Certain Death

After eating his fill, washing the dishes, and putting away his clothes, Wu Zhong racked his brains.

And sure enough, he came up with something.

"Right... Welding doors shut in reality is pretty useless, but what about virtual ones?"

Wu Zhong looked at his phone, his eyes lighting up.

He had an idea: could his door-welding ability be used online?

For example, network ports, program backdoors, and things like that.

Unfortunately, he knew nothing about this stuff. But he could test it out by opening a game first.

In a search-and-extract game, he controlled his character and shut a room door. Sure enough, the enemy couldn't open it.

Even after blowing apart the door panel, the fragments remained stuck there like a bug, covered in cracks.

"Huh? What kind of cheat is this?"

In the end, the enemy had no choice but to break through a window and kill him.

Wu Zhong didn't care. He went on to test several other games and discovered that as long as there were doors, he could trigger his ability.

Those doors were likewise welded shut. No matter how other players interacted with them, they couldn't open them.

There was even a game where players could open portals. The portals Wu Zhong created couldn't disappear either.

They were originally supposed to last only a few seconds, but they got stuck and remained there indefinitely.

And according to the game's settings, it shouldn't have been possible to repeatedly open portals. Once a new portal was opened, the previous one should have vanished automatically.

But that didn't happen under Wu Zhong's control. Once the skill cooled down, he could open a third portal, a fourth, a fifth... None of the portals he had opened disappeared.

The nonstop creation of portals eventually caused the entire game to crash.

Although it was just a game and didn't prove much, this confirmed one thing for Wu Zhong: virtual doors were doors too!

His ability might be useless, but its range of application was surprisingly broad.

Since he could weld shut doors modeled in games, which in a sense meant welding shut a piece of code, then if he made use of some kind of backdoor bug, he ought to be able to weld that shut too, making it impossible to close.

"Yes, it should work. A backdoor is still a door."

"Come to think of it, could that Spending Treasure bug from last time be used somehow?"

Wu Zhong opened the Spending Treasure app on his phone and suddenly jolted.

He remembered something that had happened not long ago. When he used Spending Treasure, every expense had automatically been discounted by twenty percent, including personal transfers, ticket purchases, credit card payments, rent payments, and more.

The stated reason for the discount had been a government subsidy, and he had been thrilled at the time.

The money he paid his landlord had automatically been discounted by twenty percent, while his landlord received the full amount of rent as usual.

Later, he learned it had been a bug incident. The platform had configured the wrong marketing template in the backend for a routine promotional event, entering both the discount amount and the discount type incorrectly, inadvertently triggering a serious bug.

This had directly resulted in every payment made by users during that period receiving a twenty-percent discount.

Of course, it lasted only a short time and was quickly fixed.

In the end, the platform announced that it would not recover the money from users. Quite a few people benefited from it, including Wu Zhong, who saved several hundred yuan on meals and rent.

Having gotten a taste of it, he had specifically looked into the matter afterward and sought advice online. A netizen in one group had told him that the bug could actually be replicated.

Apparently, it involved opening some kind of backdoor. Wu Zhong didn't understand it either.

But it couldn't hurt to ask. Wu Zhong hurriedly contacted that netizen. "Against the Light, Against the Light, that payment bug we talked about last time—you said you could replicate it. Was that true?"

He waited a long time without getting a reply.

He had met Against the Light in a Demonic Cang Yue novel fan group. They used to play games together all the time, and they had known each other online for years.

But Wu Zhong had been busy as hell these past two years, so they rarely chatted. Their last conversation had been about the Spending Treasure bug incident.

"He works during the day. He probably doesn't have time to reply."

"Mm... No, if I'm going to maliciously exploit bugs with superpowers, it's better to do it myself. I know Against the Light well and we get along great, but he's still only an online friend."

Wu Zhong thought about some things he had read in webnovels, though he wasn't sure whether they were right.

He suppressed his restless excitement and withdrew every message he had just sent to Against the Light.

"But doing it myself is easy to say... I don't know how."

"I don't know the first thing about code. Do I really have no choice but to start from scratch and learn to be a programmer?"

Wu Zhong pursed his lips. In the past, he would never even have considered learning this.

It wasn't that he disliked studying. On the contrary, he wanted to learn. After all, once he became a programmer, even as a mere code monkey, he would earn far more than he did now.

But for someone who had entered society, whose working hours were maxed out and whose income and expenses were locked into a tight chain, the time, energy, and cost of teaching himself an additional skill were unbearable.

By the time he learned programming, both he and his grandfather would probably have starved to death.

That really would be going from beginner to burial...

So he didn't dare make such an investment, afraid that instead of improving himself, his living expenses would collapse first.

"Sigh..."

Wu Zhong paced around the house, so irritated that he kicked a table leg.

If this were a novel, someone with superpowers like him would probably have quit his job long ago and found a way to start a business.

But this was reality. Wu Zhong didn't dare quit. In fact, he had even planned to go back to work that afternoon... He had only taken half a day off.

There was no other reason. It was only the seventeenth, and he had just over two hundred yuan left.

This goddamn superpower gave him no confidence at all.

"This is driving me crazy. Forget it, I'll sleep first!"

