The clang of a miner's shovel striking rock echoed endlessly down the tunnel. No miner would have taken it for someone actually cutting crystal; they would only have thought some bored fool was hammering at the stone to vent.
Someone once said the fragile rainbow crystal would crumble into dust in the air at a single breath, and that crystal ought to be handled as tenderly and carefully as a newborn baby.
Unfortunately, that famous line did not apply to Wuchang. This man, full of grief and fury, was using his shovel to work off the frustration choking his heart.
The hole in the rock wall grew deeper with every blow, and at its very center a bright crystal glittered. If Pike were here he would probably be cursing up a storm by now: the crystal had already grown ten centimeters out, and Wuchang showed no intention whatsoever of spraying foam sealant.
Wuchang had his reasons for not spraying the foam. In his brief career as a miner he had already grasped a level that the men before him had never known: doing it all in one unbroken flow.
When a calligrapher dashes off a sheet of cursive, shouldn't it be done in one breath? How could you give up that feeling of clouds drifting and water flowing?
Would a musician stop halfway through a movement to drink a cup of tea? How would you keep the emotion running unbroken from first note to last?
Mining was the same. Whether you could feel the rhythm inside the crystal itself through your blows — that was the key skill for cutting high-grade crystal.
Vibration was everywhere, and the rainbow crystal's fragility was plain for all to see. Keeping the crystal's vibration on an even, steady curve — that was the secret of Wuchang's mining. Only rookie miners sprayed foam nonstop. They had no idea how terrible a thing it was to break the rhythm of the work.
Maybe the very next blow after you finished spraying would be the instant the crystal snapped.
Today nobody disturbed Wuchang. Pike had wanted to come down the mine, but Wuchang simply hadn't brought him along. In the deserted tunnel there was only Wuchang himself.
Bit by bit the crystal extended outward. The Dragon-Tiger Rush's formidable control of force guaranteed that every one of Wuchang's blows landed perfectly evenly, while his meditation carried his mind into a state where self and object were both forgotten.
If the mind is unshaken, the hand is unshaken; one unbroken flow works miracles.
A full hour and a half. When the rainbow crystal dropped free in midair, Wuchang's left hand shot out like lightning and caught the rod securely in his palm. He did not dare slack off: the instant the crystal settled, he sprayed a thick jet of foam that locked it safe inside a protective shell.
"Holy crap! Twenty-one centimeters! Another one up to main-battleship standard. Whoa—" Wuchang leapt up in excitement, his whoops filling the whole tunnel.
Wuchang ran his hand over the deep hole in the rock wall and was startled to find no glint of crystal at the very bottom. What does that mean? It meant the crystal in the mountain had been exactly twenty-one centimeters long — he had dug out a whole crystal without damaging it in the slightest.
"Looks like my meditation's improved again. If your mind isn't steady, there's no way you could pull that off."
How much a twenty-one-centimeter crystal would actually fetch, Wuchang had no idea, but he was certain that the black-market dealers who knew their goods would pay at least ten times the official price.
Today Wuchang had truly struck it rich. Besides this top-grade crystal, his pack held six more, every one under ten centimeters, the longest of them a full eight — a haul that could only be called a miracle.
Wuchang did not linger to push his luck; he decided to head back up. For one thing, the day's harvest was rich, and for another, he was worried about the children. Poison Wasp Adu's bizarre disappearance left him anxious for their safety, and he resolved to move them at once — but the anti-crime sweep above ground was not over, and if the children went up there rashly, they might not be safe either.
In the end it was A Yun who had the answer. These cunning little thieves actually had several secret bases all their own deep in the tunnels of Huang'e City, where they kept not only their private savings but a good deal of food and clean water.
That only made the children temporarily safe. With no adult to protect them, expecting A Yun and A Liang — two half-grown kids themselves — to look after a pack of little ones really was not reliable. This was the main reason Wuchang was in such a hurry to get back.
This stretch of tunnel was unfamiliar to Wuchang, and after a few turns he suddenly realized he had a problem: I'm lost.
Getting lost in the tunnels of Huang'e was nothing unusual. Wuchang opened the portable terminal on his wrist, contacted Pike in the slums on an encrypted channel, and after ten minutes of talk finally worked out where he was.
He started back along the route Pike had described, but he had not gone two hundred meters before a strange sight appeared in front of him.
"What the hell, why is there a hand here?" the startled Wuchang muttered to himself.
The tunnel Wuchang was walking was an abandoned one left over from Huang'e's earliest days of development; its crystal had been essentially scraped clean, and nobody normally came this way. Yet here, in an ordinary abandoned tunnel, a large hand jutted out of the rock, thrusting straight into the air to block his path.
