Chapter 3 Ladder

Chapter 3: Chapter 3 LadderThe familiar ceiling.

The alarm clock jolts me awake in the early morning, and Li Cheng opens his eyes, sitting up abruptly in bed.

This is a medium-sized bedroom, with several game posters plastered on the walls, and the bookshelf crammed full of a variety of books, including but not limited to mathematics, physics, chemistry, detective fiction, astronomy, folklore, and computer programming, amongst others.

There's a computer desk at the foot of the bed, and a crumpled backpack lying on the floor.

What happened last night was not a dream.

I'm still wearing my school uniform, and the clothes carry the fishy scent of the river water they've been soaked in. Glancing at the mirror, traces of injuries are visible on my neck and palms, but there's only a thin scab over the wounds now, hardly noticeable unless looked at closely.

Why did they heal so fast? Is it the sting from the bee creature, or is it because of that Divine Calamity Fragment thing?

Without time to think it through, Li Cheng strips off his clothes and shoves them into the lowest drawer of his computer desk.

There's no time to wash the clothes now, and definitely cannot put them in the washing machine—it would stink up the machine.

He then digs out some desiccants from the bottom of the wardrobe and seals them in a ziplock bag with the water-damaged phone to dehumidify.

Finding a clean set of clothes, he quietly opens the door and tiptoes out.

The apartment has four bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and two bathrooms—all expansive and elegantly decorated. A glass trophy cabinet between the living room and dining room is filled with various competition trophies and certificates of honor won by my younger cousins.

Fortunately, my aunt, uncle, and their family haven't woken up yet. Li Cheng dashes into the bathroom and quickly washes his entire body, only to find that the piercing wound on the left shoulder of his back has healed significantly.

Rustling noises from the living room suggest that someone's awake. He turns off the tap, ready to dry off and get dressed.

Zi—

Numerous light-colored needle-like hairs suddenly shoot out of my right arm. They are about twenty centimeters long, unusually tough, like steel nails.

Caught off guard, Li Cheng grips hard with his palm and—riiiip—tears the soaked cotton towel to shreds as easily as ripping a piece of paper. His strength is far greater than before.

"Is someone there?"

A crisp female voice sounds from outside the bathroom, belonging to my cousin Xue Luomeng.

"It's me, taking a shower," replies Li Cheng, turning on the shower to keep his voice even as he tries unsuccessfully to break off the needle-like hairs on his arm.

"Then hurry up." Xue Luomeng's footsteps recede from the door, while the sound of cooking in the living room grows louder.

Li Cheng cannot leave the bathroom in this state. In his mind, he revisits the sight of last night's taxi driver sprouting compound eyes, pincers, and wings before the Special Affairs Bureau shot him dead.

Wait, something is not right. That taxi driver did not have any such thing on his arms, these light-colored needle-like hairs rather resembled... the ants that had crawled onto the back of my hand under the overpass?

What does this mean—have I absorbed the genes of those ants?

Staring blankly at his arm, an idea suddenly strikes Li Cheng. He steps onto the edge of the bathtub and reaches for the bathroom heater on the ceiling.

The light of the heater is warm and bright, illuminating the veins and muscles underneath the skin of his arm.

These needle-like hairs are not rootless—they are attached to hair follicles, and surrounding the follicles is a ring of muscle.

Muscles mean that he might be able to control them.

A strong will rises in Li Cheng's mind to control this new set of muscles and retract the needles.

Zi—

All the needle-like hairs slowly retract until none show above the skin, leaving the surface as smooth as before.

Success.

Li Cheng breathes a sigh of relief, stuffs the torn towel in his pocket, exits with an unchanged expression, and comes face to face with Xue Luomeng, who is just about to knock on the door.

"Why did you take so long?" Xue Luomeng complains as she enters the bathroom with her clothes.

Li Cheng's aunt, Li Zhao, works in HR at a clothing company, while his uncle Xue Jingming is a sales manager at a shipping machinery equipment company. The Xue family is also a centuries-old prestigious family, with a large-scale family business, and they even hold annual ancestral worship gatherings.

Xue Jingming and Li Zhao are both very attractive, and their son Xue Lingyu and daughter Xue Luomeng are the epitome of handsome young man and beautiful young woman—head-turners on the street.

Xue Luomeng used to cling to Li Cheng when she was younger, closer to him than even her own brother. Somehow, over time, she grew distant towards him, treating him like a familiar stranger, just like her mother did.

Even though they attend the same high school and are only one grade apart, their encounters are always met with cold greetings.

Li Cheng has long gotten used to his cousin's attitude. He steps aside, returns to his room, and hides the torn towel.

The increase in strength is not an illusion. Before heading out, he tries something—lifting his heavy computer desk with his left hand feels surprisingly easy, almost no pressure at all.

And his right hand is even stronger than the left.

A breeze brushes against his face as Li Cheng deliberately takes a different cycling route, stopping on the bridge and looking out far into the district he passed through last night.

Several old men in white undershirts were setting up a game of Chinese chess under the trees, while younger men and women dressed in sportswear ran by with earphones, jogging in the early morning. Everything seemed so normal, as if the bloodshed from the previous night had never happened.

