Limits

After enhancing himself with the card, Lin Rui shouldered a sixty-kilogram barbell and easily completed a dozen or so squats. His thighs only felt slightly warm, as though he had done a simple warm-up.

"Add some weight. I'll help. Let's see where your limit is."

Toby was the most curious about Lin Rui's transformation. He undid the barbell collars and loaded several twenty-kilogram plates with a series of clangs.

As he loaded them, he pressed, "Leon, you must've secretly bought steroids once you made some money, right? Trenbolone or Winstrol?

"I've heard people say you can't get results without juicing. If you want to break through human limits, you need some high-tech products."

The barbell reached a hundred kilograms, a weight Lin Rui would never have dared dream of before. Putting it on his shoulders would have crushed him on the spot.

Now he braced the bar against his shoulder muscles and tested the weight with his lower back and legs, casually asking Toby, "Have you used that stuff?"

Toby shook his head. "My mother strictly forbids me from touching it. She said she'd rather have me be a useless bum at home than develop an enlarged heart while I'm still young.

"But lots of my friends use it in secret, and the results really are good. Their muscles shed water in no time and get really beautiful definition.

"The coach at school uses it. He can bench a hundred and fifty kilograms and squat over two hundred and forty. I'm so jealous.

"But he also said the side effects are obvious. Like your balls... they shrink."

Lin Rui tightened his core and drove through his lower back and legs to lift the hundred kilograms. After exhaling, he took several deep breaths and asked, "You want your balls to shrink?"

"No." Toby shook his head vigorously. "Maybe I wouldn't have cared before, but now I've realized studying and losing weight aren't as hard as I imagined. I don't want to do that kind of dead-end stuff anymore.

"Besides, things are better financially at home now. Everyone's breathed a huge sigh of relief, and some of those extreme ideas we used to have just naturally disappeared.

"Like Cynthia. She told me several times she was planning to sell her virginity online for money. She doesn't bring it up anymore.

"Oh, and whatever you do, don't tell her you heard that from me. She'll kill me."

As Toby rambled on, Lin Rui spread his knees and arched his lower back, slowly lowering himself into a squat as he exhaled.

He could feel his knees and thighs rapidly heating up. He inhaled again and straightened. Over the next two minutes, he repeated the movement twelve times.

After he finished and returned the barbell to the rack, Lin Rui's heart hammered wildly. He was panting hard and sweating all over. But he did not feel exhausted; he still had plenty of energy.

"Wonderful!" Toby exclaimed loudly. "I think you can do a hundred and twenty kilograms." He found two more plates and added them for Lin Rui.

"Make it a hundred and sixty," Lin Rui said. "I want to test my limits too."

Toby's squat limit was a hundred and forty kilograms, but he was no athletic star. His naturally strong physique barely let him manage one rep, and afterward he was spent.

Hearing that Lin Rui actually wanted to surpass him, the young Black man cried out, "Be careful! Don't think you can do whatever you want just because you're juicing.

"You used to struggle even with fifty kilograms. That means your foundation is terrible. Push your limits recklessly and your blood vessels could burst."

Lin Rui thought he had a point and took his advice, adjusting the weight to a hundred and forty kilograms. He rested for five minutes, waiting for his strength to recover and the aching tightness in his muscles to subside before trying again.

Once again, he did twelve reps in one go. Though he was drenched in sweat and panting like an ox, he was nowhere near his limit.

Toby was speechless. Beside him, he yelled in frustration and consoled himself. "Forget it, forget it. I'm not competing with someone on steroids.

"What Leon's doing is wrong. His balls will shrink, his heart will enlarge, and he won't live past forty. I can't copy his stupidity."

Lin Rui's original "strength" had only been 7, but with the card's enhancement, it had risen to 13, higher even than Toby's.

He tried a hundred and sixty kilograms as well. This time, he truly felt his strength give out and stopped after a single squat.

Next, he tried deadlifts, weighted pull-ups, battle ropes, jump rope, and burpees, among other exercises. His endurance, explosive power, and reaction speed all far exceeded those of ordinary people.

Watching Lin Rui beat his results one after another, Toby grew somewhat dejected. Whatever he was muttering under his breath, he was telling himself not to compete with someone on steroids.

They kept at it until six in the evening, then tidied up the gym, locked the iron door, and headed home for dinner.

On the way, Toby kept urging him, "Leon, stop juicing. Seriously, don't do it anymore. It'll kill you."

"I know." Lin Rui did not deny "juicing." After all, he needed an explanation for the sudden explosion in his physical abilities. It was perfectly reasonable for Toby to attribute it to steroids.

