Chapter 4: A Quiet Clean-up
The blinding mist of vaporized water and concrete dust began to settle, clinging heavily to the floor of the muddy pit. The frantic sweeping beams of tactical flashlights cut through the gloom, casting long, erratic shadows against the reinforced concrete pillars.
"Manager Zhou! There's someone over there!"
The guard with the injured, bleeding arm pointed his flashlight toward the center of the drained puddle.
Manager Zhou adjusted his grip on his heavy, high-voltage tactical baton, his boots squelching aggressively through the mud as he stepped into the clearing. The beam of his light locked onto Lin Feng.
To the guards, the youth standing before them looked completely miserable. Lin Feng’s university-branded windbreaker was torn at the shoulder, soaked through with freezing water, and caked in thick, black industrial silt. He stood slightly bent, his shoulders shivering, his head lowered so that his messy, wet hair obscured his face. He looked exactly like a terrified college student who had been caught in a horrific industrial accident.
"You..." Manager Zhou’s eyes narrowed into dangerous, icy slits. He recognized the kid. It was the scrawny brat who had begged for a graveyard shift at the front gate earlier. "Why didn't you evacuate with the rest of the scum?"
"I... my shoe got stuck in the mud, Uncle," Lin Feng stammered, his voice trembling perfectly with the high-pitched vibration of a panicked mortal. He held up a hand to shield his eyes from the blinding glare of the flashlight. "Then the pipe exploded... and the blue light... everything went dark. I can't see anything. Please, don't report me to the foreman. I really need this job."
Manager Zhou didn't look relieved. He swept his flashlight past Lin Feng, scanning the fractured granite bedrock behind the youth. The glowing, sapphire luminescence that had filled the trench minutes ago was entirely gone. The water pooling around Lin Feng’s ankles was completely mundane, dirty, and gray.
"Did you touch anything down here, brat?" Manager Zhou asked, his voice deceptively low as he walked within three paces of Lin Feng. The two remaining guards flanked him, their hands resting heavily on their holstered batons.
"T-Touch what?" Lin Feng squeaked, taking a clumsy, fearful step backward. "The water was freezing. I thought a chemical line ruptured. I was just trying to crawl out before the walls caved in."
Manager Zhou stared intently at Lin Feng’s face. He was looking for any sign of deception, any flicker of greed or understanding. But Lin Feng’s posture was flawless; his heartbeat—deliberately slowed and regulated by the Nine Heaven Circulation Scroll—sounded faint, erratic, and terrified to anyone listening.
"Manager, the satellite data indicated the anomaly was concentrated exactly where he's standing," the injured guard whispered, his face pale from blood loss. "If the energy disappeared the moment he stepped into the vortex..."
"I know," Manager Zhou interrupted coldly. He raised his tactical baton, the high-frequency blue electrical arc along its edge crackling violently in the humid air. He didn't care if the kid was innocent. In the corporate world of the Zhao Group, potential variables were not left to chance. "It doesn't matter what he saw or didn't see. The higher-ups want this
grid clean. A structural cave-in doesn't leave witnesses."
"Hold on, Uncle!" Lin Feng cried out, his hands flying up in a defensive gesture. "I won't say anything! I swear!"
"Dead men are the only ones who keep corporate secrets," Manager Zhou sneered.
With a brutal, practiced motion, he swung the high-voltage baton directly toward Lin Feng’s collarbone. The strike was meant to deliver a lethal, multi-thousand-volt shock that would seize the youth's heart instantly, mimicking an accidental electrocution caused by the shattered drainage pump.
In his past life, a strike like this from a trained corporate enforcer would have ended Lin Feng's existence before it even began.
But right now, to Lin Feng’s newly refined senses, Manager Zhou’s explosive movement looked incredibly sluggish, like a fly trapped in heavy syrup.
The terrified expression on Lin Feng’s face instantly vanished.
The moment the crackling baton came within three inches of his shoulder, Lin Feng executed a microscopic pivot of his right heel. His body glided half an inch to the left, letting the lethal weapon slice through empty air. The sheer kinetic momentum of Manager Zhou's missed swing threw the enforcer slightly off balance.
Before Manager Zhou could register that he had hit nothing but mist, Lin Feng’s hand shot out from beneath his soaked sleeve.
