Iron Fist and Loyal Heart

Chapter 22 Gray Mission

The gray envelope from the Special Elephant Bureau arrived Wednesday afternoon. Su Xinpei had just finished a follow-up fire prevention inspection in the old Beihe district. As he was locking his bicycle at the back door of the street office, a Special Elephant Bureau communications officer in a dark blue jacket walked up from the alley entrance and handed him a gray envelope without a signature or return address. The envelope was sealed with a one-eyed, closed-eye seal from the Special Elephant Bureau. Inside was only a folded sheet of printed paper with an operation number at the top and extremely brief text—

"No. 19, Beihe Street, Xiacheng District, abnormal signal source verification. Field Team A departs at 18:00, with external consultant from Team B on standby. Wear civilian clothes and equipped with encrypted communication headsets. Task leader: Ye Xinghe."

Su Xinpei folded the paper, put it back in the envelope, and stuffed the envelope into the inside pocket of his coat. No. 19 Beihe Street—the old apartment building he had screened out from the resident information system last week. A retired female teacher was renting the first floor long-term; the electricity meter on the top floor was constantly ticking, and the electricity bill was being paid by a defunct foreign trade company. He had been monitoring this address in the population flow data for several days, repeatedly verifying every payment record and the movement trajectory of every tenant, until all corroborating evidence pointed to the same conclusion before officially submitting the report. Ye Xinghe had obviously seen his report; this action order was the result of his submitted "Analysis of Abnormal Population Flow in Beihe District"—after the Special Bureau reviewed the floor scans, it upgraded the task number from preparatory to field dispatch, adding a collaborative reconnaissance assessment. This indicated that the abnormal signal strength at No. 19 Beihe Street had triggered the Special Bureau's internal technical judgment threshold, and it was even possible that Ye Xinghe had endorsed this intelligence at the branch's weekly meeting.

He put the envelope away and pushed open the office door. Aunt He was organizing the year-end community activity sign-in sheets. Seeing him come in, she glanced at the clock on the wall—4:30 PM. There was still an hour and a half before he left work. "Aunt He, I have something to do tonight, can I leave early?" Su Xinpei asked. Aunt He glanced at him, her gaze lingering on his face for two seconds, then lowered her head to continue flipping through the sign-in sheets. "Go ahead. Don't be late for tomorrow's low-income assistance renewal review." She didn't ask what it was about, or where he was going. She simply picked up a pen, circled his name, and wrote "Two hours of personal leave."

Su Xinpei arrived at the back gate of the Special Meteorological Bureau's Iron Thorn Branch at 5:45. He had changed out of his street office work vest and was wearing an old dark gray jacket and black work pants, along with old sneakers used by the Iron Bone Hall for daily training. An earpiece was inserted into his left ear; only a slight hissing sound came from the encrypted channel. Ye Xinghe stood beside a gray, unmarked van, with two other people beside him—one was Zhou Cheng, the female technician who had followed him when he last visited the street office; the other, whom Su Xinpei didn't recognize, was short with broad shoulders, wearing a dark blue tactical vest and carrying a metal detector—Xia Liyuan, the leader of the bio-warrior assault team. Ye Xinghe nodded when he saw Su Xinpei approaching and tossed him a miniature encrypted communication earpiece. "Team B is in your group. Your task is to follow behind Team B, maintain distance once the operation begins, and provide on-site assessment and response support in the event of any unusual threats. Until the situation becomes clear, you will be in the rear observation position." He handed Su Xinpei a cross-sectional diagram of the apartment building printed on waterproof paper. "Memorize the stairwell floor plan."

Su Xinpei took the blueprints. No. 19 Beihe Street, a six-story old apartment building, over thirty years old, with a precast concrete slab structure, narrow stairwells, and four units per floor. The blueprints marked three possible signal source locations—the east side of the fourth floor, the west side of the fifth floor, and the rooftop electrical room. The Special Meteorological Bureau's technical team had already conducted a passive scan of the entire building; the abnormal signal strength was unstable, showing an intermittent increasing trend, partially overlapping with the crack expansion curve in the factory area last month. The peak value of the signal source's enhancement corresponded temporally to the expansion rhythm of the cracks in the factory area.

