Fifteen minutes earlier, over a hundred kilometers from Huashan City, a special-looking vehicle was speeding along the road.
Inside, Xu Lin was selecting and packaging useful information from the data he had gathered. This was his most important task each day. With the overwhelming volume of online information, he had to summarize and package it daily, then send it to the relevant departments for archiving. Anyone without strong information analysis skills couldn’t handle this job.
After sending off the data, he heard Xiao Ma in the passenger seat ask, “Team Leader Xu, we’re about to have some self-heating hot pot. What flavor do you want?”
Xu Lin shook his head. According to their plan, they should have been resting in a small town nearby by now. But the temperature had risen too quickly. Today, the ground temperature had already approached 70 degrees. For driving safety, they had rested for over three hours during the peak heat period. On top of that, the roads had been damaged by the high temperatures, so they couldn’t drive fast. In the end, they hadn’t made it to their destination on time.
They decided not to rest at night and just keep driving.
They took turns at the wheel, so no one would get too exhausted.
“Hey, hey, don’t eat your late-night snack yet,” said Xiao Lin, who was driving. His phone alarm went off, and he immediately called out, “Xiao Ma, grab me a pair of heat-insulating shoes. I’m driving tonight—you promised you’d help me get them.”
“Alright, alright. They’re just heat-insulating shoes.” The two people in the back seat were also chiming in, shouting that they would definitely snag a pair.
Xu Lin also opened the online mall on the Survival app and got ready to grab a pair.
As staff members of an official office, they could actually exchange for heat-insulating shoes directly through official channels.
Xiao Lin had already exchanged for one pair. Now he was trying to grab another pair for a family member. Xu Lin had also exchanged for one pair. The pair he was about to grab was for Uncle Qin and Auntie.
He knew exactly how effective these heat-insulating shoes were. With them, going outside during the next year of extreme heat wouldn’t be a major problem.
Everyone in the car worked in information technology—their hands moved so fast they were just blurs. So they all managed to grab a pair.
—
Xu Lin wanted to share the good news with Qin Sang right away. That was when he received her message.
He smiled, picked up his phone, and started to say he’d grabbed a pair too. But before he could finish, a series of gunshots rang out in the distance.
Xu Lin didn’t realize that his voice message had actually recorded the gunshots.
As soon as the gunfire started, he immediately became alert and told Xiao Lin to turn off the headlights and drive off the road.
His decision was correct.
Seconds later, they saw two cars chasing each other down the road. The car behind was shooting at the one ahead, clearly trying to force it to stop.
A scene straight out of a gangster movie was playing out in real life, making the tech specialists in the car extremely nervous. Well, except for Xu Lin.
“Everyone stay quiet. Xiao Lin, don’t panic. I’ve already called the police. Now we wait for their signal. Then we’ll steer clear of both cars.”
No sooner had Xu Lin finished speaking than the fleeing car crashed head-on into the guardrail on the opposite side. If they hadn’t left the road and pulled into the woods to take cover, that car would have crashed into theirs instead.
The car they were driving was a government vehicle issued by the Disaster Response Administration. As a new high-tech model, it could withstand both extreme heat and extreme cold, making it especially valuable. It also had collision protection. Even so, they’d still be upset if it got damaged.
When the team members saw the crashed car catch fire, they started shouting that they should go rescue the people inside.
Xu Lin: “Wait.”
Because the chasing car had stopped.
Two men got out and, cursing under their breath, ran toward the burning car. They reached out and touched the parts of the car that hadn’t yet caught fire. A stream of water poured out, hissing as it hit the hot metal.
This left Xu Lin and his team baffled.
The same people who had been chasing and shooting were now braving the heat to put out the fire.
Xiao Ma, the more lively one, was about to speak when Xu Lin’s ears suddenly twitched. He raised his hand and made a gesture.
Although it was dark inside the car, light from the solar-powered streetlights on the road filtered in.
Seeing the prearranged signal, the team members instantly became alert. Xiao Lin, the driver, immediately started the engine and placed his foot on the accelerator.
Thanks to the cutting-edge technology packed into this car, the engine noise was very faint. Once started, the black car looked like a blade in the darkness, ready to draw blood.
Once again, Xu Lin’s judgment was correct. Another round of gunfire rang out—this time aimed directly at them.
Xu Lin didn’t wait. He shouted to Xiao Lin, “Go!”
Not daring to hesitate, Xiao Lin slammed on the accelerator. The car shot onto the road like an arrow.
It wasn’t that they didn’t want to avoid the road—it was that the road was flanked on both sides by dense mountain forests. Though most of the trees had started to wither in the extreme heat, driving through that terrain would have been too slow. It was better to charge straight at the shooters.
On a narrow path, the brave prevail. And Xu Lin had a new-model gun. When they were ten meters away, he fired.
The bullet hit one of them.
Just then, their car passed the criminals’ vehicle. In that split second, Xu Lin reached his hand out the window and touched the other car. The next moment, the criminals’ car disappeared into Xu Lin’s space.
His team members stared in stunned silence.
“Holy crap, holy crap, Team Leader. I thought you were—”
“Exactly, exactly. We thought you were going to take revenge!”
Xu Lin looked back at the criminals who were chasing on foot but couldn’t catch up, then glanced at his excited team members. “You thought I was going to lead you into a suicide mission?”
“No, no! But that move of yours was incredible!”
Everyone in that car had a space. But none of them had the Team Leader’s reaction speed—to store an entire vehicle in the span of a single passing moment.
