Chapter 95

Chapter 95

The word "explosion" was a stranger to this world.

Fireworks and firecrackers were still unheard of. Even the border troops' deadliest weapon was just horse-drawn ironclad chariots. When Bian Hong served as a Junior Officer, he would stand beside the driver, military saber in hand, charging forward on the "war chariot."

When you swung the blade, you had to keep your mouth shut—otherwise, one slash and hot blood would splash down your throat, and he'd usually puke so bad he couldn't eat.

But compared to the brutal course of modern history, having no gunpowder seemed like a huge blessing. Bian Hong didn't dare imagine what kind of hell this world would sink into if a weapon that outclassed everything else ever appeared.

But now, Bian Hong felt he needed it badly.

Rong Feng didn't get it, but he did what Bian Hong said—looking for caves that were dark and damp, with big bat colonies roosting inside and underground streams running through the depths.

To make gunpowder, you first had to refine saltpeter.

Saltpeter almost never occurs naturally; it had to be made by hand. Getting saltpeter depended on nitrogen that nitrifying bacteria fixed through oxidation. Nitrifying bacteria hate light, so they only thrived in dark spots. You could scrape saltpeter off the walls of old outhouses—but that gave you next to nothing. Or you could dig big pits, toss in plant ash and manure, and bury them for a year before harvesting.

But right now, none of those options were available. So there was only the third way—the one Bian Hong knew best. Find caves packed with bat guano, high in nitrogen, dark and damp, where the soil had soaked up saltpeter for years.

Then you built a leaching pit, poured water through the nitrate-rich dirt to draw out the saltpeter, then heated and concentrated it until you got saltpeter crystals.

Those memories, worn down by time and deliberately buried by Bian Hong, had faded to almost nothing. All that was left was that suffocating feeling of pitch-black darkness in a mine—no direction, no hope.

At the age when a kid should be dreaming about the world, Bian Hong was stuck in a dark mine in a foreign land. Since he couldn't speak the local language, the overseers figured he couldn't spill secrets. So at night, when mining stopped, they locked him and a few kids from who-knows-where in a deep, pitch-black hole.

After years of nonstop digging, the tunnel ran deep, with no lights at all—just endless bats whooshing overhead in flocks, making the tight passage feel even tighter. He'd raise his arms to protect his head, and they'd end up scratched up by the bats' claws as they flew past.

But stopping meant death too. A few dark gun muzzles were aimed at their backs. When Bian Hong saw a dark-skinned kid behind him turn and run, only to get shredded by bullets, he clenched his fists and bolted into the cave like a madman.

He swore he wasn't going to die here—he had to get home.

So he mined during the day and kept working in the cave at night, getting barely three hours of sleep. Over the years, he wasted away to almost nothing—so thin and small he didn't look his age at all.

But the gunmen thought that was perfect—a scrawny body like that was better for squeezing through tight mine shafts.

They didn't care if these "mine rats" died. In this lawless place, people were just spare parts—when one died, another boatload would be brought in.

But Bian Hong didn't die. He still showed up at the mouth of that black cave every dusk, forced back in at gunpoint. The kids who'd been with him had long since disappeared without a trace—only he, somehow, held on.

And after a long time of this, young Bian Hong finally figured it out: all that sweltering, dark work in the cave was for making saltpeter.

Once the saltpeter was made, it got mixed with other stuff to make mining explosives. The blasts rumbled one after another, carving out pit after pit, and "filling" them with wave after wave of "mine rats."

Even after he escaped, he couldn't shake that sharp smell of gunpowder, mixed with the stench of burnt bodies and the never-ending reek of mine waste.

Those images had slowly blurred in Bian Hong's mind. The brain, to protect itself, selectively forgets, twists, and pretties things up, just enough to keep you going.

But those skills, repeated thousands of times, had become instinct—burned into his body.

Rong Feng didn't get why Bian Hong wanted caves with such specific features, and he knew nothing about saltpeter or explosives. But he trusted him, so he just did it.

For a Mountain Guard like him, it wasn't hard. Before Bian Hong had even snapped out of his daze, Rong Feng had already found three dark caves that more or less fit the bill before dawn.

Bian Hong grabbed the oil lamps the gold prospectors had used to light the tunnels and collected the lamp oil from the flasks that hadn't spilled. Making saltpeter meant camping out at the nitrate-rich soil spots for a long time—anywhere from two weeks to six months, depending on how much saltpeter was in the soil.

He held up a candle flame, weak as a bean, pressed his lips together—they were almost white—and stepped forward.

But before long, as he went deeper, Bian Hong started breathing fast. He leaned against the mine wall, clutching the only flame in the dark.

The tunnel was too familiar, and his brain started misfiring. For a second, he almost couldn't tell this place from his old world—maybe all of this was just a dying hallucination, and he was still stuck in that sunless coal pit, waiting to go into the saltpeter cave at night, dodging the bullets behind him to stay alive.

It was like everything was just like before...

Just then, a big, warm hand grabbed Bian Hong's ice-cold one. "Let's get out of here."

Bian Hong stayed put, shaking his head hard. He wanted to say no—no way—there were guns at his back, and if he didn't go in, he'd die.

But the man's solid, burning body pressed up against his back.

That raw, living energy seemed to flow into Bian Hong along with the warmth, and only then did he snap out of it.

Behind him wasn't a gun barrel ready to fire anymore—it was Rong Feng's arms, solid and safe as a mountain.

So Bian Hong finally stopped. He turned, slid down the damp, cold cave wall until he was sitting on the ground, and tugged at Rong Feng's sleeve.

"Carry me in on your back, will you?"