Mastering the Sword Manual, sweeping across the globe

Seeing this, several herders nearby gathered around.

Some wanted to take photos with him, others wanted autographs. An old herdsman pulled out a crumpled notebook with the words "Grassland Fire Prevention Manual" printed on the cover. He flipped to the last blank page and handed over a pen.

Zhang Qiliang took it, thought for a moment, and drew a simple sheep on it, writing "Peace" next to it.

The old herdsman took it back, looked at it, grinned, carefully tore off the page, folded it, and put it in the inside pocket of his fur coat.

The company's fire brigade captain stubbed out his cigarette, walked over and stood on the periphery of the crowd. He waited until the herders had finished taking pictures before taking half a step forward.

"Ming-ge," he rubbed his hands together, his fire-resistant gloves still on, the burn mark on his palm from the car body clearly visible in the sunlight, "a few of the guys in our team would like to take a group photo, is that alright?"

"That's convenient." Zhang Qiliang walked over.

Several company firefighters ran out from behind the water tanker, their fireproof suits covered in soot, their masks pushed up to reveal their foreheads reddened by sweat.

They stood in a row, with Zhang Qiliang in the middle. The captain shouted "Cheese!" and the camera shutter clicked several times.

After the photo was taken, a young firefighter looked down at it and whispered, "My mom will definitely be happy." Someone next to him patted him on the back of the head.

A little over an hour later, the commander's headset suddenly beeped again.

After listening for a few minutes, the commander showed a strange expression. After carefully confirming the information, the commander walked to Zhang Qiliang's side.

Zhang Qiliang looked up.

"This..." The commander looked apologetic, "I misspoke earlier about the area where fires frequently occur."

"Ok?"

"I'm sorry, I'm new here and not very familiar with the work."

A few steps away, several teammates who had followed him for years, or even more than a decade, stared at the commander in astonishment.

"Then where should it be?" Zhang Qiliang didn't mind.

“The real high-incidence area,” the commander said without batting an eye, “should be from Masi to Tamu.”

Zhang Qiliang took out his phone from his pocket and opened the map.

A few seconds later, Zhang Qiliang revealed the same strange expression on the commander's face as he had half a minute earlier.

Cyberspace:

"What does it mean?"

"This is fun..."

"From Maxi to Tamu? Isn't that from the westernmost point to the easternmost point?"

"Four thousand seven hundred kilometers!"

"The translation is: all border lines that meet with Mongolia!"

……

"Is it confirmed this time?" Zhang Qiliang asked.

"Confirmed!" the commander's voice was firm and decisive.

"Okay, then let's go from Maxi to Tamu." Zhang Qiliang said indifferently, glancing at his phone again: "About fifty minutes left."

"Now is the time..." the commander said decisively again, "All personnel and all facilities have been evacuated!"

Zhang Qiliang looked at him.

A few seconds later, Zhang Qiliang laughed.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

Three hundred kilometers away, five military helicopters are rushing toward the direction of station 173.

The aircraft flying at the very front was a Mi-17, with a middle-aged man in a suit sitting in the cabin.

The suit was made by the best tailor in Ulaanbaatar, the tie was bought during a visit to Moscow last year, and the shoes were polished at the hotel this morning, but now they are covered with a layer of grass dust that seeped in from the cabin door.

He was holding a satellite phone in one hand and pressing his other hand on the headset.

"First, establish a border fire brigade immediately." The voice from the other end of the channel drowned out the roar of the propellers. "The organization, equipment, and training standards should all be based on the same specifications as the Da Yang border fire brigade. Personnel should be drawn from the National Army and the Emergency Management Bureau, and the brigade should be established by the end of September and deployed before the fire season."

"Understood, strive to make arrangements before the fire season..." the middle-aged man repeated.

"No, it's not 'try'!" The voice on the other end of the channel rose a half-octave. "It's 'definitely'!"

The middle-aged man loosened his fingers from the earphone, took a breath, and then pressed them back in.

"Second, we promise to compensate for all losses caused by any future fires that originate in our country and cross the border into Tai Yang."

"Complete loss?" The middle-aged man was more perceptive this time.

"Yes, including ecological losses, grassland restoration, soil remediation, and water conservation—we will compensate for all the damages according to the assessment report issued by Dayang."

How much would that cost...? The middle-aged man paused for a moment.

"Third, compensate for all cross-border fire losses in the first three years of Da Yang. The assessment criteria are the same as above."

Upon hearing this, two other staff members in the cabin, who were also wearing headsets, simultaneously looked up.

One of them opened his mouth, but the middle-aged man shut him up with a look.

"Fourth, for all firefighters from the Da-Yang border who sacrificed their lives in cross-border fires over the past decade, we will provide additional compensation of the same amount, posthumously award them the Grassland Hero Badge, and provide their families with lifelong compensation."

The aide who had opened his mouth shut.

The middle-aged man switched the earphone to his other ear.

"If the opportunity arises, I humbly request Your Excellency Quedexia to also take care of the Mongolian people."

"Will it work?" the middle-aged man asked.

"At least it's better than doing nothing, right?" The voice on the other end of the channel finally softened. "After all, he can even take care of a sapling."

The voice on the other end of the channel softened.

The sound of the propellers filled the cabin, and together with the ash from the grass seeping in through the cracks in the door, it landed on the epaulets of the middle-aged man's suit, on the surface of his leather shoes, and on the back of his hand that was gripping the satellite phone.

