Chen Lin finally chose a gold shop tucked away in a deep alley in the old town.
The shop was cramped, its sign covered in dust, giving it a distinctly old-fashioned feel.
He parked the conspicuous Bentley Bentayga in a mall's underground garage five hundred meters away, then unhurriedly walked into a blind spot in the surveillance coverage.
There was no one around.
He willed it with a thought.
A faint gleam, so weak it was almost imperceptible, flashed across his wrist.
The next instant, every bone in his body gave a dense series of sharp cracks, like a bag of dry beans being crushed underfoot.
His height slowly shrank from one hundred eighty-five centimeters. His straight shoulders and back grew thick and bulky, and an extra layer of flab appeared around his body out of nowhere. The muscles in his face seemed to take on lives of their own, writhing wildly. His sharply defined jawline rounded out, his high nose bridge flattened, and even the creases in his eyelids disappeared.
In just a few seconds, a strikingly handsome young man had completely transformed into an ordinary-looking, overweight middle-aged man of around forty, with a slick, shifty air.
That bizarre, reality-warping sight would have been enough to send any witness into an immediate mental breakdown.
Chen Lin moved his unfamiliar body around, finding the sensation rather novel.
He took the heavy wooden chest out of his Storage Ring. Its terrifying weight, enough to crush a burly man, felt like nothing more than an empty cardboard box in his hands.
Holding the wooden chest in one arm, he strolled toward the gold shop.
Passersby merely gave the middle-aged man carrying a large chest a casual glance. No one would have imagined that this unremarkable-looking man possessed terrifying strength completely at odds