How many people did Zhetian even have? They wanted to blow up Xishan and rob Qian Duoduo? They would not even get past the front gate before being beaten to a pulp. As it turned out, Zhetian did not go to Xishan back then. They hit the oil base instead.
Then they turned around and came for Jing Shu's family, planning to blow up the villa, but she intercepted them on the road and wiped them out in one sweep.
So when Zhetian bragged about blowing up Xishan and robbing Qian Duoduo, it became a joke that Jing Shu quickly forgot. Until today. Lin Yi appeared, and the meticulous setup he had been building for so long only deepened her doubts. What was he really after?
After all, Lin Yi was the infamous Zero, the head behind more than a hundred forces in China.
If Zero himself had come to blow up the richest man's turf, then was Zero-Seven, the Zhetian chief of Wu City, also here?
When the thunder of explosions rolled across the mountain, she became certain. These people really were going to blow up the whole of Xishan.
Why was she so sure? Because of the underground passages.
When she and Su Mali reached a transfer point in the tunnels, she spotted clotted black smears and leftover marks on the ground. She had wondered what they were. They looked like something that had been stored there for a long time, then transported away. Transported where?
When a main passage led directly to Qian Duoduo's largest, most extravagant fortress, she had her answer. They were going to blow up Qian Duoduo's home.
Looking back, everything lined up.
The black residue had to be explosives. They had dug the tunnels, then used an "elevator" to move the charges across. As for the sheer quantity, she remembered that Lin Yi had smuggled a massive lot of explosives back from America and then disappeared from sight. So that batch must have been stashed in the tunnels.
Judging by the construction, those explosives had likely arrived last year. The tunnels had been in place for a while.
But if all the conditions were ready, why not pick a time and detonate the fortress outright? Why drag Su Mali and the others into it?
What she could not figure out most was this: if Su Mali was a chess piece, then it would be enough to keep her confined. Why deliberately let them return? That was the real question.
"If you plan to blow it up, then blow it up. Why all this nonsense?" she fumed. The thought that she might be blasted to kingdom come in a moment made her knees go weak. Hurry. She had to find the explosives.
If those tons of charges went off, they could flatten Xishan.
Lin Yi played big. Damn big.
She was, in fact, wronging him a little. The original plan had been to detonate last year. But once Lin Yi learned that Qian Duoduo had built a turtle-shell air-defense fortress capable of withstanding ton-class bombs, he gave up on bombing Xishan and switched to the oil base instead.
Alone in the tunnel, she did not need long to find another passage. Its face was disguised with a layer of invisible floor tiles, a fake wall. If she had not tapped with a hammer, she would never have found it.
Everywhere else sounded solid. Only this spot gave back a hollow thud-thud-thud.
"But this door won't open. It's iron." If the explosives were on the other side, she had no time to waste. She took out a grenade she had taken from Zhetian.
She knew it might collapse the tunnel, but that was fine. If it caved in, she would dig through.
Her first time using a grenade, she was nervous. In the pitch-black corridor, she followed the instructions to the letter: twist off the cap, pierce the moisture-proof paper, pull the igniter ring, right foot back one big step, chest up, head high, stamp with the left foot, tighten the core, snap the wrist, throw. Then hit the floor.
"One, two, three, boom!" The blast punched through the dark. The whole tunnel shivered three times.
When the dust settled, the door was gone. The corridor remained intact.
Thank Su Mali's blessed luck.
No, wait. A closer look showed the workmanship differed completely from the rough-dug sections. This was built with air-raid materials. It was designed to resist blasts. Her grenade had only blown the door, shaking loose a little dust.
From here on, she felt she had truly entered Qian Duoduo's domain.
She pushed deeper. The place opened up into a world of its own. She crouched, rubbed the floor with her fingers, and sniffed. The sharp tang of powder stung her nose.
Following the passage, she realized how poverty limits imagination. From that stretch onward, everything from underground to the surface had been built with air-defense materials. If she had to describe it, it was a giant air-raid dome, a turtle shell made of meters-thick blast walls. The place was armed to the teeth. She could almost see Qian Duoduo building a house out of gold.
No wonder Lin Yi had never carried out his plan. To crack a fortress like this, anything less than dozens of tons would be embarrassing. Now she understood his approach. If the shell could not be cracked from outside, then smuggle the explosives inside and blow it from within.
Which meant she and Su Mali had just provided the opportunity.
She quickened her pace. Then she saw detonators. And she knew them well.
In the fifth year of the apocalypse, when Wu City migrated south with the government, the plates of the earth had buckled and twisted. They met impossible terrain that had to be blasted flat, for vehicles and even for people.
She did not hesitate. She swept all the detonators into her Rubik's Cube Space. No time to joke around. These things were too dangerous. Beneath them, a thick hose lay coiled on the ground, filled with a yellow paste. The hose ran straight toward the next chamber.
There was no mistaking it. TNT.
It was the cheapest, most widely used explosive in the world, good even for underwater blasting, with tremendous power. It was also the least sensitive of the lot, unaffected by heavy rain or immersion.
You could even shoot it and it would not detonate. It needed a detonator to blow.