Never Forget National Humiliation

Inside the elevator, the next person to wake up was Liu Zheng.

He suddenly opened his eyes, his chest heaving violently, sweat covering his forehead. For several seconds, he couldn’t even tell where he was. His hands groped wildly at his sides, but found nothing. Only then did he raise his head and look around.

When he saw Lin Mo standing not far away, he finally let out the breath he had been holding.

“I just... I just saw myself being force-fed poison.”

Liu Zheng swallowed, his voice hoarse. “They held me down and poured the poison into my mouth. I kept vomiting—vomiting until there was nothing left in my stomach, but I was still retching. Then I started vomiting blood, and finally... I died.”

By the end, he was shivering himself. There had been no pain, but the sensation alone was enough to terrify anyone.

Wang Xincheng stood in the corner with his back against the elevator wall, his white hair plastered to his forehead. He said faintly, “This old man was injected to death.”

One by one, the others gradually woke up.

The girls had taken the hardest hit. After Xie Yuling woke, she kept one hand pressed against her stomach, as though afraid she might actually throw up.

Ning Qingcheng was young. When she opened her eyes, she sat there in a daze. But once she recognized the people around her, tears immediately began to fall.

She threw herself at Xie Yuling and hugged her around the waist, her shoulders trembling.

“Sister Yuling... they were so cruel.”

Her words came in broken snatches. “They soaked people’s bodies in poison and recorded everything beside them. Even after the flesh had rotted away, they didn’t stop. They even said... they said the data was excellent.”

As she spoke, she looked at Lin Mo. “They were Japanese. I clearly heard them speaking Japanese.”

Ning Qingcheng had studied Japanese. After all, she had come from a privileged family and had naturally been taught foreign languages from an early age.

Xie Yuling said nothing. She only held her a little tighter, gently resting her other hand against the back of her head.

The comfort was delicate—so delicate that it seemed barely able to hold itself together.

Everyone understood that those scenes had not been ordinary nightmares. They were memories forcibly thrust into their minds—other people’s suffering, and a buried truth from the past.

The last to wake was Wang Keting.

The moment he opened his eyes, he rolled over and tried to vomit, clamping a hand over his mouth with his eyelids squeezed tightly shut. A muffled retch escaped his throat. Liu Zheng initially reached out to help him, but then withdrew his hand.

“Don’t throw up in here. Get out of the elevator if you need to.”

Wang Keting glared at him. He had no strength to curse and could only lean against the elevator wall, gasping for breath.

After a long while, everyone began telling the others what they had seen in their memories.

Some had been force-fed poison. Some had been injected with drugs. Others had been locked in airtight rooms while their reactions were observed.

Someone else had seen himself lying on an operating table, his body dismantled piece by piece as though it were nothing more than spare parts.

Every method of killing them was accompanied by the same cold indifference of an experimental record.

In the eyes of those people in protective suits, they weren’t human beings at all.

They were merely specimens, identification numbers, materials to be used up.

At that moment, Xie Yuling looked toward Lin Mo.

“What about you? You should have seen something too.”

Lin Mo drew a deep breath. Although he had been the first to wake up, he had indeed seen something.

And what he had witnessed was no ordinary nightmare.

—System: Never Forget National Humiliation—

The underground passage was narrow and dry. Electric wires were nailed along the walls, while overhead light bulbs flickered to life at intervals.

“Brother Han, there are heavy forces guarding the outside. Even if we blow this place up, we might not make it out.”

“If we can’t get out, then we won’t.”

Yu Youhan touched the inside of his protective suit, where a bundle of explosives had been strapped to his body.

His movements were steady—far too steady for a man preparing to die.

Beside him, Xiao Xian pushed a stretcher cart. Two time bombs were hidden beneath the white sheet covering it.

To get those things inside, they had lost three men. At the western district’s rendezvous point, it had taken until dawn to wash the blood away.

Xiao Xian gritted his teeth. “Brother Han, you know Japanese. The resistance needs you behind enemy lines. I’ll handle one of the detonation points. When the chaos starts, you take the chance to escape.”

Yu Youhan stopped walking.

Through the protective mask, his face could not be seen. Only his breathing echoed dully through the tube.

“Precisely because I’m still useful, I should be here.”

Xiao Xian fell silent.

Yu Youhan lowered his voice. “Don’t divide lives into those more valuable and those less valuable. We came here today not to choose who gets to live.”

Those words silenced everything Xiao Xian had been about to say.

The two men continued downward.

After the Japanese army occupied Guangzhou, they built this laboratory beneath the city. Aboveground, a warehouse sign hung over the entrance. Soldiers patrolled during the day, and trucks came and went at night.

The people of the city avoided the place like the plague. But Yu Youhan and his guerrilla unit had watched it for half a month and discovered that the things being transported inside were not merely medicine and equipment.

They were people.

People with their heads covered.

People bound inside truck compartments.

Some still struggled when they were taken in. As for those who came out, they were only Japanese.

Yu Youhan and the others did not know why the Japanese army had built an underground laboratory here. But they knew one thing very clearly: destroying it would certainly deal the Japanese army a blow.

They had brought only a small amount of explosives, all of them timed bombs seized from enemy transport vehicles.

With so few explosives, their placement had to be precise.

The structural supports, the medicine storage room, and the ventilation room—every one of those locations was essential.

The two men wore protective suits, with long breathing tubes trailing behind them. Their masks contained only two large glass lenses.

People were constantly coming and going here. No one would go out of their way to lift a mask and inspect someone’s face.

With these suits, and Yu Youhan’s ability to speak Japanese, they had passed unnoticed through numerous checkpoints.

On either side of the passage were rows of laboratories.

Behind the glass, people were strapped to metal frames, their skin covered in ulcers, while Japanese researchers beside them lowered their heads and took notes.

In another room, several children huddled in a corner, their arms riddled with needle marks.

A person in a protective suit held a petri dish and pointed here and there, appraising the children like livestock.

Another room contained animal cages, with diagrams of human organs displayed beside them.

The walls were covered with data charts. Red markings crowded every inch, recording transplant reactions, rejection rates, and time until death.

Xiao Xian’s steps faltered.

Yu Youhan reached out and pressed down on the edge of the stretcher cart.

“Keep moving.”

Just two words.

Xiao Xian clenched his teeth until they ached.

They both wanted to smash the glass, pull the prisoners out, and take them to safety.

But they were underground, with guns waiting outside and sentries stationed throughout the passages.

If they acted recklessly, they would not be able to save many people—and they would ruin the mission to destroy the laboratory.

The hardest part was not marching toward death.

It was seeing their countrymen suffer and still having to walk past them.

That was what allowed them to move freely through the underground facility.

Yu Youhan did not look back.

He was afraid that if he did, he would no longer be able to keep walking.

The Japanese called the people they captured “logs.”

To them, these people were nothing more than expendable materials—materials with no value whatsoever.

The two men pushed the cart around a bend.

Suddenly, footsteps came from ahead.

A Japanese man in a protective suit approached them. His clothing bore no department insignia, but he carried a clipboard and walked slowly, as though conducting an inspection.

“Oi! What are you two doing wandering around?”

Xiao Xian’s hand tightened. Instinctively, he reached toward the underside of the cart.

Yu Youhan moved half a step faster and seized his wrist.

They could not draw their knives.

The moment they alerted anyone, the entire floor would be locked down.