170: Chapter 170 Five Hundred Thousand Volts, Charge Me!

In the pouring rain.

Three pickup trucks marked "Power Emergency Repair" blared their sirens as they raced down the suburban highway.

Beneath the transformer tower.

Su Ming, who was closing his eyes and enjoying his "electrical energy SPA," still maintained a posture with his arms outstretched.

He was immersed in the baptism of a continuous stream of energy.

Just as he reached the eighth minute of absorption.

He keenly captured the piercing sound of sirens coming through the curtain of rain.

"Tsk, they got here fast."

Su Ming smacked his lips, feeling a bit unsatisfied, and decisively let go!

Then, with a push of his legs, his entire body silently propelled forward, flashing over the high wall a dozen meters away in the blink of an eye, disappearing into the vast night and torrential rain.

At the exact same second Su Ming's hands left the high-voltage busbar.

Jiangcheng Power Bureau Dispatch Center.

Director Wang Gang was panting heavily as he burst through the doors of the dispatch room.

"What's the situation!" he roared.

The young operator pointed at the big screen, his hands trembling.

"Director Wang... you... you should see for yourself..."

Director Wang Gang looked in the direction of his finger.

On the big screen, the frantic curve that had been shooting up like a rocket just a moment ago gave a "pop" and plummeted straight down, settling steadily onto a smooth green line.

The red limit-exceeded alarm also automatically cleared.

The buzzer stopped abruptly.

The interface was so clean it was as if everything that had just happened was an illusion.

"I haven't even arrived yet... and the fault fixed itself?"

Director Wang Gang froze in the doorway, his mouth slightly agape.

"The inspection team just reported... they just arrived at the outer wall of the East Suburb Substation."

The director swallowed hard.

Ten minutes later, news came from the scene.

After checking the power data, in those eight minutes, the cumulative power deviation for the entire line was nearly 9,000 degrees!

The operations and maintenance team, along with the Awakened from the defense squad, held searchlights and searched the substation inside and out three whole times.

Transformers, busbars, insulators, and lightning arresters were all completely intact.

There were no burn marks from electrical arcing, and no external cables for stealing electricity.

They couldn't even find a single human footprint in the mud on the ground!

After all, Su Ming had jumped in from thirty meters away, landing right next to the high-voltage line, and any footprints had long since been washed away by the rain.

This incident, internally dubbed the "East Suburb Phantom Power Disappearance," became the biggest unsolved case for the Jiangcheng power System for years to come.

"Only sucked for eight minutes, really unsatisfying."

In an abandoned unfinished building a few kilometers away.

Su Ming crouched under a concrete slab to avoid the rain and opened his panel.

Eight minutes of stealing electricity had earned him 48,000 mass points!

"This efficiency is just so-so."

Su Ming, still feeling unsatisfied, propped up his chin and began to review.

His body could completely withstand the shock of high-voltage electrical energy.

Then the limit of his stealing... no, his "borrowing" of electricity wasn't the capacity of the power plant, but the response speed of the Power Bureau.

Since the time window was only a few short minutes, his strategy had to change.

This was like an author treating fans to a buffet; if you were only given thirty minutes, you certainly couldn't start with the cold dishes or the staple food area. You had to go straight to the point and run to the lobster, abalone, and seafood section first!

If you're going to look for somewhere, look for a place with "higher returns per unit of time"!

Su Ming immediately took out his phone and opened the Jiangcheng city planning map.

Zoom in, then zoom in again.

His gaze slid rapidly across it, finally locking firmly onto a huge silver-gray steel frame icon on the west side of the city, twenty kilometers away!

The Jiangcheng Power Supply Hub Main Station!

That was the only backbone hub station in all of Jiangcheng!

The power transmission network there wasn't some 110kV little brother level like the one from before.

It was an inter-regional... 500kV ultra-high voltage main line!

That was the real main artery!

Su Ming's breath hitched slightly, his eyes instantly becoming burning hot.

If he could get his hands on that, wouldn't his mass points skyrocket?

"Boom!"

Su Ming stomped and shattered the concrete floor beneath him, tearing through the rain curtain and turning into a dark golden afterimage as he dashed straight toward the west of the city.

Ten minutes later.

Su Ming was already lurking outside the high wall of the hub station.

The scene before his eyes was far more shocking than what he had seen on the map.

Countless ultra-high voltage cables, thicker than his waist, converged from all directions, crisscrossing and extending between towering steel giants that reached into the clouds, then radiating out toward more distant cities.

