Inside the vast Cathay Grand Theater, more than a thousand people were shaken to the core. Some were flushed with excitement and pride; others' legs trembled, and they could barely sit still, as though that nuclear bomb had exploded over their own heads.
For a moment, the atmosphere turned strange.
On the screen, the film kept rolling. Over the sea, billowing smoke surged thousands of meters into the sky and lingered there. The plane carrying Ma Zhang swooped down between sea and sky, filming the waters below.
Many warships had snapped apart or been torn open. Seawater poured in, slowly dragging them under. The bodies of hundreds of thousands of fish and shrimp churned to the surface, and here and there, soldiers' corpses rose with the swell. Their faces were twisted; some had lost their faces altogether. It was a horrifying sight.
Sheets of oil spread across the water, glinting with nauseating colors beneath the sun. Broken planks, military boots, helmets, and other debris floated in the slick among the dead fish and shrimp. That stretch of sea looked like an enormous garbage dump.
Even through a screen, Song Chengwu, Hu Xinmin, and the others felt uneasy, as though a thick stench were rushing out at them. They held their breath without thinking.
Then Ma Zhang's voice came from the film again. "Tsk. So a nuclear bomb with a yield of just a hundred kilotons is this powerful. I can't imagine what a megaton or ten-megaton bomb would be like—"
The audience was even more startled. A rustle of whispers broke out.
"A bomb this powerful still isn't the limit?!"
"That one was a hundred kilotons, and it destroyed a fleet with tens of thousands of men. What about a megaton bomb, or even a ten-megaton one? Could it destroy