At 6:00 AM sharp, the operation began. Team A, led by Ye Xinghe, with Xia Liyuan and another bio-engineered soldier advancing from the front of the staircase. Team B took the back of the fire escape, with Su Xinpei following behind Zhou Cheng. The two climbed the fire escape at the back of the apartment building to the third-floor platform, then circled around to the back stairwell via the maintenance access on the exterior wall. Ye Xinghe's low voice came through the earpiece: "Signal strength is increasing on the east side of the fourth floor." Immediately following was Xia Liyuan's low report: "No signs of activity in the stairwell. No one answers the door in either of the two apartments on the fourth floor."

Su Xinpei crouched down in the shadows of the third-floor platform. The platform was narrow and windy; behind him was the iron railing of the fire escape, above him the shadow cast by the elevated railway tracks, and beneath his feet, the concrete slab was covered with dusty gravel and discarded old canvas. He pressed his back against the cold concrete of the apartment building's exterior, closed his eyes, and exhaled. The energy he had cultivated through standing meditation unfolded in the darkness—he could feel a vague chill on the east side of the fourth floor, not a specific heat source, but a persistent pressure anomaly, as if something was silently compressing the air there. A slight numbness began to emanate from the gash in his left ribcage. It wasn't pain, but the low-frequency resonance he had experienced near the cracks in the factory area—but sharper than before, like being repeatedly plucked on an extremely narrow frequency band.

He pressed the earpiece: "Team Leader Ye, the precise location of the abnormal signal source is on the east side of the fourth floor. The signal type is consistent with the crack pulse differentiation in the factory area—there are people nearby, more than one. I can sense at least three life forms with abnormal breathing rates, forming a vertical interlayer between the east corridor on the fourth floor and the electrical distribution room on the top floor." There was a two-second silence in the earpiece, then Ye Xinghe's voice sounded again: "Roger, Team B, stand by."

A few minutes later, Xia Liyuan's urgent call suddenly came through the headset: "Multiple pre-installed devices—triggered subspace jammers—have been discovered in an unoccupied apartment on the east side of the fourth floor. They've been activated! It's suspected we've entered an ambush set up by the Northern Alliance. Team A's corridor position is under fire from both sides. Requesting Team B to enter from the rear and flank the ambush's retreat." Two gunshots rang out simultaneously through the headset, followed by hurried footsteps and the sound of shattering glass. Su Xinpei stood up from the fire escape. Zhou Cheng had already activated the anti-eavesdropping signal detector. The screen was filled with densely packed wireless signal hotspots—the jammer was activated, and the communication quality throughout the corridor was rapidly deteriorating.

Su Xinpei followed Zhou Cheng into the fourth floor from the back of the fire escape. The entrance to Group B was an abandoned garbage chute maintenance door, leading to the end of the fourth-floor corridor. The corridor was filled with smoke—not gunpowder smoke, but the residue of some kind of chemical smoke bomb, the air thick with a pungent odor of chlorine mixed with the fishy smell of ozone. In the middle of the corridor, Xia Liyuan was fiercely fighting a burly Northern Alliance agent in the narrow passageway, the two crashing into the railing, causing the entire railing to tremble. Ye Xinghe's figure flashed below another shattered window at the end of the corridor—he was suppressing a second ambush attacker who had flanked him from the other side of the corridor, using rapid bursts of fire and cover shifts, each shot extremely brief, followed immediately by a change of position, pressing against the wall.

Su Xinpei moved forward from the end of the corridor. His skin-refining skills were still in their infancy, and bullets were beyond his ability to withstand. However, his tendon-refining skills were already highly developed. His golden muscles and jade meridians allowed his muscles to complete the tension transition from absolute stillness to explosive sprint in an extremely short time. The absolute center of gravity he had developed through stance training remained stable even on the broken glass in the corridor, and he could almost simultaneously sense the changes in friction between the concrete floor and the broken glass. His dodging and shifting movements in the corridor were no longer the instinctive reactions driven by adrenaline that they were six months ago—but rather precise adjustments to his footwork and management of his force lines.

