"Foolish Boy, move farther away."
"A little farther."
"Farther."
Cheng Qi had already put on the Gravitational Field Adjustment Gloves and was gently flexing his fingers.
The gloves were about as heavy and thick as ordinary leather gloves and pale blue in color. But a closer look revealed densely packed chip circuitry integrated into their surfaces. When he clenched his fists, dark blue energy surged across the backs of his hands.
Cheng Qi raised his head and looked at the enormous mountain of medical waste before him.
He did not need to move the entire mountain. He only needed to excavate a suitably sized space in its side.
Keeping his fists clenched, Cheng Qi took a few steps forward, his palms facing the densely compacted garbage ahead.
He gritted his teeth, his eyes flew wide, and his fingers snapped open.
Hummm!
A sound that made his eardrums vibrate violently filled his ears.
Cheng Qi felt an intense numbness in his gloved palms, as though an electric current had struck them. His scalp tingled immediately afterward.
Then.
Visible pale yellow ripples spread thirty meters ahead, like ripples across a tranquil lake.
Crack...
Creeeak...
The sounds of scraping metal and tearing polyethylene products rang out.
Hummm-
Cheng Qi fully opened his other hand as well.
The force field instantly strengthened.
Whoosh!
Whoosh!
A series of whooshes sounded as objects rose into the air. Metal flakes peeled away and dust drifted upward, briefly obscuring his view.
Cheng Qi narrowed his eyes, struggling to make out the scene before him. When he finally did, his mouth fell slightly open in shock.
Hundreds of pieces of garbage, large and small, floated in midair ahead of him, suspended in some kind of pale yellow force field.
No external force was acting on them.
Gravitational field control!
"Good heavens!"
Foolish Boy tilted his metal head toward the sky. "How'd you turn into a god all of a sudden?"
Hummm-
Boom!
Cheng Qi moved both hands sideways. The force field carried the floating garbage sideways too, moving it more than ten meters away. As the field withdrew, countless pieces of garbage crashed to the ground.
And before him, where garbage had once been piled high.
A space of sixty square meters had been cleared.
Cheng Qi's heart raced a little. Though he had imagined what this might be like, he had never expected such efficiency.
He lowered his head to look at the pale blue technological gloves on his hands.
They really are miraculous tools. Just what I needed!
Hummm-
Boom-
Cheng Qi continued using the Gravitational Field Adjustment Gloves to move the garbage before him.
"Go, Cheng Qi! You're the best in the universe!"
With nothing left to do, Foolish Boy tied some colored plastic bags into bouquets and waved them up and down. Their roles had truly reversed.
An hour later.
By Cheng Qi's rough estimate, he had moved nearly two thousand tons of garbage.
It was a workload his former self would never have dared imagine.
Sure enough.
The reason humanity had risen to prominence on Earth hundreds of years ago, standing proudly above other animals, was its ability to use tools effectively.
By now.
A huge basin had appeared before Cheng Qi, and almost all the medical waste had been cleared away.
Throughout the process, Foolish Boy had also sorted through it.
They had found no more relatively intact technological equipment. Broken, battered fragments were the norm here.
Cheng Qi stood at the bottom of the basin. Naturally, no soil had been exposed. Beneath the garbage was simply another layer of garbage.
He picked up a metal nameplate from the black sludge and gently wiped it, revealing a line of text.
-"Dane War Equipment Manufacturing Group."
Cheng Qi's eyes lit up. Only now had he truly drawn close to his goal.
They continued moving and sorting.
With the Gravitational Field Adjustment Gloves, their efficiency was astonishing.
In around twenty minutes, Cheng Qi and Foolish Boy sorted through nearly two hundred tons of waste from the Dane Group.
Their bodies were covered in sludge, and their airways were coated with metallic dust.
Rivulets of sweat also ran down Cheng Qi's forehead.
Hardship and exhaustion were nothing. What he found difficult to accept was that, even now, he had gained almost nothing.
The disposal standards for military waste were extremely strict. All core components had to be removed.
Firearms were even worse. Before disposal, they were almost always cut into fragments.
Only an hour remained before his meeting with Hyena.
A faint restlessness stirred in Cheng Qi's heart.
