My Best Friend and I Became Experts During the War of Resistance

While my materials science best friend was producing the first batch of steel in the border region, I was using psychology to interrogate Japanese agents. An explosion in the lab sent both of us transmigrating to 1937. She became a materials science PhD stranded in Nanjing. She used chemical formulas to make explosives and principles of physics to modify firearms, earning the title of “Tech Bodhisattva” from the resistance base. I became a psychology PhD working undercover in Shanghai. I used microexpressions to unravel spy networks and behavioral analysis to persuade traitors to switch sides, becoming the “Mind-Reading Nightingale” whom the Military Statistics Bureau both feared and relied on. She was smelting steel by traditional methods in a Yan'an cave dwelling, while I was navigating enemy circles in Shanghai dance halls. When she submitted her “Plan for Replacing Materials in the Border Region,” I was writing “Eighteen Ways to Resist Interrogation.” When she produced “tung oil steel” to support the front lines, I was using the prisoner's dilemma to sow discord among the Japanese puppet regime's top officials. Until one day... A coded message I intercepted mentioned a “mysterious incendiary bomb.” Its technical specifications turned out to be data from her master's thesis. An anonymous intelligence report she received was marked “Psychological Warfare Warning,” and the handwriting analysis was based on my habits. Only then did we realize that in this battle waged from afar, we were each other's strongest trump card.