Explosion

In the end, neither Du Lang nor the delivery man could find any labels attached to the massive box crowding the front of the door. Eventually, after a few suppressed murmurs, the latter hopped onto his half-dusted van somewhere along the end of the street, and fled from the neighborhood with the speed of someone who had a lit flame under the seat of his pants. Du Lang sighed and shook his head, before taking the key to the mansion out of his pocket and opening the heavy wooden door.

The package was left desolate and ignored.

It was a mansion that held his name as the rightful owner, and he was given all legal rights, but in reality – it was a hand-me-down from Du Yuexin's earlier years. Since neither of them had the supposedly rich and prominent parents that had given birth to them, the graceful elder sister had completely remodeled the interior to rid her presence…. supposedly.

"To be honest, I liked the previous build more… was she partly drunk when she redesigned it?"

The mansion was massive compared to Jingdou's average living standards, but within the Silver Willow community that housed a majority of the city's prominent figures and rich households, it could only measure to a child's side spiel. And across the continent, a residence of this standard and size could barely reach the average living standard. It was of a size that Tang Jing, with her declining family status, could appreciate, but not be in awe of – just below five hundred square meters.

And the interior… was a mixture of cultures that had been thrown inside an omniscient blender without regard for their culture. The living room was designed in Victorian legacy-themed models and ambients, whereas the kitchen and bedrooms were constructed in a more modern, rectangular feel. For an unknown reason, Du Yuexin had gratefully fixated on the only source of interior lighting to be present from massive chandeliers of glass and quartz.

"Mr.… Mr. Du, this place?"

Mu Wuying's astonished gasp brought Du Lang to his senses, and prompted a wry smile to arise on his countenance. The young girl had lost herself at the melancholy atmosphere that grasped the inner walls of the mansion by its throat, and her eyes were glazed from the extravagant decorations.

The floor was completely constructed from hard blocks of marble, with a dual-layer granite and solid steel foundation… the fountains reflected the luxurious ambient with their glossy, crystalline structures of carved amethyst ore, and the stairs… was that ebony? The house was divided into two floors identical in design, and –

"Alright, it's not that amazing to look at. This is practically a second-hand product that hadn't been assembled correctly," Du Lang shook the young girl from her reverie.

"This house doesn't have a spare set of bedrooms available. Are you fine settling in the guest room on the second floor?"

Since Mu Wuying seemed hesitant to respond, Du Lang sighed and left her alone. He shouldered the briefcase against his shoulder and strode into the study room on the first floor, before another sigh erupted from his heart at the utterly ancient and pre-Medieval European design.

The ceiling was laced with an interweaving set of Gregorian designs and knighthood emblems from an unknown patch of Western History that had been lost in time. The only lights present in the study were embedded into the far corners of the ceiling – lighting systems of topaz that cast soothing rays of golden-amber light to its surroundings, and massive towers of bookshelves conquered the walls. The shelves were filled with tomes, antequated books written in a diverse set of languages, and scrolls galore; it was difficult for Du Lang to concentrate at the scene before his eyes.

"The Light of Gregory. 3.2.17," Du Lang snatched at the slip of paper decorating the center of the hardwood desk.

"Third bookcase, second shelf from the bottom, and the seventeenth book from the left? Is this meant to be some sort of code?"

Du Lang placed the sleeve of paper back onto its original position, and explored the palisade of bookshelves encircling the study's interior. His finger trailed across the leather and fabric spines of the shelved books until his fingertip stopped on an unfamiliar book dotted with Latin characters sewed with golden threads. The title of the particular book in question was completely beyond Du Lang's range of languages, but a quick survey of Wraith, the little sphere with two crimson eyes, revealed that it was indeed the book mentioned on the slip of paper. He reached out to grasp the book by its spine, but once a quarter of the book had been removed, Du Lang's ears caught onto the distinct click of meshed gears.

His heart sunk, and while his right hand paused its movements, the left sought after the sputtering Xiaomi stuffed into his pocket. Du Lang loosely shoved a wireless earphone into his left ear and dialed the horrible number – only to receive a response on the first ring.

"Lang Lang?"

"Elder Sister, you…" Du Lang grimaced.

"You didn't... plant any illegal stuff into the house, did you…?"

"Oh? Lang Lang, what house are you talking about? Elder Sister doesn't understand," there was a brief chuckle.

"My dear little brother, perhaps you should learn to question a few things on your own sometimes. Your Elder Sister has a life to enjoy as well, ah?"

"And who the hell decided to raise me this way?"

Du Lang grumbled and pulled the remainder of the book from its housing. While stepping back to place the retrieved book onto the study desk, his eyes twitched as the third bookshelf extended itself forwards then slid to the right to expose a secondary door and concealed passageway. The bizarre combination of the two choices caused his voice to hitch in surprise, and elicited a knowing laugh from Du Yuexin.

"A door, and an opened passage – Elder Sister, is this meant to be a joke?" Du Lang rubbed at his forehead and muttered with a grim expression.

"Surely… the door is meant to cover the passageway, no?"

Complain as he might, since the receiving end refused to grant a reply, Du Lang could only stride into the dark, exposed corridor with his eyes and ears strained to their might. The dense web of clicking and humming gears caused a shiver to cascade over his body from his toes, and to make matters worse, the moment his body was fully submerged into the darkness, the corridor flooded itself with a great burst of fluorescent light.

