Yin Wuqi's last memory was a ball of fire.
In the white light that exploded in the cockpit, what he thought of was not the sacrifice, but the faded enamel jar in the desk drawer.
When he opened his eyes again, he was standing in Warsaw in 1818, facing a water-stained wall.
In the mirror is a pair of gray-blue eyes, and a name that has never been on a battlefield, but is eager to fight more than anyone else -
Frédéric Chopin.
Eight years old, piano prodigy, Polish slave.
The Tsar's iron hoofs stepped on the ice of the Vistula River, and the Cossack's saber flashed in the moonlight. Polish nobles wept in salons, exiles conspired in Paris, but the vast majority of people chose to walk with their heads down and shut up.
Yin Wuqi was not going to shut up.
He was a Chinese engineering soldier and spent ten years in a hail of bullets in Africa. He knows how to blast, survey, and build cities, and can find the shortest way out of ruins.
Now, these hands can pop out mazurkas and hold them.
Twelve years. Twelve years until the Warsaw Uprising.
He wants to spend these twelve years doing one thing -
It's not about writing a nocturne, it's about laying a net.
From the piano bench at Belvedere Palace to the tunnels under the Vistula River.
From a casual chat by an engineer major to a hand-drawn Russian defense map in a dry well in an abandoned barracks.
He is not waiting.
He is laying. A road that has never been traveled before, leading from the ruins of a subjugated country to iron and blood.
Intention: A person who cannot run away travels into a body that is always in exile, and uses the blood of an engineer to refine the tragedy of a nation into a war song.