Chapter 3 Ladder

Familiar ceiling.

The morning alarm rang, and Li Cheng opened his eyes, suddenly sitting up from the bed.

It was a medium-sized bedroom, with several game posters on the walls, and the bookcase was stuffed with a variety of books, including but not limited to math, physics, chemistry, reasoning, astronomy, folklore, and computer programming.

There was a computer desk at the foot of the bed, and a wrinkled backpack lay on the floor.

What happened last night was not a dream.

He was still wearing his school uniform, the clothes and pants carrying the fishy smell of having been soaked in river water. Looking in the mirror, there were still traces of wounds on his neck and palms, but a thin scab had already formed over the wounds, barely noticeable unless looked at closely.

Why had it healed so quickly? Was it due to the bee monster sting, or because of that "Divine Calamity Fragment"?

There was no time to think it through. Li Cheng took off his clothes and stuffed them into the bottom drawer of his computer desk.

It was too late to wash the clothes now, and he couldn't put them in the washing machine, otherwise it would stink up the machine.

Then he dug out a few packs of desiccant from the bottom of his wardrobe and placed them in a sealed bag with the water-soaked cellphone for dehumidification.

After picking out a change of clothes, he tiptoed and pushed the door open.

The apartment had four bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and two bathrooms, spacious and elegantly decorated. Trophies and certificates from various competitions won by his cousins filled a glass cabinet that served as a partition between the living room and dining area.

Fortunately, his aunt, uncle, and their family had not yet woken up. Li Cheng dashed into the bathroom, quickly washed his whole body, and discovered that the penetrating injury on the back of his left shoulder had also mostly healed.

Rustling noises came from the living room, indicating that someone in the family had woken up. He turned off the tap, ready to dry off and head out.

Sss—

Suddenly, a large number of pale needle-like hairs burst out from his right arm. Each was about twenty centimeters long, unusually hard, almost like steel nails.

Caught off guard, Li Cheng clenched his hand unconsciously and with a "rip" sound, tore the heavy, water-soaked cotton towel apart, almost as easily as ripping a piece of paper. His strength far surpassed that of before.

"Is someone in there?"

A crisp female voice sounded outside the bathroom door, coming from his cousin Xue Luomeng.

"It's me, taking a shower," Li Cheng replied with the shower still running, trying hard to keep his voice calm as he attempted to break the needle-like hairs on his arm but couldn't.

"You better hurry." Xue Luomeng's footsteps receded from the door, and simultaneously, the sound of cooking from the living room grew louder.

Li Cheng knew he couldn't go out in this form. His mind flashed back to the image of the taxi driver from last night who had grown compound eyes, claws, and wings, before being shot dead by the Special Affairs Bureau.

Wait, something wasn't right. The taxi driver's arm hadn't had anything on it. These pale needle-hairs instead resembled more... the ants that had crawled onto his hand under the bridge?

What was this, had he absorbed the genes of the ants?

Stunned, Li Cheng stared at his arm, then suddenly had an idea. He stepped on the edge of the bathtub, reaching for the ceiling-mounted bathroom heater.

The light of the bathroom heater was bright and warm, shining through the skin of his arm, illuminating the veins and muscles below.

The needle-hairs were not baseless; at their roots were follicles, and above the follicles was a ring of muscle.

Muscles meant potentially being able to control them.

With a strong will in his mind, Li Cheng controlled this new set of muscles, retracting the needle-hairs.

Sss—

All the needle-hairs slowly retracted back under the skin. The surface of the skin was as smooth as before, showing no trace of what had happened.

He had succeeded.

Li Cheng breathed a sigh of relief, pocketed the torn towel, and opened the door to see Xue Luomeng about to knock.

"Why did it take you so long?"

Xue Luomeng complained, walking into the bathroom with her clothes.

Li Cheng's aunt Li Zhao worked as an HR at a clothing company, and his uncle Xue Jingming was the sales manager at a shipping mechanical equipment company. The Xue family was also a centuries-old major family with a huge family business, holding an ancestral worship meeting every year.

Xue Jingming and Li Zhao were both good-looking, and their son Xue Lingyu and daughter Xue Luomeng were also conventionally attractive, turning heads when they walked the streets.

Xue Luomeng used to be very clingy to Li Cheng when she was younger, never leaving his side, closer than her own brother. At some point, she had become distant, treating him like a familiar stranger, just like her aunt.

Even though they attended the same high school and were only a grade apart, their encounters were merely cold greetings.

Li Cheng had long gotten used to his cousin's attitude. He stepped aside and walked out of the bathroom, back to his room, and hid the torn towel.

The increase in strength was not an illusion. Before heading out, he tested it; the previously heavy computer desk could now be easily lifted with one left hand, almost without feeling any pressure.

And his right-hand strength was even greater.

—

A breeze brushed across his face, and Li Cheng deliberately changed his route, stopping on the bridge, gazing far at the district he had passed through last night.

Several elderly men in white undershirts were arranging chess under a tree, while young men and women in athletic wear were jogging with headphones on; everything seemed so normal, as if the bloodbath from the previous night had never happened.

