If Jing Shu could have seen what was inside that villa, things might have been different. At least then, she would have weighed whether it was worth wasting her time here in the flickering blue light of the walkway.
But right now, she couldn't see a damn thing. It felt like a devil was whispering in her ear, "Go on, your favorite treasure's inside," while an angel on the other side pleaded, "Leave now, you will find something even better later."
She looked at the heavy door and the silence of the hall beyond it. She decided to give it another five minutes. If she couldn't figure it out by then, she would bail.
The thing inside was probably like those laser traps in movies; the kind that slice anyone or anything that steps into their territory into tiny pieces. In those films, the hero usually wears special glasses, spots the red beams, and leaps through them like a gymnast to grab the treasure from the display case. Jing Shu shifted her weight, her eyes scanning the empty air for any hint of a shimmer.
She had tried her own tricks too. She used her poison bees to test every angle, hoping to find a gap she could exploit. If even a single thread or small object could make contact, her Cube Space would let her teleport the treasure straight out without stepping inside. That's the plan. There would be no danger and no risk.
Reality, though, had other ideas. She sacrificed hundreds of poison bees and countless Sulfuric Acid Ants, yet there wasn't a single gap anywhere. Not one. The whole place was covered in a crisscrossing laser web so dense that even a mosquito wouldn't survive it. The beams must have come from a moving axis, leaving no blind spots at all. The air in the room smelled faintly of ozone and charred chitin.
The ants could crawl along the corners, sure, but the moment they got close to the display cases, they were instantly burned to ash. Jing Shu wanted to find the switch that powered those lasers, but after crawling the entire perimeter with her mental links, she didn't see any wires or sockets.
She even thought about sending the Sulfuric Acid Ants on a suicide mission, hoping they could clog or destroy the laser emitters, but that didn't work either. The beams came from the center, not the walls. The only way to shut it down or destroy it was to get to the middle, which is impossible.
"If I dump a few buckets of water on it, or cut the power lines… maybe it will work? Damn, if only I had more time."
Then another question popped up: how were those display cases unharmed by the constant barrage of lasers? Shouldn't they be sliced apart too?
Jing Shu narrowed her eyes. She thought for a moment and then suddenly drew her crossbow. She fired straight at a display case, the string twanging in the quiet air. She didn't care if she triggered an alarm.
Piu!
The arrow shot forward. But halfway through, it disintegrated, scattering into shards before it ever reached its target. The pieces fell to the floor and were instantly sliced into even smaller bits.
Jing Shu's eyes widened. "It's fake! The whole thing's a 5D hologram! Damn it, I wasted so much time!"
She gritted her teeth and turned to leave. After two steps, she stopped, her brow furrowing. All the bees she had sent through the windows were dead. If the entire house was covered by laser traps, then this couldn't just be a projection. No one would waste so much effort for a simple illusion. That meant there had to be something hidden here.
"I don't buy it," she muttered.
She had been feeding Yi Hou, her Sulfuric Acid Ant Queen, plenty of Spirit Spring water lately. This boosted her fertility to insane levels. So Jing Shu went all out, unleashing waves of Sulfuric Acid Ants to swarm across the mansion. They poured from her sleeves and the floor, a dark tide of tiny bodies.
Dozens died every few seconds, sliced apart by the lasers, but they just kept coming. Wave after wave, they mapped out every inch of the place until, finally, they found it. A narrow gap sat right at the mansion's center.
Turns out the whole laser setup was a decoy. Whoever designed it had gone wild with creativity, hollowing out the space between the first and second floors to hide a massive built-in vault. Without triggering the right mechanism, no one would ever find the entrance.
Luckily, the Sulfuric Acid Ants could slip into that narrow space and touch the safe's surface.
The problem was, they couldn't get inside. It was a fully sealed vault, sturdy enough to survive a bombing. That alone told Jing Shu how valuable its contents were. And since her Cube Space worked as long as there's any form of contact, she didn't need to open it. Just one thread connecting to the vault was enough for her to sweep everything inside at once.
This wasn't the old world anymore, where she would sneak around and only dare to steal one gun at a time. This is America, a lawless wasteland.
Her heart pounded against her ribs as she directed the Sulfuric Acid Ants to carry a thin strand of silk and touch the hidden vault inside the wall. She closed her eyes, feeling the cold, metallic contact through her Cube Space. The vault was massive, roughly one cubic meter. It was one meter long, one wide, one high, and custom-built into the mansion's structure.
But the best part was that there wasn't just one vault. There were twenty of them, all one cubic meter each, lined up in a row behind the reinforced walls.
Just imagining what they might hold made her pulse race.
She snatched the contents of the first vault into her Cube Space. Before she could even check what she had stolen, a blaring alarm erupted. A rapid "beep-beep-beep" countdown echoed through the air, the sound shrill and urgent.
"Oh shit."
Without hesitating, she swept all twenty vaults clean. She grabbed the sack containing Hao Yunlai by the leg and bolted toward the glass walkway.
Run fast, run far. That's the only plan now.
As she sprinted, her boots thudding on the transparent floor, the countdown faded behind her. Then a wave of scorching heat slammed into her back, throwing her forward.
Boom!
The explosion roared so loud it shook the ground beneath her. A giant mushroom cloud of black smoke and orange fire rose behind her as flames swallowed the villa. Her ears rang with a high-pitched whine, and she felt a searing pain across her back as hot air tore through her clothes.
"I'm injured?" she muttered, glancing back over her shoulder. The entire mansion was on fire, smoke billowing upward into the dark sky. Even the underwater structures below had been blown open, the sea water rushing in to meet the flames. Thankfully, the area seemed segmented enough that the rest wasn't affected.
But the blaring alarms could probably be heard for kilometers.
The place was a total disaster zone. Jing Shu didn't dare linger. She had to move before security came swarming in.
Hao Yunlai's limp body kept bumping against rocks and debris as she dragged him along. She had no idea if he was in pain, but if he was, he should've woken up by now.
She downed a sip of Spirit Spring water, the cool liquid soothing her throat, and picked up her pace.
When she finally reached the bowling alley, she stopped to catch her breath. Her back was burned and bleeding, the fabric of her coat fused to her skin, but a little Spirit Spring water should fix that soon enough. Honestly, compared to the pile of loot now sitting safely inside her Cube Space, this injury was nothing.
Curiosity eventually got the better of her. She pulled out one of the stolen boxes from her space. It was heavy, made of solid, cold metal. She cracked it open.
Inside were ten glass tubes, each filled with a quiet, shimmering liquid.