Courtyard Houses: Longevity Since the War of Resistance

Fire has been burned, water has been flooded, electricity has been used, wood has been buried, and soil has been removed—the ancestral methods and foreign tricks have been tried in turn several times. To be honest, I'm getting a little tired of it.

That's about it for the physical work.

I crouched down and patted Shiro Ishii's face. His eyes slowly turned to look at me, and they were frighteningly empty, like two dry wells.

"Doctor," I said, "I need to discuss something with you." He didn't respond.

"Let's leave it at that," I continued, "for now, let's take a break from the physical hospitality. I think you've all had your fill of it."

As soon as I finished speaking, his eyelid twitched.

"However," I stood up, dusting my hands off, "it seems too cheap to just let you all go like this."

I walked to the middle of the hall and flipped my hand. Something appeared out of thin air in my palm.

It was a glass bottle, not very big, about the size of a fist, transparent, with a wooden stopper. It looked like an ordinary reagent bottle; they had plenty of those in their lab.

"Let's try something new." I held the bottle up to the dim light. "Have you ever heard of a world inside a bottle?"

Place the bottle on the ground and step back two steps.

"Demonic God - Soul Separation".

"The God of Space - Sumeru Mustard Seed"

"God of Time - Manipulation of Flow".

These are three skills, and this is the first time I've tried using them this way.

Faint specks of light slowly drifted out from above the Japanese soldiers' heads. The light was very weak, trembling, like fireflies that might dissipate at any moment.

These specks of light floated in the air for a while, and then, as if attracted by something, lined up and, one after another, disappeared into the glass bottle on the ground.

After all the light spots entered, the bottle lit up. It wasn't a blinding light, but a hazy, misty halo that slowly swirled inside the bottle.

I walked over, picked up the bottle, and put the cork back in.

The bottle had some weight in my hand, not the weight of glass, but something else. I could feel something moving inside, very faintly, but definitely moving.

I shook the bottle, and the halo inside swayed, with some smaller points of light vaguely visible colliding and tumbling.

"Okay," I said to the bottle, "let's find another place to continue our conversation."

I put the bottle in my pocket and turned to look at the hall.

The Japanese soldiers were still lying on the ground, in the same position. But something was different; their chests were no longer rising and falling, their eyelids were no longer blinking, and they had become completely empty shells.

I took one last look at this hellish place. Bloodstains from who-knows-when were still splattered on the walls, and the stench in the air probably wouldn't dissipate for years.

All the members of the digital forces, from the mastermind to the accomplices, are here, in that bottle in my pocket.

I stepped outside, walked down the corridor, past the empty laboratories, where the operating tables still had their shadowless lights on, and the scalpels and scissors in the instrument trays gleamed coldly. The filing cabinet doors were open, revealing stacks of record sheets filled with numbers and times of death.

I didn't touch these things. I'll keep them; they'll serve as evidence later.

Stepping out of the underground entrance, it was still dark outside. The night wind was cold, stinging my face like tiny knives. I took a deep breath of clean air, exhaling the musty and bloody smell of the basement from my lungs.

I checked my watch.

From the time I lowered the sealing shield of the God of Space until now, it has been exactly three minutes and seven seconds.

The underground ritual of the Five Elements Cycle, the International Torture Chamber, the application of ancient methods to modern times, and the final soul separation, which lasted for an unknown period of time, only took three minutes in the outside world.

I touched the bottle in my pocket. The points of light inside were still trembling slightly.

For them, perhaps decades? Centuries? Or even longer?

Each round of punishment, each death and resurrection, the pain accumulated and fermented in my memory. Time, in that created "torture chamber space," was deliberately stretched, distorted, and cycled by me.

Now, even their sense of time is completely confused.

Good.

I looked up at the sky. It wasn't light in the east yet, but the darkness wasn't completely impenetrable. Early birds were chirping and chattering in the woods.

It's time to get down to business.

The digital forces have been eliminated, but the biggest cancer on this land remains: the Kwantung Army.

With 700,000 elite troops, a fortress built over a decade ago, and equipped with everything from airplanes and tanks to artillery, it was known as the "flower of the R army."

I weighed the bottle in my pocket and felt that the points of light inside seemed to be shaking more violently.

"Don't rush," I whispered to the bottle, "I'll show you something big later."

After saying that, I vanished in a flash into the deepest darkness before dawn.

Direction: Southeast.

Shenyang, Changchun, Harbin... the heartland of the Kwantung Army.

I am coming.