The Rain of Shells

The sky was impossibly blue.

His body, however, was growing impossibly cold.

Perhaps, he truly was fated to perish here.

He blinked, his mind drifting back to the tapestry of his life.

Lin Yu, twenty-four years old, was a mercenary.

This wasn’t some hackneyed trope, but the stark reality of his age and profession.

From a young age, he had been captivated by games like Call of Duty and Battlefield, often immersing himself in their digital battlefields. After graduating from university, he had languished at home for two years, only to be seized by some inexplicable urge, obtaining a tourist visa and venturing abroad to become a ‘volunteer’.

Today, he had, in a twisted sense, fulfilled his wish, standing on the front lines of what was termed ‘the fight against fasces (TL Note: ‘Shùbàng’ refers to fasces, a symbol associated with fascism.)’.

Yet, this so-called war, it seemed, was proving far more brutal than he had ever imagined.

Small, dark specks, harbingers of death, danced across the sky—enemy observation drones. Artillery fire would likely descend within the next minute, he surmised. Or perhaps a suicide drone would come hurtling towards him?

Regardless, escape was no longer an option.

Summoning his last vestiges of strength, he clutched at the young Russian’s pant leg. In his still-unpracticed Russian, he pleaded with every fiber of his being:

[Please, take this back to the rear…]

Ah.

He had run.

But now he was back.

Yes, run, run far away.

Watching as the other man departed with his last will and testament, Lin Yu finally allowed himself a long, relieved sigh, settling to quietly await the shell or drone that would claim his life.

He hoped no other fool would journey thousands of miles to this desolate land only to meet their end.

The drone’s hum drew nearer from the distance.

He hoped no other fool would take for granted a life of peace and prosperity.

The drone’s shadow began to envelop him.

He had one final wish.

‘If transmigration truly exists, I hope to go to a different world—one without drones… haha, well, that’s just a fantasy before a drone blasts me to smithereens, I suppose.’

Years later, a certain mediocre doctor, recalling these very words, would invariably find herself raising a hand to slap her own cheeks twice.

Why had she only wished for ‘no drones’? How could something that could plunge the entire world into hatred, into fury, into an endless cycle of death and slaughter—something that could rob her of all happiness in this life—be merely ‘drones’?

It was too late.

The wire fuse struck the ground, and the ensuing explosion carried away both his dying life and his final wish.

****

Upon reopening her eyes, the sky above was still a boundless, cloudless blue, and the scent of blood still permeated the air around her—though it seemed not to be her own.

Having been abruptly thrown to the ground, her mind in a chaotic haze, Lin Yu finally recalled what had transpired.

Years ago, in her previous life, she had stepped on a landmine and collapsed before enemy lines, only to be sent to another world by an FPV drone. This new world boasted a technological level roughly equivalent to the late nineteenth century, having already undergone its own industrial revolution.

Moreover, it was a beautiful parallel world—one where drones didn’t buzz erratically through the sky, and fighter jets didn’t drop iron bombs!

Indeed, it had been, until she grew up.

Lin Yu’s essence now inhabited a girl named Lin Yu, and she endured a childhood of poverty and hunger, though mercifully she never starved to death. She would drift to sleep listening to the village elders recount tales of immortal lords and celestial maidens.

Her homeland, Diacra, once harbored ‘Cultivators’—beings just like those described in the novels of her previous life. They pursued Foundation Establishment, Golden Cores, immortal arts, and sword techniques, with the sole aim of ascending to immortality, capable of cleaving mountains with a single sword stroke.

‘Once’.

Decades prior, the Great Collapse had obliterated everything the Cultivators relied upon for their existence, and ‘cultivation’ ceased to be. Stripped of their abilities, they quickly faded into obscurity, or else turned to practicing the magic introduced by foreigners.

Without the aid of immortal arts in production and daily life, Diacra was soon compelled to accept various magical industrial goods. While accepting the dumping of these products, the nation strove to catch up technologically. However, due to its late start and the presence of too many stubborn old-timers from the cultivation world, it proved difficult to swiftly match the level of those Westerners on the continent.

Consequently, it had become a semi-colony. Truly, there was nothing new under the sun.

