they gave her friendship.

Even if they were a bad influence on her.

There was nowhere to scrounge from and nobody to swindle at the moment. As far as he could tell, the only large source of cores sitting out in the open was for him to sell himself for that bounty, which would fetch twenty energy cores.

Even after mulling over it for a long while, he couldn’t puzzle out an idea.

Let’s see what Commander Shen says tomorrow, he eventually thought, setting the whole mess aside.

He was soon fast asleep.

Early the next morning, he went downstairs.

Some recruits at the combat training base had already shouldered their packs and moved out with veteran teammates to join their district platoons. From that point on, they were no longer recruits.

He greeted people along the way as he headed for the mess hall.

“Come here. Let’s talk for a minute,” Qi Shantong called out between puffs of his cigarette, sitting on a flight of steps by the road.

Wen Jifei and the others tensed up.

“It’s fine. He may be crazy, but he knows where to draw the line,” Han Qingyu said. “You go eat. Grab a portion for me. This probably won’t take more than a few minutes.”

If Qi Shantong were truly mad, he wouldn’t be a major general. Han Qingyu had worked that out a long time ago.

“Major General Qi.” Han Qingyu saluted.

Qi Shantong looked up and tapped a cigarette out of the pack in his hand. “You smoke?”

Han Qingyu shook his head.

“Once you’re out with a platoon, it’s hard not to.” Qi Shantong put the cigarette away. “I kept telling myself to overestimate you, but you still managed to surprise me. As for Bai Ji...”

Han Qingyu had nothing to add to that. Qi Shantong had brought this topic up on his own.

“Three months, I’d say,” Qi Shantong continued without a trace of awkwardness. “If he can move past this, he may still go on to achieve big things. If he can’t, he’ll basically be half-crippled. Mentally, that is. Either way, the White Erasers won’t leave him to rot.”

Despite his rambling, this obviously wasn’t the reason he had come. It wasn’t his style.

Qi Shantong stood and moved up beside Han Qingyu’s shoulder. “Promise me one thing. Don’t touch politics.”

Han Qingyu glanced at him. “I don’t understand it anyway. If doing it means dealing with people like you all the time, though, I’d definitely rather not.”

“Fair enough.” Qi Shantong laughed, then, out of nowhere, asked, “Do you know what post the legion commander held before he took over the First Army?”

Han Qingyu shook his head.

“No post at all,” Qi Shantong said.

A master had all the more reason to stay on the front lines rather than trade their combat case for a differently colored shoulder mark. That had been Chen Bu’e’s philosophy.

Back then, the higher-ups wanted him to be a regiment commander, then a division commander, but he stubbornly refused. He was a fighting man.

At one point, he even taught himself to drive, got hold of an open-top military jeep, and put up a shed out on the grassland where seven or eight districts met, where he lived alone and herded sheep.

Wherever a Sharpie came down, he would hop in the jeep, throw his blade on the passenger seat, and drive over.

He would brake on arrival, fly out with the blade in his hand, and go straight at the Sharpie.

Back then, his future was bright. They fostered his growth and even forced him to get an education. When he finished his course, the teacher told him to write a poem expressing his aspirations, and he wrote: At dawn, roosters crow and water is thrown across the yard. At noon, a melon rests by a chair in the shade. At night, if I can’t beat my wife, I’ll beat the kids.

Qi Shantong lit another cigarette.

“Then came the battle against the Red Shoulder. We won in the end, but the confidence of the whole Oriental Republic Army Group collapsed. That Red Shoulder was just too terrifying. The only person who could step forward and actually be believed was the man who had taken that Sharpie’s head off with his own hands. He was the only one who could raise morale. So, he became commander of the First Army, then the legion commander, and his back slowly bent under the weight of it.”

Han Qingyu was briefly confused. Qi Shantong’s account didn’t quite line up with Shen Fengting’s.

Didn’t the legion commander end up that way because that single slash burned through too much of his vitality and damaged his foundation? After briefly hesitating over this, he decided to keep this to himself.

“Everybody knows the legion commander is strong,” Qi Shantong continued. “But the truth is that nobody has ever seen him at his peak. His peak never arrived. It never had the chance to. And now, it’s too late.”

The words carried weight. Qi Shantong left.

So he wants me to focus solely on being a fighter? Han Qingyu thought. Then hand over eight or ten energy cores, damn you.

***

After breakfast, the group gathered at the Shen home once more.

“There are raw metal cores,” Shen Fengting said. “And more than one.”

1. The Green Dragon Crescent Blade or 青龙偃月刀 is a legendary weapon most commonly associated with the Chinese general Guan Yu in the 14th-century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (pulled directly from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dragon_Crescent_Blade). See translator’s thoughts for an image. ☜