Chapter 5: Certain Death |
After eating his fill, washing the dishes, and putting away his clothes, Wu Zhong sat there thinking hard.
Surprisingly, he actually came up with an idea.
"Right... real-world weld-door is pretty lame, but what about virtual doors?"
Wu Zhong stared at his phone and his eyes lit up.
He had a line of thought: could his door-welding ability work on the internet? For example, network port backdoors, program backdoors, that sort of thing.
Unfortunately he knew nothing about that area, but he could at least open a game to test it.
In a hack-and-slash type game, he controlled his character to shut the door, and sure enough the enemy couldn't open it.
Even after they blasted the doorboard to pieces, the fragments stayed stuck like a bug, full of cracks.
"Huh? What kind of cheat is this?"
Wu Zhong didn't pay it much mind. He tested several more games and found that wherever there was a door, he could trigger his ability.
Those doors were welded shut too — no matter how other players interacted, they couldn't open them.
Even in a game that allowed opening teleportation gates, the portals Wu Zhong created could not disappear.
Originally those portals should only last a few seconds, but they got stuck and remained.
The game's setting was supposed to make a previous portal vanish when a new one opened, but under Wu Zhong's operation it didn't happen. After the skill's cooldown expired, he could open a third, fourth, fifth portal... The portals he opened did not vanish.
He kept creating portals nonstop until the whole game crashed.
Granted, it was only a game and didn’t prove everything, but from this he confirmed that virtual doors were still doors!
His power, though a bit useless, had an unexpectedly wide range of applicability.
If he could weld a modeled door in a game, in a sense he was welding a segment of program. If he could exploit some kind of backdoor bug, he should be able to weld that too, making it unable to close.
"Yeah, it should be possible—backdoors are still doors."
"Come to think of it, what about that payment app bug from last time? Could that be used?"
Wu Zhong opened the Huashengbao app on his phone and shivered as he remembered something from not long ago: when he used Huashengbao, all expenses were reduced by 20%, including personal transfers, tickets, credit card payments, rent, and so on.
The discount reason listed was government subsidy, which had pleasantly surprised him.
The money he paid his landlord was automatically discounted to eighty percent, while the landlord still received full rent.
Later he learned it was a bug: the platform had mistakenly applied the wrong marketing template in the backend for a routine campaign, swapping discount amounts and discount types, unintentionally triggering a nasty bug.
This caused all user payments during that window to be charged at eighty percent.
Of course it was fixed quickly.
The platform said it wouldn't reclaim the discounts, so many people benefited; Wu Zhong was one of them — he saved a few hundred on food and rent.
Tasted by this, he researched the issue and asked around online. A netizen in a group told him the bug could be replicated.
Apparently one had to open some kind of backdoor; Wu Zhong didn't understand the details.
He messaged that netizen right away: "Niguang, Niguang, about that payment bug you said you could replicate—can you really do it?"
He waited for a long time with no reply.
That Niguang was someone he met in a fan group for the novel Demon Moon; they used to game together and had known each other for many years.
But the last two years Wu Zhong had been swamped, and they rarely chatted. The last time they had spoken had been about the Huashengbao bug.
"He's probably at work during the day and can't reply."
"Mm... no, for maliciously abusing superpower bugs like this, it's better to do it yourself. Though I'm pretty close to Niguang, he's still just an online friend."
Wu Zhong thought about things he'd read in online novels and wasn't sure if his instincts were right.
He calmed his restless impulses and retracted every message he'd just sent to Niguang.
"But doing it myself... sounds simple to say, but I don't know how."
"I have no clue about code. Do I have to learn to be a programmer from scratch now?"
Wu Zhong pursed his lips. If it were before, he wouldn't even consider learning this.
It wasn't that he couldn't learn—he actually wanted to. After all, if he became a programmer, even as a junior developer, his salary would be far higher than now.
But as someone already in society with a full work schedule and a tightly locked income-expense chain, the time, energy, and cost to self-learn another technical skill were unbearable.
By the time he learned programming, he and his grandfather would probably have starved.
That would truly be from beginner straight to the grave...
So he couldn't afford such an investment, fearing that the attempt to improve himself would instead collapse his finances.
"Sigh..."
Wu Zhong paced around the apartment, annoyed enough to kick the table leg.
If this were a novel, someone with his power would have quit long ago and started a business.
But this was reality—he didn't dare quit. In fact, he planned to go back to work this afternoon... he had only taken a half day off.
No other reason: today was only the seventeenth, and he had just over two hundred yuan left.
This stupid superpower gave him no security at all.
