Chapter 299: The Dense Forest Frontier

"I lay on my back in that oversized wedding dress, and cried myself unconscious in front of the post office." Elena looked up, her eyes drifting far, far away, "When I woke up, I thought it had been the darkest moment the war could have brought me."

"But everything that followed told me that there was much more to it than that."

Elena raised her hand, wiped a tear from her eye with her palm, took a deep breath and continued, "Then, Alex and I were out of touch for a while, until I heard someone say that the commanders of that war had mobilized many, many tanks and artillery pieces over to the front from our town."

"I realised that there was a big battle coming up and I wrote to Alex again, trying to ascertain his safety, and trying to persuade him not to go into this dangerous battle."

Elena covered her face with her wrinkled hands, her voice hoarse.

"I waited long and anxiously by the post office day and night, but I still hadn't heard back from Alex until the day before the Great War."

"That's one, one ......"

Her voice rose sharply and brokenly, as if she could not name the letter.

As Bai Liu listened to Elena, he continued to search for the letters, and once again he saw a letter from Alex to Elena.

It is a long, long letter, a letter from home with arrangements for its aftermath, a desperate suicide note.

[to Elena.

I should not have written this letter to you, but I have thought and thought about it, and it seems to me that there is no one else but you to whom I can give an account of my affairs in peace.

It is so wonderful to say, Elena, that you and I have never met, yet you and I have enjoyed a nominal relationship as an unmarried couple, lived through the death of the person I loved most, and accompanied my parents through the most difficult years.

If nothing else, you will have to witness my death next.

You have experienced all the great events in my life, but I have not yet seen you once with my own eyes. It is selfish and self-serving to keep rejecting your existence, and in the end to have to say the most important thing about me to you, the most familiar stranger, before I die.

But there's no way around it, you're the only person I've ever willed to die without feeling guilty about it, right?

I know that my death will not upset you too much and will only serve to free you completely from a marriage relationship that should never have existed in the first place.

Only with you can I realise that my death might still be a good thing for someone to walk away thinking they are a little more comfortable and contented.

Next I will confess to you all the mistakes I have made in my life.

I've spent my life trying to save everyone around me, but in the end it's not a stupid thing to save anyone.

I invented the potion that can coagulate death, but everyone who is running to death hasn't said hello to me in advance and said, hey Alex, I'm going to die, remember to coagulate my death.

All I could do was cover their bleeding wounds with my hands and feet, break down and howl for them to stay for me for even a second, and eventually carry their bodies back to sit dumbfounded until dawn for the next round of death.

The lake of death known as Pluto must have found my attempts to stop it coming to earth hilarious and amusing.

I kept, and kept, and went crazy trying to improve my potions, but no matter how much I slowed down their deaths, death would eventually come, and all I did was make them suffer a little longer before they died.

They would quietly, and with tears streaming down their faces, ask me to make their death easy when they were in so much pain and despair.

For even if they survive, there is a good chance they will die in the next round of the offensive and defensive battle.

Sometimes I ask myself if my selfish desire to leave this group of people to live and be tortured in this war is a crueler thing than letting them die.

Am I wrong?

Elena, I haven't wanted to answer your letters because I can't face the ubiquitous name in your letters - Guy.

Guy did not die on the battlefield, I lied about his death and used my position as a sweeper to secretly transport his "body" to my potions lab.

I gave everything I had to save him and he miraculously awoke, and I swear I had a moment when even the evil gods wanted to thank me when I saw his eyes open.

Whichever God it is, thank Him for sending Guy back to me.

I want you to confess that my potion was not originally this strong, but I was limited in my experiments in this place and could not get as much experimental supplies as on the university campus, so I had to use some of the locally produced experimental potions as ingredients.

Most of the experimental potions were of poor quality and led to failure, but one peculiar thing worked wonders - a bizarre paint.

This paint was used by the natives here to apply to the idols of the evil gods, a burnable oil-like texture, and when I was short of oil-based solvents, my superiors retrieved half a jar of this red paint from a captured native and sent it to my laboratory as a replacement oil-based solvent.

Although the stuff looked slimy and weird, like human blood after the oil had melted, I didn't have much more choice.

