Iron Fist and Loyal Heart

The task of tracking the alarm clock was initiated by Zhou Cheng through a direct phone call.

Su Xinpei had just finished refining and quenching his skin and was slumped on a bench, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck with a towel when his phone vibrated twice in his pocket. He pulled it out and saw a thirteen-digit encrypted short number on the screen. He answered, and Zhou Cheng's voice was lower than usual, speaking so quickly it sounded like he was reciting a dictated briefing: "Class C containment object, number 215, codename 'Mad Alarm Clock,' lost signal this morning while being transported by the Special Affairs Bureau. Its last known location was east of your Beihe District. The signal lasted approximately forty seconds before it was lost. We intercepted its passive radio frequency feedback on the black market—an intelligence broker from the Northern Alliance sent an inquiry this afternoon seeking to purchase a Class C time trigger. Captain Ye has already departed and asked me to inform you. The alarm clock's feature document will be sent to your encrypted email immediately; delete it after reading it."

Su Xinpei draped a towel around his neck and stood up. "What are the characteristics of an alarm clock?"

"The alarm rings precisely at 3:27 AM every day. The ringing will trigger inexplicable violent impulses in every living creature with auditory nerves on the same floor. Any living thing, including cats, dogs, rats, and even sleeping babies. In the last out-of-control incident, a policeman knocked down his partner and woke up with no memory of what had happened." Zhou Cheng paused for a moment, and the keyboard clicked rapidly from the other end of the microphone, typing the first few words. "This time, after Beilian gets their hands on the alarm clock, they will likely try to reverse engineer its time trigger and modify it into a remotely controlled directional weapon. If they succeed, the next step is to install the trigger into a portable signal generator and deploy it at any location they choose. Team Leader Ye is already on his way to Beihe District. We have conducted passive scans on several main roads outside Beihe District and locked onto the triangular area, but the buildings inside are too dense, so we need someone familiar with the area to investigate."

After listening, Su Xinpei held his phone between his ear and shoulder, zipping up his jacket with one hand while bending over to tie his shoelaces. "Give me the specific area. I live here, no need to take a taxi." Zhou Cheng sent him an encrypted map, which Su Xinpei quickly scanned on the screen—the area wasn't large, but it perfectly encompassed several old tenement buildings, the back alley of the Beihe vegetable market, and the area of ​​bungalows surrounding the old No. 2 Primary School. Coincidence and familiarity often go hand in hand. He put his phone in his pocket, told Lao Tietou "There's an emergency at the Special Meteorological Bureau," and left the courtyard.

He went to the back entrance of the market first. It was past nine o'clock at night, and the market had long since closed. The metal roller shutter was pulled all the way down, and the ground still bore the water stains left from washing fish during the day. The air was filled with the smell of rotten vegetable leaves and fish. He squatted down at the back entrance and swept the ground with his flashlight—there was a fresh drag mark on the cement floor, not heavy, as if something had been pushed along the ground. At the corner of the mark, there was a tiny shard of glass, dark in color, with very fine mechanical marks reflected in its surface. He picked up the shard and examined it briefly in the flashlight beam. He walked along the drag mark for about ten steps, following it to the recycling bin next to the public toilet. The bin lid was open, and inside was a torn gray canvas glove. On the palm of the glove, there were fine marks with the same reflective pattern as the glass shard—someone had been cut by the shard while hurriedly changing the outer packaging, and then threw the glove, packaging and waste together, into the public garbage collection point in the back alley of the market.

He turned the gloves inside out, the flashlight beam illuminating the label on the inside: half of the label had been torn off, leaving only a printed "Military" character and a blurry logistics number. He took a picture and sent it to Zhou Cheng, adding: "Military logistics clothing supplies, not commercially available work gloves." Then he got up and continued walking.

Two alleys to the east led to the old No. 2 Primary School's old residential area. He had visited four complaining residents here last time, and remembered the directions of each fork in the road and the approximate walking time between them. He guessed the alarm clock's signal had been led through this densely populated area towards the dead-end alley to the east, so he quickened his pace without lingering. A stray cat jumped down from the wall, glanced at him with its back arched, and then scurried away along the shadows at the base of the wall. This detail made him pause—not because of the cat, but because directly ahead of the direction the cat ran was a window, emitting a very faint blue light. It wasn't the light from a television; it was flicker-free and extremely steady, like the standby indicator light of some electronic device. He circled around to the side of the building and found it was an old, closed grocery store that the Beihe Subdistrict Office had previously photographed and archived; the iron gate was sealed. He approached the gate and pressed his ear to the door for a while—there were people talking inside. It wasn't a conversation, but a one-way whisper, spoken very quickly, repeated every few tens of seconds, as if someone was repeating information into a communicator, using code words he couldn't understand.

