In 2025, Chen Yuanzheng, a young military academy cadet, falls into a coma during a border exercise. His soul transmigrates to the Yunnan front on the eve of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, inhabiting Lu Chengzhi, a soldier about to deploy. Lu is a machine gunner in the 1st Battalion, 126th Regiment, 42nd Division of the 14th Army, based on a real historical figure. Armed with modern military knowledge and hazy memories of history, Chen tries to use his “foresight” to reduce casualties and change the course of fate. Yet when artillery fire tears through the dawn, and his comrades drink their farewell wine with smiles, shave their heads, write their last letters, and promise to meet again at the Martyrs’ Cemetery, he finally understands what a soldier’s faith truly means. From a rational strategist to a warrior tempered by fire, he remakes his soul between life and death. In the pivotal battle to seize Hill 575 at Ban Lao, he is wounded dozens of times, just like his historical counterpart. A fragment pierces his lung, and he falls unconscious among the dead, but miraculously wakes. After thirteen days of evacuation, he is brought back to China for treatment. Though countless fragments remain in his body for the rest of his life, he survives. After the war, he transfers to the public security bureau and fights on the front lines of criminal investigation, solving one major case after another and protecting peace in a different way. In 2007, old wounds take his life, and steel pellets and shrapnel remain in his ashes. His wife Yunxia, an ordinary woman from Tongren, Guizhou, makes three promises before he dies: to send their son to university, pay respects to his fallen comrades in his place, and care for his mother until the end of her life. She fulfills them all: in Qingming 2014, she visits the Martyrs’ Cemetery in the southern frontier, and in 2018, dressed in mourning, she bids farewell to her mother-in-law
