Ethan looked coldly at the corpse on the ground, its upper body blown apart. “A guy with precision instruments inside his body, whose mechanical parts suddenly caught fire and exploded from within because some component short-circuited... heh heh heh... to die in such a ridiculous way—can that even be considered a parallel rank?”

The three survivors snapped back to their senses and spread out a few steps. Two of them raised their arms horizontally; the skin at the center of their palms opened from the inside, and the barrels of six-barreled rotary machine guns extended out. Their ulnae and radii had been replaced by these heavy firearms.

The tall man only raised his right arm; likewise, a gun barrel protruded from his palm. He turned sideways, aimed in Ethan’s direction, and shouted, “Attack!”

A continuous barrage of ear-piercing gunfire erupted. In a sense, they were indeed “using their hands”—three people, five arms, thirty gun barrels. In under a minute, more than six thousand bullets were fired at Ethan along three intersecting trajectories.

But Ethan still stood where he was, completely unscathed, until the others ran out of ammunition and had to stop shooting.

“This is impossible!” The three of them stared in disbelief at the scene before them.

Ethan said, “Of course it’s possible. For example, every bullet on each of the three firing lines that could have hit me collided midair with a bullet from another trajectory and was deflected. And most bullets, due to recoil, subtle air resistance, even temperature and other factors, had their flight paths slightly altered, so they wouldn’t have hit me anyway.”

“You lowly paper-rank bastard!” The man who had previously called Ethan the Inverted Cross showed a vicious expression and lunged at Ethan. A sharp, shark-fin-shaped blade extended from the outside of his right elbow, and in seconds he was upon him.

But he brushed right past Ethan, charging at empty ground, slashing fiercely, then turned around in confusion to stare at the empty space to his right.

Ethan, with his back to him, pronounced his fate: “If the chemical delivery tubes inside your body rupture from years of accumulated wear, those green fluids might just flow into your brain. In that case, there’s not even any point in trying to save you.”

“You... you... ugh... guh...” The man’s right eye filled with blood, which spilled from the socket; finally, even the eyeball burst out, still attached by its tendons. Thick, murky fluids—red, white, and green—poured from his nostrils. He fell to his knees, babbling incoherently, his voice trembling violently as his body convulsed. Then, with a sound like a string of firecrackers exploding in a pile of cat dung, something burst in his brain, and he collapsed face-first to the ground, never to move again.

The two survivors dared not move a muscle, for fear is a human instinct.

The tall man cautiously asked, “How on earth did you do that...?”

“Hmph... What a stupid question. If I told you now, it’d be bad for me. And once you’re dead, I’m not about to explain it to a corpse. Can’t you ask something more constructive? Like, what would make me spare you?”

“Ah!!!” The man beside the tall one turned and ran—he had no intention of dying here for no reason.

But he hadn’t even run ten meters before he inexplicably tripped and fell. Within seconds, he stopped breathing.

“Now, there’s only you left. Based on your earlier logic, what do you think the odds of this happening are? Zero percent?” Ethan asked with a smile.

The tall man looked back at his last companion’s corpse, his face pale. “How is that possible... He broke his neck... on flat ground...”

Ethan’s tone was like a bystander watching a spectacle on the street: “Yeah, sometimes a bad fall—even a few steps—can be fatal.”

“What will it take for you to let me go?” The tall man abandoned his pride and asked a very practical question.

“Good question. You’re at least smart enough to listen to advice.” Ethan once again lifted his head and gazed at the sky. “But... I have no intention of letting you go, no matter what. I just plan to humiliate you a bit before you die, for my own amusement.”

“You bastard!!” The tall man roared in fury, stomping the ground and shattering it into a web of cracks. In a flash, he charged at Ethan, but before he could make any move to attack, his body, pivoting at the philtrum, was neatly sliced in two.

The burly figure, nearly two meters tall, was split in half and, propelled by inertia, flew past Ethan on either side. From Ethan’s position, one side was all flesh and organs, the other all mechanical metal.

“Sigh, a guy with only half a brain is just an idiot...” Ethan looked at the scattered remains, his expression still apathetic and indifferent. He picked up the iron bucket at his feet, dumped the ashes on the ground, whistled, walked into the bookstore, and closed the door.

Chapter Twelve: The Call

160° east longitude, 0° latitude, above the Pacific Ocean.

At an altitude of over four thousand meters above sea level, there was a never-landing artificial floating island—Tiandu.

This was the city where the imperial palace was located, built with the most cutting-edge human technology. No matter if sea levels rose, nuclear war broke out, the earth’s crust shifted, the climate changed drastically, or viruses ran rampant, none of it would pose a threat to Tiandu.