From the moment the underground garage was found inexplicably locked, Jing Shu felt a deep, instinctive wrongness. She regretted, not for the first time, not having bulletproof windows and reinforced plating installed on the electric car. Her mind flashed through a mental list of enemies who might still be alive and hold a grudge.
Emmm, there were quite a few, but very few could pose a real, organized threat at this stage of the disaster.
"Most likely someone locked the garage on purpose to force us to take the upper road and set an ambush there," Jing Shu said, her voice low and tense inside the vehicle.
Regardless, she stayed on high alert and told her family to lie flat in the car as they drove slowly, minimizing their profiles. At the moment, the biggest immediate threat she could conceive was firearms. Grenades and bombs were less likely, since they were tightly controlled military items even before the collapse, though she couldn't rule them out completely given the chaos.
The family, shaken but trying to stay calm, felt Jing Shu might be overreacting. Under the remnants of strict laws and martial law, who would bother setting such an elaborate ambush now? Most ordinary households didn't even have a proper kitchen knife left after the riots. Even if someone did have a gun, hitting a moving car in this pitch darkness and heavy rain would be incredibly hard.
Even so, trained by past crises, the family still followed her orders without question. Better safe than sorry. They had learned that lesson.
They couldn't just stop the car and turn back because of a suspicion, nor could Jing Shu call Li Yuetian and say, "I suspect someone wants to kill me, please send people to protect me." It would sound paranoid and draw unwanted attention. They couldn't simply refuse to go home either, with the animals and supplies waiting. The car even made a long, cautious detour, taking a different route into the villa section. Even with her heightened senses, Jing Shu failed to spot anything unusual in the swaying shadows and torrential rain.
"Looks like I worried for nothing," she murmured to herself, a thread of doubt still pulling tight in her gut.
They were about to turn the last corner, the one that would bring their villa into direct line of sight. The remote feed from the surveillance cameras around the house showed everything normal, no thermal signatures. In that instant of false reassurance, the world erupted.
The flash-bang charge hidden in the drain grate exploded with a boom right ahead of them. Jing An instinctively wrenched the wheel, the momentum sending the heavy vehicle into a terrifying skid and then a roll. The car flipped onto its side with a sickening crunch of metal and glass. Screams of shock and terror filled the overturned vehicle.
Her heart pounded against her ribs. At the same time, her perception, honed by endless Rubik's Cube drills, seemed to fracture time. The world seemed to slow to a crawl.
She saw it, a dark, grenade-like object tracing a lethal arc through the rain directly toward the vulnerable underbelly of the overturned car. She didn't hesitate. Inside the Rubik's Cube Space, her mind moved at impossible speed. She mentally lined up four dense rows of stored boulders at the space's "front" and launched them outward in an instant, materializing them in a stacked wall between the car and the incoming projectile. In a crisis like this, her only move was to knock it back or block it; she didn't have time to identify it precisely. A live grenade could obliterate everything within fifteen meters. Jing Shu wouldn't bet her family's lives on a guess.
The moment the projectile struck the stone wall and detonated with a much larger, shattering BOOM, she knew she had judged correctly. It was a grenade, a military-grade one. In her previous life, she had never even seen a real gun in ten years of struggling survival. In this life, she not only saw them often, she now had the "honor" of being directly targeted by a grenade. Wonderful.
In misfortune there was fortune. Thanks to the hyper-fast reflexes and spatial manipulation honed by training with the Rubik's Cube Space, Jing Shu had intercepted the grenade mid-flight. The car's violent rollover, terrifying as it was, had at least not triggered a secondary fuel explosion; the electric battery, though damaged, was safer than a gas tank.
"Jing Shu, don't rush out. Let Dad go with you. It's dangerous outside!" Jing An shouted from the driver's seat, his voice strained with pain and fear.
"Go check what happened. I'll stay here with Grandma and Grandpa," Su Lanzhi called from the back, her voice trembling but controlled.
"I'm stuck. I can't get my seatbelt off. Pull me," Jing An said, struggling against the pinned door and his own harness.
While everyone in the car was still in shock, disoriented and bruised, Jing Shu, who had been in the passenger seat, unbuckled her own harness with practiced ease. She kicked out the cracked windshield and climbed out first into the pouring rain. She sprinted toward the direction the grenade had come from, her night vision goggles cutting through the gloom.
In the Rubik's Cube Space, she released a swarm of her poison bees, sending them ahead in a furious cloud to sweep the area. To guard against a possible second grenade or an ambush, Jing Shu kept a last line of boulders mentally queued, ready to fire.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, she only found one man at the broken window of a ground-floor unit, hit by the edge of his own grenade's back-blast. The man was young, his face almost unnaturally handsome even in death, now bleeding from the seven orifices, his eyes wide with disbelief and the frozen shock of his final realization.
"So he saw it after all," Jing Shu whispered to herself, cold rain mixing with the sweat on her face. He must have noticed the sudden, impossible wall of boulders materializing from thin air. That sight had been his last.
The man toppled straight back from his crouch, lifeless.
After climbing through the shattered window into the damp, empty unit, Jing Shu saw the evidence of a hard life: a bowl-sized, not-yet-healed scar at the man's shoulder blade, the flesh angry and infected, and other older injuries in various stages of healing across his torso. He had probably been a dying man already, sustained by obsession and hate. The blast wave had simply finished the job.
