Born Human, I Am Honored

Immediately afterward, the white-haired old man began recounting his past experiences to Su Wen and Jiang Menghan:

"Before I became the leader of this small Resistance Army camp, I was merely the village chief of a poor village.

Our village was deep within a Southeast Asian rainforest somewhere in Indonesia. Poor—so very poor.

So,

on what seemed like an ordinary morning,

many children in the village came down with severe illnesses, yet there was no medicine to treat them. So I wrote a letter asking for help from Denpasar, the capital of Bali Island.

But,

long after the letter was sent,

the people who arrived were not doctors, but a group of armed men in camouflage."

At this point, the old man even slapped himself hard across the face.

"I am a sinner!

Those armed men had burst out of the dense forest like ghosts. There was not the slightest glimmer of humanity in their eyes, only greed and cold cruelty.

Then,

within that memory that resembled the end of the world,

many children were taken away. Even I myself was violently abducted and imprisoned in a dark, damp dungeon.

The dungeon was surrounded by cold stone walls, and the air was thick with the mingled stench of mold and blood.

Here, all the prisoners—countless pitiable people from different nations and of different skin colors—looked pale and helpless from despair.

We were treated like livestock, receiving only enough food and water each day to barely stay alive. But that was not the end. What awaited us, and the children, was an even more horrifying fate.

One night,

I was dragged out of the dungeon and brought into a brightly lit operating room. The air reeked of disinfectant, but it could not conceal the suffocating terror.

I saw the cold instruments