War Photographer's Notebook

Chapter 2018 The Uneaten Pancake
As the sun once again shone over the Northeast, the Queen, who had been draped over Wei Ran with one leg and one arm, finally opened her eyes.

I had a dream last night.

Sui Sui hugged Wei Ran, who had been awake for a while, and said, "I dreamt that you were sitting outside, and I went to find you."

"And then?" Wei Ran asked with a smile.

"I forgot," Sui Sui replied with a silly smile.

"You did come to see me last night," Wei Ran gently hugged the other person and asked, "Are you going to sleep or not?"

"I can't sleep anymore."

Sui Sui yawned as she spoke, "We still have to travel today."

"Then get up?"

"Wait a little longer," Sui Sui said, already mounting her horse and becoming a female general.

While Her Majesty the Queen was galloping on horseback, far away in the center of a certain city, in a hotel's penthouse suite, Hirano Haruto stared in disbelief at the stack of files that Zhong Zhen had personally delivered to his door.

"Is this true?"

After reading through the records about the Hirano family in the file for the second time, Hirano Haruto asked blankly.

"I have no reason to lie to you about something like this."

Zhong Zhen patted the other person on the shoulder, "You really are not related to Hirano Hiroto by blood."

“But I do use Hirano as my surname,” Hirano Yoto said.

"I can release these things publicly."

Zhong Zhen said, "I know some police officers through recruitment, so-called insiders. It would be more effective for them to release this information."

"Never mind," Hirano Haruto shook his head. "Let's leave it at that."

"never mind?"

"never mind"

Hirano Haruto took a deep breath. "I can lose the Hirano family bloodline and surname, but can I also lose the fact that I am a nuclear recruiter?"

“You’re now free from electricity,” said the girl kneading her breasts, who was standing beside her.

"Japanese-American free electricity user"

Hirano Haruto started acting stubbornly again, "So let's leave it at that, let's not announce this."

"Bearing a bad reputation?" Zhong Zhen looked at the other party with considerable surprise.

"In my comics, aren't the senior members of the opera troupe also burdened with infamy?"

Hirano Haruto retorted, "I don't believe I'm innocent, so let me experience that feeling too."

"You're not going to commit suicide again, are you?" Zhong Zhen asked after a moment of silence.

"No more."

Hirano Haruto shook his head. "From now on, suicide is actually a relief."

"He's a man."

Zhong Zhen patted the other person on the shoulder, turned around and walked out of the luxurious and comfortable suite, then put his arm around Xiao Lingdang, who was standing at the door, and walked into the elevator.

On this day, Hirano Haruto released a new chapter of his manga, and on the same day, Hekko Girl also released a new song called "Album".

On the same day, the Eye of Horus, which had recently appeared out of nowhere, once again updated with a batch of photos and corresponding clues without warning, just as many had predicted.

On the same day, new protests and violent clashes broke out again. Not far from the scene of these protests and even violent clashes, the newly opened 28 Stars Cafe was playing the Internationale, the open-source Crimson Blood, and the album of Hera's new song released that day.

"Look at those tourists who were recruiting nuclear weapons, they were beaten really badly."

Marlene, who once gave Wei Ran a baby boy's pacifier as a gift at a bargain fair, was admiring the coffee by the window in the café.

Outside the thick, bulletproof floor-to-ceiling window, a group of authentic French blacks were brutally beating several nuclear recruiters who had been thrown to the ground.

"Miss, they may be innocent."

The bodyguard, who had once accompanied Marlene to the forest and had plugged his ears so he hadn't heard anything, reminded her.

"It wasn't me who hit it, what's it to me?" Marlene rolled her eyes at the other person. "Why are you always such a spoilsport?"

"I mean, do you need me to kick it a few times for you too?" The bodyguard immediately changed his tune.

"You've finally shown some intelligence, but never mind, I won't do something so rude."

Marlene said, pressing a banknote under her coffee cup. "Let's go, we should leave Paris. Why is this place full of black people?"

"Miss, you..."

"Okay, okay, I'm black too."

Marlene waved her hand impatiently, "I've known this since I was born, so you don't need to remind me."

