001.

The screen lights up suddenly with a muffled buzz, and the young man hiding underneath the car stifles a curse as he reaches down, trying to touch the phone in his pocket. The pale light illuminating the floor of the garage disappears shortly afterwards, and only the youth's faint breathing can be heard in the dark room for a while.

There is no sign of the motion sensor being triggered, and the youth heaves a sigh of relief. He moves the leg that's starting to feel a bit numb, using the movement to shift his entire body to the left before swiftly wrapping his arms around himself and rolling out from beneath the hover car.

There is about thirty centimetres of space in between the whitewashed wall and the luxury car, in which even a fully grown adult can squat without being noticed, although maybe a bit uncomfortably.

In fact, there are many ways to disable a motion sensor alarm.

Some people like to use jammers to block the signal of wireless alarms, and there are naturally ones who are very efficient at their craft, directly cutting the appropriate wires to stop the transmission of electricity. There are people who choose to leave out the sensor itself from the deal and like to interrupt the internet or electricity in the entire house – and of course, there is Mo Caiyong.

Mo Caiyong prefers brute force.

Most burglar alarms leave a short window of time – somewhere between about ten and forty seconds – between the moment movement is first detected and when the alarm goes off, only giving a faint, warning beep as though to signal to the youth; now you can run, we'll see if you're quicker than us. Now you still have a choice, and if you flee, you'll still have your life after this; if you don't, it's difficult to say.

But Mo Caiyong never listens. It's as if he can't hear the taunting words at all; or maybe he can, and it is that he doesn't have a thought to spare them – the beeps have sounded, and there is still some time to take down all three of the sensors without triggering the alarm.

It's like he's running a race against time with the biggest possible disadvantage: the sensor is the highest kind of luxury product, a kind he has only had the luck to see before, but never touch – the kind that might as well be equipped with a system that sounds another alarm the moment he touches the outer covering.

It seems that the heavens are smiling down at the youth today though. He leaps up with a step onto a stainless steel shelf and holds onto the first sensor with all his strength, ripping the screws out with pure force and landing on the cold concrete in an almost Asian squat-like position.

He turns the sensor in his hand and the screws fall out with the motion. It isn't difficult to access the battery, and there is no alarm triggered either; it is apparent that the sensor, although a luxury brand item, is an older model.

Even though he moves quickly, twenty-or-so seconds have already passed since the first beep. It is safe to say that the youth is running out of time.

The second sensor is placed in a tricky spot, and he can only climb on top of one of the many sports cars to reach the corner. Although the interior of the garage is engulfed in darkness, with the help of the cell phone the blue spot of the sensor is quickly illuminated.

A small star bit screwdriver appears from seemingly thin air between Mo Caiyong's fingers as he moves quickly to unset the sensor, simply throwing the battery to the ground once the alarm is taken apart.

He jumps down lightly, already observing the third and last sensor above himself as his hand lets go of the pieces of the second one.

The third alarm is placed in a spot where it cannot be reached by using any other object as a steppingstone, and the youth appears to have run out of tricks. Time is ticking, and the final setting can't even be known, which only lengthens the expectation with a few more seconds of time than what is appropriate to hope for.

Even though things are already like that, Mo Caiyong still doesn't panic. His movements show practiced ease as he holds a crowbar taken from the shelves up into the air, squinting his eyes to measure the necessary range of movement in the harsh light of the phone's flashlight.

Right as his shoes leave the ground, a solitary note of shrill whistling reverberates in the air before the iron hits the plastic and the ear-splitting noise is cut off with a single swing of the arm. Unable to follow the sudden movement, the reaction force rides up the heavy sweater on the wheat-coloured waist and the fuzzy outline of a paintbrush-like pattern is momentarily revealed.

The aftersound rings in the youth's ears as he turns around, the only audible sound in the garage his faint gasping. He pauses in front of the car he had climbed out from underneath not long ago, scrutinising it in the phone's light as if admiring a masterpiece.

In truth, he's had his eyes set on this specific model for a few weeks now, it only just happens that his current situation allows him to take the car on a test ride of sorts. Truly, he can feel the warmth of the explosive tension in his veins already, and he can't stint himself of finally opening up this seemingly empty shell of true speed and trying it out for himself.

Although, by definition, breaking into a car means actually having to break at least something; if not a window, then the lock, or maybe prying open the door itself, Mo Caiyong is extremely reluctant to damage the car any more than what is absolutely needed in order to disable the artificial intelligence of the vehicle.

The hover car doesn't even have a so-called lock he could pick, but instead the doors sink into the body of the car directly, and they are impossible to open without the chip implanted into the flesh of the real owner's hand.

Of course, hands can be cut off, and chips taken out, but Mo Caiyong still feels that such thoughts must be controlled and cannot be implemented in action for such a small matter as merely borrowing a car.

Instead, he simply rests his palm on the roof of the car with a movement comparable to a gentle caress, and to his delight, as if in reply to his touch, there is an actual reaction from the car.

In actuality, even though there are many methods especially designed to confuse the inner system of the luxury brand, TPQ's hover cars, only a small handful of them are truly worth a try, and even of those, many are specifically made up by TPQ's people to confuse thieves and people with special interests into giving themselves up.

And it is especially so with this new Qing Ru Hongmao – Light As a Feather – model, which has only been released to the public for less than a few months; there are no known methods of unlocking the car without using either the chip, or the technique that had been "secretly" released by the company shortly after the publication.

Although, it seems that the fact that there are no known methods does not necessarily mean that there are no methods at all. At the very least, the open door of the Hongmao suggests so.