"This is killing me. Screw it — sleep first!"
Wu Zhong set his wake-up worker to call him at two in the afternoon, then flopped onto his bed and fell asleep instantly, burying his face in the pillow.
But before the wake-up worker called, the hospital caregiver rang.
He checked the time: he'd only slept two hours; his eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed.
"Caregiver?" he froze, realizing the hospital had called.
After the morning tests, the family should have waited until ten o'clock for the doctor to explain things in the ward.
He had been impatient to get to work, so he had the caregiver fill in and send him a message relaying the doctor's instructions.
Now the caregiver was calling — something must have happened.
"What is it? What did the doctor say?" Wu Zhong's head was splitting and his tone heavy.
The caregiver brought bad news, just as feared: "The doctor said the hematoma in the patient's brain has expanded and surgery must be done as soon as possible."
Wu Zhong asked urgently, "How could it have expanded? It had been shrinking before. As long as he lies still, his body would naturally improve."
The caregiver said, "But it has expanded. This is what the tests show. If you don't believe me, come ask the doctor yourself."
Wu Zhong steadied himself and asked, "When will the surgery be?"
The caregiver said, "They're scheduling it. The doctor said they'll arrange surgery as soon as possible. By the way, prepare thirty thousand yuan."
"Thirty thousand?"
Wu Zhong's heart tightened. Thirty thousand wasn't a huge sum, but he couldn't come up with it unless he took another online loan.
He had already taken a loan — the day his grandfather had a brain hemorrhage. It was split into twelve installments and wasn't fully repaid yet.
If he borrowed again it would be on a different platform, but regardless of the repayment term, he simply couldn't afford it.
Damn it — he had just been worrying about keeping daily expenses afloat, afraid to risk any investment.
Now, one phone call later, his financial chain was doomed to break.
Wu Zhong took a deep breath and clawed at a hole in the bedsheet with his hand.
He forced his voice to be calm: "Okay, I understand. I'll go to the hospital right now..."
His thoughts centered on his grandfather; he couldn't care about anything else and rushed out for the hospital.
In his hurry he forgot his umbrella, and outside a torrential downpour raged with howling wind.
Wu Zhong glanced at the storm, then at the elevator, weighing whether to go back for the umbrella.
"This is annoying..."
Because one elevator had been dismantled, the whole building was sharing a single elevator that was already up to the upper floors.
He didn't want to wait. From experience, a single shared elevator for the whole building would take ages.
Wu Zhong shook his head and dashed into the rain, intending to run to the hospital straight through the downpour.
The rain was loud and the wind louder; clouds gathered over Mount Lu, churning in a dramatic display, but he had no mind to admire it.
He sprinted through the rain, water blurring his vision.
By the time he boarded a bus, he was soaked through like a drowned chicken, standing in the carriage holding a strap as he swayed.
People on the bus gave him odd looks as if to praise the resilience of youth.
Wu Zhong was numb and silent. He got off and, somewhat dazed, ran toward the hospital.
His phone rang halfway there; he froze, thinking something else had happened at the hospital, terrified.
Only when he checked did he breathe easier — it was the wake-up worker calling to wake him up... it was precisely two in the afternoon.
No need to pick up—he could just hang up.
But his hands and the screen were wet; after fumbling, instead of hanging up he accidentally answered.
"Ugh..." Wu Zhong cursed and hurriedly wiped the screen with his clothing, but the clothes were wet too; after a long time he finally managed to end the call.
As he prepared to cross the street, his boss called, asking him to come in that afternoon.
He'd only taken a half day off; since he didn't show up in the afternoon the shop's orders piled up, and of course the boss wanted them handled as soon as possible.
Everything came at him at once; his head felt like it would explode.
"Ah screw it, let it kill me."
Just as he managed to answer the boss and request additional time off...
With a whoosh, something huge thundered down beside him.
Maybe the rain made visibility awful — a large truck driver somehow veered and roared toward the sidewalk.
"Ah!"
There was no warning horn; when Wu Zhong turned his head, the speeding truck had already cleaved through the curtain of rain, almost upon him!
Wu Zhong was exhausted and overwhelmed; the sudden disaster left his mind blank, and the single thought that flashed was the giant word danger!
"Ugh!"
Heaven help him — everything happened too fast. The incident came without warning; in an instant the high-speed truck was right there.
He was tired, worried, running, clutching his phone; who could react in time when a truck was face-to-face like that?
Shock, despair, his brain a void.
Even with adrenaline surging, he only managed to freeze his running pose; there was no time to dodge.
Death! Certain death!