White Olive Tree

1 • Explosion

The day Song Lisa met Li Jungkook was a very ordinary day.

On June 3, Ale City, located in the north-central part of the East Country, looked the same as any other day. At eight o'clock in the morning, Song Lisa opened the window of the hotel. Downstairs, a north-south street led directly to the elementary school at the end. The shops on both sides of the road were short and flat, and the high and low residential houses were hidden behind the trees.

Looking around, the streets were dusty, with no one to clean up the paper scraps and fallen leaves, but the sky was blue and the sun was shining brightly.

In the restaurant downstairs, a young mother in a headscarf and a black robe sat at the table with her little son to eat breakfast; the shop owner stood behind the stall, cutting grilled meat with one hand and flipping flatbread with the other. The aroma of grilled meat, boiled beans and flatbreads wafted through the street. In the repair shop across the street, several middle-aged men pushed their motorcycles in front of the shop door early, talking to the repairman in a flurry of words in the Eastern language that Song Lisa couldn't understand. A whistle sounded not far away, and the bus stopped by the roadside. A group of elementary school students in school uniforms got off the bus and ran towards the school. The bus driver rolled down the window and talked to the police patrolling on the roadside.

Everything seemed the same as every day before, but also a little different.

The local restaurant was still open, but KFC had already closed; the dental clinic was opening, but the mobile phone store had been closed for more than a week. On the door was a poster of a new model of a Chinese mobile phone brand, the poster was tattered, and the paper was shaking in the morning breeze. A stray dog was curled up in a pile of torn newspapers in the corner. The glass window of the clothing store next door was also covered with a layer of dust, and two mannequins could be vaguely seen in the window, one wearing a black robe and headscarf to cover her face, and the other wearing a white shirt and flowered short skirt.

The morning breeze swept through the fallen leaves and paper scraps, but could not blow away the still skirt in the window.

Song Lisa sighed for no reason, and a faint melancholy in her heart was like a piece of dusty glass. This was her last day in this country. Today her overseas assignment ended and she was about to return. It took 4 hours to drive from Ale City to the capital Gama, and the flight back home was at 11 o'clock at night.

She was leaning against the window, browsing the internet with her phone. It was afternoon in China, and netizens were discussing topics like celebrity cheating and the most beautiful tofu beauty.

It's 8:30 a.m. local time, and it's almost time to pack up.

She had just folded the tripod when the floor beneath her feet suddenly shook, as if there was an earthquake. But it wasn't an earthquake! She grabbed the camera, turned on the switch and rushed to the window, and there was a loud thunder explosion in the sky.

But the world outside the window was normal, and people on the street looked up like a group of confused geese. Soon there was another loud noise, one after another - it was a cannonball.

The war has begun.

The streets were suddenly in an uproar, people were shouting and running around.

Song Lisa rushed to the rooftop with her camera tripod and communication equipment on her back. She looked out over the wasteland outside the city. She could not see any troops. But the roar of artillery fire continued. It was Haru City, dozens of kilometers northeast of Ale City, where one of her male colleagues was stationed.