Chapter 119: Remote Charging Released, Charging Cables Become a Thing of the Past

The smug curve on Cook's lips hadn't even fully faded.

The blinding California sun shone through the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the expensive mahogany desk.

The encrypted tablet at the corner of the desk began to vibrate wildly without warning, buzzing loudly.

A long string of glaring red text popped up as a notification on the screen.

Xinghai Technology was live-streaming across multiple global platforms, and the signal had already cut in.

"Can't these Chinese people even afford to rent a venue for a press conference?" Cook scoffed coldly.

He picked up his bone china cup, just refilled with hot coffee, and unhurriedly clicked on the live stream link.

There were no spotlights from a ten-thousand-seat stadium.

Nor were there any foreign media personnel wearing gold-rimmed glasses.

On screen, it was just an ordinary family living room set.

A fabric sofa, a glass coffee table, and a double-door refrigerator placed in the corner.

Warm yellow overhead lights shone down.

It exuded a sleepy, everyday atmosphere.

Off-camera, in the control room of the Xinghai Technology building in Donghai City.

Chu Xuan was squatting in front of the monitors.

Today, he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a purple background and a leopard print, the collar pulled wide open.

He clutched a crumpled-up tissue in his hand, desperately wiping the greasy sweat from his forehead.

"Weiliang, is this streaming bandwidth enough?" Chu Xuan swallowed dryly, his throat tight.

"Over eighty million people have flooded in from the external network; don't let the whole screen freeze into pixels later."

Xia Weiliang was barefoot.

She was curled up in a swivel chair nearby, her toes digging hard into the edge of the leather seat cushion.

Her dirty white lab coat had a smudge of spicy chili oil on it.

"Shut your crow's mouth." She was biting on a grape-flavored lollipop, the plastic stick bobbing up and down.

"The CDN nodes taken over by Pandora's underlying protocol could even withstand the traffic of The Pentagon."

She kicked Chu Xuan's thigh with her toe.

"Keep your eyes on the beamforming power curve; if it deviates by even one milliwatt, I'll shove you into the microwave and roast you."

There was movement on the live stream.

Lu Jingming was wearing that washed-out black T-shirt, and a pair of old jeans on his lower body.

He stepped into the frame, shuffling in a pair of ten-yuan plastic slippers.

He didn't take a microphone.

He just slumped onto the fabric sofa and crossed his legs.

He held a Xinghai Mobile in his hand, his thumb sliding frantically across the screen.

The intense sound effects of a gunfight in the game were transmitted through the live stream microphone.

"What the hell is this?" Cook stared at the screen, his brows knitted into a tight knot.

The coffee cup hovered by his lips, forgotten.

"Streaming a game? Have the Chinese lost their minds?"

The comments on the external network were also filled with question marks.

Countless digital influencers sat in front of their screens, scratching their heads, unable to understand this move.

Suddenly, a glaring red low-battery warning box popped up on the phone screen.

Battery remaining: 1%. The game screen was instantly forced to suspend.

Lu Jingming stared at the red box and clicked his tongue in annoyance.

He tossed the phone onto the glass coffee table. With a "clatter."

The phone slid half a foot across the smooth glass surface and stopped at the edge of the coffee table.

Lu Jingming didn't pay it any mind.

He stood up, hands on his knees, and strolled leisurely toward the refrigerator opposite.

The very second he turned around, the live stream camera zoomed in sharply, locking tightly onto the phone on the coffee table.

A massive close-up was shoved onto the retinas of tens of millions of viewers.

The coffee table was perfectly clean.

No data cables, no charging docks.

And certainly none of those ugly, overheating magnetic charging pads that Apple had just released.

The back of the phone lay bare against the cold glass.

One second. Two seconds. "Buzz—"

The phone screen lit up without warning.

The pathetic little red battery bar in the top right corner was instantly filled with a blinding green.

A clear lightning bolt icon lit up in the center.

There was no physical contact whatsoever.

This dying device had connected to power out of thin air.

A YouTube digital influencer in Silicon Valley with ten million followers was watching the live stream with a cup of water in his hand.

Seeing this scene.

His eyes bulged, and red bloodshot veins instantly crawled across the whites of his eyes.

"Fuck! Hidden coils? There's definitely a coil buried under the glass!"

The influencer roared into the microphone, his spit spraying onto the pop filter.

"This is just another magic trick!"

As if hearing the skepticism from the external network, in the live stream, Lu Jingming had already opened the refrigerator door.

He took out a can of iced cola that was emitting cold air.

