Ninety-Four: The Great Explosion

As the night slowly deepened toward one o’clock, the sentries had just changed posts. After the searchlight swept past, Wei Hua vaulted over the high wall and the electrified fence and slipped easily into the outer grounds of the supply depot. From there he quietly infiltrated the room where the guards slept.

More than a hundred Indonesian soldiers were stationed here in all. The rotation of the patrols and the sentries was staggered, and apart from the men on patrol and guard duty, the rest were asleep in three large rooms. Wei Hua first eliminated nearly a hundred soldiers in those three rooms, using the kind of barehanded combat techniques commonly employed by the American military.

After wiping out all the sleeping Indonesian soldiers inside, Wei Hua then dealt just as easily with the patrol moving through the courtyard, using a dagger to finish them off. By then only two sentries remained at the gate, along with the soldier in the watchtower operating the searchlight. Wei Hua leapt silently onto the tower, slit the man’s throat from behind with his dagger, then jumped straight down from the tower to stand before the two gate sentries. Before they could even react, the blade in his hand had already cut across both their throats.

Kicking the bodies aside, Wei Hua opened the gate and drove a stolen truck into the yard, taking it straight to the warehouse door. Using the key he had found in the duty office, he unlocked the main entrance.

Inside, the warehouse was packed with boxes of all sizes, each marked with different symbols, with identical markings stacked together in the same place. Wei Hua pried open one box of each type, and very quickly found everything he needed.

He took away ten crates of C4 military explosives, and obtained more than enough detonating components and blasting devices. After that, he deliberately loaded up a number of remote detonators and timed detonators into the truck as well. Since he had come all this way, of course he had not made the trip merely for a few sticks of C4. Most of the weapons in the warehouse were American-made. The U.S. government had given Suharto’s regime quite a few good things, but now all of it had fallen into Wei Hua’s hands.

He took several military silenced pistols, and several M16A2 assault rifles. The Americans had only begun fielding that weapon last year, and yet it was already here. Thinking of that, Wei Hua felt almost giddy. He also took two M40 sniper rifles, several crates of military grenades, and as much matching ammunition as he could fit.

Once everything had been loaded, Wei Hua began placing C4 throughout the warehouse, the soldiers’ rest rooms, and every other building he could find. He set the time on the timers, then drove the stolen truck away without looking back.

What he had taken was enough to support a small-scale battle. That had, in fact, been Wei Hua’s original intention: to wage a guerrilla war in the city against the Indonesians, to teach the Indonesian army a lesson and show those Indonesian pigs what blood and fire looked like.

At about four o’clock in the morning on May 11, 1981, a deafening explosion rang out from the outskirts of Jakarta, startling the city’s residents awake. From that day on, Indonesians began to live in terror. From then on, gunfire and explosions became part of everyday life, liable to strike at any moment.

It was not until ten years later, after Suharto was assassinated, his government collapsed, and the new Indonesian administration took power and restored all the lawful rights of Chinese Indonesians, including the rights to vote and to stand for election, that the Indonesian people regained a peaceful life.

But now, their nightmare had only just begun.

Wei Hua hid the stolen weapons at several locations prepared in advance, each of them extremely secluded, so that the arms would not be discovered there. At this moment, he was deeply envious of Immortal Emperor Xuan Yi’s abilities. From the memories of Xuan Yi preserved in the biological computer, Xuan Yi had been a master craftsman of magical artifacts. He possessed a top-grade immortal artifact in the form of a spatial ring, one vast enough to hold the entire city of Jakarta without difficulty, and that immortal artifact had been refined by Xuan Yi himself.

The foundation of Xuan Yi’s cultivation technique was the spiritual energy of heaven and earth. Without spiritual energy, it was impossible to cultivate his method. On Earth, the spiritual energy of heaven and earth had already almost completely vanished, so under normal circumstances Wei Hua would have been unable to cultivate Xuan Yi’s technique at all. But Wei Hua had the biological computer from another world behind him, and because of that, he could cultivate.

The method Wei Hua practiced had been modified by the biological computer. Drawing on Xuan Yi’s cultivation technique, Xuan Yi’s understanding of the human body, and another world’s research and understanding of energy, it had been transformed into a technique based on electricity. Its effect on strengthening the body was beyond question, even better than the body-refining techniques in Xuan Yi’s memories. But as for the other abilities associated with cultivation, Wei Hua had yet to demonstrate any of them. For example, he still had not managed to cultivate true fire.

He even imagined himself refining a spatial ring one day. He needed such a thing very badly, and for him it would be enormously useful.

Early the next morning, Wei Hua left his residence as usual, but unlike his normal habit, he did not wander about aimlessly. He knew the streets of Jakarta would certainly be under heavy guard today, with police and soldiers everywhere. Probably every law enforcement officer in Indonesia was out searching the city for the people responsible for the explosion. A foreigner without proper entry papers like himself, strolling openly through the streets, would simply be asking for trouble. So he went instead to one of the hidden weapon caches. He had not had time to inventory it the night before, and this was a perfect opportunity to do so.

More than a hundred soldiers had died, and an arms warehouse had been blown up. This was no longer something the Indonesian military could cover up. Besides, the blast had been so enormous that even a deaf man would probably have heard it, so even if the military had wanted to conceal it, it would have been impossible.

After the explosion, foreign reporters rushed overnight to the scene. They learned the extent of the damage in complete detail. The first people to arrive at the blast site were from a nearby fire station, and they had no experience dealing with incidents like this, so those foreign reporters easily obtained everything they wanted to know, and they learned it in meticulous detail.

Two hours after the explosion, the upper ranks of the Indonesian military received the news. Large numbers of military police arrived at the scene, followed by the Indonesian army general in charge of Jakarta’s defenses, Bondi Avalondi, and the quartermaster general, Jabu Surihe.

Come on, everyone! Throw everything you’ve got at me!