Courtyard House: I only wiped out 30,000 Japanese pirates

He Dajun didn't answer immediately, but gently rubbed the corner of her eye with his thumb.

He understood what she meant; it wasn't that she wanted a child, but that she was afraid.

I'm afraid he won't come back after he goes to Jingzhou, afraid he'll disappear from this world without leaving a trace.

She was a member of the underground Communist Party. She wasn't afraid of death, but she was afraid that after he died, there would be nothing left.

Bai Ling did not wait for his reply.

She reached out and hooked her arm around his neck, pulled his face down, and kissed his lips.

Her lips were cold, but her kiss was forceful, as if she wanted to force all the unspoken words into that kiss.

He Dajun hesitated for less than a second before she grabbed him and turned him over.

The moonlight streamed in through the window paper, shining on her disheveled hair, her slightly trembling eyelashes, and the single tear that hadn't fallen from the corner of her eye.

That night, Bai Ling finally became a woman.

At two o'clock in the morning, He Dajun sat up on the kang (a heated brick bed).

Bai Ling was still asleep, her breathing deep and even, with dried tear stains still remaining at the corners of her eyes, but the corners of her mouth were slightly upturned, as if she was having a long dream that she didn't want to wake up from.

He Dajun lowered his head and gently kissed her forehead, then pulled the blanket up to cover her exposed shoulders.

He didn't wake her.

Tonight won't do. Tonight he's going to do something big, something he's been planning for a long time but hasn't found the right opportunity to do.

Kill Sasaki.

He Dajun put on the Japanese military uniform he had redeemed through the system, then climbed over the courtyard wall and landed in the alley.

The alley was quiet, with the occasional bark of a dog in the distance, which quickly subsided.

He followed the route he knew well to Sasaki's residence, which was a detached villa with sentry posts at the entrance, patrol teams in the yard, and a lamp lit on the second floor.

Sasaki is still awake.

He Dajun squatted in the shadows across the street for a long time, waiting for the patrol team to change shifts, for the second-floor lamp to go out, and for the whole building to sink into darkness.

Then he redeemed ten grenades from the system, pulled the pins, and threw them one after another into the second-floor window where the lights had just been turned off.

Then he picked up the heavy machine gun and opened fire on the Japanese soldiers who rushed out of the building.

The sound of Type 92 heavy machine guns echoed through the streets in the dead of night, muffled and heavy, like someone hammering the foundation of the entire city.

That night, he killed Sasaki, Suzuki, and the Japanese soldiers stationed around Sasaki's residence, totaling more than a hundred people.

After he finished, he left a note on Sasaki's desk with only one sentence: "Those who kill the people of Beijing, no matter how far away they are, shall be punished."

After returning to the courtyard house, He Dajun started throwing grenades at it again.

Soon, many houses in the courtyard were destroyed, including He Dajun's.

Clearly, the resistance fighters were aware of the large army and numerous puppet troops stationed at the courtyard.

Soon, the Japanese confirmed that He Dajun had been killed in action.

The death of He Dajun brought joy to some and sorrow to others in the courtyard.

Bai Ling, who shouldn't be the one saddened the most, kept crying and even fainted from crying. Of course, He Daqing was also very sad, after all, his cousin was gone just like that.

This also brought a huge shock, and the traitor He Dajun was also killed.

……

He Dajun left at around 4 a.m.

Before dawn, the alley was as dark as the bottom of a pot.

He pushed the three-wheeled motorcycle out of the courtyard, without starting the engine, and pushed it through two alleys with a wooden stick until he reached an open space outside Nanluoguxiang before finally getting on.

When the motorcycle started, a plume of black smoke billowed from the exhaust pipe, twirled a few times in the pre-dawn darkness, and then dissipated.

He glanced back in the direction of the courtyard house, but couldn't see anything except the still-burning house, which he had blown up.

Then I remembered Bai Ling.

Unfortunately, I have to leave immediately and set off right away.

He Dajun turned around, twisted the throttle, and the motorcycle sputtered out of the alley.

The journey out of the city went more smoothly than he had expected. At this time, the Japanese sentries were at their most lax. The sentry who had been on duty all night was drooping with sleep when he saw a lame man in an Imperial Army uniform riding a motorcycle. He waved him through without even checking his identification.

He Dajun smiled at the sentry, and the motorcycle drove past the sandbag fortifications, past the barbed wire, past the two city gate panels that had been removed and were leaning against the wall, and into the night outside the city.

By daybreak, He Dajun had arrived in the outskirts of Baoding.

He parked his motorcycle, changed out of his Imperial Army uniform, and put on the gray cloth shirt and black cloth shoes that Bai Ling had sewn for him. He folded the uniform and stuffed it into his cloth bundle; the dog-skin uniform was still useful and couldn't be thrown away.

After changing his clothes, he stood at the entrance of the brick kiln and looked south. The wheat in the fields had been harvested long ago, leaving only a bare stubble field.

Occasionally, a few crooked trees stand on the edge of the field, their leaves mostly fallen, their bare branches creaking in the morning breeze.

There was a burnt smell in the air, I don't know which direction it was coming from.

He Dajun continued driving south.

The highway south of Baoding is already packed with refugees.

The further south you go, the more people there are. The highway is full of people pushing wheelbarrows, carrying bundles, and holding children.

The wheelbarrow was piled with quilts and pots and pans. An elderly person who could not walk sat on the quilts. The pots and pans were tied together with hemp rope, making a clanging sound with every step.

Someone was leading an ox, with two bamboo baskets on its back, containing several thin, pale-faced children.

Some people had nothing but a tattered cloth bag on their backs, a wooden stick in their hands, and walked mechanically with their heads down, their faces showing a blank and tired expression.

It felt as if they had been walking on the ground for a very, very long time, so long that they had forgotten where they came from and where they were going.

At the time, this was called "escaping the Japanese."

Destroyed villages can be seen from time to time along the roadside.

Some villages were burned down to just a few mud walls, with scorch marks left by the flames.

Some villages have lost even their earthen walls, leaving only a few bomb craters and a pile of broken tiles, with a charred cloth shoe or half a cracked pottery jar occasionally peeking out from among the tiles.

An old woman sat on a stone mill at the entrance of the village, holding a sleeping child in her arms, with several cloth bundles piled up beside her.

She stopped moving and just sat there, staring north, motionless, like a stone statue forgotten by the roadside.

No one stopped to ask her why she was sitting there; everyone was in a hurry, everyone was running for their lives.

The dead livestock lying on the ridge of the field had not yet been dragged away; their bellies were swollen high. Several crows perched on the withered tree next to them, tilting their heads to sized up the passing refugees.

The smell of burning in the air grew stronger, mixed with a familiar odor to He Dajun—the sweet, pungent smell of rotting corpses. He had seen far too many bodies.

He no longer finds the smell disgusting, but it still makes him unconsciously clench his fists every time he smells it.

Ten days later, He Dajun encountered a soldier who had fallen behind on the roadside.