The big hoodlum and the space pirate stared at each other for a moment, quite at loggerheads. After a moment both realized that the other party had no intention of backing down, both therefore felt the other the ungrateful bastard.
They each sneered. Double O One spoke first, “We have invited all prominent people in the Eighth Galaxy. The guests are almost all here now. Sige is fashionably late, it looks like you are the finale.”
So it turned out that this group of unidentified space pirates invited more than just him. Lin Jingheng was a little surprised, because although the big hoods of the Eighth Galaxy were not the government, they were inextricably linked to the weak officialdom and shouldered many managerial responsibilities. They could be considered the invisible governments in the gray areas. They mostly guarded their own little fiefdoms and rarely interacted with anti-government organizations such as space pirates.
It would require more than just an invitation letter to bring these people into the same room. Some unusual means must have been involved.
Lin Jingheng put his hands in his pockets and asked meaningfully, “Am I the finale or the rearguard?”
This was a little rude. Double O One’s eyes twitched. Then he smiled, “Of course, I have invited everyone over to make friends and get acquainted. Not everyone is as far-sighted as Lin Sige. I have studied the expansion of the Black Hole in recent years. I feel like Sige would want to be more than just a local snake, so you should be very interested in our proposed partnership.”
“I’m flattered,” Lin Jingheng stood tall in front of the starship, “I’m not a local snake, at most a local earthworm. I can’t worry about things outside of Planet Beijing. But if someone wants to make some moves on Planet Beijing, I’d have to poke my head out and take a look.”
Double O One’s face darkened a bit at Lin Jingheng’s arrogant al dente attitude.
With carrots and sticks they had gathered all the big hoods from the Eighth Galaxy, but the man from the Black Hole was undoubtedly their most special guest - their biochip had been invincible in the entire Eighth Galaxy. It would have been no big deal to snatch a galaxy chancellor, let alone a child. Yet they missed the mark on Planet Beijing. Spider disappeared without a trace, most likely dealt with by someone. Double O One did not know whether the “Lin” in front of him had any mysterious means or was just lucky.
At the same time, most people they invited to the remote space station did not come voluntarily. Some were threatened and some were simply tricked by technical means. Only the Black Hole accepted the invitation without any question. Moreover, this Lin strutted here with merely a pretty boy toting a bag. Double O One could not tell whether this other party was privy to their ploys or was just plain stupid.
Because he could not tell, Double O One considered a moment and chose to swallow his pride for the time being, “Please follow me.”
The massive starship looked like a skyscraper, pointing straight into the sky. It contained a world that was completely distinct from the outside. Double O One intended to start with a head-on blow and took Lin Jingheng directly to the top floor in the elevator. As soon as the elevator door opened, he extended his hand out with a skin deep smile and said, “This is the viewing boardwalk. Please.”
It turned out that there was a completely transparent boardwalk outside the elevator, cutting across the entire starship and hanging tens of meters high in the air. It was not clear what kind of material the boardwalk was made of. The refractive index was very close to that of air. It was squeaky clean and almost invisible to the naked eye. The guardrails on both sides of the boardwalk were less than 30 centimeters high and basically useless. To make it even worse, the boardwalk’s ends were not fixed to the starship, instead it floated in midair using magnetic fields.
“Sige doesn’t have acrophobia, does he?” Double O One grinned and showed off his broad teeth. He stepped onto the transparent boardwalk and stood as if suspended in the air. The boardwalk seemed to sway gently with his movements, “The view is great here, I personally like it a lot, though I’m not sure if it suits Sige’s taste.”
“I’m a rough guy with no taste,” Lin Jingheng stepped up without hesitation and remarked without lifting his head, “Zhanlu, take it slow when you come up.”
Zhanlu, even though ignorant and talkative, had nevertheless followed him for years and understood his cant. Having received the malicious directive from his master, he strode onto the boardwalk and silently released magnetic interference. The boardwalk jolted violently and suddenly sank.
Double O One focused his entire attention on swanking and had none left for maintaining his balance. All of a sudden he lost his footing, let escape a loud cry, danced around and grabbed the edge of the boardwalk with all four limbs, almost scared to tears.
Lin Jingheng kept his balance perfectly and gave Zhanlu an affected glare, “I told you to slow down, look at what you’ve done!”
Zhanlu looked back at him innocently.
Lin Jingheng strolled over to Double O One and bent down, “You should have told me earlier that the boardwalk has a weight limit. See, that was dangerous. Come, let me lend you a hand.”
His words were saying lending a hand, yet with both hands firmly stuck in his pockets, his face brimmed with schadenfreude from the sideline.
Double O One’s face turned green and red. He gritted his teeth and clambered up. Murderous intentions arising in his mind, he shot a look of daggers at Zhanlu. He pressed a small device on his earlobe and said, “Inspect the boardwalk!”
Having said that, he could no longer maintain the superficial courteousness and led the way with a sullen face.