But that had all happened over a decade ago. The current imperial court had established a new dynasty, named Chu. The reigning emperor had, almost miraculously, brought the application of magic technology up to advanced global standards, establishing Chu as a powerful force in the vibrant lands of the Far East.

While the Westerners exclaimed at the awakening of the ‘Sleeping Lion of the East’, they swiftly launched a hegemonic war against Diacra to dispute the allegiance of its vassal states. This war had raged on ever since, employing every conceivable tactic.

Apart from the absence of planes soaring overhead for reconnaissance and bomb-dropping, the war’s ferocity now paralleled, and even surpassed, that of her previous life—this alternate world knew no Geneva Conventions, and the Westerners, unable to comprehend their language, rarely took prisoners on the battlefield.

Lin Yu, conscripted for the second time, cradled her rifle, her gaze fixed on the birds soaring above the battlefield.

Lin Yu, fourteen… no, fifteen years old, was a conscripted private.

She currently lay in a trench, awaiting the descending artillery shells that would send her away once more.

“Hey! Private! Do you want to die?!”

A military boot splattered mud onto her face, its steel-capped toe viciously kicking her in the side. Struck hard, she immediately curled up, clutching at the painful spot.

“Ugh…”

The boot’s owner seized her uniform at the shoulder, dragging her forcefully from the trench passage into a dug-out shell-proof shelter in the wall.

She did want to die; she wanted to die from the pain, from the exhaustion, and from—the regret.

Why had she dared to climb onto that train to sell steamed buns? Why hadn’t she dared to let the lieutenant confirm her gender?

In this life, as a girl, war should theoretically have been far removed from her. Her age aside, her gender alone should have ensured her an honorable discharge and a return home.

That was the theory.

In practice, however, the unit Lin Yu found herself in was a peripheral branch of a peripheral branch. As the weakest fighting force raised by a local warlord, it naturally couldn’t afford to be picky about its recruits.

She was like the peddler Ding Xiao Er, who sold eggs from a basket. She had been hawking her homemade white steamed buns on a military train undergoing temporary repairs at the village entrance. Too many people had pushed her, preventing her from getting off, and an officer with poor eyesight had mistaken her for a boy, drafting her into the army.

After much pleading, she finally convinced the officer with the foreign accent that she was, in fact, a girl. But then an unknown attack occurred, and before she could disembark, she was swept along to the front lines. The quartermaster handed her a steel helmet and a rifle, then unceremoniously kicked her into a communication trench.

Clutching the unused rifle, she aimlessly searched for someone of higher rank to report her situation. However, because she dared not publicly remove her trousers, the lieutenant did not immediately release her, instead instructing her to wait for a medic from the rear to verify her identity.

While she waited, the shelling began. She was pushed out of the officers’ bunker, stumbled through the trench, and then was thrown to the ground by a blast wave.

She gazed at the sky.

She was brutally kicked again, then dragged into the shell-proof shelter.

“Didn’t you hear the shelling, you brat?! Do you want to get blown to bits?!”

A middle-aged man who appeared to have some rank yelled fiercely at her, his accent peculiar and laced with profanities she couldn’t understand.

Shells rained down, and with each explosion, a deluge of damp earth sifted through the gaps in the logs overhead.

Trenches again, she thought.

She sat up, dazed, the familiar environment stirring long-forgotten memories.

In her previous life as a ‘volunteer’, she had huddled in an even cruder dugout than this one, enduring two days of small-scale shelling before assaulting another makeshift bunker in an infantry fighting vehicle.

An anti-tank missile had obliterated the IFV, and a landmine had claimed her right leg. She had been abandoned before the enemy lines in a forested area, where she shared an intimate first kiss with an FPV drone.

It seemed this alternate world was merely devoid of drones.

Death, in this war, had intensified its grip, disregarding all her struggles to date, vowing to extinguish her life once more in a rain of shrapnel. Lin Yu, Lin Yu, drenched in a rain of shells. (TL Note: The character’s name ‘Lin Yu’ (林雨) is a homophone for ‘rain of shells’ (淋雨), creating a somber pun.)

She found herself utterly unable to smile.