087 “Triathlon” on the Highway with a Bicycle

A scream tore from the room as the baton slammed into Yang Ying’s right shin. Li Jie had already rolled the blanket over the man’s upper body, burying even his head beneath it.

Crack.

Thud.

Han Zitong lunged in with blazing pain in his wrist, only to be met by Li Jie’s side kick, which snapped his ribs cleanly. The instant the breath was knocked from him, Han Zitong knew his lung had been injured.

That single blow stripped him of all fighting strength at once, and he could not even cry out. He could only watch in mute horror as Li Jie delivered two more savage strikes, smashing Yang Ying’s right leg beyond repair.

Twisted into an unmistakable angle, the limb was finally still. Only then did Li Jie stop, and with deliberate calm he patted down Han Zitong and took the magazines from him.

He glanced at his watch. Plenty of time.

So he searched the gear off the bodyguard lying in the corridor outside as well. One man, one gun. Rather well stocked, it seemed.

He casually tore open two homemade smoke bombs and tossed them into the hallway. The hissing never stopped. They were not made with any fancy smoke compound at all, just ordinary perchloroethane, ten yuan a pound. Throw enough of them and the job was done; he had even stuffed in little pinches of white phosphorus, just for the visual effect.

The guards downstairs had not yet reacted when Li Jie began firing the borrowed pistol for fun.

Bang bang bang bang bang bang!

The handgun skills he had squeezed out of the dog system were not bad at all. Shooting at his reflection in the glass, he hit head and heart every time.

The only reason he could keep shooting at the glass was because the glass was bulletproof too.

He tossed the emptied pistol aside, lifted the blanket, and looked down at Yang Ying, trembling and no longer feeling the pain in his right leg. Leaning close, he said softly, “Mr. Yang, take care of yourself. Rest well and recover. I brought you… a little fruit.”

He took out a soft persimmon and placed it carefully on the bedside table. Only then did he straighten up, walk over to the already incapacitated Han Zitong, and kick him hard enough to knock him out cold.

The whole world went quiet.

Then Li Jie opened the window, stood on the sill, and looked back at Yang Ying with a frightened face. He gave a little wave. “Bye, Mr. Yang. See you again if fate allows.”

He leapt into the night—not a leap of faith, but one with a grappling hook and descender attached.

When he reeled the hook back in, he no longer knew which floor he had come from. It was all dark anyway. The burst of gunfire had not disturbed the other floors, so one could only say the soundproofing in the private ward was indeed excellent.

Humming a tune, he slipped into the corridor, bent low, took a few backward steps, and then in the blink of an eye surged forward at a hundred-meter sprinter’s speed. Under his wildly enhanced dynamic vision, everything around him seemed to slow.

At the far end of the corridor, he sprang from the window. Beneath the night sky, a dark figure arced gracefully through the air and landed squarely upon a massive ginkgo tree in the hospital grounds.

In winter the ginkgo stood bare. Clinging to its trunk, Li Jie remained there, breathing out wisps of white vapor.

As police lights flashed and sirens blared, and he saw a large number of officers pouring into Renhui Hospital, he finally nodded in satisfaction and climbed down the tree. At a section of wall, he made only a light hop, slapped one hand against the pillar, and his whole body sailed over.

The shadows of night were the best disguise.

At that moment, Li Jie could feel his blood flowing faster, his heart pounding fiercely. The thrill of skimming past police cars, close enough to meet within a fraction of a second, left him deliriously excited.

A different experience. A different pleasure.

He was now more convinced of this unprecedented delight than he was of the system’s rank assessment.

Absurd, chaotic, unspeakable… bliss!

“Hahahahahaha…”

In the car, Li Jie laughed like a true villain.

The whole city might well be setting up roadblocks, inspecting every suspicious vehicle that passed through, questioning every dubious outsider they could find.

And yet…

So what?

He parked in front of a small scrap collection yard. At a glance, it was the sort of place that made a little money on the side, nothing like the big yards that processed tons upon tons of scrap steel, iron, and copper.

Here, flammable materials were everywhere—wrapping paper, plastic bottles, and the like.

Beep beep.

He tapped the horn.

Under the pitch-black eaves, an old man in a worn military overcoat stood with a cigarette between his lips, though he was not smoking it. Only when the horn sounded did he flick a disposable lighter twice with a series of clicks.

A faint, wavering glow appeared in the dark at last.

The old man ambled out, unlocked the chain on the gate, and grumbled, “You little monkey, sneaking around like a thief in the dead of night. I’ve been keeping watch on you for three or four hours. Have you eaten?”

“I have.”

In truth, Li Jie’s vision in low light had improved greatly as well. Before Hou Taiji had even lit his cigarette, he had already seen him.

“Go inside and eat something hot.”

“I’m leaving right away.”

As he spoke, Li Jie cut the engine and got out, handing over a box of unused equipment. “Hide this somewhere for me.”

“No gun, right?”

“No.”

“Then it’s none of my business.”

Hou Taiji did not even ask what Li Jie had come for. Asking would have been pointless. What was there to ask? Why he had been snooping around for where the second young master of the Yang family lived?

Still, Hou Taiji caught the smell of gunpowder. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then stopped himself. In the end he said nothing.

“Uncle, say one line to me, and I’ll leave right away.”

“What line?”

Hou Taiji looked baffled as he turned his head, cigarette still in his mouth.

“Just say, ‘The weaker the power, the less the responsibility.’”

“You’re crazy…”

Muttering curses, Hou Taiji had no interest in playing such a childish game. As he went inside, Li Jie tossed him the car keys.

“You’re not driving it?”