The transparent boardwalk soon came to an end. There was an empty field there, and roars maybe from cornered animals could be heard.
It was a circular open field, like a sports field, surrounded by stands. In the inner circle of the stands sat a group of researcher-looking people, busily recording experimental data. In the outer circle were guests like Lin Jingheng, all looking grim.
When Double O One walked in with Lin Jingheng, a man standing at the very corner inadvertently raised his head and met Lin Jingheng’s eyes.
This man was tall and very handsome, but not the mainstream kind of handsome, because the abrupt aquiline nose gave him a somewhat gloomy air, and upwards from the bridge of his nose, he had a pair of eyes with apple and orange colors - it was said that this man suffered trauma to his left eye and needed an artificial eyeball when he was young. In truth, the artificial eyeball could have looked exactly the same as the original with the technology at the time, but who hadn’t been young once?
This gentleman, who was at that point still not done with puberty, deliberately chose a different colored iris in order to stand out. He thought he was rad, but ended up turning himself into an unsightly Persian cat. It was too late to regret the decision by the time he was grown.
This would be Monoeyed Hawk, the father dearest of Principal Lu of Planet Beijing.
When the incident with the IU traitor Lu Xin happened, Mrs. Lu fled with the mech Zhanlu. The IU army chased her all the way to the Eighth Galaxy, where an unknown force appeared out of nowhere and took Mrs. Lu. Since the army had already captured Zhanlu by that point and the small starship carrying Mrs. Lu was hit by a missile, the army did not bother with them, figuring that she should have been burned to a crisp.
Fifteen years ago, Commander Lin led a troop to clear out some remnants of space pirates. While passing through the Eighth Galaxy, he left the troop privately and made a special trip to see Monoeyed Hawk.
No one knew why a dignified IU commander would want to meet an arms dealer, and no one knew what they talked about.
In any event, Monoeyed Hawk breathed a sigh of relief when he heard that Lin Jingheng was assassinated five years ago.
Right now, coming face to face with Lin Jingheng all of a sudden, he was briefly confused, for Lin Jingheng’s current slovenly appearance was a far cry from when he was the commander. Then, Lin Jingheng smiled faintly towards him, and that smile was like something straight out of a nightmare.
Monoeyed Hawk thought he had seen a ghost in broad daylight. The hairs stood up all over his body. His eyes opened so wide that the apple and orange eyeballs almost fell out of the sockets. He subconsciously put his hands on his waist.
“Mr. Lu, I trust that you have been doing well.” Lin Jingheng stretched out a hand to him, “The last time I saw you was more than ten years ago, and you look splendid as ever. I have settled on Planet Beijing in the past few years, but I haven’t made the time to visit you yet. That is rather inappropriate. Please allow me to come by and apologize some other day.”
Monoeyed Hawek’s shoulders tensed up and the veins in his neck popped. Lin Jingheng maintained his ice-cold smile and let his outstretched hand hover. The air between the two men seemed to have frozen over in an instant.
Double O One eyed them suspiciously, “You two are…”
Right this moment, a heart-piercing shrill came from the empty field beneath the stands, and there was commotion everywhere, breaking up the knives-out intensity between the two.
Lin Jingheng withdrew his hand as if nothing had happened and nodded towards Monoeyed Hawk, “Nothing. Just a little excited to see an ‘old friend’.”
Double O One regarded himself a man of grand schemes and was disinterested in the hoods’ grievances. Seeing that they had no intention of doing anything on the spot, he was happy to let it go, and simply arranged for Lin Jingheng to be situated away from Monoeyed Hawk.
No one paid any mind to what went on there and then. Everyone’s eyes were glued to the two men in the field.
Lin Jingheng himself was tall already, but the two men in the field were at least a head taller than him. Their physiques were beyond buff, looking nearly inhuman. They were both shirtless and covered in sensors. Serieses of data flashed on the translucent screen next to the field.
One of the men pulled out a gun from nowhere and fired three shots in a roll at his opponent’s chest. The precise speed and trajectory of the bullets were shown on the screen, enough to shoot through a cow, but the opponent’s chest held like a bulletproof steel plate. He shouted, bolted towards the bullets, blocked the gun muzzle with his pectorals, and threw a punch at the person holding the gun.
The man holding the gun pulled back his head to dodge it. The fist hit a lamppost nearby. The towering lamppost actually snapped and crashed down from a height of more than ten meters, landing right into the stands. The audience scurried about temporarily.
The man who blocked the muzzle then threw a second punch. This time his opponent failed to dodge it. A muffled sound that made people’s teeth hurt issued from the field. The person who was hit by the punch had his neck unnaturally bent to one side, his cervical spine obviously broken. Yet the man somehow did not die and was able to move as usual despite the broken cervical spine. Blood came up from the bottom of his eyes. The machine gun in his hand rang out randomly, turning the opponent into a sieve - literally.
The bullets were embedded in the man’s bare chest in a row, as if his chest grew a row of uneven teeth!
