The scorching sun beat down without mercy, offering no incentive to move quickly. Despite the soldiers' constant shouts and the irritable crack of their whips, the supply carts rolled forward at an unhurried, almost contemptuous pace.
Yang Qiu rode in the back of one such cart, a rifle slung over his shoulder like every other man in the column. He had changed into a short-sleeved jacket, the collar left casually open — giving him, to any passing eye, a rough-edged air.
He turned the pistol over in his hands slowly, letting the afternoon light catch the metal.
As an ordinary supply soldier in the Hubei New Army, he had nothing. No money. No connections. No territory. In his previous life he had served in the military, then spent years on the floor of an automobile factory — and yet even if he could somehow conjure the finest German machine tools from the future and drop them in the middle of this dirt road, it would mean absolutely nothing.
Industry wasn't something you could will into existence with ambition alone.
Even with warehouses full of machinery, you still needed skilled workers, raw materials, and a supply chain that didn't collapse the moment it rained.
So yes, that bastard in the hat could go straight to hell with his teasing.
"Brother Yang….. What is that?" Bingwen, sharing the cart, turned around and immediately forgot what he was going to say. His eyes locked onto the short pistol in Yang Qiu's hands — a design he had never seen before — and lit up like a child spotting fireworks. He scooted over without hesitation.
"My second uncle picked these up in America," Yang Qiu said smoothly, deflecting without missing a beat. He had a second uncle doing business in Shanghai; it was a convenient excuse, and one nobody would bother to verify. "He was worried I'd get swindled, so he paid good money for a matching pair — for self-defense"
Bingwen nodded without a trace of suspicion.
In these times, wealthy young men purchasing a foreign pistol for personal protection was practically a social custom.
Yang Qiu's parents were gone, but his family had been comfortable once, and a Shanghai merchant uncle was more than enough to explain a quality sidearm.
"Stop!"
The shout came from up ahead, sharp and authoritative, cutting through the lazy rhythm of the march.
It was followed almost immediately by the mechanical click-clack of rifles being cocked. The bearded Ma Kui rolled smoothly over the side of the cart and landed at the back, eyes forward and hand on his weapon.
Yang Qiu was already on his feet.
At 1.80 meters, he stood a full head above most men of this era — a fact that occasionally made him feel less like a person and more like a landmark.
The height served him now.
He could see clearly over the commotion to the source of it: from both sides of a narrow ravine ahead, a group of men had materialized seemingly from nowhere. They wore black short jackets, much like his own.
And they were armed.
Yang Qiu's eyes went still.
Mosin-Nagant rifles.
He recognized them instantly — the distinctive profile, the long barrel, the straight bolt handle.
If he hadn't spent years as a gun enthusiast in his previous life, if he hadn't stood in front of those same rifles on display at the Xinhai Revolution Memorial Hall just weeks ago, he might have simply seen guns.
But he knew exactly what he was looking at, and knowing made his scalp prickle.
Mosin-Nagants were not supposed to be here.
During the Beiyang period, the Chinese military diet consisted primarily of German and Japanese hardware, with the occasional serving of French or Italian arms.
Russian weapons were another matter entirely — uncommon to the point of being anomalous.
The only plausible explanation for how those rifles had traveled from Russian armories to a Sichuan ravine ran through a single, pointed historical fact: the Russo-Japanese War had ended with Japan as the victor, and Japan had captured thousands of them.
Most had simply vanished, absorbed or discarded.
But some, apparently, had found their way here.
Yang Qiu's instincts — sharpened across a career of military service in another lifetime — told him these were not farmers who had stumbled onto surplus weapons.
The men in black carried themselves with a particular stillness, the kind that didn't come from nervousness, but from experience.
Whoever had equipped them with Japanese war trophies had done so deliberately.
These were no ordinary people.
"Who goes there?"
"I am Xiao Anguo."
The convoy's escort stepped forward, keeping his voice level.
"Transporting mountain goods to Chengdu on my master's orders."
"Mountain goods."
The man at the front of the blocking party repeated the words without any particular inflection. His eyes, however, were doing something else entirely — they kept sliding past Xiao Anguo toward the carts, quiet and calculating.
"Open them up. Let me have a look."
Yang Qiu felt the wrongness of it settle in his stomach.
Checkpoints were not unusual in Sichuan.
But there was something off in the way this man's gaze moved, something proprietary and too knowing, as though the inspection were a formality for a conclusion already reached.
"This... this really isn't—" Xiao Anguo stepped forward to negotiate, but before he could string together more than half a sentence, they were already pushing past him toward the carts.
His face went tight. He knew what was under those covers. Guns were a powder keg at the best of times; here and now, exposure would be nothing short of catastrophic.
"Don't move!"
One of the men swung his rifle toward Yang Qiu and the others, his eyes sharp and watchful.
"Sichuan has been turbulent lately. Our leader has been ordered by the Gelaohui to secure this stretch of road. We have reason to believe you may be Qing government agents sent to seize it by force."
