After losing his job, falling into debt, and being humiliated in public by his former boss, Lu Chen is about to duck into an old warehouse for a breather when he steps straight into a wounded-soldier transfer station in Jiangbei on a winter night in 1937.
The people on the other side are short on medicine, food, and winter clothes. Even a bowl of hot porridge has to be split three ways.
The System tells him he can use “Kindling Points” to extend the passage’s operating time, but Lu Chen has only 27.5 yuan to his name.
He thinks for three seconds, pulls out his phone, and calls the police. “Comrade, I think I’ve found a national-fortune-level passage that could save lives.”
From then on, the nation gets involved.
Self-heating meals, thermal blankets, first-aid kits, water-purification tablets, anti-cold medicine, portable generators, folding stretchers: supplies pass through the rusty door, batch after batch.
He saves a signalman with a high fever, keeps a scout with a severed arm alive, gives refugee children their first hot meal, and helps the old quartermaster replace the truckload of winter clothes that never arrived.
At first, Lu Chen only wanted to pay off his debts. Later, he realizes he’s repaying a century-old debt to his homeland.
And when a red banner bearing the words “Those who came after us have not forgotten” is raised at the field hospital, new coordinates appear deep within the passage: a unit that should have perished to the last man, whose story occupies only half a line in the history books.