It seems the Special Affairs Bureau took care of everything. They cleaned up the scene and deleted the surveillance footage.

Li Cheng inexplicably shivered, as no human society's organization could master their craft right away without a period of practice and adaptation.

How many times had the Special Affairs Bureau expertly covered up killings and locked down information like this?

Or rather, how long have incidents like last night been happening? One year? Three years? Five years?

Li Cheng pulled up his scarf, covering his nose and mouth, silently pedaled his bicycle off the bridge, driven by intense hunger and itching in his arms, and bought ten pork buns and two cups of soy milk at a breakfast shop.

After wolfing down his food, he still wasn't satisfied. He switched to another restaurant and bought two baskets of soup dumplings and a bowl of pork and vegetable noodles.

After packing up his food, he found an alley without surveillance cameras, quickly finished his meal, and only then did the hunger in his stomach and the itching below his arms subside.

Li Cheng felt that if he hadn't eaten his fill, needles would have pricked through his skin like they did in the bathroom.

He couldn't go to the hospital, as there was a high probability that the doctors would report his condition, and the Special Affairs Bureau, upon discovering there was a survivor, might decide to kill him.

The immediate priority was to figure out what was going on.

After much thought, Li Cheng thought of someone.

————

In the evening, at the Zhouyue Middle School cafeteria, a petite girl with short hair was sitting alone in a corner, eating her meal and scrolling through her phone.

She wore a white T-shirt and a gray plaid shirt, and thin-framed glasses, a sharp coldness in her eyes.

Logically speaking, a girl as pretty as her wouldn't eat alone, even if she didn't have close friends.

The reason was simple; the girl from the next class, Yuan Zhixia, was considered odd.

On the first day of school, when other students were nervously introducing themselves, she boldly stated, "I'm a genius, not interested in ordinary humans. If anyone here is an alien, a time-traveler, a person from another world, or a superpower user, come find me." Done.

After her speech, reminiscent of Suzumiya Haruhi's words, she casually stepped down from the stage and began her oddball life.

She sat in the back row of the classroom, never paid attention during lessons, always played with her phone with earplugs in, and her grades were always in the top ten citywide. Whether it was a mathematics competition, a robot battle, or a coding contest, she invariably won first place.

The so-called "genius" and "top scholar" were merely others' limits, not hers.

It wasn't that no one admired Yuan Zhixia and wanted to be her friend, but she truly lived the philosophy of "not interested in ordinary people" and always kept to herself.

Li Cheng was one of the few people who could talk to her, probably because they were both members of the school newspaper and astronomy clubs.

He set down his tray beside her and awkwardly said, "Eating, huh?"

"Just say what you want." Yuan Zhixia glanced at him and continued to browse on her phone, adding to her Amazon cart the latest wireless electronic devices, metal 3D printers, desktop collaborative robotic arms, and desktop workstations.

"Do you have a way to access the international web undetected?"

Li Cheng asked, "It needs to completely hide the IP address, counter traffic filtering and sniffer analysis, and be untraceable by anyone in any way."

"Oh?"

This statement finally caught Yuan Zhixia's interest. She put down her phone, raised her eyebrows slightly, and asked, "What are you up to?"

"Just some research," Li Cheng vaguely replied.

Yuan Zhixia didn't probe further. She dug into her pocket, sifted through a bunch of USB drives, and placed one on the table.

"You know about Tor, right? It's a browser package used to anonymize oneself on the dark web, covering any tracks."

Yuan Zhixia said, "This USB drive contains a program I wrote myself, which not only uses the original anonymity features but also fully blocks any browser vulnerabilities, blocking traffic analysis, electronic fingerprinting, and other detection methods, keeping anyone from tracking it."

"Thanks," Li Cheng sighed in relief. "How much do I owe you?"

"I don't want money," the girl shook her head, "I want you..."

"Huh?" Li Cheng's eyes widened in surprise.

"What were you thinking? I want you to pretend to be sick in a few days."

Yuan Zhixia leaned back, squinting her eyes, "And then hand over the photo duties of the school newspaper that day to me."

"What?" Li Cheng seemed puzzled with a figurative question mark appearing above his head.

The reason he had joined the school newspaper, besides his interest in photography, was that Ye Jiaying was also a member.

"Wait." Li Cheng suddenly thought of something; his cousin, Xue Luomeng, was going to be interviewed by the school newspaper in a few days.

"You're not trying to get close to Luomeng, are you?" He scratched his head, confused. "If you want to be friends with her, you could just say so directly, why go about it in such a roundabout way?"

For some reason, Yuan Zhixia had been particularly interested in Xue Luomeng, who was a grade below her, even making indirect inquiries to Li Cheng about his cousin's childhood photos at the start of the semester.

But Li Cheng's sixth sense was quite certain; Yuan Zhixia was not a lesbian. Her interest in Xue Luomeng seemed more like... a pure desire to be good friends?

"It sounds like you think you're some kind of relationship expert," Yuan Zhixia tossed the USB drive to Li Cheng, picked up her tray, and walked away.