5: Chapter 5 Bloodbath at Blackstone Village

The wind died down. The entire valley fell silent, as if someone had pressed a mute button, leaving only the faint sound of sentries changing shifts in the distance.

They appeared just as the sky began to lighten.

On the horizon, the figures of the orcs advanced like a slow-moving mudslide. The ones at the front carried a crude battering ram—a whole felled tree trunk, one end sharpened and wrapped in crude iron sheets. The dense ranks behind them exuded a foul odor of rust and rotting flesh, carried by the wind, so strong even those standing deepest inside the walls could smell it.

Rock counted once, then again, and cursed under his breath. One hundred and thirty. Twelve militiamen. Three days to teach ten men how to make gunpowder, each with at most three grenades to throw, a hit rate of less than fifty percent.

A vein throbbed on his forehead. One hundred and thirty orcs, twelve militiamen. He quickly calculated the exchange ratio in his mind, arriving at the same conclusion as Lin Mo—not enough. But he didn't voice it. He glanced at Old Zhou on the wall, who already had an arrow nocked on his bowstring.

Factoring in Old Zhou's arrows, Rock's battle-axe, and the newly repaired wall—Lin Mo silently recalculated the potential exchange ratio. The result: not enough.

But he didn't share that number with anyone.

"Fight as planned," he said.

Time passed differently on this planet than on Earth. No phone reminded him of meetings, no calendar told him what day of the week it was. Only sunrise and sunset, only battle and peace, only being alive and being dead. He recorded the days with vertical lines in his notebook, drawing a horizontal line every five. This primitive counting method gave him a sense of grounding—at least he still knew which day he was on.

The first row of orcs stepped into the pit traps. Sharpened stakes pierced the feet and shins of the front ones, their agonized screams mingling with the sound of breaking bones. The orcs behind didn't stop, nor did they detour—they simply charged forward, trampling over their fallen companions and their cries.

Old Zhou's arrow struck the eye of the first orc carrying the battering ram. It collapsed with a heavy thud, but another immediately took up the ram.

Rock, frantic on the wall, veins bulging on his forehead: "Damn it! Aren't they afraid of dying?!"

Lin Mo also wanted to know the answer to that question. But the battering ram was already crashing into the wall—

Thud.

The entire wall shook violently, clumps of dirt and debris raining down from the cracks.

Thud—Thud—!

Cracks spread out from the impact point like a spiderweb. Lin Mo had calculated how many such impacts this wall could withstand—the answer was no more than ten.

"Grenades! Throw them!"

The first batch of clay pots flew out, exploding amidst the orc ranks. Shrapnel flew in all directions, dark green blood raining down on the muddy ground like a downpour. Several orcs fell—the rest charged on, trampling over their corpses. The pressure from the numerical disparity pressed down on every militiaman's chest like a solid wall.

That wall held out a bit longer than Lin Mo had estimated. It wasn't until the eighth impact that the northwest corner finally crumbled with a roar, opening a breach. The moment the orcs surged through the gap, Rock collided head-on with the first one. His battle-axe bit deep into the orc's shoulder, the blade wedged in bone, impossible to pull free for a moment. The orc let out a roar and backhanded Rock in the chest—he was sent flying, crashing into the wall of a wooden hut behind him, blood immediately seeping from the corner of his mouth.

The breach was lost.

Lin Mo raised the flintlock musket—its barrel was longer than usual, its powder charge heavier. He aimed at the second orc charging through the breach and pulled the trigger.

The roar of the shot hurt his eardrums, white smoke billowing.

A fist-sized hole exploded in the orc's chest. It looked down at the wound, then up at Lin Mo, before collapsing like a falling mountain of flesh.

This was the first intelligent being Lin Mo had personally killed in this world. His hands trembled—but his reloading motions didn't stop.

That night, he had his first dream since arriving in this world. There were no orcs, no Golden Throne, no golden light—only a young man in a hoodie sitting in a cubicle, staring blankly at a PRD document on a computer screen. The document's title was "Q3 User Retention Optimization Plan." He stared at those words for a long time, then reached out and closed the screen. He closed the screen in his dream. Waking up, he found himself crying—silently, tears flowing from his temples into his hair. He lay on the wooden plank bed, eyes open, watching the moonlight filtering through the oilpaper window, waiting for dawn. When dawn came, he got up and continued loading ammunition. He didn't tell anyone about that dream.

The golden light at the edge of his vision flickered almost imperceptibly.

Not data, not parameters—it was a line of poetry. Like someone had crumpled a paper full of words and stuffed it into his mind. He didn't have time to unfold it, only grasping one line:

*The moon is dark, geese fly high; the chieftain flees in the dead of night.*

*We would pursue with light cavalry, snow fills our bows and blades.*

*—Lu Lun, 'Song of the Frontier.' He was stunned—why would there be Earth's poetry in the Emperor's memories?*

"What's your name?" Lin Mo asked.