“I’m giving it to you. It’s a used car I bought for eight thousand.”

“I’m supposed to drive a used car?”

“What kind did you want, then?”

“At the very least, a Volkswagen Golf manual from the Wolfsburg factory. That one looks more upscale…”

“Boss Hou, when you’ve got money, be a little kinder to yourself, every day…”

Li Jie pulled out ten thousand yuan and slapped it into Hou Taiji’s arms. Then, without looking back, he turned and raised a hand in farewell. “I’m off.”

“Such a pile of cash, and hey—hey, why are you taking my bicycle? Hey! Hey! You monkey! You thieving beast—”

Amid Hou Taiji’s furious cursing, the dog in the yard finally realized this was no guest and started barking madly.

Though its chain was not even fastened, it still did not dare give chase,只能 watch helplessly as that fellow rode off with its master’s commuting machine.

Hou Taiji kept cursing as he returned indoors and stood by the table, staring at the spread of good dishes. “Damn it all, I cooked up this whole table for nothing.”

“If you won’t eat it, I will!”

The yellow wine in the flask was still warm. He filled a cup with it, took a pleasant sip, picked up a chopstickful of stinky mandarin fish, and ate with a sway of the head and shoulders.

Once his mood had lifted, he picked up the ten thousand yuan on the table and began counting it for amusement. Before long it was gone, and he slapped the table, shouting, “You little monkey, you even skimmed off two bills from me!”

Ten thousand yuan had become only nine thousand eight hundred. Boss Li could not afford not to take two notes, after all. Riding a bicycle back to Jiankye meant at least two hundred kilometers of road.

If he got hungry on the way, wasn’t he supposed to stop at some night market stall?

What could two hundred yuan even buy him?

Whoosh!

He wound through streets and alleys, darting through lanes. If not for the mask, Li Jie felt the cold wind would have blown snot bubbles out of his nose.

The twelfth lunar month was still bitterly cold.

To warm himself up, he immediately put on his earphones and played a little speedster tune. The fixed-gear bicycle shot up to forty kilometers per hour in an instant.

This junker had solid rubber tires and no chain drive, only shaft drive. Its whole purpose was to be tough and endure abuse.

Even if Li Jie’s legs smoked from pedaling, he would not worry about breaking the bike on hardened roads.

Who cared about pace? What the hell was pace for?

Turn up the intensity!

A steady cruise at fifty-five kilometers per hour—that was all about beastlike stamina.

He could reach Jiankye in a little over three hours, no problem.

Bridge underpasses, culverts, village road intersections—if the phone navigation could get him there, so could he.

If the phone navigation could not, then he would just carry the bicycle and bound over walls and rooftops.

After passing the junction at the rural edge of southern Luzhou, he was already beneath the highway underpass leading to Jiankye.

Carrying a bicycle onto the highway was not right.

Cruising along a highway at sixty kilometers per hour was even less right.

And if he occasionally hit seventy on a downhill stretch, that was simply an insult to professional cyclists!

But Li had his reasons. He planned to take part in the triathlon, so training on a bicycle was perfectly reasonable.

He thundered along the emergency lane. By then, the song in his ears was no longer the speedster tune but the midnight news broadcast from Luzhou.

The report about the violent attack at Renhui Hospital had already gone out, and in the distance he could still hear sirens. Clearly, the local police truly intended to corner the perpetrator and bring him down.

“Aah… heh.”

Yawning, he rode into a highway service area. There he opened a small bag containing a folded windproof jacket, very light and convenient.

After putting it on and smoothing the wrinkles twice, it looked much neater.

There were not many people in the service area in the dead of night. The stalls were either closed or staffed by sleepy night workers, and the lights were kept low, just enough to illuminate tea eggs, snacks, and the like.

He bought tea eggs, dried tofu, tofu skewers, bean curd skin, and a bowl of curry fish balls. After eating his fill with great satisfaction, he went to the restroom to relieve himself. In his earphones, the Luzhou midnight news broadcast was already issuing a new notice, saying that checkpoints were being set up at every major traffic intersection.

Very good.

Full of food and drink, he set off again.

Luck favored him with a downhill stretch, and he immediately climbed to seventy kilometers per hour. At night, many road sections had no streetlights; a lot of truck drivers would simply cruise in the right lane at fifty or sixty, when suddenly, whoosh, a bicycle would sweep past them.

That frightened more than a few truckers awake in an instant.

When traveling the world, the most feared thing is the uncanny and the inexplicable. They quickly muttered prayers to the gods of the road, begging them to keep the filthy things from sticking to them.

Three hours later, Li Jie could already see the road sign showing twenty kilometers to Jiankye.

Once inside Jiankye’s borders, he found a village-road culvert and got off the highway, carrying the bicycle while running and jumping. He still had energy to spare.

“Really tough stuff.”

He set Hou Taiji’s bicycle down properly, patted it once, mounted again, and rode off. This time, he took things much more leisurely.

He rode all the way to the university town in the north of the river, and the remaining little over a hundred yuan went entirely to barbecue.

He also ordered a can of still zero-calorie happy soda. Whether the label said it or not, if he did not look, it was zero calories. He poured it into two cups: one to himself, because it had not been easy; and one to the world, because the world had it even harder.

Then he took out his phone.

The local Luzhou forum, as well as regional sections on some portal websites, had exploded again and again.

Everyone just wanted to know what on earth was going on tonight, with police cars all over Luzhou shrieking through the streets, making such a huge display of force.

Late-night posting, ten thousand words, all fresh from the keyboard.

Update progress: 10.4k out of 200k!

The end of this chapter.