He had just married a policewoman when he was diagnosed with criminal genius.

With a muffled "plop," the first anchor bolt was completely pulled out, its tail trailing a sticky, degraded residue, like a crooked tooth being pulled out.

Old Zhou's face turned pale.

Lu Chen did not stop.

The second, the third, and the fourth.

He was like a precise humanoid machine tool, pulling out each anchor bolt with almost identical rhythm.

Inject solvent, wait for penetration, sense resistance, and pull out with steady force.

Five minutes later, all four anchor bolts in the lower left corner were pulled out.

The lower left corner of the door frame has detached from the wall, revealing a gap about two fingers wide.

The locking mechanism inside the door can be seen through the gap.

There are three locking bolts: one horizontal locking bolt at the top and bottom, a double-sided locking bolt in the middle, and a gear set for time locking at the deepest part.

Old Zhou was completely speechless at this point.

His mind was racing, trying to find reasons to comfort himself.

So what if four anchor bolts are removed?

There are still more than a dozen locks on the upper right side of the door, but the door still can't be opened; the latch is still stuck inside...

But Lu Chen did not continue to pull out the anchor bolts.

He stood up and took out a stainless steel rod from the innermost compartment of his waist bag.

It has a diameter of 12 mm, a length of 60 cm, and a 30-degree wedge-shaped tip at one end. The surface has been hardened to a hardness of HRC58.

Lu Chen inserted the wedge-shaped tip into the two-finger-width gap between the door frame and the wall.

Then he took out a hydraulic jack.

It is palm-sized, single-acting, and has a maximum output of twelve tons.

The jack is positioned between the stainless steel rod and the wall.

"What are you going to do?" Old Zhou's voice had changed.

"Pry open the door frame," Lu Chen replied.

"Are you crazy! This whole door weighs two tons and eight ounces! You're using a jack..."

Lu Chen pressed the pressure lever on the jack.

"Gah!"

The metal and concrete emitted sharp groans simultaneously.

The remaining anchor bolts were not broken.

However, the section of wall where the anchor bolts were fixed began to crack under a 12-ton lateral force.

Concrete is a compressive-resistant material, and its shear strength is only one-sixth to one-tenth of its compressive strength.

Lu Chen only damaged one corner, but he had already changed the stress structure of the entire door frame.

The lower left corner of the door frame shifted outward by fifteen millimeters.

Thirty millimeters.

"Snap!"

The fifth anchor bolt, along with a fist-sized area of ​​surrounding concrete, was completely ejected from the wall.

The sixth and the seventh.

The left side of the door frame has completely detached from the wall, like a broken rib, crookedly revealing the grayish-white reinforced concrete core inside.

Lu Chen adjusted the position of the jack, moving it to the upper right side of the door frame.

Old Zhou heard the sound of metal tearing apart, like a beast tearing at the bones of its prey.

"Bang!"

The right side of the door frame broke in the middle, and the entire vault door, having lost two-thirds of its anchoring points, tilted inward due to its own weight.

The hinge emitted a piercing scream, like a dying iron beast.

Lu Chen did not hesitate.

He inserted a stainless steel bar into the gap between the door and the frame, and used the gravity gap created by the tilt of the door to force the bolts back into the lock body one by one.

This is what he calculated precisely: after the door frame deforms, the guide hole of the lock tongue is misaligned, and the lock tongue loses the end support of the locking stroke. Under the combined action of the door's own weight and the lever force, it will be "squeezed" back into the lock body.

"Click." The first locking bolt retracted.

"Click." The second one.

"Bang!" The third horizontal latch snapped off the guide pin under the pressure of the tilted door.

Now only the time lock remains.

Old Zhou leaned against the wall with his mouth agape.

"You fucking... just like that..." Old Zhou's voice was as dry as sandpaper grinding iron, "you just opened the mechanical lock like that? A two-ton, eight-foot door, twelve anchor bolts, three locking bolts, and you..."

Lu Chen's actions completely shattered Lao Zhou's understanding.

In his mind, their vault doors could be forcibly broken open.

But that's definitely not like the young man in front of me.

A person, with only a pitifully small number of tools at hand.

Like peeling silk from a cocoon, it was pried open little by little.

If the doors to their bank's prized high-security vaults were breached in such an absurd way...

That would really be a joke.

What's even more terrifying is that Lu Chen is now focused on breaking through the last security lock on the vault door.

Time lock.

Old Zhou no longer has the confidence he had before.

However, he also wanted to see how the other party broke the time lock.

The locking tongue of a time lock is an independent mechanical structure that will not release until the set time has elapsed.

But at this moment the door has tilted by nearly eight degrees, and there is a deformation gap of nearly ten centimeters between the door and the frame.

Lu Chen reached his hand through the gap.

Old Zhou saw Lu Chen's entire right arm disappear through the crack in the door, the veins on his arm bulging out from the exertion, the blue veins standing out.

Lu Chen's fingers groped in the darkness.

He encountered the lock body of the time lock.

The cool, metallic casing is round and about ten centimeters in diameter.

His fingers moved along the edge of the lock body and found the protruding end of the latch.

The latch of the time lock is spring-loaded; after the allotted time, the spring is released, and the latch retracts.

However, the spring's release mechanism is controlled by a cam, which is driven by a set of spring gears.

The cam won't turn and the locking tongue won't retract until the time is up.

There's really no way to do it from the outside.

But Lu Chen's hand was not outside.

His fingers found an inconspicuous groove at the base of the latch.

That's the safety latch between the bolt and the spring, a maintenance interface used at the factory for manually testing the bolt's extension and retraction.

Normally, this bayonet is sealed with a lead seal with a diameter of three millimeters to prevent unauthorized operation.

Lu Chen's fingernails gripped the lead seal and pried it off.

Then he used the four-millimeter precision screwdriver to insert it into the bayonet and press it against the safety pin.

Press down.

"despair."

The spring is released.

The time lock's bolt retracts.

After losing its last restraint, the vault door slowly collapsed inward under its own weight and the guidance of the deformed door frame.

"boom!"

The 2.8-ton steel door crashed to the ground.

Dust fell from the ceiling.

Cold air rushed out of the doorway, carrying the smell of metal and concrete debris, and hit Lu Chen's face.

"It's done!" Lu Chen finally showed a look of joy.

……

"boom!"

The sound came from deep within the bank.

It looked like something had collapsed.

In the bank lobby, the bank tellers, who were tied up by Lu Chen, suddenly looked up and stared at each other. One female teller, her face pale and her voice trembling, asked, "What was that sound?"

No one answered her.

The customers who had been squatting in the corner had started to quiet down again, but now they became restless once more.

Some people tried to stand up to look, but their hands were tied, and they fell back down as soon as they got up. "Has someone come to rescue us?"

Someone asked in a low voice. The person next to them shook their head: "I don't know."

At the end of the corridor, the assault team members who were strapped to the radiator with belts also heard it.

The captain, who had been resting with his eyes closed, suddenly opened them upon hearing the loud noise.

"What's that sound?" one of the team members asked.

No one spoke.

It's safe to say that this robber was up to no good.

The captain did not reply.

He suspected that the muffled thud he had just heard was the sound of a solid steel door hitting the concrete floor.

"Isn't this exercise supposed to be this realistic?"

"You should have said so earlier! If you had said so earlier, we would have taken it seriously and wouldn't have been subdued by him so easily," a young team member said fiercely.

The SWAT team leader shook his head: "It's not their fault; we underestimated them."

"We assumed all the participants were the same, but we never expected to run into such a tough opponent."

On the mobile command vehicle.

Ding Jianguo's ears twitched slightly.

What was that sound?