“Did we… truly win?”
She, from the future, gazed at the comrades before her, the ones who had charged out of the old era’s flames and blood toward a new China. She stumbled half a step forward, then silently retreated as if an invisible wall had stopped her. Tears trembled in her brown eyes. Beneath that flicker of hope lay a longing so humble it was almost pitiful: she yearned for an answer in the affirmative, yet feared it might shatter the dream she had guarded with her life.
She had once fought against the current of time, falling from an era of peace back into a past thick with smoke and gunfire. The cannons at Lugou Bridge on July 7 shattered the dawn; a sea of blood swallowed the streets of Nanjing; cries from Xia Wujiazi tore through the wilderness… She had gripped a gun, saved lives, and scattered seeds of hope across scorched earth, yet in the end she fell alongside her comrades in the weeds on that nameless hillside. As a shell bloomed into a yellow-brown firework over the loess, she watched her shadow slowly dissolve into the blood-red sunset.
When she opened her eyes again, she had somehow fallen into the world of Light. But her fingertips could not touch the warmth of a spark, and all that beat within her chest was dead silence. Where had her heartfire been lost? Or had it already gone out with the final gunshot of that unfinished victory?
Through countless sleepless nights, she murmured to herself: “A single spark can start a prairie fire! A single spark can start a prairie fire…”
A single spark can start a prairie fire!
