The Road Home

Chapter 30

The place to which Lu Yanchen was posted was not a military academy, but it still had strict requirements.

According to policy, each military instructor was required to rotate through being on duty at this base, and each rotation was for thirty days in which they were closed off from the outside world. Telephone use and Internet access would also be monitored. As Lu Yanchen was the head of the instructor group, he had the first rotation.

Each day, he and Gui Xiao would talk once on the phone. It was like they had returned to the days when he first joined the military, with the frequency and method of contact being more or less the same.

They could actually also use QQ[1], but the monitoring of textual communication was a bother as well, so he dropped that idea.

Even with only phone communication, he still admonished Gui Xiao to not say anything that was too embarrassingly lovey and sappy. There was a reason for such instruction.

Back when he had just been transferred from his company of new recruits into a military unit, the place at which he was stationed had also had this requirement of ensuring confidentiality. Gui Xiao had mailed five letters in succession to him. After the contents of those letters were widely read, they had immediately become "model love letters" praised by the mouths of the political instructors. Later, when Lu Yanchen was already in Erenhot, one of those political instructors happened to be passing through, and on the way, he visited Lu Yanchen, who by then was already a deputy commander. In front of a group of superiors, he had once more mentioned those love letters, dropping a sentence here about that "model example" and another sentence there about that "perfect template." Lu Yanchen's supervisors had listened to all of this and then afterwards had made a joke of it for a good half a year and more...

Hence, he felt there was very much a need for him to exhort Gui Xiao a bit on this so as to avoid repeating that mistake of the past.

After not even five days of classes, Lu Yanchen gave a good lesson to everyone.

On this day, he was sitting on the steps beside the training grounds, watching from afar a class of trainees as they did a test.

They had been divided into groups of ten.

Currently, the people in the first group were each in an individual protective circle, defusing a bomb.

They all thought that this was a competition, so they were making each minute and second count, wanting to give their best performance and beat out the other people. But something was really odd. Two minutes had passed, but still no one raised a hand in signal. The trainees in the remaining six groups standing at the back also felt that something was amiss, and they craned their necks to see.

Those trainees inside the protective circles were all wearing protective gear. It was terribly heavy, and they were tense and edgy, not knowing what had gone wrong.

From his peripheral vision, Lu Yanchen watched the second hand: Three seconds. Two seconds. One second...

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Five massive roars resounded.

Five protective-gear-clad trainees were thrown two metres by the explosions. There was one who simply sat on the ground, terrified into a daze; another who was utterly panic-stricken as he trippingly crawled to his feet; and others who removed their face masks and, with their foreheads coated in cold sweat, stared in shock at the instructor who was carrying out the test...

Although nothing had happened to the remaining five people, they were all stupefied as well.

Whether it was a trainee who had been thrown by the blast or one who had been standing in line waiting, all that anyone could hear was his or her own breathing and heartbeat.