Siheyuan: Stockpiling Grain During the War, Clearing Out the Japanese

In 1941, the fourth year after Beiping fell.

Zhao Changhe hauled coal at a coal yard to support his family of four: his blind mother, his younger brother whose head had been cracked open by puppet troops, and his seven-year-old sister, swollen from hunger.

He was so lowly he seemed ground into the dirt, not even daring to clench his fists.

Then six storage slots appeared out of nowhere in his mind. Anything placed inside would neither rot nor spoil, and no one else could detect it.

The first thing he did was hide the last ten jin of cornmeal in the house.

Underhanded currents ran through the courtyard compound:

Shopkeeper Wang in the front courtyard delivered grain to the Japanese in exchange for a permit,

Auntie Liu in the back courtyard made ends meet by washing clothes for the wife of a puppet soldier,

and someone always knocked on Master Chen's back window in the middle courtyard late at night.

Food prices soared, and medicine cost more than a life.

Forced into the black market, Zhao Changhe accidentally uncovered Master Chen's shocking secret: he was a contact for the underground resistance against Japan.

And a seventh storage slot quietly appeared, with four words written on it: Mission Unlocked.

In times of chaos, staying alive is the greatest skill of all.

But when he clenched his fist, he wanted more than just to survive.

At the end of this road, would he find light or an abyss?