Alright, let's leave now. We need to get to the Queen's castle as soon as possible. The Queen has put me in charge of organizing the reception, and I can't afford to mess it up.

"I've already bought the plane tickets," the bodyguard finally showed some intelligence.

That evening, after a full day of exploration, Her Majesty the Queen, accompanied by her mount—no, her man—once again ended her day with beer and barbecue.

After coaxing Sui Sui to sleep as he had done the day before, Wei Ran once again took out the two kettles and placed them on the table in the outer room.

This time, he was no longer as apprehensive as before.

Suddenly, a feather-shaped timeline appeared before his eyes. This timeline gracefully wrapped around the two kettles, and the time coordinates on it began to rotate rapidly, eventually settling on October 27, 1942.

This time, there was no white light, no time for him to prepare, and no restrictions on which props he could use or could not use.

But in a daze, everything around them had turned into a desolate wasteland with yellow dust everywhere.

Everywhere you look, there are corpses of the starving.

Startled, Wei Ran noticed a box full of sesame cakes appear beside him.

He took out several meat-filled flatbreads and handed them to a little boy who seemed to be chewing tree bark and had a very large belly.

"Eat, take this and eat," Wei Ran said, squatting down.

He knew very well that the child's large belly was either due to edema caused by long-term malnutrition, a condition he had seen before in Leningrad, or it was schistosomiasis, a disease that was widespread in China at that time, also known as "big belly disease."

The disease has progressed to such a late stage as this little boy's condition.

Wei Ran knew very well that, regardless of the cause, he had no chance of surviving unless he received comprehensive and modern treatment.

However, the little boy seemed not to hear or see, ignoring the sesame seed cake that was almost in his mouth, and continued to chew on the bitter, rough bark.

Wei Ran tried again, even attempting to stuff the sesame seed cake into the other person's mouth.

But in the next instant, the sesame seed cake in his hand, and even the other sesame seed cakes he was holding, fell to the yellow earth with a clatter.

He had just clearly seen that the sesame seed cake in his hand overlapped with the little boy's face!
Fuck your grandpa! Fuck your grandpa!
Wei Ran cursed incoherently, realizing that the other person and the pancake in his hand might not even be in the same "space-time dimension" as himself.

This is perhaps what Luo meant by "anti-addiction".
After taking a few deep breaths, Wei Ran finally had a huge Pentax 67II camera and a tripod in his hands after some selection.

Wei Ran fixed the camera on the tripod that was not yet unfolded, aimed the lens at the little boy who was intently and numbly tearing at the bark of a tree, and gently pressed the shutter.

Right after taking this photo, he noticed a group of Japanese soldiers in the distance, led by two soldiers riding tall horses, walking slowly and steadily forward.

"Da-da-da! Da-da-da-da!"

He subconsciously took out his Mauser pistol and futilely pulled the trigger at them, but the bullets passed through the bodies of those Japanese soldiers without taking down a single one.

In the end, Wei Ran, having run out of bullets, watched helplessly as the leading Japanese soldier grinned maliciously, drew his command sword, spurred his horse forward, bent down, swung his sword, and killed the boy he had just photographed who was tearing at tree bark.

He also noticed that the Japanese soldier had a shiny silver canteen with a leather case hanging from his waist.

Watching the Japanese soldier pass by him, Wei Ran expressionlessly brought up the timeline, adjusted the time forward, and pressed pause.

Immediately afterwards, he set up his tripod without saying a word, stepped back a short distance, and refocused the camera on the little boy before ending the pause on the timeline.

Amidst billowing dust, the reckless hoofbeats, and even more unrestrained laughter, the samurai sword, reflecting the blinding sunlight, easily severed the little boy's head.

"Crack!"

In Wei Ran's next press of the shutter, everything, including the splattered blood, was captured.

"boom!"

Before the Japanese soldier on horseback could shake the blood off his knife, a gunshot rang out behind Wei Ran, and a cloud of blood mist immediately burst from the soldier's chest.

This forced Wei Ran to press pause again and then carefully reverse half a second.

Then, he turned around and looked in the direction behind him—it was backlit.