He hooked his index finger into the tab.

With a "crack," white mist sprayed out.

He tilted his head back and took a large gulp, his Adam's Apple bobbing violently twice.

Lu Jingming turned around.

Holding the cola can in one hand, he fished out that green plastic lighter from his jeans pocket with the other.

He pressed his thumb onto the flint wheel.

"Click."

A ghostly blue flame shot up, reflecting off the side of his stark white canine teeth.

"Stop looking for coils in the comments." Lu Jingming casually extinguished the lighter.

He pointed at the phone on the coffee table.

The battery percentage, as if hacked, jumped directly to 3% in front of the camera.

Then, Lu Jingming's finger turned toward the corner diagonal to the room.

There sat a black cylindrical object.

It was half a meter tall, with a faint blue light flashing at the top, as quiet as an oversized router.

"Magnetic Resonance Beamforming Spatial Power Feeding System." Lu Jingming spat out a long string of technical jargon that the foreigners couldn't understand.

He paced back to the sofa and sat down.

"It doesn't matter if you don't understand. I'll translate it into stupid talk that the folks in California can understand."

Lu Jingming sneered.

"That black pillar is the charging head."

He pressed his index and middle fingers together and gestured a distance.

"From here to the corner, the straight-line distance is five meters."

Lu Jingming stared into the camera, his eyes filled with a ferocity that seemed to crush the iron laws of physics.

"Within this radius. As long as your device has a Xinghai receiving chip."

He tapped his knuckles on the coffee table, making a "knock-knock" sound.

"Whether you're lying down, running, or hiding under your covers."

"Your battery will stay full."

The live stream comments section went silent for a full ten seconds.

It was as if everyone's keyboards had been unplugged simultaneously.

No one dared to type.

This was beyond the scope of current technological understanding.

The bone china coffee cup in Cook's hand jerked violently.

The scalding coffee splashed onto the back of his hand, instantly turning his skin red.

He didn't even cry out in pain.

His eyes were glued to the battery percentage on the screen, which had jumped to 5%.

"Impossible... five meters? Microwave radiation would turn the room into a microwave oven!"

Cook gasped heavily, his chest heaving violently.

He looked like a gambler clutching at his last straw.

"Temperature! Get a temperature gun to measure the motherboard temperature! This thing must be about to explode!"

In the Xinghai control room.

Chu Xuan saw the influx of skeptical data in the backend and wiped the sweat from his face.

"Boss Lu, the foreigners are trying to stir up trouble, saying this is a lethal radiation oven."

Lu Jingming slammed the can of iced cola in his hand next to the phone.

Condensation from the bottle dripped onto the glass tabletop.

He casually picked up an industrial-grade infrared temperature gun.

Without any wasted words, he pulled the trigger.

The red laser dot hit the center of the phone screen.

"Beep."

A large electronic reading popped up.

Twenty-eight degrees.

Under the injection of kilowatt-level spatial microwaves, the phone was actually even cooler than room temperature.

Xia Weiliang rolled her eyes in the control room.

She stood barefoot on her chair and crunched down hard on the lollipop in her mouth.

"Idiots. Spatial phase-locked beamforming; the electromagnetic waves are precisely locked onto the micron-level antenna of the receiving end."

She cursed unintelligibly.

"Even the air loss has been suppressed to fifteen percent; where would the heat come from to roast your pig head?"

Once this twenty-eight-degree figure appeared.

In countless labs with lights on in Silicon Valley, there came a chorus of crisp sounds of glass beakers shattering.

The Wailing Wall of physics had been kicked to pieces by Lu Jingming.

That YouTube digital influencer with ten million followers slumped in his gaming chair.

His throat felt painfully tight, and he couldn't even swallow his saliva.

On the table sat a newly purchased Apple magnetic charger.

The scorching heat from its base was being transmitted through the wooden table, making his wrist numb.

He looked at the white data cable he was clutching in his hand.

One end connected to the socket, and the other connected to that pathetic charging port.

Like a dog leash.

The influencer's fingers began to tremble uncontrollably.

His fingernails turned a pale, bluish-white.

"Clang."

His hand went limp, and the data cable fell directly into the half-cup of coffee in front of him, splashing a few drops of brown liquid.

He grabbed his collar violently, pulling it so hard that the veins on his neck bulged.

His eyes were bloodshot, staring fixedly at the black cylindrical object in the live stream.

His voice cracked instantly, like a broken guitar with snapped strings.

"Pull the plugs! Go quickly and pull your plugs! The era of data cables has been ended by this Chinese man!"