May the Land Remain at Peace

“If I can’t change history, what’s the point of my being here?”

“Because you must sound the trumpet of victory in every corner.”

On August 31, 2025, a school organized every class to watch the newly released Nanjing Photo Studio.

It should have been a solemn, quiet moment, but someone was crouched beneath his desk, fingers flying over a game.

Ji Wuyang was one of them.

His homeroom teacher caught him red-handed, but he still had the nerve to talk back.

After he got home, his father made him kneel in the ancestral hall.

As night deepened, he drifted off in a daze, only to feel as if he had fallen into another time and place.

He saw a broken land and bloodstained soil. He saw his countrymen suffer, and his homeland teeter on the brink of ruin. He also saw countless figures press forward resolutely, building one line of defense after another with their own flesh and blood.

He heard gunfire and cries of grief, but also the calls to charge and the defiant shouts.

So the phrase “lay down your life and shed your blood,” which he so often wrote in school essays, really was an action.

He hated himself for having wasted so much time, for having studied history so carelessly.

He grieved that he stood before suffering yet could not save a single person.

But just then, someone told him: Your purpose is not to turn back the past, but to let the sound of victory carry across every inch of this land.

From then on, whenever someone asked his name,

he would straighten his back and answer in a clear, resolute voice:

“My name is Ji Wuyang. The ‘Wuyang’ means that I wish for my motherland to prosper and for the land of China to know peace.”