His fingers were no longer trembling; they were perfectly rigid, infused with the dense, newly awakened power of Mortal Flesh Refinement—Stage 3. His palm struck Manager Zhou directly in the center of his chest. It wasn't a flashy martial arts strike, but a simple, compact application of raw, explosive physical leverage.
Thump.
A dull, heavy sound echoed through the trench, like a sledgehammer striking a thick roll of carpet.
Manager Zhou didn't fly backward. Instead, the incredible kinetic force of the strike localized entirely inside his chest cavity. The reinforced carbon-fiber armor plating beneath his tactical vest instantly shattered into microscopic shards. His lungs collapsed as the air was violently driven from his throat, his eyes bulging outward in absolute, uncomprehending shock. He sank straight down onto his knees in the mud, his tactical baton dropping from his limp fingers as his nervous system completely shut down from the trauma.
"Manager!"
The two remaining guards froze, their brains entirely failing to process what their eyes were seeing. A scrawny, penniless college student had just neutralized their elite, military-trained squad leader with a single, casual tap of his open palm.
"You—what did you do?!" the injured guard roared, frantically reaching for the heavy combat knife secured to his tactical vest.
Lin Feng didn't give him the chance.
Taking advantage of the guards' momentary psychological paralysis, Lin Feng stepped forward, closing the distance in a fraction of a second. He gripped the wrist of the injured guard, twisting it outward with a cold, effortless flex of his forearm. A sickening pop echoed through the pit as the guard's shoulder joint was instantly dislocated. Before the man could even scream, Lin Feng used his other hand to strike a precise nerve cluster at the base of the guard's neck. The man’s eyes rolled back, and he collapsed into the mud like a puppet with its strings cut.
The third guard, completely terrified now, didn't even attempt to fight. He turned on his heel, his boots splashing wildly through the puddle as he ran toward the aluminum ladder leading to the upper perimeter.
"Help! Someone help! The kid is an awaken—"
He didn't finish his sentence. Lin Feng casually bent down, scooped up a palm-sized chunk of fractured granite from the shattered bedrock, and flicked his wrist.
The heavy stone tore through the misty air like a cannonball, striking the fleeing guard squarely in the back of his right knee. The bone shattered instantly under the immense kinetic impact. The guard let out a choked gasp, his momentum carrying him forward as he crashed face-first into the metal rungs of the ladder before sliding back into the mud, unconscious and bleeding.
Silence returned to the excavation pit, broken only by the steady, rhythmic patter of rain against the concrete retaining walls.
Lin Feng stood at the center of the carnage, his breathing perfectly calm, his pulse steady. He looked down at his palms, a cold, satisfied expression settling onto his features.
"The Nine Heaven Circulation Scroll truly doesn't disappoint," he murmured, feeling the dense, pure Qi circulating effortlessly through his pristine meridians. "Even at Stage 3 of Mortal Flesh Refinement, my physical output already exceeds the limits of an ordinary human elite."
He walked over to the unconscious Manager Zhou, unceremoniously kneeling in the mud beside him. With practiced efficiency, Lin Feng began looting the corporate enforcer. He stripped the man of his secure tactical smartphone, a thick leather wallet containing high-tier corporate credit cards, and a sleek, silver electronic keycard emblazoned with the luxury logo of the Zhao Group Inner Sanctum.
Finally, he grabbed the short-circuited matte-black jamming device from the puddle, tossing it into a deep drainage hole where it would be buried by the shifting mud.
"A perfect mishap," Lin Feng whispered, checking the stolen smartphone. The device required a biometric fingerprint to unlock, but Lin Feng simply pressed the unconscious Manager Zhou’s thumb against the glass screen. The interface lit up, displaying a classified corporate email string with the subject line: Geological Variance Grid 04 – Jiangnan West.
Lin Feng memorized the coordinates listed in the files before wiping the phone clean and dropping it back into the mud. By tomorrow morning, the Zhao Group would find their elite security team severely beaten and suffers from amnesia-inducing nerve trauma, with all the expensive technical equipment ruined by a "sudden mudslide and equipment explosion." They would assume a rival corporate faction had raided the site to steal the anomaly.
They would never suspect a broke, twenty-year-old student from Jiangnan University.
Lin Feng grabbed his old backpack from beneath the tracked excavator, slung it over his shoulder, and began climbing the metal ladder toward the surface. His body was covered in filth, but his path toward the apex of the modern world had just been paved in stone.