After asking the wake-up service to call him at two in the afternoon, Wu Zhong collapsed onto his bed and fell fast asleep the instant his head hit the pillow.

But before the wake-up service could call, the caregiver called first.

When he checked the time, he realized he had slept for only two hours. His eyes were bloodshot and red.

"The caregiver?" He froze, realizing there was news from the hospital.

After the examination that morning, family members were supposed to wait until ten o'clock for the doctor to explain the situation in the ward.

But he had been in a hurry to get to work, so he had asked the caregiver to take his place and send him a message afterward relaying the doctor's instructions.

Yet now the caregiver was calling him. Had something happened?

"What is it? What did the doctor say?" Wu Zhong's head felt as though it were splitting apart, and his voice was grave.

Sure enough, the caregiver brought no good news. "The doctor said the hematoma in the patient's brain has grown larger. Surgery has to be done as soon as possible."

Wu Zhong asked anxiously, "How could it have gotten bigger? Wasn't it shrinking the whole time? As long as he stayed lying down and didn't move, his body should have recovered on its own."

"But it did get bigger. Those are the test results. If you don't believe me, come ask the doctor yourself," the caregiver said.

Wu Zhong steadied himself and asked, "Then when will the surgery be?"

"It's still being scheduled. The doctor said they'll arrange it as soon as possible. Oh, and you need to prepare thirty thousand yuan."

"Thirty thousand?"

Wu Zhong's heart tightened. Thirty thousand yuan wasn't much, but he couldn't come up with it unless he took out an online loan.

In fact, he had already taken out an online loan—the day his grandfather suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. It had been divided into twelve installments, and he still hadn't finished repaying it.

And if he wanted another loan, he would have to borrow from another platform. But without question, no matter how many installments he used, he wouldn't be able to pay it back.

Damn it! Just moments ago, he had been worried that his living expenses wouldn't hold up, so he hadn't dared go all in or make any investment.

Then one phone call came, and his financial chain was destined to snap.

Wu Zhong took a deep breath, digging furiously at a hole in the bedsheet with his fingers.

He forced his voice to remain calm. "Okay, I understand. I'll go to the hospital right now..."

Wu Zhong was worried about his grandfather and couldn't spare a thought for anything else. He immediately headed out for the hospital.

But in his rush, he forgot his umbrella. Outside, rain poured down in sheets and the wind howled.

Wu Zhong looked at the raging storm, then back at the elevator, considering whether to go home and get his umbrella.

"This is so damn annoying..."

Since one elevator had been removed, the entire building now shared a single elevator, which was currently rising past the tenth floor.

He had no patience to wait slowly. From experience, with the whole building sharing one elevator, it would take quite a while before it came back down.

Wu Zhong shook his head and simply charged into the rain, enduring the downpour as he rushed toward the hospital.

"Whoosh..."

The rain was heavy, but the wind was even stronger. Storm clouds gathered toward Mount Lu, dark clouds churning in a spectacular sight, but he had no mind to appreciate it.

Wu Zhong ran wildly through the rain, water filling his vision.

By the time he got on the bus, he was soaked through like a drowned rat. He stood in the middle of the carriage, gripping a handrail and swaying with the vehicle.

The people on the bus looked strangely at his dripping body, as if to say, Young people really are tough.

Wu Zhong remained silent and numb. When he got off at his stop, he ran toward the hospital in a daze.

"Ring, ring, ring!"

Halfway there, his phone rang. Wu Zhong thought something else had happened at the hospital and was scared half to death.

After looking carefully, he finally relaxed. It was just the wake-up service telling him to get up... It was exactly two in the afternoon.

He didn't need to answer that kind of call. He could just hang up.

But the rain had soaked both his fingers and the screen. He swiped at it for ages without effect, and somehow answered the call instead.

"Damn..." Wu Zhong groaned in annoyance and hurriedly wiped the screen with his clothes, but his clothes were wet too. He lowered his head and fiddled with it for a long time before finally managing to hang up.

Just as he was about to cross the road after hanging up, his boss called again, telling him to come to work that afternoon.

He had only taken half a day off, and he had failed to show up in the afternoon. Orders had already piled up at the shop, so naturally his boss wanted them handled as soon as possible.

Everything hit him at once, and Wu Zhong felt like his head was about to explode.

"Oh, fuck, just kill me already."

Just as he finally answered the call, dealt with his boss, and asked for more time off—

With a roar, something enormous crashed down beside him.

Perhaps the rain was too heavy and the driver couldn't see the road clearly, but for some reason, a truck came roaring straight toward the sidewalk.

"Ah!"

There wasn't even a horn. By the time Wu Zhong turned his head, the speeding truck had already torn through the curtain of rain and was right in front of him!

Wu Zhong was exhausted in body and mind. Caught by this sudden turn of events, his mind went blank, and only one enormous word flashed through it.

Danger!

"Ugh!"

Good heavens, everything happened too fast. The sudden change caught him completely off guard. In an instant, the speeding truck was already before his eyes.

Wu Zhong was sleepy, exhausted, and weighed down by worries. He was in the middle of running, phone in hand, when the truck suddenly filled his vision. Who could react in time?

Shock. Despair. A blank mind.

Even with adrenaline surging through him, he only managed to stop running. It was already too late to dodge.

Death! Certain death!