But it was the addition of this paint that made an incredible difference - it brought Guy, whose heart had stopped beating for half a minute, back to life when he entered my lab.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing, even if I thought I was deluding myself by wanting Guy to come back to life too much.

But Guy did get better day by day, or rather, better is not an accurate description of his entire recovery, and combining my clinical and microscopic observations, I can come to a conclusion that you will surely think I am mad -

-- Guy has time on his body in reverse.

His shed skin glued back together, his broken bones healed again, and even the nails and hair that had grown after death shortened back.

This is something that is not even humanly possible, it is in the realm of the gods, even God does not have such power.

I have hated the so-called evil gods from the moment I arrived here and learned that the reason for these foolish and ugly natives to wage war was the so-called oracle of the evil gods.

And all along, I thought that the evil god was a symbol invented by the natives to explain what they could not understand, to send out unexplained anger, an illusory, evil imagery.

But as Guy sat up again, opened his eyes, smiled and asked in confusion how I was in your lab, I closed my eyes and hugged him tightly.

If this is the work of an evil god, then I can understand why those natives would go crazy over an evil god.

Guy woke up and forgot everything that had happened in those seven days - stealing innocent villages, killing children and women in the neutral zone, defecting and then being killed in the first place.

Everything, he doesn't remember anything.

I carefully hid him in the lab, almost anxiously waiting for the big battle to come, but before it did, Guy managed to get the information he wanted from one of the recruits who came to clean the lab.

He knew what had happened in the past seven days and that the commanders were going to muster enough artillery to launch the ultimate battle - to blast away all the indigenous habitats and the natives within them, as well as all the surrounding neutral zones where the natives were likely to flee to.

Although these neutral zones were not involved in the war from the beginning to the end and were mostly women and children, the commanders felt that such natives with their vile beliefs had to be driven to extinction and should not be left with any chance to breed on and share resources with us.

You can imagine what Guy will do.

Guy went on a righteous mission to assassinate the commanding officer and, after failing, was blasted by hundreds of guns into a gunshot panel riddled with holes and burned to ashes by a flamethrower.

When I arrived at the scene, there was nothing left.

I told the soldier on guard duty that I was covering for him before I could logically stand alone all night where Guy had been burned to death leaving a black trail, letting the tears slide numbly in the dark.

Elena, do you know what I saw that night?

I saw cannons as thick as a child's waist being brought in, cold tanks, soldiers ready to fire, and a crowd with bloodshot eyes of anger, fear, and greed.

In that moment, I realised that no matter how powerful a potion I invented, I still couldn't save anyone from this war.

Those who want to kill others will still do so, and those who do not want to kill will die because they do not want to, wanting to be miserable and avoiding it.

Between these two, it is as if a natural food chain exists that never stops running.

Even such powers as raising the dead and reversing time do not seem to change anything in this war.

So I filled out the form to sign up for the raid, and I'm going deep into the rainforest to meet the evil god who gave me the power to fulfill my desires -

--Asked him what it would really take to give everyone in this war a stay-put ending.

For that, I would give anything.

Elena, if I do not return after this great battle, please forgive me for selfishly entrusting you with my parents and ask you to look after them until you reach adulthood and just go and pursue your own life.

---- Alex .]

"That was the last letter I received from Alex." Elena whispered with dazed eyes, "The next day, the Great War broke out."

"I still can't forget the big battle, the shelling shook even the ground of the town I lived in, the swish of ash off the walls, plates and glasses shattering, planes circling everywhere outside the windows, everyone huddled in fear in the house, I hid under my bed and could see the flames constantly flickering in the distance."

Irina was quiet for a few seconds, "The shelling continued for three days, and on the evening of the third day, the town where the soldiers were stationed to store their explosives was stolen by the natives, who sprinkled them with a magical red paint that eventually triggered a particularly large explosion to take place."

"After the explosion subsided, both the town and the rainforest that had been blown through remained untouched until someone came to take over half a month later." Elena looked to Bai Liu, "You said you were Alex's comrade in arms, which is impossible."

"Because there were no survivors in that war at all."