[Time, that mercilessly moving train, soon crossed the mire of blood and fire once more and roared into 2025.]
[As always, at this juncture of renewal and transition, the system's emotionless card-draw notification sounded punctually in your mind.]
[Nasal Turbinate Alternating Breathing Technique [N]] [Card effect: Through conscious control, the host can precisely regulate capillary congestion in the mucous membranes of both nostrils, forcing themselves to breathe through only one nostril at a time and switching sides with perfect accuracy every ten minutes.] [Tactical value: This forced rotation between nostrils ensures that the olfactory receptors in the host's nasal cavity perpetually alternate between "rest" and "work," granting complete immunity to "olfactory fatigue" in extreme environments.] [Even in a slaughterhouse where the smell of blood is thick enough to suffocate you and make you retch, you can still keenly detect the faintest trace of gunpowder or chemical gas in the air amid the overwhelming stench.]
[You coldly glanced at this seemingly professional but utterly useless skill. The physical enhancement to your sense of smell granted by this Card would probably never prove useful, even on the day you died.]
[You could not even be bothered to give it another second's thought before casually tossing it into the vast, bottomless card collection in your consciousness, like discarding a worthless coin.]
[Yet the system's unruffled calm only threw the real world's madness into sharper relief.]
[In this new year, the war, which had long seemed mired in an inescapable stalemate, underwent a terrifying escalation capable of changing the global order.]
[A major power that had remained behind the scenes, possessing cutting-edge military technology and immense resources, finally lost patience, brazenly tore away its disguise, and intervened with lightning force in the Middle Eastern battlefield that had long since been reduced to