In the light of his mining lamp the hand gave off a grayish-white gleam, clawing weirdly at empty space. Wuchang, badly startled, circled it three times before he finally determined that it was a mechanical arm made of steel.
"Lane, take a look for me — what the hell is this thing?" Wuchang switched on the terminal's camera and streamed the live feed up to Lane above ground.
"Huh? Where are you shooting this from? Is this a live feed?" Lane stared at the screen for a long while, then suddenly slapped his forehead. "You little punk, you've found treasure! Dig, dig that war armor out of the rock wall — I'll send Pike and Wild Bull down to back you up right now."
The moment Wuchang heard the word treasure, his eyes lit up. He swung his shovel straight into the rock wall, and chunks of stone went flying.
"If I'm not mistaken, what's buried in that rock ought to be one of the first-generation war armors, the Hercules series. You're in the most ancient tunnel level on Huang'e — this suit was most likely left here in the planet's early development days..."
With old Lane's explanation, Wuchang got his first rough picture of what war armor, that top-tier equipment, actually was.
War armor was a special combat suit that fused technology, magic, and ancient martial arts into one. Its body-hugging design packed in a mass of nano-engines that boosted a person's strength and speed. Its high-strength alloy was the same material used for the casing of folded-space engines — even a grade better. Most crucial of all, what linked the armor's joints was magical energy: a thin energy membrane. That magical light film replaced every skin-sensor component, taking the signals of muscle movement directly and making the armor move in response.
Put simply, the armor did not merely provide physical protection — more importantly, it amplified the body's movements, letting people jump higher, run faster, endure longer, and hit harder.
"Do you have any idea how expensive this armor is? An early Hercules series like this is already an antique — on the collectors' market there's a price but no goods to be had. And the next grade up, the Raider series, costs at least two million gold coins for the cheapest set..."
"Two million gold coins... my god. Coyote Seven's entire fortune is barely over a million. This pile of scrap in front of me is worth two of Seven's whole fortune? We're rich..."
Lane looked at Wuchang's hopeless money-grubbing face with contempt. "Damn it, has money eaten your brain? Listen to me — if I can fix this suit of armor, you'll be the undisputed number one expert on Huang'e. The Guard? Not worth shit. Ye Tian? Not worth shit..."
Wuchang got excited too and swung even faster, Dragon-Tiger strength flooding his whole body so that every shovel blow knocked away great slabs of stone. Gradually the heavy humanoid armor began to take shape.
From the live feed on the terminal, Lane could tell the suit must have been buried in the mountain by an earthquake and had escaped damage by magma. Its main body had been warped by the weight of hundreds of millions of tons of rock, but the fine components were not badly damaged, so the odds of repairing it looked quite good.
An earthquake had buried the suit inside the mountain, and an earthquake had exposed one of its arms to the air — as if some god really were watching over Wuchang from the shadows.
By the time the armor's head was uncovered and its helmet dropped to the ground and rolled, Pike and Wild Bull finally arrived. The three of them worked a solid four hours before they managed to dig the armor out of the rock wall.
Under cover of darkness the three of them shuttled back and forth twice like mice moving house before they finally had the whole Hercules suit together. Lane rubbed his hands in excitement and, gazing at the pile of junk in front of him, said eagerly, "Give me money — get to the black market and buy parts, quick. Today I'm going to show you what a genius looks like..."
While Lane was forgetting food and sleep to repair the armor, in an unremarkable warehouse outside Huang'e City, Adu — bandaged from head to toe — lay groaning on a bed, with Coyote Seven and his men beside him.
"Big Fatty, Little Fatty — can you pin down the location?" Seven asked coldly.
"No problem. When Wuchang was beating Adu, he never turned off the terminal, so the two of us heard every word. Wuchang and his people are hiding right now inside Huang'e City."
The speakers were Big Fatty and Little Fatty — the one who is Blood Rose's illegitimate son and his brother. They had been Adu's men all along, standing watch in the tunnel — and for safety's sake, the terminal on Adu's wrist had never once been switched off.
Every detail — how the children were tormented, how Wuchang appeared out of nowhere, even Adu's screams under the beating — had come through to them in full. But they knew their own limits and knew they were no match for Wuchang, and on top of that they loathed the way Adu bullied the children, so in the end they never once lifted a hand to save him.
So after Wuchang left, believing Adu would be left to live or die on his own, the two fatties hauled Adu up and ran like the wind, hurrying to report the intelligence to Seven.
"So what now? Do we go smoke them out of their den right away?" one of the killers asked.
"Damn it, are you stupid? The city is Ye Tian's turf — and Brother Mad Dog's. You think we can just waltz in and start something there? If we want to grab anyone in that city, we have to go through Ye Tian..."