In the rainy night, blue electric arcs occasionally flashed across the insulator strings, illuminating the wet metal framework with flickering light.

The security level here was in a completely different league than that little suburban station from before.

The top of the wall was strung with a high-voltage electric fence, a row of surveillance cameras was installed at the corners, and the lights of patrol cars were slowly moving in the distance.

He crouched in the shadows, looking up at that silver-gray steel heart; the wall was eight meters high, covered with electrified electronic fencing.

The high-voltage infrared beam network was woven tightly, leaving no gaps.

Over thirty dynamic high-definition cameras with no blind spots were scanning back and forth through the rain.

The security room was brightly lit, and several Awakened guards were on duty.

Su Ming made a rough estimate.

The alarm in the main control room should be at the millisecond level.

If he rushed in directly to touch the wires, the moment he touched the infrared fence, the security guards would rush out to investigate. If they also mobilized the city defense army to surround the place, it would at most leave him two to three minutes.

Two minutes to absorb ultra-high voltage was, by any calculation, enough to secure 70,000 mass points.

"Thermal imaging and infrared, I'm not afraid of those."

Su Ming looked down at his arms.

With his silicon-based Physique combined with [Mass Concealment], he could suppress all external temperature, gravity, and even energy fluctuations back into his body.

In this state, his silicon-based body was no different from a cold stone in the eyes of infrared cameras.

The trickiest part was the normal surveillance cameras.

Forcefully destroy them? He could, but it wasn't necessary.

If he accidentally startled the people in the monitoring room, he wouldn't be able to enjoy this buffet in peace.

He didn't have any plans to dominate the Federation or become a pure villain for now.

He just wanted to quietly "charge up."

Then... what should he do?

Suddenly, a flash of inspiration struck his mind.

Got it!

[Gravity Domain]!

Gravity is not just an attractive force.

In essence, it is the curvature of spacetime itself!

In general relativity, a powerful gravitational field can bend light!

This is the "gravitational lensing effect"!

If he released a trace of a micro-gravity field to cover the camera, causing the light passing through the lens to slightly deflect and fail to focus precisely on the photosensitive element, then the image... wouldn't it become blurry and out of focus?

Simply put, gravity can make the image blurry!

It could turn surveillance cameras into being severely nearsighted!

"I am truly a Genius!"

Su Ming gave himself a mental thumbs up.

Seizing the gap when the guard in the booth looked down at his phone, Su Ming moved.

He slid silently along the shadows of the wall, directly locking onto the primary camera covering this area.

He raised his fingertip slightly, aiming at the wall camera twenty meters away.

[Void Realm Gravity Domain, 10x Precision Compression Activated!]

A cluster of extremely light but high-density gravity field instantly and precisely enveloped the space a few dozen centimeters in front of the camera.

In the monitoring room.

The operator was staring at the wall of screens, bored, when he suddenly noticed slight distortions like water ripples appearing at the edge of one of the screens, and the entire image seemed to be covered by a layer of fog, becoming blurry.

He frowned and muttered: "Damn, this weather, the number three camera has fogged up with condensation again!"

He casually pressed the remote wiper button on the control console.

The small wiper on the screen swiped twice, but the image remained a blurry mass of distorted light and shadow.

"Piece of junk equipment. I'll have logistics come change it tomorrow."

The guard cursed, then lowered his head to play with his phone again.

He didn't think about human interference at all.

Having just wiped out the remnants of the Tongyuan Society, who would be crazy enough to break into an ultra-high voltage substation in the middle of the night?

And in this gap!

Outside the wall, Su Ming's figure rose from the ground!

He silently vaulted over the eight-meter-high wall and the buzzing high-voltage electric fence above it, landing lightly on the lawn inside the hub station without triggering any alarms.

Bypassing rows of humming equipment, Su Ming headed straight for the core area of the hub station... the 500kV busbar bridge!

It was a behemoth supported by several huge insulators, standing more than ten meters above the ground.

Flowing through it was terrifying energy sufficient to light up a medium-sized city in an instant!

Su Ming's leg muscles tightened abruptly, and he shot into the air, landing precisely on the bridge structure.

Time is mass points!

He didn't hesitate for a second, hardened his heart, and welded his hands tightly onto the high-voltage busbar that exuded an aura of death!

"Come on!"

"Let me see how intense 500,000 volts can be!"

(There will be another chapter later. Happy Dragon Boat Festival to all the Yanzu and Yifeis!)