Under the cover of night, Qing Chen quickly vaulted over the low walls of two small courtyards, weaving through the environment he knew best.
In an instant, the entire layout of Courtyard No. 4 appeared in his mind like a three-dimensional image.
The autumn wind was slightly cool, carrying a trace of the day's lingering heat.
The next moment, the boy silently calculated his opponent's sprinting speed...
No, he had to be faster!
Qing Chen felt his lungs burning and his blood boiling with them.
Suddenly, he stopped in the shadows at a corner.
And held his breath.
The leaves of the plane trees rustled in the courtyard, their shadows swaying across the ground.
The sound of running not far away, the lights going out in countless homes.
None of it mattered anymore.
3.
2.
1.
Now.
In the darkness, the boy swung his entrenching shovel with all his strength at the empty air beyond the corner.
With a thud, the sprinting middle-aged man was struck squarely in the legs and tumbled forward!
Qing Chen did not spare him another glance. He turned and swiftly vanished into the shadows between the buildings, leaving after a single strike.
Only after he had gone did the middle-aged man's screams ring through the entire residential complex. Countless windows lit up as people looked outside, but all they could see was the criminal clutching his leg and wailing.
The middle-aged man's right leg was broken, blood pouring from it.
Gradually, many people gathered at their windows to watch the commotion. They could only see the criminal; Qing Chen had already disappeared.
Even the criminal himself had yet to figure out what had happened.
When Qing Chen returned to Jiang Xue's home, he found her holding the trembling Li Tongyun. Qing Chen asked, "Was Xiaoyun hurt?"
"She was just frightened. I'll call the police now and have them deal with those men."
"No need. I already called them," Qing Chen said.
Hearing his voice, Li Tongyun looked up with tears in her eyes. "Brother, there was another one who got away."
"Don't worry. I found him," Qing Chen replied.
Only then did Jiang Xue notice the split skin in Qing Chen's palm caused by the recoil of the entrenching shovel. She suddenly realized that he must have encountered the criminals, and had even clashed with them head-on.
Yet after examining Qing Chen for a long time, she discovered that apart from his palm, he had no other injuries.
"Your palm is split. Wait a moment, I'll get you some gauze and iodine," Jiang Xue said.
"In the end, I'm still just an ordinary person," Qing Chen murmured, lowering his head to look at his palm. He sighed inwardly that although he possessed a powerful mind, he lacked a body to match it.
He needed to speed up his progress in gaining abilities in the Inner World!
"Don't trouble yourself, Auntie Jiang Xue," Qing Chen said. "I have some at home too."
By then, the neighbors had all come out after hearing the commotion. No one had dared to step forward earlier, but judging by the sounds now, it seemed everything was over.
Seeing more and more people gathering around, Qing Chen hurriedly said, "The police will be here soon. I'm going back inside first. Remember, I had nothing to do with this tonight."
Jiang Xue hesitated for a moment. "All right."
The noisy discussions outside the window, the wail of police sirens, and the footsteps of people coming and going seemed unable to affect Qing Chen at all.
He lay silently on his bed, deep in thought. The moment he had swung that entrenching shovel today felt like the moment he had welcomed a brand-new life.
One reason Qing Chen had gone after that criminal was that he could not accept a child like Li Tongyun being harmed.
Another was that he felt if he did not even possess this much courage, there was no point in longing for a life in the Inner World.
He slowly drifted off to sleep, only to be awakened by a burst of knocking on his door.
Still groggy, Qing Chen opened it and found Li Tongyun standing outside.
"Brother Qing Chen, can you come to my home for a moment?" Li Tongyun asked timidly.
"What's wrong?" Qing Chen asked, puzzled.
"Please hurry and help my mom," Li Tongyun said urgently.
Qing Chen went upstairs and saw Jiang Xue sitting helplessly by the dining table, her arms hanging limply at her sides.
"Are you hurt?" Qing Chen asked.
"No, I'm not hurt," Jiang Xue replied. "...My mechanical limbs have run out of power."
Qing Chen was genuinely stunned. He had never carefully considered how mechanical limbs operated. He had simply assumed the Inner World possessed some sort of black technology, perhaps an antimatter reactor hidden inside or something similar.
He had not expected Jiang Xue's excessive use of her mechanical limbs yesterday to leave them unable to move at all.
Put simply, they had run out of battery...
"Wait, their endurance is that bad?" Qing Chen asked in confusion. "Then how do people in the Inner World sustain high-intensity combat?"
Jiang Xue explained, "You haven't traveled there, so you don't know. The entire Inner World has already completed an energy upgrade to wireless charging. You can see the cooling towers of nuclear reactors on the outskirts of the cities, and all the electricity they generate is transmitted through Cloud Flow Towers distributed throughout the city to power the entire place."
"In the Inner World, whether it's vehicles, communication devices, mechanical limbs, rice cookers, lights, or ninety percent of electronic devices, they've all moved beyond wired transmission. The network is the same, like an enormous Wi-Fi network covering the entire city."
"Everyone has their own paid serial number, like an ID number. As long as you pay monthly, you can enjoy the convenience. The corporations charge people based on their electricity usage."
"There are more than three hundred Cloud Flow Towers operating at full capacity in City No. 18, so people there no longer even have the concept of charging, because all their devices are charging at every moment."
Wireless charging through the air? Qing Chen was puzzled. Wasn't that the dream of scientist Nikola Tesla?
At that moment, Qing Chen's status as a top student came in handy, and he began analyzing it rapidly.
The essence of charging was energy transfer. In fact, the Outer World also had such technology. For example, Xiaomi's new product could charge devices remotely through the air, covering an entire room.
The reason Xiaomi could achieve wireless charging was that it had made breakthroughs in rectification technology and positioning technology, allowing it to precisely capture the millimeter waves transmitted by the charger.
Of those two technologies, positioning was the most important. Otherwise, the charger would emit spherical waves rather than transmitting energy precisely to the phone.
Simply put, without positioning, a charger would be an open microwave oven.
That would be terrifying.
And the technology of the Inner World was definitely different from that of the Outer World. At the very least, no one knew how many technological barriers it had overcome.
Would this harm the human body? The answer was that the effect would be negligible, because the radiation it emitted was even lower than that of a phone.
As long as its positioning technology was advanced enough, there would be no real impact.
Of course, Qing Chen had not specifically studied the transmission principles of the Inner World, so he was not sure whether it had realized Tesla's dream or simply resembled the current wireless charging technology of the Outer World.
Still, regardless of which it was, fully implementing wireless charging was quite novel.
At that moment, Li Tongyun suddenly asked, "Would wireless charging like this produce radiation? Last month, some elderly people in the neighboring complex forced China Mobile to remove a signal tower. Would this radiation be even stronger than a signal tower's?"
Jiang Xue had not thought much about it before, but Li Tongyun's words made her somewhat worried too. She asked, "So many public accounts say that even phone radiation is very harmful to people. Could these Cloud Flow Towers affect our health?"
Indeed, far too many public accounts spread information about the dangers of radiation.
And quite a few people truly believed them, even tearing down many telecom base stations and signal towers...
Qing Chen thought for a moment and said, "The amount of radiation varies from person to person."
"What does that mean?" Li Tongyun asked, confused.
Qing Chen considered it, then said, "The lower your education level, the greater the radiation."
Li Tongyun: "???"
Jiang Xue: "???"
Thanks to classmate Xieriguai for becoming this book's Alliance Leader. Boss, you're generous; may your fortune be as vast as the Eastern Sea and your life as long as the Southern Mountains!
Also, are there any other bosses who would like to receive my blessing of a long life?!
Before you continue