Standing on the mahogany prow of an eighty-foot Azure-68 superyacht moored outside Pier Nine, Lin Mo blew gently on a porcelain spoonful of Grandma Chen’s late-night shrimp wontons.
Behind him on the illuminated foredeck, crates of live river prawns bubbled in aerated tanks while Master Zhou Guodong gripped the yacht’s stainless-steel guardrail with white knuckles. Out in the swirling midnight fog, three flat-bottomed iron barges packed with forty machete-wielding thugs drifted within fifty feet of the drydock slipway.
“Chairman Lin, get behind the cabin bulkhead!” Master Zhou whispered urgently, his breath pluming white in the cold river wind. “That’s One-Eyed Crocodile from the Black-Tiger Martial Alliance! He’s a Rank 2 Peak internal martial killer who broke the ribs of six dock patrolmen last winter—and his thugs are lighting phosphorus firebombs!”
Lin Mo swallowed the warm pork-and-shrimp wonton, savoring the touch of toasted scallion oil and ginger.
“They picked a terrible time to play pirate,” Lin Mo said, his tone completely relaxed. “Wonton broth cools down fast in the river wind. Letting good soup go cold is a serious offense.”
Beside the cabin door, Tie Niu crossed his massive arms over his tactical vest and chuckled in his gravelly bass. “Relax, Old Master Zhou. The Chairman hates having his midnight supper interrupted. Those river rats are about to find out that dockside table manners are mandatory.”
Commodore Old Hai stepped out of the superyacht’s wheelhouse in his crisp navy-blue uniform, holding a pair of night-vision binoculars.
“Chairman Lin, all thirty superyachts have their searchlights primed, and fifty-two dock security veterans are in position behind the gantry cranes,” Old Hai reported in a low, steady voice. “One-Eyed Crocodile has been running extortion rackets along the Tianhai riverfront for the Song Clan for eight years. Whenever an independent barge owner refuses to pay his river toll, his crew burns their boats at midnight and blames it on electrical fires.”
“Tonight he can blame his hospital bill on bad aim,” Lin Mo said calmly.
Out on the bow of the lead iron barge, a hulking man in a studded leather vest and a rusted iron eyepatch raised a three-meter barbed steel harpoon in one hand. Around him, forty Black-Tiger thugs whooped savagely, holding up wire-wrapped glass jugs blazing with greenish-yellow kerosene wicks.
[Target: One-Eyed Crocodile | Role: Black-Tiger Martial Alliance River Boss.]
[Goodness Score: -8/100 (Arson, river piracy, extortion, crippling honest fishermen).]
[Cultivation Realm: Rank 2 Peak Internal Martial.]
“Listen up, you Hongxing shipyard beggars!” One-Eyed Crocodile roared across the dark water, his voice echoing off the steel freighter hulls. “Young Master Song Zihao and Chief Lei Ba gave the order—any drydock that takes Taichu Group’s money burns to the waterline tonight! Throw the firebombs into the welding sheds and hack their shrimp boats to driftwood!”
Thirty lit kerosene jugs drew back in the thugs’ hands, ready to fly toward Master Zhou’s drydock.
Lin Mo didn’t step back an inch. He took one last sip of the golden herbal broth.
Deep inside his dantian, the 1,200,000 Benevolence Merit Points from rescuing Master Zhou and the shipyard families fused with his 1,500,000 boat-show points. Reaching full saturation, the combined merit surged into his bone marrow!
CLANG!
A deep, resonant chime vibrated through Lin Mo’s skeleton, sounding like an ancient bronze bell struck inside a mountain temple. His twelve primary meridians expanded to twice their previous width as warm, indestructible golden energy surged from his spine to his fingertips. Every cell in his muscles tightened with explosive power, while a warm golden sheen briefly flickered beneath his skin.
Inside his mind, a golden-purple system notification flashed:
`[DING! 2,700,000 CUMULATIVE BENEVOLENCE MERIT POINTS FULLY ASSIMILATED!]`
`[HOST LIN MO ADVANCES TO: HALF-STEP RANK 3 MARTIAL GRANDMASTER (INTERNAL QI GERMINATION)!]`
`[MODULE UPGRADED: PURE-HEART EYE LV.2 — PROVINCIAL DISTRESS RADAR (20KM RADIUS) UNLOCKED!]`
In a single breath, Lin Mo’s sensory awareness expanded across the fog-shrouded river like an invisible radar net. Without squinting, he could trace the heartbeat of every thug on the barges, the trajectory of every swirling ember, and the hairline stress flaws inside One-Eyed Crocodile’s barbed steel harpoon.