After moving garbage for another ten minutes, Cheng Qi stopped.
Deep inside the garbage mountain, he had discovered an enormous sealed metal fuel tank, as large as a two-story building. Every opening had been welded shut several times over.
"No one bothers processing garbage they're about to throw away."
"Why seal every opening?"
Using the Gravitational Field Adjustment Gloves, Cheng Qi gently rocked the enormous fuel tank. A metallic clattering came from inside.
"There's something in there."
Cheng Qi narrowed his eyes, then gave Foolish Boy a meaningful glance. Understanding, Foolish Boy transformed his arm, flipping out a metal-cutting torch.
A bright white flame formed a sharp cone and moved slowly across the enormous fuel tank, gradually widening the cut.
The discarded fuel tank was unusually thick. It took a full nine minutes to cut an entrance large enough for one person.
Thud!
Foolish Boy kicked the fuel tank, and the cut steel plate crashed down.
The interior was dim.
A rotten stench wafted out, along with unidentified black ash that swirled and drifted inside.
Squinting, Cheng Qi tied a square cloth over his nose and mouth and slowly stepped into the enormous fuel tank.
Clatter!
Something stark white suddenly dropped from above Cheng Qi's head, and a pair of skeletal hands closed around his neck!
Cheng Qi had never expected this and panicked.
He stumbled back two steps before regaining his senses.
Only then did he realize a white skeleton hung overhead. It was no ghost or evil spirit. Its hands simply hung down naturally and had happened to land on his neck.
Cheng Qi took a deep breath, steadied himself, and looked deeper into the fuel tank.
The next instant.
He saw a horrifying sight.
Bodies.
Nearly thirty bodies!
Like the one above his head, they had been dead for a long time and had all been reduced to bare bones.
"Why are there dead bodies in the Dane Group's garbage?"
Cheng Qi was shocked. Scavengers had found human limbs before, but those had merely come from murders in which the killers had dumped the bodies. They were nothing compared to the scene before him today.
In the dim light.
Some of the bodies' clothes had not completely rotted away.
Cheng Qi lowered his head to examine their chest badges.
-Huaxia Interstellar Exploration Team, Sixth Battalion, Third Special Operations Group.
"They were soldiers."
Cheng Qi's eyes widened slightly. "Exploration Team, Sixth Battalion, Third Group... isn't that the famous Limit Squad?"
Cheng Qi was only eighteen, and dreams of heroism inevitably filled his heart.
He had previously listened to many military programs on his grandfather's battered overclocked radio.
The Limit Squad had been iron-blooded heroes twenty years ago.
Fearless and selfless, they had explored interstellar space while also carrying out interstellar rescue missions. During their service, they had saved tens of thousands of refugees.
Whenever a member of the Limit Squad died in service, countless civilians would line the streets to mourn them.
Then, one day twenty years ago, this heroic squad had suddenly announced its disbandment and gradually faded from public view.
Once, when a young Cheng Qi had finished listening to "Memoirs of the Limit Squad" while squatting on the ground, he had been unable to keep from grieving, even crying in sorrow.
Now.
He bent down to examine the bones beside him, and his pupils contracted slightly.
Something's wrong.
Their neck bones all bore cut marks!
The weapon had been sharp, and the blows had carried tremendous force!
Cheng Qi trembled slightly.
"Their throats were all slit!"
"Then they were sealed in this iron tank and thrown away as garbage!"
"There must be a truth here that someone couldn't let see the light of day!"
Grieving for these heroes, Cheng Qi collected their nameplates one by one.
"Ding Feng..."
"Lin Lanyue..."
"Long Zhanxiao..."
Cheng Qi committed their names to memory. If he could leave Earth someday, he would do whatever lay within his power to uncover the truth of what had happened to them.
When he reached the depths of the fuel tank.
Cheng Qi saw eight rather "bulky" white skeletons.
More precisely, those eight skeletons were wearing a type of bulky combat suit.
"Those are..."
Cheng Qi began trembling uncontrollably. "Those are the eight Limit Warriors. What they're wearing... is the X-12 Limit Warrior Exoskeleton I've dreamed about countless times!"
Before you continue