It really works well.
Looking at the timeline floating in front of him, Wei Ran felt a sense of helplessness that was stronger than ever before.

He can no longer change history, and he has no way to participate in it either.

Bending down to pick up the fallen sesame cakes, Wei Ran patted off the yellow dirt, put one in his mouth and took a bite, then placed the remaining ones next to the little boy's body.

Silently packing up the box of sesame cakes, he carried his tripod a few steps further away, then pressed the shutter button on the Japanese soldier who had been shot.

Instead of letting time continue to flow, he packed up his tripod, walked over to the wounded Japanese soldier, carefully examined the water bottle, and then turned and walked towards the direction from which the gunshot had come.

Soon, he saw a child hiding inside a corpse next to a withered tree that had been stripped of its bark.

That was just a child, sixteen or seventeen years old, covered in filth and grime, with two emaciated and bloated corpses on top of him.

But in his hand, he held an old-fashioned pistol from who-knows-where, and in that moment of pause, he had already gripped the bolt and was ready to pull it back.

He took out his camera, which was mounted on a tripod, and snapped a picture of him, letting time start flowing again. Wei Ran stood quietly beside him, observing.

Just then, bursts of gunfire erupted from both sides of the Japanese troops. No, those weren't gunshots, they were the sounds of firecrackers.

But amidst the sound of firecrackers, there were also two or three gunshots.

It was these two or three gunshots that caused another Japanese soldier, who was also riding at the front, to be shot in the side, screaming and falling to the ground. It also caused a cloud of blood to burst from the neck of another Japanese soldier.

"boom!"

Amidst the chaos, sporadic gunshots rang out from all directions, causing occasional casualties to the Japanese troops.

Finally, when a cloud of smoke rose in the distance, and a cloud of smoke suddenly exploded in the middle of the Japanese troops, with a number of soldiers lying down, this Japanese force of only about a hundred men hastily chose to retreat after leaving behind a relatively small number of corpses.

But the "gunfire" around them did not stop. Some people even sounded the charge, and others brandished broadswords and launched a real charge.

"Quickly, quickly! Pack your things and run! Once the Japanese wake up, they'll definitely come back to snatch that high-ranking official's corpse!"

Just then, from the pile of corpses not far away, a man who looked to be around 40 years old, thin all over, with a yellowish-brown towel wrapped around his head, called out in dialect.

At his waist, on the dark red cloth belt, hung a suona (a traditional Chinese wind instrument) and a tobacco pipe.

Immediately, three or five "corpses" sat up around them and ran to the side of the dead Japanese soldiers, picking up anything they could use—including the two military horses.

"Hitch up the bike! Hurry up and bring the frame over!"

As the old man urged them on, several men with handkerchiefs wrapped around their heads and guns in their hands ran over from a distance.

These men either dug out a wooden cart frame and two wooden wheels from the yellow soil by the roadside, or the four of them worked together to carry a small cannon on a wooden pole.

That was just a small cannon, its cast iron barrel about the length of a thigh, with several iron hoops hammered onto it. As the four men ran, it swayed and emitted almost perfect smoke rings.

In the blink of an eye, the dozen or so people had assembled the cart frame. The old man with a horn and a pipe on his waist sniffed the noses of the two animals with something, and then easily harnessed them to the cart.

Almost simultaneously, the people around threw the guns, pistols, belts, clothes, and other items they had picked up onto the bare cart. The little boy who had fired the first shot limped onto the cart with the help of his companions and plopped down on the still-warm iron cannon barrel.

"Snapped!"

The old man lightly lashed the rump of the two military horses with the Japanese leather belt in his hand. The cart, carrying several younger men and a few stronger men, ran off into the distance.

"That kid, what a pity."

One of the men glanced at the little boy's corpse before he started running.

"Not a pity"

The old man driving the car sighed, "He's got a huge belly, the veins are bulging, even if we take him back, he won't survive! Living is just suffering, it's better if he dies, the sooner he dies, the sooner he'll be reborn."

"Fourth Master, you're really heartless!" a man on the other side muttered.

"Snapped!"

The old man, known as Fourth Master, did not respond to the complaint, but instead lashed the horse's rump with his leather belt.

This is probably the last story.