The police and paramedics arrived together and the town folk told the police about the situation in various voices.

  A paramedic looked at Xia Lei squatting next to Josef in astonishment. He was holding the tweezers in Josef’s back steady. “What are you doing?”


  “The bullet hit his lung and he’s in critical condition. I removed the bullet for him, then clamped his blood vessel with tweezers to stop the bleeding,” explained Xia Lei.

  “Wha-?” The paramedic was at a loss for words.

  “Who told you to do this?” asked a nurse reproachfully, “Don’t you know that this is very dangerous?”


  Xia Lei said nothing. Josef’s condition was stable and that was enough. He did not expect these paramedics to thank him for his great help.

  The paramedics put an oxygen mask on Josef. The nurse who had admonished Xia Lei cautiously took over the holding of the tweezers from him and held it steady like he had been doing. The paramedics were aware that though Xia Lei’s methods had been rough, they have saved Josef’s life.

  Xia Lei walked towards Annina after handing Josef off to the paramedics. Annina was being questioned by the police so he did not go close but stood to one side to listen.

  You said you killed five gang members?” The police officer writing notes couldn’t believe it and his eyes were full of surprise.

  “Yes. I used my father’s hunting gun to shoot them. Their bodies are in the woods,” said Annina.

  “You did this yourself?” asked the policeman.

  Annina glanced at Xia Lei.

  Xia Lei grew nervous - he had no idea what Annina would say.

  Annina was silent for a bit before answering. “Yes, I did it on my own. They were members of a gang and they’d attacked me before in a bar. They came chasing all the way here today and shot my friend Josef. They wanted to kill me too. I was defending myself.”


  The police asked more questions and Annina answered. Xia Lei let out a quiet breath of relief. He had not fired the gun himself but guided Annina in the killing of those gang members because he did not want to stir up trouble for himself. Annina seemed to have picked up on this and shouldered the responsibility though she knew it was impossible for her to have done this alone.

  Josef was quickly taken away in the ambulance and the police found the bodies of the five gang members in the woods. The bodies were packed in body bags and carted off on a temporarily commandeered pick-up truck.

  “Miss Annina, you’ll have to come with us to the police station to help with the investigation,” said a police officer, “Don’t worry, it’s just procedure. You killed them in self-defence so there will not be any charges against you.”


  “Can I have a few minutes?” asked Annina, “I want to speak with my friend.”


  The policeman nodded, “Go ahead, but be quick.”


  Annina walked to Xia Lei, pulled him to a corner and made sure no one was listening before she spoke. “Lukas, go to my house and wait for me to come back. I won’t be long.”


  “Sure, I’ll go to your house after you leave,” said Xia Lei.

  “You can sleep in the room upstairs and use the bathroom there. Um, just do what you’d like, no worries,” said Annina.

  Xia Lei nodded. However, he was not thinking of sleeping or showering - he was thinking of how he would enter Josef’s shed and obtain the secrets of the intelligent lathe after the police and residents leave.

  Annina suddenly hugged Xia Lei and nibbled on his ear. “Wait for me to come back.”


  Her softness, her fragrance and sexiness were right in his arms and aroused certain inclinations in Xia Lei. His body stiffened. He did not know how to respond to her words.

  Annina kissed him on his cheek and smiled, then turned and walked back to the waiting policemen.

  Xia Lei watched Annina get into the police car. The police drove off and he smiled wryly. ‘Western women are really open. Should I tell her I have a wife? Will she get mad if I tell her?’


  It was difficult to guess at the way a woman’s mind worked.

  The townsfolk were also leaving.

  “Lukas, want to have a drink at my place?” said the last to leave, Luana, to Xia Lei.

  “Thank you, Aunt Luana but it’s late. Another day perhaps,” said Xia Lei politely.

  “All right. Good night, Mr Lukas.” Luana bid him good night and left.

  Xia Lei walked to the little path he’d come by and along it for a bit before he walked off of it. He rounded back in the woods and went towards Josef’s shed.

  There was no one in Josef’s house at this time and it was the best time to act.

  Xia Lei scouted the area around Josef’s house by the woods with his X-ray ability to make sure that there was no one around before he moved quickly across the grass and straight to the shed.

