Chapter 432: This Leap Covered His End
On the massive screen.
Lei Zhong’s finger had already hooked the pull ring.
The manic look of a desperado who had reached the end of the line exploded across his face.
“Clink.”
A very light, crisp sound.
But in the Dolby Atmos screening hall, that sound hammered the eardrums painfully.
The safety pin popped free, flipping through the air and scattering a streak of cold light.
That second stretched to infinity.
Jiang He’s pupils trembled violently.
From the initial terror at seeing the grenade, to the panic when he looked back at his comrades closing in behind him,
and finally, it hardened into a resolute relief.
It wasn’t the tragic heroism of someone rushing to die.
It was the calm of someone thinking, finally, this is over.
“No—!!!”
The narcotics team captain’s roar was still lodged in his throat, his body still driven by forward momentum.
Jiang He moved.
He lunged forward violently again.
He opened his arms in midair, in a kind of embrace, and hurled himself at the demon trying to drag everyone down with him.
“Bang!”
Two bodies slammed heavily onto the ground.
Jiang He pressed his chest hard against the smoking grenade, pinning Lei Zhong beneath him.
He locked all the deaths into his own embrace.
In that instant, Director Jiang Wen made an extremely daring edit.
All sounds from the speakers—wind, roars, footsteps—cut off abruptly.
The whole world was muted.
On the massive screen there was no sound at all.
Only a glare of white so blinding it hurt to look at erupted from beneath Jiang He.
The light was so intense it swallowed color, swallowed contours, swallowed the young policeman’s figure.
Hall Four fell into a deathlike silence.
Everyone’s heart skipped a beat at that moment.
The shock left the audience’s minds blank.
Chu Hong sat beside Jiang Ci.
When the white light flared, her body shook violently.
The hand that had been gripping Jiang Ci suddenly clenched harder,
her nails digging deep into the back of his hand with enough force to draw blood.
She stared at the white glare, tears overflowing silently.
That was her husband.
That was her son.
That was the image she had dreaded in nightmares and woken from countless times over twenty years.
So this was how it would end.
Not even a farewell could be said.
The white light didn’t fade; the image began to flash back within the glare.
Fragments of memory, like frames on a lantern wheel, swept rapidly through Jiang He—or rather, through Jiang Ci’s mind.
On the police academy drill field, a young Jiang He stood beneath the national flag, right fist clenched, eyes clear.
“I pledge to volunteer as a People’s Police officer of the People’s Republic of China…”
The scene shattered.
It was the night after he was forced to swallow drugs for the first time,
he curled on the bathroom floor like a dog, banging his head against the wall, trying to use pain to fight withdrawal.
The scene shifted again.
In front of Red River Elementary’s school bus, he shoved away the little girl offering candy with a feral face, and when he turned, his fingernails had cut his palm, blood trickling out.
There was also that bowl of scalding chicken soup.
He drank it in a single gulp, tears flowing from the heat, yet forced a smile and said, “So warm.”
Finally, the footage froze on that crumpled sheet of stationery.
It was the night before his undercover assignment, the only time he was allowed to write a Letter Home.
The pen hovered over the paper, ink bleeding into a round blot.
At that moment Jiang Ci’s own voiceover sounded.
The voice was light, clean, no longer the street-slanging low-level dealer but the boy-next-door in his early twenties.
“Mom, actually I don’t like fish, but I was afraid you’d be sad, so I never told you.”
“Dad… I finally understand you.”
Those lines weren’t in the script.
Jiang Ci had added them on the fly in the dubbing booth, watching that footage.
Each sentence slowly cut Chu Hong’s heart.
At last the white light dispersed.
Only a chaotic field of shattered stones remained.
Jiang He lay prone on the ground.
His back was a raw, bloody ruin, his black jacket blown apart and fused to charred flesh.
A few meters away the SWAT officers charged forward, then stopped in their tracks.
They stared at the figure on the ground, their eyes reddening, their hands trembling on their guns.
“Kh—”
A faint cough broke the silence.
Jiang He moved.
He painfully, little by little, turned his head.
The stormy, ink-dark sky suddenly split at that moment.
A shaft of golden morning light, like a blade, pierced through the gunpowder smoke, through this land of crime,
and fell on that face smeared with blood and ash.
In that instant, there was a light in Jiang He’s eyes.
It was the last focusing of his slack pupils.
He looked at that beam and the corner of his mouth lifted extremely slowly.
His lips fluttered, and with the last of his strength, he breathed the final line of the film.
The voice was faint, a breathy whisper, yet it sounded like thunder.
“Day… is breaking.”
The frame froze on that bloody smile.
Color drained away, turning into black and white.
The camera slowly pulled back; the prone figure became smaller and smaller,
until at last he became a nameless monument in those towering mountains.
“Ping!”
Jiang Ci sat in the darkened theater as the system’s voice sounded in his mind.
It was no longer the usual cold, mechanical tone.
This time it carried a faint, indistinguishable compassion and a static-like electrical tinge.
The system’s settlement announcement rang wildly.
What came after he could no longer hear.
He felt an overwhelming exhaustion and slumped back in his seat.
Inside Hall Four,
a few hundred viewers were nailed to their chairs.
Only restrained breaths rose and fell in the darkness.
This was a suffocating silence.
It was the blankness that follows being hit head-on by sorrow and shock, when words fail.
In the front rows,
the girl who had been crying had her tissues shredded to bits in her hands.
She stared blankly at the blackened screen, like a soul had been ripped away.
In the very last row,
Old Detective Xing, his face scarred by burns, rose slowly.
He took off his faded cap and, with the three fingers he still had, clutched the brim and pressed it against his chest.
He stood as rigid as a rifle.
Tears slid silently down that grotesque scar and into his mouth.
In that deathly quiet,
“Ha ha ha ha ha!”
“Oh my god I can’t, I’m dying! That was hilarious!”
Deafening laughter pierced through the not-very-soundproof wall.
It came from neighboring Hall Two.
Laughing All the Way had just let out.
It was a family-friendly comedy; the audience streamed out discussing how loud Shen Teng’s gag had landed and where to go for dinner.
That shameless laughter, even through a wall, sounded unbearably grating.
Separated by a single wall,
this brutal, absurd contrast
felt like a slapping blow to everyone in Hall Four.
A nameless, inarticulate rage and sorrow fermented in the darkness.
The louder those laughs grew, the more suffocated the people here felt.
Someone laughed because someone had shielded them from the darkness.
But those who shielded them couldn’t even keep their names.