The soldier in tattered uniform grinned—missing a front tooth, making him look a bit foolish when he smiled, but his eyes held a light: "Rex, Seventh Legion. And you?"

"Lin Mo."

"Good name. Glad to meet you alive."

Old Yang Tou was the second to charge into the breach. His weapon had been knocked away in the earlier struggle. Without thinking, he used his shoulder to ram into an orc's gut, desperately pushing it back out of the breach. When the second orc's battle-axe swung down, he didn't dodge. The blade slashed diagonally from his right shoulder into his chest. Old Yang Tou let out a muffled grunt, his knees buckling, but he didn't fall immediately.

He turned his head and shouted something toward the breach. His voice was so hoarse it was unclear whether it was words or blood. Then his body finally collapsed—falling beside the orc he had pushed out of the breach. His teeth were clenched tightly on the orc's throat. Dead, still biting.

Rock witnessed this.

He scrambled up from the ground, spat out a mouthful of bloody foam, rushed back into a house, and emerged carrying a bundle—six clay pots tied together, their fuses twisted into one thick rope.

"Rock, are you insane?!" Lin Mo shouted.

"They're the insane ones!" Rock lit the fuse and hurled the bundle with all his might toward the densest cluster of orcs.

BOOM—!!!

The blast wave widened the breach by half. Orcs within the radius were blown to pieces, the closest ones flung outside the wall by the shockwave. Rock's chest was grazed by the blast, sending him tumbling backward, rolling twice on the ground, his face covered in grime and blood.

The air was thick with the acrid smell of saltpeter and rust mixed together, a dry, burning sensation in the throat.

But he stood up.

He stood up, bent down, and picked up the battle-axe stained with green blood from the ground.

"Come on!" His voice was hoarse yet deafening. "Come on!!"

At that moment, his expression was completely different from his usual bragging-while-drinking self. That expression didn't belong to a reckless brute; it belonged to someone who had defended something.

The orcs stopped their charge.

They halted before the mangled breach. Not all of them. About half. But the remaining half was enough to tip the scales of the entire battlefield. Those green-skinned creatures growled low, a flicker of hesitation appearing for the first time in their yellow eyes—these humans were too tenacious. Every time they thought they'd broken, someone else stood up.

Then they retreated.

Only when the last orc's back vanished into the morning mist did Lin Mo truly see the cost.

Old Yang Tou's body lay on its back inside the breach, his right hand still clenched in a fist. Aunt Zhang's husband, Old Zhao, was crushed under a collapsed wooden shed, his body already cold. Militiaman Ah Wang leaned against a broken section of wall, eyes open toward the sky, a fist-sized hole in his chest. Xiao Liu's neck was twisted unnaturally, a large dark stain spreading beneath him. Er Gou—that sixteen-year-old boy who had been smiling and following Lin Mo to learn how to load gunpowder just yesterday—lay curled on the ground as if asleep, but would never wake again.

Five names.

Five smiling faces.

Five pairs of eyes that would never open again.

Rock sat on a piece of rubble, taking three tries to light a cigarette—the blood on his fingers had dampened the match twice. Wang Defu stood in the midst of the ruins, leaning on a wooden stick, his back more hunched than ever, as if he had aged ten years overnight. He didn't cry, just stood there—staring at the bodies covered with white cloth.

Lin Mo crouched beside Er Gou's body, reaching out to close the young boy's eyelids. He wanted to say something, but every word stuck in his throat. He had only lived in this world for eleven days. He had already learned to recognize corpses.

His fingers brushed against the octagram pendant in his pocket. The metal surface was scalding hot, as if just pulled from a fire.

At that moment, the golden light at the edge of his vision flickered—not a prompt, not a warning, just a light. Faint, like a distant signal, crossing ten thousand years, landing on his shoulder.

He didn't know what it meant. But at least, on this blood-soaked muddy ground, before the five bodies covered in white cloth, amidst the gradually dispersing gunpowder smoke in the morning mist—he wasn't alone.

*Five names carved into the same wooden stake,*

*the village blackened by gun smoke gasps in the dawn light.*

*—Lin Mo, 'Charcoal Poem Inscribed on the Inner Wall After the Battle, Dawn'*

The night was as deep as a well that had swallowed all sound. He stood by the window, an occasional wolf howl echoing in the distance—not from orcs, but from a native creature truly belonging to this planet. This planet was still alive. He was still alive. Tonight, just live. Tomorrow's matters could wait for tomorrow.