  The shed had a big metal door with a large lock. The lock was a stumbling block in his plans. If he opened it, Josef would know that someone had broken into his shed. If he didn’t, it would be impossible to enter. The shed had a metal roof and was sealed as tight as a drum and had no ventilation ducts either. There was no way in other than the metal door.

  ‘That’s right, I didn’t see any key on Josef when I was fixing him up. It isn’t likely that he’d have the key on him for his birthday party so they must be in his house. I should look for his key and open the door with it, then put it back where I found it. He won’t know.’ Xia Lei was quickly struck by an idea.

  Xia Lei entered Josef’s house through the back door and used his X-ray vision. A few minutes later, he found the keys he needed in a drawer in Josef’s study. It was a very easy thing for him to find hidden items with his X-ray vision.

  He walked into the shed after opening the metal door with the key. It was ink-dark in the shed but he did not need lights. Light would be seen from far off and would be easily discovered; he wouldn’t make such a basic mistake.

  Xia Lei walked to the machine covered by the fluorescent tarpaulin and removed the tarpaulin. What met his eyes was indeed a large lathe and it looked incomplete but nearly finished.

  He circled the lathe twice and used his X-ray vision to examine the insides. He could not help but to admire the machine. ‘Josef is not a very nice human being but a genius at electrical engineering. A lathe like this is definitely the most advanced in Germany and maybe even the world. If I can bring the blueprints and design plans back to China, my Thunder Horse Manufacturing will have the most advanced lathe in the world!’


  It looked like taking the risk to save Josef was the right move. If Josef died this lathe would have no one to complete its research and production.

  After doing an overall X-ray of the incomplete intelligent lathe, Xia Lei examined its internal structure from different angles with his ability. Every part, every circuit board and even the model number and location of the components such as capacitors, resistors and so on were ‘photographed’ and saved by his left eye. This was a large amount of information and overuse of his X-ray ability had expended a lot of his energy. He fainted half an hour later when he was done examining the machine.

  Hallucinations which he had not experienced in a long time re-surfaced.

  Xia Lei saw Annina. She’d suddenly appeared in the shed in a sexy bikini. She walked towards him and she had some sort of perfume on her which enveloped her in its fragrance. She went to his side and knelt, then reached with her hand to stroke his cheek, then his chest, and his abdomen……

  Xia Lei knew very well that is was a hallucination but it felt so real. He could not help staring at her thighs which were slightly apart, and at the mature yet mysterious shape moulded by the bikini. A sort of burning started in his body.

  Hallucinations from overuse from his X-ray vision were similar to dreams. There were daydreams and sleeping dreams and today, while he was with Annina, they had hugged, embraced and even kissed so having a hallucination like this right now was quite normal, really.

  “Lukas, you’re so strong.” Annina pressed herself against him as she spoke.

  Xia Lei closed his eyes. He was powerless against the realism of this hallucination.

  Lucky for him, the hallucinations disappeared after a few minutes and he picked himself off the ground after regaining some of his strength. Xia Lei looked around the shed and saw some unprocessed parts, a computer and some circuit board-like things. His gaze then landed on a safe in the wall.

  Xia Lei walked to it. The safe was German-made and it was not a top of the range brand but it was not poor quality either. The safe needed a numerical code and a dial code to open it. A safe like this would be very difficult for a cat burglar like Qin Xiang to open but it was nothing to Xia Lei.

  After a short rest, Xia Lei used his own method to open the safe.

  There was a thick stack of drawings in the safe and he took them out for a closer look. The drawings were all Josef’s personally crafted design plans for the intelligent lathe.

  Xia Lei flipped through them one by one; this took him half an hour. After he was done, he took out his phone and took pictures of all the drawings.

  He had already memorised everything when he’d looked at the drawings and he only took pictures of them to send to Long Bing. She had a part in the mission too and she needed something to hand to her superiors. The design plans in Josef’s safe were missing the last part but what was there was already extremely important to the relevant parties. It was entirely enough for Long Bing to submit these pictures.

  When he was done taking pictures, he put the drawings back into their original positions in the safe and closed it. A few minutes later, he covered the incomplete lathe with the fluorescent tarpaulin and exited the shed.

  Before Xia Lei put the key back, he used a piece of soap to get an imprint of the key and took the soap with him. He would need to enter Josef’s shed again in the future so it was quite necessary to get a copy of the key.

  On the path back to Annina’s house, Xia Lei was relaxed and in a very good mood indeed.