It was constructed entirely of granite. The pale grains, when combined with the brilliant lighting, caused his eyes to cramp. Du Lang forced his legs to tread through the passageway as fast as possible, and his lips formed an inaudible scream when the three-meter long corridor opened to reveal its secrets.

It took fifteen seconds for his eyes to properly relay the picturesque scene to his brain, and a full minute for the neurons to form the complete picture. When his mind finally received a state of understanding, Du Lang felt his veins surge with volcanic anger –

"Elder Sister, this isn't even a f*cking joke anymore, you're trying to get your –"

[Observed severe threshold of danger towards host. Initializing <Improved> curse model Distort Time, 50% output.]

Sibyl's words, which had largely been silent throughout the day, abruptly erupted in Du Lang's ears as his lips moved to complain. The sea of black chains stabbed through the marbling of the floor, the concrete ceiling and lighting, and sundered the entire mansion as time crawled the a halt. The female, secretarial voice had adopted a cold, solemn lint to her voice, prompting beads of glacial sweat to form on his neck.

"50% output… meaning I have only ninety seconds…" Du Lang thought for a brief moment, before his expression warped into that of horror.

The forbidden palace before him was quicky ignored as he threw the unfortunate Xiaomi onto the ground and raced through the corridor and out of the study. Sibyl's voice continued to rely the passing, precious breaths of time as he raced through the mansion's inner rooms and walls in search of the warning.

The grey, monochromic filter enveloping the entirety of the mansion indicated that the threat was nearby. He could ignore the second floor of the mansion as he hadn't touched it since Du Yuexin had renovated the building, and Mu Wuying who was in a state of undress while staring longingly towards the full-sized bathhouse could be ignored as well –

"Outside!?"

Du Lang roared and dashed out of the front door and towards the package that had been left aside on the concrete passage leading from the driveway. Utilizing strength that was foreign to his memories, he tore apart the flimsy cardboard packaging to reveal a dashingly beautiful assortment of women's underclothing of both top and bottom, and nestled at the base of the mountain of bras and panties was a peach plastic block the size of a man's torso.

Du Lang wasn't skilled in ballistics and explosive design – but anyone who had a hint of modern understanding easily recognized that the plastic block was a massive, heaven-sized hunk of explosive putty. Gamers tenderly attached the titular calling of 'nitro cell' to the block at Du Lang's feet, but the sheer size of the object caused sweat to flow from his arms.

[Host, fifteen seconds remain.]

"Sh*t, sh*t, sh*t – what do I do!?" Du Lang rubbed his head with his hands, and shook his hands to wring them dry.

"I can't throw it away, nor do I know how to defuse such a thing. The size will definitely blow the house away, as well as a few others – blow away?"

A block of explosive putty could deliver a maximum heat of detonation of 6.7 megajoule per kilogram. And the block at his feet was definitely more than five kilograms from a single glance…

"Distort Time was already used by Sibyl, and the only curse models that can interact with spatial coordinates are Power, Ghost's Path, and Distort Space. But what do I use… think, you stupid retiree!"

[Five seconds remain. Four. Three.]

"Ah, f*ck it all!"

Du Lang clamped his middle fingertip against the pad of his thumb, and triggered the curse model Distort Space to arise at his bidding. As this was his first time experiencing the mysteries of spatial coordinates, there wasn't much Du Lang could do except for throwing the explosive block towards a direction away from the house.

An underground explosion in Jingdou was bound to cause many problems in infrastructure. The modern developments had shallowed the foundations that could be implemented onto the devised buildings and skyscrapers, and an unhindered, unmitigated explosion was a recipe for disaster. The same was an explosion in the air – even the worst student at aerodynamic physics understood the destructibility of an airburst explosive. There weren't any rivers or lakes in Jingdou – but there were some in the nearby cities.

All Du Lang could do was to imagine the block of primed explosive vanishing and appearing at the base of a nearby river, and hope for the best. And much to his delight, the peach-colored plastic block shriveled and shrunk, as though it had been transformed into flowing grains of sand.

As Sibyl announced the conclusion of the automated curse model and the chains and the grey filter dissipated from view, Du Lang sighed and witnessed the block vanish to some other part of Quanzhou Province. All he needed to do was to report back to his beyond-mischievous Elder Sister, and ignore tomorrow's news no matter what –

"Lang Lang? Lang Lang? …did he fall asleep?"

The confused voice rang in his ear once the wireless receiver reconnected with the Xiaomi. Du Lang paused as he formulated the best combination of words based on what he had witnessed in the forbidden enclosure, and all that left his lips was a sincere and heartfelt –

"Elder Sister, I really hate you."

"Ah, my dear brother, Elder Sister loves you too, ah," Du Yuexin burst into a bout of uncontrollable laughter.

"Not a bad present, right? Isn't it just what you need given your current circumstances?"

Du Lang forcefully twitched his lips into a callous smile. He had gotten sidetracked by the former shoving a marriage into his hands, but now had been forcefully returned to reality. The peach-coloured block of happiness and eternal sanctity remained firmly plastered in his mind as Du Lang arose with the Xiaomi tightly gripped in his hand.

"Elder Sister, this truly is a great gift. Little Brother will surely use it well."