Once they reached the street, Lin Rui instinctively hid his face inside his hoodie and put on a mask so no one could recognize his ethnically Chinese face.

This neighborhood began to change its face after nightfall.

Shady characters crawled out of alleyways, underpasses, and abandoned parking lots, their hair dyed every color of the rainbow, their torn leather jackets jingling with metal studs, like nocturnal animals beginning their hunt for food.

To these people, "ethnically Chinese" and "fat sheep" meant the same thing.

"I want to buy some water. Want any?" Toby pointed at a convenience store on the corner ahead.

"No. Be quick." Lin Rui kept his voice very low, his eyes constantly scanning their surroundings. "Someone's watching us."

The ground was sticky and filthy, and each step brought the faint crunch of crushed glass.

An overturned trash can looked as though it had been kicked countless times. Spilled swill and beer cans gleamed greasily beneath the streetlights.

Layers of wild, deranged graffiti covered the walls on both sides. Red-and-black gang signs mingled with words of vented rage-the reasons that gym had closed down back then were written all over this street.

Toby looked unconcerned, patting his broad chest. "Relax. I'm this big. Who'd dare mess with us?"

He walked toward the convenience store.

The storefront had no door at all, only an iron window welded shut with thick steel bars, like a prison visiting window.

To pay, customers had to slip money into the rusty trough beneath the window. Only then would the clerk reach out from inside to collect it, ask what they wanted, and push the goods out.

Just as Toby bent down to count his change, a figure drifted over from across the street.

He was a white man whose face looked as though it had been brushed with coal dust. His unkempt beard and hair were tangled together, and his murky eyes held a predator's aggression.

His gaze swept over Toby first, then locked firmly onto Lin Rui, like a hunting dog scenting blood.

Every hair on Lin Rui's body stood on end.

In his previous life, he had spent twenty years scraping by at the very bottom of society in the United States. If he had not been robbed a hundred times, it had been eighty. He knew that look all too well-that naked appraisal that treated a person like an ATM.

The white man drew closer, his right hand tucked in the pocket of his worn work pants the entire time, creating a distinct bulge.

As he came within reach, he opened his mouth, revealing missing front teeth. His voice was low and hoarse, but vicious. "I've got a gun in my pocket. Unless you want a bullet, hand over your money and phones. Now."

Before he finished speaking, Lin Rui moved.

He darted sideways, moving his body out of the possible line of fire.

At the same instant, his right fist struck like a venomous snake flicking its tongue, unleashing astonishing force over an extremely short distance. A precise jab landed squarely on the man's Adam's apple.

13 points of explosive power and 11.5 points of agility were compressed into an impact lasting a fraction of a second.

"Ghk-"

The white man let out a short, muffled grunt. His eyes flew wide, and both hands instinctively clutched his neck, like prey with its windpipe pinched shut.

He staggered back three or four steps, bubbling chokes squeezing from his throat. His face rapidly turned from red to purple. His knees buckled, and he dropped to them with a thud, his body convulsing violently as his feet kicked wildly against the filthy pavement.

Expressionless, Lin Rui stepped back twice and swiftly scanned the surroundings-no accomplices, no gunshots, no sirens. Only then did his taut shoulders relax slightly.

Toby had just finished paying. He turned around with a chilled sports drink in hand, just in time to see a man lying in the middle of the street, writhing and convulsing like a fish starved of oxygen.

"...What happened?" Toby froze.

"Nothing." Lin Rui caught his arm, his tone so calm he hardly sounded like someone who had just struck another person. "Let's go. This guy's probably having a sudden withdrawal episode."

"Withdrawal?" Toby frowned, but quickened his steps to follow. "Shouldn't we call the police?"

"The police? You want to stand here waiting for them until next year?" Lin Rui pulled him into the nearby alley. "Move."

Their figures soon disappeared around the corner.

Behind the convenience store's barred window, the clerk chewed gum expressionlessly, looking out through the narrow opening.

A few meters away, the white man's convulsions grew weaker and weaker. His limbs spread stiffly, like a rag doll carelessly discarded.

The streetlight shone on his face, illuminating the whites of his eyes and the foam slowly trickling from the corner of his mouth.

The clerk shrugged, picked up the old landline on the counter, and dialed a number he knew by heart.

"Hello, body collection? Another one's dead here... Yeah, the convenience store at the Seventh Street intersection. Hurry up and haul him away. The body's blocking my business."

He hung up, blew another bubble, and popped it with a snap, then lowered his head and went back to playing on his phone as though nothing had happened.