If Jing Shu could've seen what was inside that villa, things might've been different. At least then, she'd weigh whether it was worth wasting her time here.
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 was pleading, "Leave now, you'll find something even better later."
She decided to give it another five minutes. If she couldn't figure it out by then, she'd 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.
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 was the plan—no danger, 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've come from a moving axis, leaving no blind spots at all.
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, 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 was impossible.
"If I dump a few buckets of water on it, or cut the power lines… maybe it'll 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, thought for a moment, then suddenly drew her crossbow and fired straight at a display case. 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.
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—but after two steps, she stopped, frowning.
All the bees she'd 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 an illusion. That meant there had to be something hidden here.
"I don't buy it," she muttered.
She'd been feeding Yi Hou, her Sulfuric Acid Ant Queen, plenty of Spirit Spring water lately, boosting her fertility to insane levels. So Jing Shu went all out, unleashing waves of Sulfuric Acid Ants to swarm across the mansion.
Dozens died every few seconds, sliced apart by the lasers, but they just kept coming—wave after wave—mapping out every inch of the place until, finally, they found it.
A narrow gap 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 was 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'd sneak around and only dare to steal one gun at a time. This was America, a lawless wasteland.
Jing Shu's heart pounded 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 contact through her Cube Space. The vault was massive, roughly one cubic meter—one meter long, one wide, one high—and custom-built into the mansion's structure.
But the best part? There wasn't just one vault. There were twenty of them, all one cubic meter each, lined up in a row.
Just imagining what they might hold made her pulse race.
She snatched the contents of the first vault into her Cube Space. But before she could even check what she'd stolen, a blaring alarm erupted, and a rapid "beep-beep-beep" countdown echoed through the air.
"Oh shit."
Without hesitating, she swept all twenty vaults clean, grabbed Hao Yunlai by the leg, and bolted.
Run fast, run far—that was the only plan now.
As she sprinted, 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. A giant mushroom cloud rose behind her as flames swallowed the villa. Her ears rang, and she felt a searing pain across her back as hot air tore through her clothes.
"I'm injured?" she muttered, glancing back. The entire mansion was on fire, smoke billowing upward. Even the underwater structures below had been blown open. 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 people came swarming in.
Hao Yunlai's limp body kept bumping against rocks 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 and picked up her pace.
When she finally reached the bowling alley, she stopped to catch her breath. Her back was burned and bleeding, but a little Spirit Spring water should fix that soon enough. And 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—it was heavy, solid metal. She cracked it open.
Inside were ten glass tubes, each filled with a quiet, shimmering liquid.