A Door? One Chop Will Do It

On the surface in New York, inside an RV.

Stryker ripped off his white coat and flung it onto a seat.

He clutched a tablet displaying the underground laboratory's security footage.

On the screen, the man in the white suit was still pointing at the camera and cursing up a storm.

Stryker ground his back teeth. Where the hell had this bastard come from?

Fortunately, he had been careful. You couldn't put all your eggs in one basket.

He held no more than two high-value test subjects at each underground research facility.

Even if someone wiped one out, the losses would be manageable.

Stryker let out a cold laugh.

He swiped across the tablet screen and pulled up a red icon.

He entered the password and verified his fingerprint.

"Go build outhouses in hell, you yellow monkey!"

Stryker slammed the confirm button.

In the underground laboratory.

The alarm suddenly changed pitch, its buzzing becoming a howl.

Warning lights along the ceiling of the corridor flashed wildly.

"The base self-destruct sequence has been activated. Countdown: three minutes."

"Isolation doors in all areas have been locked."

With a series of rumbles, the doors at the end of the passage slammed shut.

"Fuck!"

Riptide cursed.

He set Anton on the floor, brought his hands together, and gathered a wind blade that he sent slashing at the doors.

When the wind blade dissipated, it had left only a white mark on the doors.

Sing Sing strolled over and reached out to touch the mark.

"Riptide, your wind's pretty weak!"

"You'd do all right as an oscillating fan in the summer, but for hard work like this, you're seriously underpowered."

Riptide jumped up and down in alarm. "How can you be talking about fans at a time like this? This place is going to blow sky-high in two and a half minutes!"

"What's the hurry? If the sky falls, the tall guys can hold it up. If they can't handle it, there's still the fat guy."

Sing Sing pulled out a pack of cigarettes and tapped one out. He put it in his mouth and was about to show off when someone beat him to it.

"Move."

Lorna walked up to the doors and spread her fingers, a green glow appearing in her palms.

"Rise!"

Lorna shouted.

The doors creaked, and even the walls trembled.

The middle of the doors began to deform.

Riptide's eyes lit up. "It's working! Keep it up!"

Lorna bit her lip, beads of sweat covering her forehead.

As she continued to exert herself, her fingers began to tremble.

The green light in her palms flickered, and the doors stopped deforming.

She had been locked in a cell for a whole year, had blood drawn every day, and had lived on nutrient solution. Her body was far too depleted.

She could still manipulate an object under normal circumstances, but when it came to forcing a door like this, she didn't quite have the strength.

"I can't..." Lorna grunted, her legs giving way as she fell backward.

An arm caught her around the lower back, and Sing Sing pulled her into his embrace. "Oh dear, Lorna, you're not in very good shape."

Sing Sing casually patted the side of her leg twice with his other hand. It was very springy.

"When we get back, I'll have to find you an old traditional Chinese doctor to prescribe you a few doses of Ten-Ingredient Tonic Soup. Your qi and blood are both severely depleted."

Lorna struggled to stand, but she didn't have a shred of strength in her body.

She could only lean against Sing Sing, panting. "Shut up... if you're so capable, you do it!"

"Fine, I will."

Sing Sing let go, and without his support, Lorna landed on her backside.

She glared at him resentfully. Did this man have no consideration for a woman at all?

He just let go like that!

There was one minute and twenty seconds left on the countdown.

Sing Sing reached behind his waist with his right hand, and the Pig Butchering Knife appeared.

Riptide was getting nervous. "Stephen, stop fooling around! Those are titanium alloy doors! You're using a meat cleaver..."

"Watch closely!"

Sing Sing held the Pig Butchering Knife level in front of his chest. "The ancients said that with enough effort, an iron pestle can be ground into a needle."

"I sold pork for years, chopping through hundreds of big bones every day."

"I grasped the truth long ago: anything can be chopped."

He turned his wrist, sweeping the Pig Butchering Knife through a semicircle in the air as Inner Qi flowed down his arm into the blade.

"Open!"

Sing Sing roared and brought the knife down in a mighty cleaving strike. The edge of the Pig Butchering Knife sliced from the top of the doors all the way to the bottom.

Sing Sing withdrew the knife and turned around.

"Done."

Riptide looked at the doors.

They were still standing there, intact.

"What did you do? There isn't even a crack in the doors..."

Before he had finished speaking.

Crack, crack, crack...

A fine line appeared down the center of the doors. Then they split cleanly in two and crashed to the floor.

Anything can be chopped

Sing Sing crouched in front of the fallen doors and rapped on the exposed cross section of titanium alloy.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk. They really didn't skimp on the materials."

"If we sold this to a scrapyard, it'd be worth dozens of yuan a jin at least, right?"

Riptide hoisted Anton onto his shoulder and dashed madly for the exit.

"Stop counting your money! It's going to blow in forty seconds!"

"What's the hurry? I've got to take these doors with me!"

Sing Sing grabbed the edge of one door, actually intending to drag the hunk of metal out.

Lorna couldn't stand watching anymore and grabbed Sing Sing's sleeve.

"Are you crazy? Is your life more important, or the scrap metal?"

Lorna pulled and dragged Sing Sing along as she ran outside.

He kept muttering under his breath.

"You wasteful woman! What do you know?"

"The country is at a crucial stage of major infrastructure development. This is all valuable strategic material!"

In the end, Sing Sing gave up on carrying the doors away.

The three of them raced onward and, scrambling to find a way out, came across an emergency exit.

Stryker had thoughtfully put a note beside it.

"The exit's up there! That sewer manhole cover!"

Riptide pointed overhead and shouted.

Sing Sing wrapped one arm around Lorna's slender waist, grabbed Riptide by the back of his collar with his left hand, and pushed off with both legs.

"Here we go!"

The four of them shot into the air.

They smashed straight through the sewer manhole cover and flew out onto the surface.

The moment they landed, the street beneath their feet shook violently.

Boom.

An explosion sounded from underground, the road heaved, and a column of fire dozens of meters high burst from the sewer opening. Stryker's underground laboratory was reduced to a pile of rubble.

The three of them ran dozens of meters before stopping.

Lorna's chest rose and fell violently, and her hospital gown barely covered anything.

Sing Sing looked away.

Hmm...

He had only stared for five seconds.

"Lorna, we were running so fast just now. You didn't twist your ankle, did you?"

"Thanks to you."

Riptide set Anton down and looked at the thick smoke in the distance. "Stephen, where are we going?"

Sing Sing pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the flight information.

"How about we just head back?"

He turned to Lorna. "Lorna, you still haven't agreed to sign a contract with me!"

"I never force anyone. If you'd rather stay in the United States and keep being hunted, I'll call you a cab right now."

Lorna looked at the man in front of her, whose mind worked in such an abnormal way.

She gritted her teeth. "I'll go with you."

"But if a single one of those benefits you mentioned is missing, I'll pull out every hair on your head."

Sing Sing was delighted.

"Don't worry! We always keep our word! But once we get there, you'll have to accept your assignment."

"We've got a cross-river bridge project in the southwest that's short a technical adviser who can weld rebar while airborne."

"You're practically tailor-made for it!"

Lorna froze.

"You want me to... weld rebar?"

"What? You look down on welders? That comes with grade-eight skilled worker pay!"

Sing Sing had the future master craftswoman's arrangements all sorted out and happily calculated in his head.

An electric fan and a crane.

This trip to the United States hadn't been for nothing!

Once he brought those two back, wouldn't Lao Wang have to give him a bonus of tens of thousands of yuan?