He encountered the first ambush point a third of the way down the corridor. The Northern Alliance ambushers had set up two firing positions in the fourth-floor corridor: a short-haired, extremely thin woman on the flank of the middle of the corridor, wielding a short-barreled submachine gun, alternately firing from the blind spots at the corridor corners, each peek revealing only a very brief exposure; at the front of the corridor, a male bio-engineered soldier crouched behind a door frame to cover her reloading. Su Xinpei wasn't armed. From the corner, he saw the female agent just before she finished firing a magazine and the magazine left her hand—her finger leaving the trigger guard, the angle of her shoulder blade shifting extremely slightly; this reloading action was only half a second in advance. In that instant, he cut in, using his right foot to push off the wall, sliding sideways from the opposite slope of the corridor corner. The female agent reacted extremely quickly, smashing his chin with the butt of her rifle before the magazine was fully inserted. Su Xinpei didn't dodge. He braced himself against the gun butt with the outside of his right forearm, his muscles tightening automatically at the moment of impact—he could clearly feel the shockwave from the cold steel butt striking his forearm muscles. The force traveled upwards along the tendons in three layers, the outermost layer being differentiated by the tightened spiral tension, finally reaching the ulnar periosteum with only a needle-like sting. Taking advantage of the moment when his opponent recoiled defensively after the butt struck, he grabbed the barrel with his left hand and unleashed a spiraling punch with his right fist, the tip precisely striking the clavicle crevice above the sternum, killing her with a single blow. The female agent's body went limp and she collapsed to the ground, the submachine gun in her hand falling onto broken glass, the barrel still trembling slightly.

He didn't pause. The male bio-engineered soldier at the end of the corridor had already rushed out from behind the door frame, a blade flashing across his left forearm—the edge of his prosthetic forearm was a retractable alloy tactical knife. Su Xinpei sidestepped, the knife grazing his shoulder and tearing the outer fabric of his jacket. He crouched down and swept his leg to the ground, then locked the man's shoulder joint with his forearm in a squatting position. The two wrestled on the broken glass for a few seconds, shards of glass embedded in the back of his shin, the sharp edges stinging painfully, but Su Xinpei didn't let go. He heard Ye Xinghe's voice in the earpiece: "Control the right exit of the corridor—don't let him detonate the jammer!" Su Xinpei gritted his teeth and twisted the other man's arm and shoulder into a joint lock. His arm strength, honed to perfection, made his forearm feel like an iron bar gripping the other man's shoulder. Then, he used his shoulder to smash open the door to the nearby electrical room a crack—a jumble of circuit boards, a keypad, and an open encrypted communication unit were stacked on a shelf, with an unused spare magazine pressed against the wall. He glanced at it without stopping, saving the details for later.

Just then, a roar suddenly came from the end of the corridor. Seeing no hope of escape, the bio-engineered soldier in front of Su Xinpei slammed his right arm against the corner of the wall—behind an abandoned electrical box in the corner was a simple trigger switch, connected in series with a small electronic fuse, and embedded in the wall below, a pre-loaded ammunition, slightly larger than a matchbox, emitting a steady green light. Su Xinpei loosened his grip, forcefully throwing the soldier aside, and turned to lunge at the switch, trying to disengage the trigger from the connector. His sweaty fingers slipped once, and only on the second attempt did he manage to pry the trigger off with his fingernail—the ammunition still detonated after hitting the wall. The shockwave threw Su Xinpei to the ground; as he fell sideways, his left shoulder slammed against the edge of a fire hydrant with a loud thud, his ears ringing. After the smoke cleared, he struggled to his feet, using the wall as leverage. A gaping hole had been blasted in the wall in front of him, broken bricks and fragments of electrical wire scattered everywhere, the air thick with the smell of gunpowder. His left shoulder was throbbing with pain, and a patch of skin was scraped off his right arm, with blood flowing from his elbow down to his wrist, though his fingers could still move. The bio-soldier who had taken advantage of him losing his balance in the shockwave had rolled backward out of the capsizing range and was now using his injured arm to drag the submachine gun back down the stairwell.

Ye Xinghe's voice came through the earpiece asking, "Team B, what's the casualty situation?"

Su Xinpei, panting, replied, "I won't die. The Northern Alliance agents withdrew from the back stairwell, and both ambush sites have been cleared." After saying that, he chased after them.

The bio-engineered soldier, dragging his injured arm, had retreated to the third-floor platform and was attempting to climb down the fire escape. Su Xinpei chased after him from the back stairwell. Two figures stopped at the end of the alley—a Northern Alliance agent was there to provide backup. He hadn't had time to remove the jammer's main unit yet; he had just torn off the waterproof tarpaulin covering the fire escape and was using his prosthetic right arm to support the unit as he ran. The jammer's main unit was about the size of a car battery, with at least three layers of signal modules of different colors embedded in its casing, each layer still flashing. Su Xinpei gave the walkie-talkie, "Follow in the alley," and quickened his pace.