Half-Step Rank 3 Grandmaster, Lin Mo mused, feeling the dense golden Qi coiling around his knuckles. So Internal Qi can be projected outside the body onto everyday objects now. Let’s see how sturdy hotel porcelain really is.
Out on the lead barge, One-Eyed Crocodile spotted Lin Mo standing calmly under the superyacht’s deck lamps in his dark wool coat. A cruel grin split the river boss’s scarred face.
“So you’re the kid Chairman Lin who bought out Cloud-Crown and Hongxing!” One-Eyed Crocodile snarled, his right arm bulging with dark veins as he poured his Rank 2 Peak strength into the three-meter steel harpoon. “Go feed the river carp! Eat my River-Splitting Spear!”
WHOOSH!
Hurled with twelve hundred pounds of brute internal force, the heavy steel harpoon tore through the midnight fog like a ballista bolt, whistling straight toward Lin Mo’s chest!
“Chairman, look out!” Master Zhou shouted, lunging forward to pull him down.
Lin Mo didn’t even set down his empty wonton bowl. Holding the white porcelain soup spoon lightly between his right thumb and middle finger, he infused a single thread of golden Half-Step Grandmaster Qi into the ceramic glaze and flicked his wrist.
PING!
Wrapped in a halo of golden Qi, the humble porcelain soup spoon shot off his thumb at three times the speed of sound, carving a vacuum tunnel through the damp fog!
Fifty feet over the black water, the two-ounce porcelain spoon struck the tip of the thirty-pound steel harpoon head-on.
KRA-CLANG!
Sparks erupted in the mist like a detonated grenade. Under the unstoppable kinetic impact of Half-Step Grandmaster Qi, the forged steel harpoon didn’t even slow the spoon down. Its thick iron shaft shattered straight down the center into seven jagged pieces that splashed harmlessly into the river!
Unscratched and still humming with golden light, the porcelain soup spoon punched straight through the fog and slammed flat against the center of One-Eyed Crocodile’s studded leather vest.
BOOM!
It sounded like a cannonball hitting a drum. One-Eyed Crocodile’s single eye bulged nearly out of its socket as his sternum caved inward. Lifted clean off his boots before he could even scream, the two-hundred-pound river boss shot backward off the barge and skipped across the dark surface of the Tianhai River like a flat stone!
Splash! — Splash! — Splash! — CRACK!
One-Eyed Crocodile skipped four times across forty yards of open water before crashing into a rotting timber mooring piling on the far mudbank. The impact snapped the thick pine post in half, and he slid unconscious into the reeds with the unbroken porcelain spoon resting neatly on his chest!
Dead silence dropped over Pier Nine.
On the three iron barges, all forty Black-Tiger thugs froze like statues. Their lit firebombs burned down toward their fingers as cold river water lapped against the hulls.
“Boss... Boss Crocodile just got skipped across the river by a soup spoon?!” the lead barge helmsman squeaked, his machete clattering onto the iron deck. “That’s not a merchant—that’s a Martial Grandmaster monster! Drop the bottles! Jump!”
“Too late for swimming lessons,” Lin Mo said, wiping his hands with a paper napkin. “Tie Niu, two minutes. Don’t let their kerosene get near Captain Old Hai’s live shrimp.”
“Yes, Boss! Iron Guard—cast the nets!” Tie Niu roared.
At Tie Niu’s whistle, fifty-two Taichu dock security veterans and night-shift patrolmen stepped out from behind the superyacht’s superstructure and the drydock gantry cranes. Four high-pressure industrial fire hoses roared to life at once, blasting cold river water across the barges and extinguishing every single firebomb in three seconds flat.
Before the drenched, coughing thugs could scramble over the gunwales, Tie Niu and eight former navy frogmen fired pneumatic cargo-net launchers from the pier.
THWACK-THWACK-THWACK!
Six weighted Kevlar-mesh cargo nets dropped over the three barges, tangling all forty machete thugs into squirming, cursing bundles. Powered by the drydock’s electric winches, Tie Niu’s unit hauled the netted thugs out of the barges like a catch of mud-catfish. They dumped all forty men in a dripping heap on the concrete pier in under two minutes!
Two dock guards paddled a skiff across to the mudbank and fished the groaning One-Eyed Crocodile out of the reeds. They washed off Lin Mo’s porcelain spoon and returned it on a silver tray.