Suddenly, I felt a push on my shoulder.

The middle-aged man ignored him.

The person on the other end of the channel is confirming the commitment text line by line; every word must be heard clearly.

My shoulder was pushed again.

Heavier.

The middle-aged man turned his head and glared at him impatiently.

The person who pushed him was his aide sitting next to him—who had been sitting in that spot since the start of the journey and hadn't said more than three words the whole way except when answering a phone call.

His staff didn't look at him.

The staff member tilted his head, looking out the cabin window toward the horizon.

Over the shoulder of his staff, the middle-aged man's gaze was also fixed on the porthole.

Daylight broke again.

132 Valley of a Thousand Waterfalls

Bayar is a border inspector at the Mandula border crossing.

At nine o'clock in the morning, Bayar was still sitting behind the verification counter in the immigration channel.

Around 10 o'clock, the section chief called him out from behind the verification station and handed him a satellite phone and a handheld camera.

Then, Bayar stood in the basket of the cloud vehicle.

The cloud-mounted vehicle is the tallest piece of equipment at the port. The suspended platform can be raised to 15 meters and is usually used to inspect and maintain surveillance cameras and lighting poles.

At this moment, all four legs of the cloud vehicle were fully extended, the counterweights were increased to the maximum, and triangular wooden blocks were inserted in front of and behind the tires.

On Bayar, the other end of the safety rope was tied to the guardrail of the suspended platform, and two auxiliary ropes were added to the guardrail, which were tied to the left and right sides of the boom of the crane respectively.

"Is the video stable?" came the section chief's voice through the earpiece.

“Steady.” Bayar pulled the camera closer to his chest, wrapped the safety rope around his wrist again, and held the end of the rope in his palm.

"They're almost here!" A voice suddenly came through the earpiece; it was Xiao Liu from the monitoring room.

Xiao Liu's task was to keep an eye on the dot of light moving along the border on the radar screen.

The light spot originated from station 173 and is moving westward.

The speed is not particularly fast, "only" four to five kilometers per second.

“How much longer?” Bayar asked.

"According to the report, it took about two minutes."

Bayar raised the camera and pointed the lens at the western horizon.

coming!

More than ten kilometers away, at least a thousand meters in the air, a small figure was flying this way along the border.

The reason why such a small figure could be observed from such a great distance, besides the high-definition pixels of the camera, is mainly because a huge lightsaber extends from between the man's two fingers: the blade plunges straight into the ground from a height of thousands of meters.

Wherever the lightsaber went, the north and south sides of the earth simultaneously and rapidly opened up. The smoothness was such that it was less like being cut open and more like a huge crack emerging from the depths of the earth itself, rapidly extending eastward in pursuit of the lightsaber's trajectory.

The distance of more than ten kilometers was covered in the blink of an eye; the figure had already flown away. Bayar turned around quickly, but the lightsaber only lingered in the camera's view for two more seconds.

"Laser ranging shows that the distance between the two sides of the rift valley varies from 4993 meters to 5008 meters... This should be due to geological differences..." came Xiao Liu's voice from the monitoring room through the headset.

"Depth! Where is the depth?!"

This was the question he was asking himself, and Bayar quickly pointed the camera at the rift valley:

The south wall of the crack is straight, and the north wall is also straight. Sunlight shines down from the edge of the crack but does not reach the bottom.

Zooming in, the edge of the fissure is flat, revealing the soil structure of the grassland—the top layer is withered grass and humus, dark brown, about half a meter thick; below that is a layer of sand, grayish-yellow, more than a meter thick; below that is a layer of gravel, with fist-sized stones embedded in compacted sand; below that is sedimentary rock, grayish-white, with layers as clear as book pages; and at the bottom is bedrock, dark red, with a smooth, reflective cut surface.

From withered grass to bedrock, the process is clean, neat, and orderly; any piece dug up could be sent to a geological museum as a specimen wall.

“Judging by sight… over 500 meters.” Bayar’s voice was more steady than he had expected.

……

Na Shun was a herdsman.

He found a high place.

It's called a high ground, but it's actually just a raised earthen ridge on the north bank of the river bend, about five or six meters higher than the surrounding area.

He propped his motorcycle up under the earthen ridge, climbed up with a shovel, and set up his phone on a protruding rock, pointing the camera northward.

"Brothers, we've finally arrived."

"Be careful, bro!"

"Don't get too close!"

"Weren't we notified to evacuate? Be careful of getting fined!"

“I don’t live here,” Na Shun’s voice was half carried away by the wind. “Building houses is not allowed nearby. I live more than 20 kilometers away and it was a lot of trouble for me to come here.”

Na Shun tilted his phone forward, letting the camera pass over his shoulder and point at the cracked earth to the north.

Tens of thousands of eyes in the live stream saw a huge crack through Na Shun's camera.

The vastness of the land made even cheap cameras barely visible on the other side—from Nashun's position, the Mongolian land to the north had become a blurry gray line, almost melting into the horizon.

……

Su He is a captain in a civil aviation company.

His route operates three times a week, flying from a city in northern Xinjiang to Central Asia.

When this flight took off, the sky was still grayish-yellow. From takeoff to climbing to cruising altitude, a thin layer of gray always covered the outside of the window.

Most passengers had their window shades down, making the cabin dark.

Suhe didn't look out the window either.

He has been flying this route for eleven years, and he can draw the scenery outside the window with his eyes closed.

The passenger nudged his arm.

"captain."