The bloodiness of this scene went beyond normal imagination. Some in the audience covered their mouths and vomited.
The timer on the translucent screen rang at that moment - five minutes exactly.
The ringtone seemed to have some magic power. The two monster-like men froze like beastly versions of Cinderella who had heard the midnight bell.
Immediately afterwards, the skin of the man with a broken neck turned red, and soon became as red as cooked shrimps. Blood then oozed out from pores all over his body. He was like a broken plasma-filled plastic bag, quickly shriveled up. The astonishingly majestic body from moments ago melted, revealing the scarlet skeleton inside.
The other man screamed and ran like mad out of the field. No one tried to stop him because there was no need.
As he ran, the flesh on his body fell like an oversized coat. He stopped after running some fifty meters. The muscles and ligaments attached to the bones snapped thereafter. Unable to continue, the skeleton fell forward, and the eyeballs rolled out for over three meters.
The entire audience went pin-drop silent. Lin Jingheng frowned.
The big hoods shortly exploded, “What the hell is this?”
“The chip you snatched is just a crude half finished product.” Double O One said to Lin Jingheng in a hushed voice.
Double O One then turned around, walked directly between the two corpses, put on some gloves, and broke off a chip from one of the corpses. He grinned and showed off a gum-baring sinister smile, “Everyone - I believe you have seen it with your own eyes. Before the chips were injected into experimental subjects No. 5 and 6, they were both ordinary men with a height of about 1.80 meters and a weight between 75 and 85 kilos. They did not receive any military or physical training, but after being injected with chips, their height, weight, body fat and various physiological indicators saw night and day changes.”
“This is one of our research achievements,” Double O One said, holding up the chip in his hand, “We named this project ‘God Creation Project’.”
Monoeyed Hawk scoffed, “God creation? Sorry, I think this should be the ‘To-Hell Project’.”
“Of course, this is just an experimental sample. The effective duration is only five minutes.” Double O One said, “But our technology is fairly mature now. It is expected that the effective duration will be greatly improved in the next couple months. Just imagine, everyone, an immensely strong, powerful, and fearless superhuman army.”
Monoeyed Hawk, “I thought modern warfare has gone past hair pulling and face scratching.”
Double O One gave him a glimpse, “You are right. In addition to the physical evolution that was just demonstrated to you, these modified subjects are also perfect mech pilots. Once linked with a mech, they will become part of the mech. I think that everyone knows this - in actual combat, the match between the human mind and the mech’s mental network is only 90% at best, which means that there is a gap. If the enemy’s mental threshold is higher than your barrier, your control of the mech could be seized by the enemy.”
Back in the day, Lin Jingheng of the Silver Fortress was invincible and would go anywhere as just one man in a mech, it was precisely because of his extremely high mental threshold.
But if there were impenetrable mechs in the world…
Double O One looked around, laughed, raised his hand to draw up the translucent screen next to the platform, and played back the scenes of the two men fighting tooth and nail, “The reaction time of the modified subjects is sixteen times that of ordinary people. Everyone knows what this means in a mech war.”
Monoeyed Hawk, “We are living the good life, why should we prepare for war?”
Double O One bowed slightly towards him, “Dear Sir, just because you don’t go looking for war, it doesn’t mean that war won’t come looking for you. Everyone doesn’t know yet, right? On the night of June 29th, Universal Time, that is, about fifty-six hours ago, a thousand hyperspace heavy mechs blasted the Silver Fortress to smithereens. At the same time, someone infiltrated the capital planet and assassinated the secretary general of the IU -“
Lin Jingheng’s whole body shook.
However, his slight movement went unnoticed. The Eighth Galaxy was too far away from the other galaxies. News of sudden events could not reach here so quickly. Everyone was caught off guard by the bombshell and looked at each other in confusion.
“Impossible!”
“Is there any evidence?”
“Quit being sensational here. What on earth do you want?”
Double O One snapped his fingers. The translucent screen rose into midair and a footage started playing.
The towering fortress command post collapsed all of a sudden, dust flew everywhere, and the roar was deafening. Then an intense light abruptly appeared, briefly blinding everyone. A remaining piece from a mech fell into the scorched earth, showing half of the logo of the IU - eight vines intertwined into a ring of peace.
“This is our era,” Double O One extended his arms, “The Eighth Galaxy has been trampled on by the IU for two hundred years. It is our turn to seize the wave. Please join us on our journey! Everyone here will be a maker of history!”
Just as the space sociopath Double O One was giving an impassioned speech and recruiting people to join him, a nondescript single-person mech quietly glided into the space station’s mech platform on autopilot. It automatically passed through security. Parked among numerous other mechs, it was entirely unnoticeable.
Everyday, countless single-person mechs come and go from the space station. The security system remained quiet as a mouse, showing no sign of being disturbed.
No one knew that it carried four minors who had been knocked out by their first space journey.