Chapter 299: Dense Forest Borderland

"I slumped over the oversized wedding dress, and fainted from crying 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 more to it than that."

Elena raised her hand, wiped a tear from her eye with the palm of her hand, took a deep breath, and continued, "And then, Alex and I didn't have any contact for a while, until I heard someone say that the commanders of that war were moving lots and lots of tanks and artillery over to the front lines from our town."

"I realized that there was a big battle about to start, so I wrote to Alex again , trying to ascertain his well-being, and trying to talk him out of going into this dangerous big battle."

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

"I waited for a long time, anxiously guarding the post office day and night, and still received no reply from Alex until the day before the big fight."

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

Her voice broke sharply, like she couldn't name the letter.

Bai Liu listens to Elena while he continues to look down for the letters, and once again he sees a letter from Alex to Elena.

It was a long, long letter, a family letter arranging the aftermath, a desperate suicide note.

[To Elena:

I shouldn't have written you this letter, but I've thought it over and over, and it seems that there's no one else I can comfortably talk to about the rest of my life but you.

It's amazing, Elena , little girl, that I've never met you, but you've enjoyed a nominal fiancé-couple relationship with me, survived the death of my favorite person, and accompanied my parents through the most difficult years.

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

It's selfish and self-serving that you've been through all the great things in my life, yet I've yet to meet you once in person, have always rejected your existence, and in the end have to tell you, the stranger I know best, the most important thing I have to say before I die.

But there's no way around it. You're the only person I've ever willed to die without feeling guilty, I guess.

I know my death won't upset you too much, it will just completely free you from this marital relationship that should never have existed in the first place.

It was only with you that I was able to realize that it turned out that my death might still be a good thing for someone, walking away thinking they were a little more comfortable and pleased with themselves.

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

I spent my whole life trying to save everyone around me, but in the end saved no one's stupid ass.

I invented the potion that staves off death, but everyone who runs to their death without saying hello to me ahead of time and saying, hey Alex, I'm going to die, remember to stave off my death.

All I could do was hold my hands over their blood-spilling wounds, break down and howl pleading for them to stay for me even for a second, and eventually, powerlessly, carry their bodies back and sit stagnantly until dawn for the next round of death.

The lake of death called Pluto must have found my attempts to prevent it from coming down to earth hilarious and amusing.

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

They would quietly, with tears in their eyes, plead with me when they were in excruciating pain and despair that I would let them die easily.

Because even if they survive, they will most likely die in the next round of offense and defense.

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

Guy didn't 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 woke up, I swear for a moment I tried to thank even the evil gods 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 originally didn't have such a strong effect, but I was limited in my experiments in this place and couldn't get sufficient supplies for my experiments like on a university campus, so I could only utilize some locally produced experimental potions as materials.

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

This paint is 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 oily solvents, my superiors scrounged half a jar of this red paint out of a captured native and sent it to my lab as a replacement oily solvent.

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

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 when he entered my lab, back to life.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing, and even thought it was some kind of self-defeating hallucination from my own overwhelming desire to bring Guy back to life.

But Guy does get better day by day, or rather, it's not accurate to describe his entire recovery in terms of getting better, and combining my clinical and microscopic observations, I can come to a conclusion that you'll surely think I'm crazy--

-- Guy's got time on his hands.

His peeling skin re-bonded, his broken bones healed again, and even the nails and hair that had grown after death shortened back.

This is simply not something that humans can do, it's in the realm of the divine, and even God doesn't have this kind of power.

I have abhorred the so-called evil gods from the moment I arrived here and learned that the reason these foolish and ugly natives started the war was actually the so-called oracle of the evil gods.

And all this time, I thought that this evil god was a symbol that these natives made up to explain things they couldn't understand, to send out their undispatched 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 the Evil God, then I can understand why those natives would go crazy over the Evil God.

Waking up, Guy forgets everything that has happened in those past seven days - stealing from 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 last seven days, and he knew that the commanders were going to call in enough artillery fire to launch the final battle - to bombard all the natives' habitats and the natives inside them, as well as all the surrounding neutral ground where the natives were likely to flee to.

Despite the fact that these neutral zones were not involved in the war from start to finish and were mostly women and children, the commanders felt that such natives with their vile beliefs needed to be exterminated and should not be left with any chance of reproducing down the line and sharing their resources with us.

You can anticipate what Guy will do.

Guy righteously went to assassinate the commanding officer, and after failing, was blasted into a hole-riddled shooting board by hundreds of guns, and burned to a crisp by a flamethrower.

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

I told the soldier standing guard that I was on duty 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 darkness.

Elena, you know what I saw that night?

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

In that moment, I realized that no matter how powerful a potion I invented, I still wouldn't be able to redeem anyone from this war.

Those who want to kill others will still do so, and those who don't want to kill will want to die painfully, avoiding it, because they don't want to.

It's as if there is a natural food chain that never stops running between these two types of people.

Even abilities like raising the dead and reversing time don't seem to change any endings in this war.

So I filled out the form to sign up for the commando team, 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 a stayed end in this war.

For that, I would give anything.

Elena, if I don't return after this great battle, forgive me for selfishly entrusting you with my parents, and ask you to take care of them until you come of age, and just go after your own life.

---- Alex.]

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

"I still can't get over the big battle, the shelling shook even the ground of the town I lived in, the walls swished dust off, plates and glasses shattered all over the place, planes circled everywhere outside the windows, everyone was so scared they were hugging each other in their homes, I hid under my bed and could see the flames flickering constantly 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 the explosives was raided by the natives, who sprinkled the explosives with a magical red paint, which ultimately triggered an exceptionally large explosion to occur."

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

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