He clashed with the backup agent in the back alley. The two exchanged blows in the narrow, junk-filled sewer. The agent's cybernetic right arm was incredibly strong; a single punch could knock half a brick off a wall. However, Su Xinpei, with his mastered tendon training, didn't rely on strength in his hand-to-hand combat; his precision and frequency were far superior. He crouched low, using the close-range control he'd developed through stance training, repeatedly employing sleeve-penetrating and door-opening techniques to press his opponent against the wall. Finally, he delivered a powerful spiral strike to the agent's side—the force of the sleeve-penetrating strike twisting from the sole of his foot to his fist, the fist striking the weak point in the agent's protective suit. The cybernetic agent groaned, collapsing to the ground along with the main unit, all the signal lights on the jammer extinguishing. As Zhou Cheng reported through the earpiece that the jamming signal had disappeared and the call fully restored, Su Xinpei was dragging the man up from the ground and handing him directly to Ye Xinghe, who had arrived.

After the team finished their work, Ye Xinghe wrote a report in the operations room on the third floor of the branch office and pushed a printed copy in front of Su Xinpei. Su Xinpei glanced at it and first read a line of neat, strong handwriting in the comments section: "Accurate judgment, decisive action. Recommendation to become a formal external consultant." He didn't sign it immediately, but instead turned the page and corrected a minor discrepancy in the two-minute timeline of Group B's operation. Next to his name, he used a red pen to change "external consultant" to "field operations liaison officer"—a title more closely reflecting his actual functional boundaries as a street office coordinator and special affairs bureau consultant. Only after making the changes did he sign, cap the pen, and put it back on the table. Only when signing did he realize his hand was trembling—not from lingering fear, but from the physiological aftershock of suddenly being pulled from a highly focused state. His entire right arm, from elbow to knuckles, was trembling slightly, and a few shards of glass were still embedded in the nail of his middle finger. He refrained from flaunting his hand in front of Ye Xinghe, but thought to himself: Not bad, didn't embarrass Lao Tietou.

It was almost midnight when he got home. Su Xinpei didn't go straight to his room. He sat on the steps outside his apartment building, his hands still trembling slightly. He looked down at the back of his hands—the knuckles were scraped, there were shards of glass under his fingernails, the bruise on his left shoulder was starting to turn blue, and the lining of his old jacket, torn open by shards in the mirror, was showing through. He remembered when he subdued that female agent in the fourth-floor corridor; her breath had escaped from beside his knuckles, stopping abruptly. That was the first time he had used the "sleeve-piercing force" on a living person. He had practiced countless times on the wooden stakes of the Iron Bone Hall, on tires, on old sandbags, on Wu Xiong's arm, but it was different when he hit a person. No one would fall after he hit a wooden stake, no one would slip and lie motionless after he hit a sandbag. After he hit that person, she fell and never got up again.

He turned his hand over to look at his palm. His right palm was still swollen, but the gold veins shone quietly beneath the skin, layers of fine gold mesh faintly visible under the light. This wasn't a mistake. It was a choice. He could have chosen to crouch on the third-floor platform and wait for Team A to clear the area; he could have chosen to rush out through that half-second reload window in the corridor and tear the ambush apart. He chose the latter. The female agent was right behind the stairwell exit. If she were suppressed and covered, her teammates would detonate the jammer, completely cutting off communications for the entire building, cutting off Ye Xinghe's flanking route, and causing even greater casualties for Team B. His rush wasn't impulsive; he had read the gap in firepower in that instant and reacted with his muscle memory in a fraction of a second.

He put his hands back on his knees and took out a notebook and pen from his coat pocket. By the light of the hallway lamp, he wrote a few lines:

"Tonight was the Special Elephant Bureau's first operation. 19 Beihe Street, ambush. Two North Alliance agents were subdued, and they assisted in dismantling signal interference. First time using the Great Tendon Refining Technique on a living person. Effective. Non-lethal. Good assessment. But my hands are shaking. Not out of regret. It's because after using the Sleeve-Piercing Force for the first time, the bone conduction vibration from the opponent's collarbone still lingers on my hands. Tomorrow I'll ask my master how to remove the vibration waves that remain on the periosteum after hitting someone."

He closed his notebook, got up, and walked up the steps. No one was waiting for him to practice his stance tonight, but he still stood in his apartment room, setting up his stance in the darkness, and stood with his eyes closed for an hour. His energy channels circulated twice, and the charcoal in his dantian was still steadily glowing.