He stepped back two paces and walked around to the back of the general store, peering through a crack in a window boarded up with wooden planks. A military mat was laid out on the floor of the back room, and two people were squatting on it. In front of them was an activated military portable terminal, the waveforms on the screen jumping extremely slowly—it was a passive radio frequency analysis software scanning a tiny module, independently attached to a base, inside a disassembled casing. The module's casing was the dark brown plastic of an old-fashioned alarm clock, with several old scratches on its surface. A very thin metal wire connected from the alarm clock's spring knob to the terminal's data interface. Su Xinpei's breath caught for a moment—Containment Item 215. The alarm clock was still intact, not disassembled, but one of the adjustment knobs on the side had been removed, and there were pry marks at the seams of the plastic casing. The other party was analyzing the vibration timing principle inside the alarm clock's spring cavity; several sets of extremely hastily drawn waveforms and handwritten conversion formulas were scattered on the table. The fact that these two people could start reversing the clock less than 24 hours after it was shipped out indicates that they already had background knowledge in the development of subspace resonant weapons—they were not ordinary agents, but technical agents.

He didn't act rashly. He retreated, crouched in the shadows, and sent the location coordinates to Ye Xinghe with a short note: "Two technical agents are reversing the alarm clock's timing cycle. They are not carrying heavy weaponry and have not detected any third party present." After sending the message, he silenced his phone, put it in his inner pocket, and circled back to the front of the grocery store. Under the cover of darkness, he crouched in a dark corner next to the seal and began to wait. He waited for Ye Xinghe's team to complete their encirclement, for the optimal window of intervention, or for an unexpected event to occur—whichever came first. He kept his Qi sensing in a semi-open state. His body, having achieved mastery of the Tendon Refining technique, automatically switched to a low-center-of-gravity posture, ready to strike at any moment, as he crouched and waited, his breathing slow and even.

The unexpected happened faster than he anticipated. His phone flashed silently in his pocket; Ye Xinghe's reply was only four words: "Coming in two minutes." Su Xinpei put away his phone and had just taken a breath when a muffled thud came from the window. He peeked through the crack in the window and saw the communications agent in the room suddenly clutch his wrist, letting out a low, extremely painful groan. He tossed the tool he used to disassemble the alarm clock aside and shuffled back half a foot on his camp mat. A faint blue light flashed on the alarm clock's trigger terminal—an operational error had activated the alarm clock's temporary sensor circuit. The parasitic pulse module inside the spring wall released a very short, low-power resonance. The energy was very low, not enough to trigger a full ring, but it was enough to disrupt the central nervous system of the person closest to it. The tech agent drew his pistol from his waist, pointing it at his partner in utter chaos. His finger trembled violently on the trigger guard—the pulse had directly overridden his conscious control, rendering him unable to move his hand, but the last thread of reason hadn't snapped. His partner immediately grabbed his wrist, pressing the muzzle to the ground, and the two wrestled together on the cot.

Su Xinpei stood outside the iron gate. It was locked, nailed shut; the seal prevented him from pushing it open from the outside, but every second the person inside hesitated on the trigger increased the chance of an accidental firing. He took a deep breath, his internal energy circulation automatically activated, the heat from his dantian flowing up his Ren meridian to his chest. He stepped back, and with a variation of the "opening the door" technique, he slammed his right fist into the door—the force of his arm combined with the spiraling, extreme vibration shattered the rusted steel lock lug on the door. He flung the door open and rushed in, knocking the seal hanging behind the metal door to the ground.

The two were still wrestling. Su Xinpei first subdued the technical agent who was holding the gun, then precisely struck the tendon depression in the center of the back of the man's hand with his right knuckles. The man cried out in pain, and his pistol fell onto the cot. Su Xinpei kicked it into the corner and then pressed his elbow into the man's shoulder blade. Taking advantage of the moment when the other man was subduing his companion, he lunged at the alarm clock on the table. His fingers were less than ten centimeters from the clock when Su Xinpei grabbed his wrist with his left hand, twisted it with a powerful twist, and the man fell to the side in pain. Su Xinpei pinned both men to the ground, glanced at the digital clock on the wall—the numbers had jumped to a little past 2 a.m. He pulled two canvas straps from under the cot, tied the two men's wrists behind their backs to the table legs, then walked around the cot to the table and looked down at the alarm clock carefully.

Item 215. He silently repeated the number to himself. Just like in the photos inside the Special Phenomenon Bureau, it looked like an ordinary old-fashioned mechanical alarm clock, with a dark brown plastic casing, a beige plastic face, crooked markings, and a thin hammer between two brass bells. But its hands were wrong—it was a little past 2 a.m., but the hands were stopped at 3:30. He had read in the profile Zhou Cheng had sent him that Item 215's hands did not move with normal time; it was always stopped at 3:27. Only a few seconds before that exact moment would the minute hand begin to slowly move forward one last notch. No matter where it was placed, no matter if it was fully wound—it only recognized that one time. Su Xinpei looked at the hands, then glanced at the thin wire hanging from the half-removed side knob, and suddenly realized—although the Northern Alliance technical agent had only triggered a very short blue light when he made the operational error, the clock's hands had already slightly jerked forward half a notch. The pulse has been activated and the countdown to charging has begun.