Ma Kui had already slid close to Yang Qiu's side. "Gelaohui," he said under his breath, his voice flat with recognition. "They're tied to the Tongmenghui."
The Gelaohui.
Yang Qiu turned the word over.
He knew the saying: "A warm greeting to the Gelaohui reveals the many chivalrous figures of Sichuan."
The organization's roots ran deep — some claimed a lineage back to the Heaven and Earth Society itself.
In the late Qing, these men — in groups of three to five, short blades at their hips — had moved through the towns and villages of Sichuan like weather, impossible to ignore and difficult to predict.
Ma Kui clearly read the look on Yang Qiu's face as ignorance and leaned in further.
"The Gelaohui — also called the Pao Ge. They practically are Sichuan. One of their leaders, Qin Zaigeng, reportedly joined the Tongmenghui not long ago."
He exhaled slowly. "We're not getting through them quietly."
"Brother Ma."
Yang Qiu kept his voice easy, conversational. "There's something I don't quite follow. We're government troops. Why all the secrecy? Why not just say who we are and be done with it?"
Ma Kui gave him a look of weary pity.
"The moment we move, every Tongmenghui cell from here to Chengdu will know there are crates of steel headed for the Governor. Shanghai, Guangzhou—they have eyes in every tea house. And these Gelaohui boys? They're just looking for a reason to start a fire."
He shook his head, staring into the dark. "The news would outrun our horses. By the time we make camp tonight, the whole of Sichuan will be waiting for us."
"So what?"
Bingwen — young, sharp-jawed, and constitutionally incapable of restraint — crossed his arms. "Let it spread. What are they going to do about it?"
Ma Kui looked at him for a moment with the patient exhaustion of someone who had explained dangerous things to brave young men before. "Tiger, Bingwen — you're still new to all this. Sichuan isn't like other provinces. The people here have always been fierce. You've got Miao and Tibetan communities with their own loyalties, you've got the Tongmenghui stirring the pot, and now you've got the Gelaohui sitting on top of everything like they own it. Even Lord Zhang and Lord Li walk carefully here. That's why we were told to travel light, move quietly, and keep our heads down. If any of this were simple, we wouldn't have come this far eating road dust."
Yang Qiu said nothing for a moment.
Ahead, Xiao Anguo was still arguing, his voice strained with the particular tension of a man trying to keep a lid on something about to boil over.
"Revolutionaries…" Yang Qiu murmured — not with reverence, and not with contempt.
Something more complicated than either.
He watched the standoff for another moment, then asked quietly, "Brother Ma — do you believe in them? In what they stand for?"
Ma Kui smiled — a slow, private sort of smile.
He drew a cigarette from his breast pocket, turned it between his fingers without lighting it, and inhaled the dry tobacco smell.
Then: "You spent four to five years studying abroad, Tiger. Don't you particularly believe in all of that?"
Yang Qiu blinked.
It wasn't the question he'd expected from a broad-shouldered, heavily bearded man from Henan who looked like he'd been carved from riverbank clay.
But then — he supposed that was the point.
These days, every man who had studied abroad, attended a modern school, or been exposed to Western thought seemed to carry revolution around with him like a fashionable coat.
In today's terms, you might call it a trend.
But could a trend save a country?
The old Yang Qiu — the one who hadn't yet stood in that memorial hall, hadn't yet seen the full shape of what came after — would have answered without hesitation.
Now he wasn't so sure.
Yang Qiu knew the price of this "Revolution."
He had seen the aftermath , the sterile facts of school textbooks, the hushed stories of family elders, and the flickering heroics of television dramas —all of which had been distilled into the somber silence of the Memorial Halls he'd once visited,—the decades of splintered authority and the rise of the warlords who would eventually tear the country apart. Standing here now, the irony was bitter.
These idealistic Party members were brokering deals with men who were, in truth, little more than bandits wrapped in the flag of the Tongmenghui. To see "revolutionaries" arming local thugs with Japanese war spoils, preparing to ambush supply carts on a desolate Sichuan track, didn't just feel wrong—it felt like watching the first domino fall toward chaos.
It meant something.
He wasn't sure what yet, but the weight of it was undeniable.
He took a slow breath and dropped his voice. "Brother Ma — have you ever heard a particular phrase?"
"What phrase?"
Yang Qiu let the corner of his mouth curl. "Illegal armed forces."
Four words. Bingwen, who had been scanning the treeline nearby, caught them and snorted.
Ma Kui frowned, scratching the back of his neck, turning the phrase over and trying to locate where the joke had come from — when Yang Qiu's eyes caught something.
A glint. Fast and furtive.
Deep in the bushes to the left of the ravine.
His blood ran cold.
How in the hell did they get one of those?
"Scatter! Get down!"
He didn't wait for anyone to process it.
Both arms shot out — he shoved Bingwen left, Ma Kui right — and before either man had hit the ground, he was already moving. Three running steps across the cart, feet pushing off the boards, and he launched himself forward like a hawk dropping from altitude, arms extending to tackle Xiao Anguo bodily out of the line of whatever was about to come screaming out of those trees.
"Sir — careful!"