Faced with his team’s avalanche of compliments, Xu Lin remained unmoved. In truth, if that car had been any larger, he wouldn’t have been able to store it.
The authorities had researched spaces quite thoroughly.
Metrics like the maximum volume a space could hold in a single instance had been calculated long ago. Xu Lin didn’t have many special traits, but he was exceptionally sensitive to numbers. The moment he saw that car, he pulled its specifications from his memory.
Only after confirming that the car would fit in his space did he take the actions that followed.
Picking up his phone, Xu Lin was about to report his actions to the police when he saw the flurry of messages from Qin Sang. He quickly called her back to let her know he was safe. Only then did he report the incident.
—
By the time Qin Sang saw Xu Lin in person, it was already past four o’clock the next afternoon.
By then, Xu Lin had already sent his team members to settle in at the office complex in the city center while he rode an electric scooter back to Xinling Village at breakneck speed.
“You’re not at all what I imagined,” Qin Sang teased, looking at his slightly disheveled hair after he took off his helmet and then down at the scooter between his legs. “I thought you’d come back in style—driving some car nobody’s ever seen, looking all impressive.”
Her exaggerated description made Xu Lin laugh. If his team members had seen that smile, their jaws would have dropped again.
But right now, Xu Lin was surrounded by familiar relatives and friends. To them, this Xu Lin—who occasionally smiled, was mostly expressionless, but warm-hearted—was the Da Linzi they’d always known.
—
“You have no idea. Past midnight, Sang Sang messaged me, asking what to do if someone got caught in a shootout and how to call the police. I was so scared I nearly shot the noodles I was eating for a late-night snack right out my nose. I told her, ‘That kid’s a keyboard jockey—since when does he handle guns?’”
Brother Fa gestured dramatically as he spoke, making Qin Sang feel a bit sheepish.
It hadn’t been long since she’d experienced gunfire at her own doorstep. Of course she was sensitive to the sound of gunshots. When she heard gunfire in the background of that voice message, of course she got nervous.
These days, there were madmen running around killing space owners every so often. Even though the authorities kept saying that killing a space owner wouldn’t make their space drop, there were still plenty of idiots willing to try.
Add to that the batch of space-detecting compasses the authorities had released earlier, and it had made it even easier for those madmen to hunt down space owners.
Da Linzi had also said that everyone in his car was a space owner. How could Qin Sang not jump to the conclusion that they’d run into hunters?
—
The group sat down at Qin Sang’s house, and then Brother Fa asked Da Linzi for the full story.
Da Linzi didn’t hold back. Things outside were getting more chaotic by the day—they needed to know what was happening so they could stay alert.
After recounting the entire incident, Da Linzi also shared what happened next.
“When I got to the nearest police station, I took the criminals’ car out of my space. The police searched it and found a plastic crate full of various jade pieces in the trunk. When they arrived at the scene, there were two bodies—one was the owner of the car that had been chased, and the other was the criminal I’d shot.”
When Xu Lin talked about the killing, his face was expressionless. Qin Sang could tell at a glance that this probably wasn’t the first attack he’d experienced. She just didn’t know what exactly he’d encountered in the capital.
“Why didn’t the one who ran away take his accomplice’s body? Wasn’t he afraid the police would trace it?”
Xu Lin immediately realized that Qin Sang hadn’t heard the news yet. He glanced at Brother Fa, who nodded and spoke up: “Sang Sang, you might not know this, but spaces can’t hold dead people.”
“What?” Qin Sang shot up from her seat in surprise. Qin Sang’s parents were equally shocked.
“W-why is that?” Qin Sang didn’t have a jade space herself, but her parents’ spaces contained plenty of frozen meat. In theory, that was also a type of corpse. Why could animal corpses be stored, but not human ones?
Xu Lin spoke up at that moment: “The authorities don’t know why either. This was discovered when two good friends turned on each other over supplies. One killed the other. To hide the body, he tried to put it in his space—and found out he couldn’t. He was trying to figure out another way to dispose of it when someone stumbled upon him. That’s how it came to light.”
Otherwise, who in their right mind would test whether a space could hold a dead body?
It was strange enough as it was.
Qin Sang realized how little she still knew about jade spaces. She’d had no idea about this limitation. Her roasted goose space had never held a corpse, but her gut told her it probably could.
Da Linzi had also mentioned how the criminals fought the fire—they had to touch the hot car body to release water. Qin Sang filed that away as useful knowledge. With extreme heat coming, storing some sand in everyone’s space would be incredibly useful if they ever ran into a fire.
Of course, the limitation of jade spaces—having to physically touch an object to store or retrieve it—was inconvenient.
Bringing up the fire, Qin Sang asked, “Was their goal the jade?”
It was the only motive she could think of. The criminals’ car had been full of jade, after all.
Xu Lin nodded. “That stuff is a hot potato right now.”
Hearing Da Linzi’s assessment, Qin Sang felt a flicker of hesitation. But she still decided to speak up: “I’m planning to go to Chaonan City. I was going to ask you for some information about it.”
Chaonan City, over two hundred kilometers from Huashan City, was home to the largest jade trading market in the south. Every household there was involved in jade processing.
After learning how important jade was, Qin Sang had been searching for information online. She discovered that jade trading was still happening in Chaonan City.
Of course, that trading was essentially black market activity now. The authorities had long since banned large-scale jade trading. But demand was too high—where there was demand, there was a market.
Qin Sang wanted to do everything she could to strengthen herself before the full force of the disaster arrived. And the energy contained in jade spaces was crucial to improving her abilities.
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