"Even on his last breath, he wanted to drag us all to hell with him," she said coldly, looking down at the corpse. She stabbed the body dozens of times with her knife, a brutal venting of the fury and the fear that had gripped her. With such a single-minded, twisted fixation, this could only be Shangguan Jun, the name from Wu You'ai's past that brought a chill.
Xiao Dou, who had been riding in the car, somehow flapped out from the broken window and landed beside her, rubbing against her leg. Xiao Dou seemed to sense Jing Shu's boiling anger and, for once, didn't pounce to devour the fresh body, as if understanding this was not food but something else.
Jing Shu had kept wondering how Shangguan Jun would eventually come for Wu You'ai. She hadn't expected a lone-wolf stakeout, the most patient, mind-numbing, and ultimately suicidal approach.
"When did he start watching us? He knew we had surveillance around the villa, so he stayed back here, out of the camera's range, to avoid showing his face. I need to expand the cameras' coverage significantly," Jing Shu thought, the lesson searing itself into her mind.
She wiped the rain and grime from her face. While her family was still recovering inside the overturned car, she quickly recalled the large stones back into her Rubik's Cube Space. The brief, violent fight had cost more than a dozen sizable boulders from her collected stash. The front rows were reduced to gravel, and the ones behind were cracked and fissured. Boulders, she realized, were consumables in a battle. If possible, she needed real anti-explosion gear, proper ballistic shielding, not just rocks.
If that grenade had hit the car directly, the shaped charge would have punched through the roof and the entire family would have been killed instantly. The thought alone chilled her to the bone, a cold wave that had nothing to do with the rain.
She knew it was time for a harsh reflection. She had grown complacent, assuming a shred of social order and scarcity still existed even in the apocalypse. But if guns and now grenades were in play, what threat could not appear? This time it was a grenade. What if next time it was a rocket, or a sniper, or poison? The rules had changed.
In her previous life, Jing Shu had been too poor, too insignificant to attract this level of targeted trouble. In this life, with the Rubik's Cube Space and abundant supplies, she needed matching power, not just wealth, but defensive and offensive power, to protect it all.
First, Jing Shu had to strengthen her own capabilities. This incident made her realize her danger-detection ability was still lacking. She had sensed wrongness, but not the precise threat.
Right now, she could command her bees to attack a target, but it was only a one-way command.
She could give orders, but could not receive feedback from the swarm. She didn't even know whether the bees had successfully stung anyone or what they saw. If she could control the bees to scout and report back, where people were, the lay of the land, many ambushes could be avoided. Like today. There would've been no surprise.
Xiao Dou had drunk the most Spirit Spring, and Jing Shu could now faintly sense Xiao Dou's general intent and emotional state. That proved the issue was not the Spirit Spring alone but the integration and level of the Rubik's Cube Space. The first and second major forms of the Cube had shown very different functions. Each upgrade clearly raised the overall tier of her abilities.
Jing Shu suddenly felt that upgrading the Rubik's Cube Space was urgent, not just for more storage, but for deeper integration. She had a strong hunch the next upgraded space would provide the support system she desperately needed. Perhaps it could truly integrate with her own nervous system, allowing for two-way communication with her biological tools.
Right now, she had immense physical power and a versatile storage space, but few refined ways to apply the former or leverage the latter offensively. She decided to go back to the villa and study the Cube's patterns with new desperation. Before the upgrade, she could try a low-tech fix: attaching tiny night-vision or infrared pinhole cameras to bees for remote surveillance.
By the time she had packed away the last of the stone debris, leaving only scorch marks and a dented drain cover as evidence, Jing An finally managed to kick his door open and burst out. Seeing Jing Shu standing unscathed in the rain, Jing An finally exhaled a ragged breath. "How is it? What was that explosion? Are you hurt?"
"Someone planted a diversionary charge and then tried to hit us with a grenade," Jing Shu said, her voice steady now. "Fortunately, the car flipping messed with his timing or aim. By the time I got there, the man was already dead from his own back-blast. Let's get grandparents and Mom out first. We can talk more after everyone is safe."
Luckily, her grandparents had been drinking Spirit Spring daily for more than a year. Their bodies were still strong and resilient. Once everyone was carefully pulled free from the wreckage, the family was mostly fine, shaken, bruised, and scared, but with no critical injuries. The car, however, was in terrible shape, its roof caved in, windows gone, frame twisted. Who knew if it would ever run again. A vehicle that heavy had flipped. Even with her enhanced strength, she couldn't push it upright alone.
"Should we call Captain Li?" Jing An asked, looking at the wreckage and the blown-out window of the nearby unit.
Jing Shu shook her head firmly. The scene was too strange, a grenade attack, a mysterious wall of stones that was now gone, a lone dead assassin. Last time, with Yang Yang, there had already been unspoken questions. She couldn't bring the police over again and invite scrutiny she couldn't explain.
Just then, as if summoned by their need, her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Heng Jin. The call connected, his voice crackling but clear. He had navigated through the flooded outskirts and had finally arrived in Wu City. He was at the northern checkpoint, asking for coordinates.
Perfect timing.