He opened his communicator: "Team Leader Ye, I've broken in, and the two men have been subdued. But the alarm clock has been activated by being touched. I just observed a flash of blue light in the mainspring chamber from outside—an operational error triggered a low-frequency pulse, and the minute hand slid forward a little half a tick when the malfunction was triggered. If Beilian destroyed the mainspring chamber during the reverse disassembly process and triggered an internal pulse, the hands are not now reset, and the entire ringing cycle may have entered the calibration countdown."

There was a brief silence in his ear for a split second, then Ye Xinghe's voice was slightly hoarse: "How many minutes until the next 3:27?"

Su Xinpei glanced at the digital clock on the wall. "A little over an hour. I'll tie everyone in the room securely and then take the alarm clock and head out. Don't go into the alley yet. Its ringing cycle will change after the explosion pulse; if it rings too early and explodes, the radius of impact will be quite large." After saying that, he switched the communication back to low-noise standby mode, squatted down, pulled out another half roll of industrial tape from under the cot, and secured the knees of the two agents. He then checked the straps on their wrists one by one—tight, but not too tight. Finally, he picked up the alarm clock from the table. The moment his fingers touched the casing, the gash on his left rib suddenly twitched violently—not pain, but a chill that penetrated deep into the bone membrane. Unlike the domineering horizontal pulling of the cracks expanding in the factory area, this chill was more like a narrow-frequency vibrato, muffled in his ear, like someone gently scraping glass with their fingernails at very close range. The alarm clock transmitted an extremely weak, rhythmic heat pulse to his palm, completely out of sync with his heartbeat.

He held the alarm clock in one hand and whispered into his earpiece with the other, "Out of the way. Retreat to the dead-end alley to the east. We know this area well, don't set off flares."

He pushed open the door and stepped out. The iron gate slammed shut behind him. There were only two streetlights in the alley, one completely broken, the other flickering in the cold wind, casting indistinct shadows on the cobblestones of the dead-end alley. He ran twenty paces north into the dead-end alley, then suddenly stopped—there were no windows on the wall ahead, only shadows. Two dark figures parted from the shadows, advancing about ten paces ahead of him in a pincer-like formation, their steps light but their intentions undisguised. Su Xinpei recognized the two men—the escorts; the gray canvas glove he'd torn when changing gloves earlier bore the same military supply uniform stamp number. He gripped the alarm clock tightly in one hand, his right fist poised in an opening stance, and retreated while using sidesteps to move his body to the base of the wall, preventing both men from simultaneously having a frontal attack angle. He wasn't yet a beginner in leatherworking and couldn't withstand bullets head-on. If the modified pistols they carried had an effective range of about ten meters, he could still close the distance. Fortunately, the two men didn't raise their guns, but simply lowered their center of gravity and surrounded him. Su Xinpei crouched low, twisted his waist, and launched a right punch through the sleeve, directly into the gap between the man on his left and the wall. Taking advantage of the man's fall, he kicked off with his left foot, flipped over, and hooked the blocking arm of the man on his right with his right arm, twisting it until the elbow joint was locked. Only then did the man wince in pain and break free. Su Xinpei then took two steps back, clutched his alarm clock, and ran, hearing someone behind him groaning as they crawled away against the wall.

He ran out of the back alley of the Beihe vegetable market, heading north through a patch of ruins of old bungalows without streetlights, quickly locating several emergency signal jamming points pre-set by the Special Meteorological Bureau in his mind as he ran. About two minutes later, he saw an iron gate at the end of a narrow alley between two buildings—Ye Xinghe was standing outside the iron gate.

Ye Xinghe took the alarm clock, flipped the side knob, and sealed it with a miniature resonance enclosure, a standard feature of the Special Meteorological Bureau. Su Xinpei stood beside him, panting, wiping the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. Ye Xinghe put the enclosure in the trunk, dusted off his hands, turned to look at him, and his first words weren't "Are you alright?" but rather, "You missed an agent."

Su Xinpei glared at Ye Xinghe, then lay motionless on the old cement curb beside the garbage heap. He'd run too fast and now felt a burning pain in his lower back where the iron gate had scraped against it. His hand, which had been burned by the thin wire of the side knob when he caught the alarm clock, had a coin-sized blister. He pulled out a wet wipe and pressed it against the blister, feeling the gash on his left rib slowly subside after the alarm clock was sealed away.