It seemed that the so-called Special Affairs Bureau had taken care of everything: cleaning the scene, erasing the surveillance.

Li Cheng felt an inexplicable shiver. No organization in human society could master their craft right from the start; there must be a process of practice and adaptation.

How many times had the Special Affairs Bureau been involved in destroying bodies and containing information leaks, seeing as they now operated so efficiently?

Or to put it another way, how long had these abnormal events like last night been happening? One year? Three years? Five years?

Li Cheng pulled up his scarf to cover his mouth and nose, silently pedaling his bike down the bridge, driven by an intense hunger and an itching sensation in his arms. He bought ten meat buns and two cups of soy milk from a breakfast stall.

After hastily finishing the food, he still felt unsatisfied and went to another restaurant to buy two baskets of xiaolongbao and a bowl of noodles with pork and green vegetables.

After packing his purchase, he found an alleyway without surveillance cameras and devoured his meal in no time, finally quelling the hunger in his belly and the itching on his arms.

Li Cheng had a feeling that if he hadn't eaten his fill, spikes might pierce through his skin from underneath, just like they did in the bathroom.

He couldn't go to the hospital; doctors would likely report his condition, and if the Special Affairs Bureau found out there was a survivor, they might kill him.

The most urgent task was to figure out what was going on.

After much thought, Li Cheng came up with a plan.

In the evening, in the cafeteria of Zhuoyue Middle School, a petite girl with short hair sat alone in a corner, eating her dinner and scrolling through her phone.

She wore a white t-shirt with a grey plaid shirt and thin frame glasses, her eyes sharp and intense.

Logically, a girl with such a pretty face wouldn't be eating alone, even if she didn't have any close friends.

The reason was simple: Yuan Zhixia, from the class next door, was considered strange.

On the first day of school, when other students were nervously introducing themselves, she walked up to the podium and declared nonchalantly, "I am a genius and not interested in ordinary humans. If any of you are aliens, time travelers, people from other worlds, or Superpower Users, come and find me. That's all."

After that declaration, a direct cosplay of Suzumiya Haruhi's famous spiel, she casually stepped down from the stage and embraced her lone existence.

She sat in the last row of the classroom, never paying attention during lessons, always with earbuds in, playing on her phone, her grades always among the top ten in the city, whether it was math competitions, robot battles, or programming contests—she always won first place.

The terms "genius" and "top scholar" represented the limits for others, not for her.

It wasn't that no teenagers admired Yuan Zhixia and wanted to befriend her, but she consistently lived by the principle of "not being interested in ordinary humans," always keeping to herself.

Li Cheng was one of the few people who could actually speak with her, probably because both of them were members of the school newspaper and the astronomy club.

He set down his food tray next to her and said sheepishly, "Eating?"

"Just spit it out," Yuan Zhixia glanced at him before continuing to scroll on her phone, adding the latest wireless devices, a metal 3D printer, a collaborative desktop robot arm, and a desktop workstation to her Amazon shopping cart.

"Do you have a VPN that can access the foreign internet undetected?" Li Cheng asked. "I need to completely hide my IP address, be safe from traffic filtering and sniffing analysis, and remain completely untraceable by anyone, in any way."

"Oh?" Her interest piqued, Yuan Zhixia put down her phone and arched an eyebrow. "What for?"

"Just looking up some stuff," Li Cheng replied vaguely.

Yuan Zhixia didn't probe any further. She rummaged through her pocket, picked out a USB drive from a bunch of them, and placed it on the table.

"You know about the Tor onion network, right? That's a browser bundle used to mask your identity online and surf anonymously," she said. "This USB contains a program I wrote that enhances its capabilities. Besides the original masking function, it can fully block browser vulnerabilities, traffic analysis, and electronic fingerprinting, preventing anyone from being able to track or identify you."

"Thanks," Li Cheng sighed with relief. "How much?"

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

"What?" Li Cheng's eyes widened in astonishment.

"What are you thinking? In a few days, pretend to be sick," Yuan Zhixia leaned back and smiled slyly. "And let me take over the photography work for the school newspaper that day."

"What?" Li Cheng was visibly confused.

He had joined the school newspaper partly because he knew a bit about photography, but mostly because Ye Jiaying, whom he was interested in, was also a member.

"Wait." Li Cheng suddenly realized that the subject of the newspaper's interview in a few days was his cousin, Xue Luomeng.

"You're not trying to get close to Luomeng, are you?" he scratched his head, puzzled. "If you want to be friends with her, you can just say it directly. Why the need for secrecy?"

For some unknown reason, Yuan Zhixia had been taking a special interest in Xue Luomeng, who was a year her junior, even going as far as to indirectly inquire if Li Cheng had any photos of his cousin from their childhood. There was a sense of similar souls recognizing each other.

However, Li Cheng was certain that Yuan Zhixia was not lesbian. Her interest in Xue Luomeng resembled that of a pure desire to become good friends.

"It's like you think you're a master of emotions," Yuan Zhixia tossed the USB to Li Cheng and picked up her tray to leave.