Heavy Sacrifice

"Heavy Sacrifice" The bones gnawed by ancestors grow into new teeth in the blood. Deep in the underground archives of the Chengnan Police Academy, there is a DNA map that has never been made public - tooth marks from three generations, twenty-three kinds of bone fragments, and a "" carved on the skull, which connects a cannibal network spanning half a century. Under the leadership of their mentors Su and Nan, eight interns from France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, starting from the nude pink nails of the female corpse in the storage tank, gradually dug up the black root system called "merit". On the way home from celebrating Ci's birthday, a bullet penetrated his chest and an undelivered ginger candy fell out of his pocket. Qi put the broken candy into his heart, and the captain's star on the epaulette shivered in the dark night - he wanted to finish the unfinished journey for those gray-blue eyes. During the evacuation, Gar was caught in a factory explosion, and the fire illuminated the direction where Mei last looked. Mei bit her tongue to bits on the drug dealer's rack and never uttered a single word until her death. Their birthdays were only two days apart, like two stars falling side by side. Ying was targeted by a sniper on the top of the mountain, while Fa Zheng squatted next to the body fifty meters away to test for drugs. The bullet pierced the air, and the last thing Fa saw was Ying's open arms as he pounced - so wide that he could block the entire sky. When Lian rushed into the fire scene and pulled out Wei's data hard drive, Wei's white coat was stained with his own blood, and he still held the unfinished antidote formula in his arms. Nan led the drug dealer to the cliff, and the last number he dialed before falling into the deep valley was the call that Su never answered. Su helped Ci stand up from the pool of blood, wrapped his last body armor around Ci, turned around and rushed into the hail of bullets. Ci held Su's gradually hypothermic body and waited for the rescue team. Su's body temperature remained in the blood-stained uniform that Ci was wearing. This is the story of fifteen people - they fell in love under the shadow of the poplar tree and were buried before the unfinished dawn. Those vows carved into the bones, those confessions that died halfway, the birthday candle that was never lit, the bowl of overcooked noodles, those hands that were held together in the dark - all that was too late, that could not be said, and that could not be carried, sank into the same soil and became the moisture of the root system in the next season. Russia said "Я рядом" in the dark - I am next to you. The kind of side that is very, very close, so close that I can catch your falling hand with my palm, so close that I can see the extinguished light in your eyes, so close that even through death, gunshots and charred poplar trees, I can say - don't be afraid, I'm here. The living person, holding the half-broken ginger candy in his mouth, walked the rest of the way. His name is not Star. Star is the name of the unborn girl. But the mark he made in the darkness and the three marks she made on the wall of the tank were the same movement. One is saying "Here I am". One is saying "I remember you". Intention: Sacrifice is something that the living do for the dead. Offer food, offer wine, offer those words that are too late to say, offer the gap that cannot be filled in a lifetime. But if the sacrifice is not once, but twice, or three times, and is passed down from generation to generation until no one remembers why it was sacrificed in the first place - then what is the sacrifice? In "Heavy Sacrifice", someone swallowed the enemy's corpse and said it was meritorious service. So his son learned to eat spoiled meat, and his grandson learned to imprison a ten-year-old girl for nine months just to cook them together after she gave birth. Eating it from generation to generation, passing it on from generation to generation, until in the end you can't tell whether it's food or people, honor or sin. They think they are inheriting something, but in fact they are just eating the same bones that can never be digested. In "Chongji", someone also cooks a bowl of noodles for another person. I woke up on a winter morning and saw a ginger candy under my pillow. Reaching out in the dark corridor, waiting for another hand to fall in. What they sacrificed was the warmth of each other's lives - those moments that were as short as a breath but as heavy as a lifetime of trust. Then they died one after another, died under sniper bullets, died in the flames of the explosion, died in front of the experimental table when they were tired until the last moment, and died on the hillside where they were getting cold little by little after putting the last piece of clothing on another person. The living were sacrificed for the dead. The dead are left for the living. Lin Xue scratched three marks on the tank wall and let her nails tell her the last secret. Xiaosui called her child Xingxing and hid that name in her body for nine months before the word "" was engraved on her skull. In his last breath, he left his name. These traces, these names, these broken ginger candies and birthday candles that never light up - they are the offerings. What is sacrificed is what is eaten, what is forgotten, what is numbered, what is treated as a number rather than a person. The sacrifices are also made to those who stayed, those who continued to investigate, those who lay down looking at the empty bed and still got up the next day and walked to the dissecting table, training field and archives room. "Heavy Sacrifice" wants to ask: How much preparation does a person need to make to eat another person? The answer is within a generation. How much preparation does one need to make to survive for another? The answer is also within a generation. The same length, the same weight, the same engraved in the bones, passed on to the next generation, and the next generation. Just in the opposite direction. So this story is about two inheritances. One walks into the darkness, feeds blood with blood, feeds meat with flesh, and goes deeper and deeper until no light can be seen. The other kind is to walk towards the light, feeding memory with memory, feeding temperature with temperature, even if only one person is left at the end, that person is still standing under the poplar tree, still wearing old clothes that cover his companions, still waiting for the person who will never come back. Heavy sacrifices are for things that cannot be digested. Those things are etched in the bones. Can't wash it off anymore. Never forget it again. And never let them happen again.