1918: Steel Red Road

On New Year's Day in Berlin in 1917, a cold fog mixed with gunpowder smoke and coal ash enveloped the city. Major Leon von Hoffmann stood in front of the window of the OHL (High Army Headquarters) staff headquarters. The glass reflected his slightly pale face, and also reflected the huge, but already stiff, map of the Eastern Front on the wall behind him. The astringent taste of inferior substitute coffee lingered on his fingertips, but a flame that did not belong to this era surged in his chest - belonging to Lin Fu, a soul from the future. Two memories were torn apart and merged in my mind: the Kaiser's major, and the ideological successor born in that eastern land who could start a prairie fire. Outside the window, the dimly lit streets were dead silent. What he could see was not just the cold and deprivation in front of him. He saw the despair spreading behind the meat grinder of Verdun, the unwillingness rushing under the skin of the sailors and workers, and the hastily ruined November Revolution that was about to break out next year in the history textbook. The old world is rotting in the blood and mire of its own making. And the new one... He gently pressed the old, painful wound. There was a bullet there that almost took away Leon von Hoffmann, but it completely awakened Lin Fu. "The time is coming," he whispered silently, and deep in his ice-blue eyes, there was a brand new picture intertwined with the dawn of the east and the will of steel. This cold night must end. With his own hands, he ignited a different flame.