Master Zhou stood by the yacht railing, staring at the snapped mooring post across the river and the forty groaning Black-Tiger thugs trussed up in cargo nets. Finally, he looked back at Lin Mo’s calm profile.
“One flick of a soup spoon shattered a thirty-pound steel harpoon into seven pieces...” Master Zhou breathed, his respect for the young chairman rising to near-reverence. “And here I was worried that Song Zihao’s underworld thugs would intimidate our welders!”
Commodore Old Hai saluted briskly from the wheelhouse steps. “Chairman Lin, that wrist flick was cleaner than a naval deck gun! My twenty fishermen saw the whole thing from the marina. Not a single boat crew on this river will ever fear the Black-Tiger gang again!”
Su Wan walked up the gangplank with her tablet open, her eyes bright behind her lashes. “Chairman, the municipal river police chief is five minutes out to arrest One-Eyed Crocodile and his forty men for attempted arson. Shen Qiaoqiao has already linked their confessions to Song Shipping’s bank accounts.”
“Good,” Lin Mo said, walking down the superyacht’s gangplank onto the pier.
He looked over Tie Niu and the fifty-two soaked dock security veterans and night-shift shipyard patrolmen standing at crisp attention in the cold wind. Several of the night-shift patrolmen were retired soldiers hired that afternoon whose raincoats were still thin and worn.
Under his upgraded [Pure-Heart Eye Lv.2], every single man in the formation glowed with a clean, upright emerald halo between 85/100 and 93/100.
Fifty-two honest veterans standing watch in the midnight river fog so eight hundred shipyard families can sleep safely, Lin Mo thought warmly. And every yuan I spend on their gear comes back a hundred times over. There’s no better defense budget on the planet.
“Tie Niu,” Lin Mo said, pulling out his black-gold Taichu Benevolence Card. “River fog is bad for old army joints. Order custom stab-proof thermal night-combat armor, heated patrol boots, warm lamb-broth rations, and a night-combat bonus for every man in your dock unit tonight.”
Lin Mo swiped the card across Su Wan’s portable terminal.
BEEP!
`[TRANSACTION APPROVED! RECIPIENTS: COMMANDER TIE NIU (95/100) & 52 DOCK DEFENSE VETERANS (GOODNESS: 85–92/100)!]`
`[AMOUNT SPENT: ¥30,000,000 RMB — NIGHT-COMBAT ARMOR, THERMAL EQUIPMENT & VICTORY BONUSES!]`
`[DING! 100X PURE-HEART BENEVOLENCE REFUND TRIGGERED! +¥3,000,000,000 RMB (+¥3.00 BILLION) DEPOSITED!]`
`[CURRENT PERSONAL LIQUID VAULT BALANCE: ¥458,470,000,000 RMB (¥458.47 BILLION)!]`
`[GOOD PEOPLE NETWORK UPDATED: 11,168 -> 11,220 VERIFIED BENEFICIARIES (+52)!]`
Phones buzzed down the line as five-hundred-thousand-yuan combat bonuses and equipment vouchers hit every guard’s account.
“Thirty million yuan for a two-minute net sweep?!” Tie Niu blinked at his screen, his booming voice catching with emotion before he snapped a thunderous military salute. “Brothers! Did you see that?! Chairman Lin treats us like sovereign generals! As long as we breathe, not a single spark touches Taichu’s docks!”
“Thank you, Chairman Lin!” fifty-two grizzled veterans roared in unison, their eyes reddening in the floodlights.
Just as Lin Mo nodded to the men, a sudden, urgent vibration shook the inner pocket of his wool coat.
The Cracked Qingcheng Spiritual-Wood Sword Scabbard he had redeemed at the border noodle stall began to hum like a plucked bowstring, radiating an icy, panicked pulse of sword resonance!
At the exact same instant, Lin Mo’s newly unlocked [Pure-Heart Eye Lv.2: Provincial Radar] swept across the midnight map of Tianhai Capital and locked onto a blinding, sky-piercing pillar of golden-purple light just 1.2 kilometers away!
`[URGENT LV.2 RADAR LOCK: SUPREME TARGET CHU LINGXIAO (GOODNESS: 97/100 — PEAK RANK 3 SWORD FAIRY)!]`
`[LOCATION: 1.2 KM SOUTHWEST — UNCLE LUO'S NOODLE SHOP, OLD CANAL ALLEY!]`
`[STATUS: DISH-WASHING ACCIDENT IN PROGRESS & 20 MURONG SYNDICATE LOAN-SHARK THUGS APPROACHING!]`