After the joke was made, Wu Xie walked while saying to the other two, “The most important thing now is to figure out the cause of this tragedy, so starting tomorrow, we need to inspect all the vehicles. What is our greatest fortune right now? It’s that these people were buried and died due to being trapped by the sandstorm, rather than dying from lack of food and water. So perhaps there will be many resources left in the vehicles. These resources, like military compressed biscuits, may still be edible in such dry weather, so we must search every vehicle very carefully and look for any rations on each corpse.”

Li Cu asked, “How do you know these people didn’t die of thirst or hunger? I think a sandstorm can trap people at most, but it wouldn’t kill them. So their cause of death is still the exhaustion of food and water.”

Wu Xie patted Li Cu’s shoulder: “You’ve lived in the city for too long, do you even know what a sandstorm is?” Li Cu shook his head, and Wu Xie continued, “A sandstorm means that when it happens, everything around you is solid rather than gas, do you understand? In other words, you ultimately die of asphyxiation. There are two types of asphyxiation: one is when a large amount of sand blows into your mouth and nose, making it impossible for you to breathe. If you don’t have a very solid windbreak, you will die a horrible death. The second type is when you are completely buried by the sand.”

“Collect… collect the corpses,” Li Cu said. Before he could finish, Wu Xie kicked him down from the sand dune: “Speak Chinese.”

The next two days were filled with tedious work. At first, Li Cu was somewhat afraid of the dead, but by the evening of the first day, he was already able to treat those dried corpses as lifeless objects, just like Wu Xie did. They pulled all the bodies out of the vehicles and found a distant sand dune to bury them one by one. Later, they realized there were simply too many bodies, and their personal strength could not bury them neatly and cleanly, so they had no choice but to throw the bodies off the sand dune and let them slide down the sand, hoping to fill the sand gully with the corpses.

By the afternoon of the second day, they estimated they had processed around 1,600 corpses. The enormous pile of bodies had formed a mound of the dead, and Wu Xie decided to erect a tombstone for these fallen soldiers. When setting up the tombstone, Li Cu asked Wu Xie what name would be appropriate for it.

What should we call it? Wu Xie said, “Regardless of the purpose for which they came to this place, they have died after all. Respecting the dead is our traditional virtue.”

“How about calling it the Monument to the Martyrs of a Thousand?” Li Cu suggested.

Wang Meng countered, “Actually, during that period of history, while ‘martyr’ is an honorable title, it also has many flaws associated with it. Calling them martyrs feels uncomfortable; it would be better to choose a name that has some cultural sentiment.”

Wu Xie looked at him and said, “You understand cultural sentiment too?” Wang Meng circled his head and chuckled. Li Cu continued, “How about we take ‘the sorrow of the parted’? The ‘parted’ refers to those who leave their hometown and can never return. Which sorrow is that? Of course, it’s the sorrow of empty lament.”

Wu Xie nodded, “Indeed, you are a fine flower of our motherland. Alright, let’s erect this monument. You can write these three characters, right?”