On the eve of the fall of Liaodong, he led his troops in a remonstrance against the young marshal.

Captain Shin Miyamoto emerged from the headquarters building, stood on the steps, and squinted at the densely packed streets below the mountain.

Sun Ditch, Old Town Street, New Town Street, gray-tiled roofs stretch layer upon layer to the edge of the harbor, and wisps of smoke are rising from the chimneys.

He drew his Nambu pistol and said only two words to the military police behind him.

"Let's do it."

Five hundred military police were divided into twenty groups and simultaneously rushed to every block in Lushun.

The command is simple and direct:

They searched house to house, taking away all Chinese civilians, regardless of age or gender.

At the same time, Miyamoto Shin issued a mobilization order in Japanese to all Japanese expatriates in Lushun through the city's radio station.

"Attention all citizens of the Empire! This is the Kwantung Army Lushun Headquarters!"

"The Northeast Army is about to attack Lushun; the survival of the Japanese Empire in Manchuria hinges on this!"

"All men aged sixteen to sixty, please immediately assemble at your respective town offices to receive weapons and be assigned to the garrison!"

"Women and children are patrolling the streets. If they find any Chinese civilians hiding there, they must immediately report to the military police!"

"This is a sacred duty bestowed upon you by His Majesty the Emperor! For the Empire! For Manchuria! For the Black Card!"

The broadcast echoed through the streets and alleys of Lushun, the sound from the loudspeakers sharp and urgent.

Taiyanggou, Sakura-cho.

This is the most densely populated area of ​​Japanese expatriates in Lushun, but even here, hundreds of ordinary Chinese people have lived for generations.

Among them were grocery store owners, vegetable vendors, rickshaw pullers, and dockworkers.

In this neighborhood, the two-story Western-style buildings of the Japanese and the low-rise houses of the Chinese lived together in harmony for decades.

Now, those Japanese neighbors pushed open their doors.

An old man selling tofu was grinding soybeans in his yard.

His door was kicked open, and two military policemen and three Japanese civilians rushed in.

He recognized the foreigner in the lead; it was Yamada from next door, who had bought two pieces of tofu yesterday.

Yamada held a bamboo spear in his hand, the tip of which was sharpened to a fine point and gleamed pale in the sunlight.

His eyes met the old man's for a second, then he looked away and said something to the military police in Japanese.

The military police nodded, walked up to the old man, grabbed him by the collar, and dragged him away from the millstone.

The old man struggled to shout:

"What are you doing? What are you doing?"

"Yamada, you son of a bitch, what the hell are you doing here with all these people?"

Yamada did not turn back.

His face turned bright red, and the veins on his forehead throbbed.

The old man was dragged into the street and tied to a rope.

The same thing was happening simultaneously in every alley.

Liu the blacksmith's shop was surrounded by five overseas Chinese.

He grabbed a large sledgehammer used for blacksmithing and roared as he charged toward the door.

"Who dares to touch my wife and children!"

A bayonet pierced his stomach from the side.

The bayonet was pulled out, with a piece of intestine hanging from the tip.

The blacksmith clutched his stomach and collapsed next to the anvil he had been forging for twenty years. Blood splattered on the anvil, staining the newly forged kitchen knife dark red.

His wife and children screamed as they were dragged away, the children crying and calling back "Dad," their cries echoing through the alley for a long time.

An old woman with bound feet was dragged away from the Buddhist shrine.

She was just burning incense, praying to the Bodhisattva to bless her son's safe return.

When the military police grabbed her by the hair and dragged her across the threshold, her fingers were still digging into the door frame, her fingernails scratching ten bloody marks on the wood.

On the dock, a group of laborers unloading cargo were surrounded.

They had only carrying poles and ropes in their hands, and were powerless to resist the fully armed military police.

A young laborer jumped into the sea, trying to swim away.

The military police stood on the pier and fired a full volley of bullets at the sea.

A dark red patch rose to the surface of the sea.

The arrests were even more brutal in the Chinese-populated area west of Lushun.

The majority of the population here is Chinese, with only a few Japanese households, leading to constant friction between the two sides.

Today, the malice that has been building up for years has finally found an outlet.

Three Japanese expatriates dragged a pregnant woman, eight months along, out of the house.

The pregnant woman's husband knelt on the ground and kowtowed, his forehead hitting the bluestone slab, drawing blood, the sound resounding like the beating of a wooden fish.

He begged them to spare his wife, saying she was pregnant.

One of the overseas Chinese kicked him in the chest, knocking him to the ground, and then two other people dragged the pregnant woman away.

The pregnant woman's legs left two long trails on the ground, and blood seeped from the inside of her thighs.

The man got up and chased after him, only to be hit on the back of the head with a rifle butt, and fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

There is resistance.

A young man who had learned martial arts used a carrying pole to knock down a military policeman, disarmed him, and stabbed an expatriate.

But before he could run ten steps, he was hit in the lower back by a bullet fired from behind.

He collapsed next to a well, trying to climb up by gripping the edge with his hands, but his legs wouldn't obey him.

Blood gushed from his lower back and flowed into the well through the cracks in the stone slabs.

He lay on the edge of the well, watching his reflection in the water grow increasingly blurry, then with his last bit of strength, he let go and slammed face down onto the stone slab.

Someone is running away.

A dozen or so Chinese people rushed out of a small alley at the same time and scattered in all directions.

The military police opened fire and shot down three of them.

The remaining people continued to run; some climbed over the courtyard wall, some crawled into the sewers, and some hid under the incense table in the temple.

But many more people did not escape, because the women of the Japanese expatriates were standing at the street corner, pointing to every hiding place.

"There's one here!"

"There are three people behind that courtyard wall!"

"In that water tank! The water tank is moving!"

These women were, in their daily lives, the wives of merchants, the families of South Manchuria Railway employees, and the proprietresses of taverns.

They were wearing kimonos, with elaborate hairstyles, and some were even holding children.

But now, like a group of sharks that have smelled blood, they excitedly run through the streets, guiding the military police and expatriates to every hiding place with their sharp voices.

A six-year-old Japanese child walked to a courtyard wall that had collapsed halfway and stopped.

He listened intently for a few seconds.

There's some noise.

He excitedly ran inside and found a cellar entrance hidden by weeds.

The Japanese children dug open the cellar entrance.

The cellar was not deep, only two meters square, and inside huddled a young woman and three children.

The woman was about thirty years old, holding a baby in her arms, with two boys around seven or eight years old huddled around her.

There was no light in the cellar, only the sunlight filtering in from the entrance illuminating their pale faces.

The woman looked up at the child above her, a pitiful expression on her face.

"Please, don't tell them..."

The Japanese child was dressed in a primary school uniform, wearing a hat with a brim, and clutching a small paper flag made of Hinomaru.

That's what they give out in town; every Japanese child received one this morning.

His eyes met the mother's for a second; there was no childlike innocence in those eyes, only the baseness ingrained in the very name.

He turned around and called out in a childish voice towards the alley behind him.

"Military police officer! There! There are Chinese people hiding here!"

The woman closed her eyes in anguish and wept in despair.

Just when he was at his most desperate, a buzzing sound came from the sky.

"Buzzing!"

"Buzzing!"

The sound came from the north, sharp and terrifying, like an invisible wall crushing down from the sky.

The sound grew louder and louder until it finally shook the roof of the warehouse, and dust fell from the beams.

The women and children in the cellar looked up, and hope suddenly appeared.