Puzzle Madness

Chapter 20 The Package—
[Customer] With his broken nails and turned-up fingers, he supported his jaw and used his remaining strength to push against the base of his palm to reset his jaw:

Click!

Get get get get.
As soon as her jaw was reattached, the [client]'s teeth began to clatter against the elevator wall: from her angle, she could just see the straight corridor and the bright yellow figure disappearing into the door at the end of the corridor.

boom!
The sound of the door closing seemed to come from far away, yet it seemed to be right next to my ear.

【Self-check.】

[Client] thought about the training he had received in the company and began to carefully feel the pain in every part of his body——
It would be nice if there was a visual panel for the damage to the body:

She felt her broken ribs, sharp spikes piercing her internal organs. Perhaps it had penetrated her lungs, perhaps it had pierced her stomach; the muscle spasms caused by John Dou's earlier release of ecstasy had turned her minor injuries into serious ones. But the exact severity, [the client] herself did not know.

Perhaps soon, she will suffocate in the sleep of hemorrhagic shock--
But it didn't hit the heart, giving [the client] some final time. She felt that this might be fate: a little mercy from God or some higher being, giving her one last chance to complete the task.

"I will dedicate my best fortune to the people in the high-rise buildings."

[The client] mumbled a prayer, propped himself up on his elbows, and crawled on the elevator floor, which was made sticky with blood; the black and red body fluids were scratched and smeared into stains: the old elevator shook and creaked.

".High-rise office district. Long live the high-rise office district."

She recited silently. Her goal was right beside her, and she would reach it after a little crawl:

The former field colleague who had previously controlled his own life and death was now unable to move again, emitting a rusty and fishy smell. Faced with a dead person, the [client] was startled to find that the anger, hostility, and panic of being chased that had been there just a moment before had quietly vanished.

The real fear comes from something else.

She trembled and fumbled in the inner pocket of the coat of the headless corpse beside her.
【found it】

It was a thick, round tube, wrapped in a plastic bag: needle-free epinephrine, standard issue for Asia-Europe postal field agents, used to prolong the dying. [The client] had never been a field agent, but she was a qualified support; support agents should know everything about field agents.

[Client] struggled to tear open her coat and bit open the envelope of the adrenaline injection with her teeth. Amidst a low roar, she used her right hand, which felt like it had been electrocuted, to slide the injection along the bra strap, aiming it at and injecting it into the area roughly where her heart should be.

Muscle contractions brought another wave of intense pain, followed by spasms and new waves of pain—until the sound of my heart pounding and throbbing filled my skull, overwhelming any discomfort from my physical body.

[The client] knew that he had ten more minutes until he took his last breath in this world.

The [client] once again grasped the twisted door frame and peered out of the elevator, which was filled with a dead atmosphere.

There were no dark red footprints on the floor of the corridor, which gradually faded from thick to thin - such marks should have been left on the ground when you walked out of an elevator covered in blood.

This wasn't the [client's] professional experience; it was simply common sense. But the ground was completely empty, devoid of anything except for dust, debris, and blood seeping from the elevator shaft.
Why didn't the bright yellow monster just now leave any shoe prints?

The corridors and hallways showed few signs of life. The apartments were rarely occupied; there were even some crossed wooden boards blocking the doors.

There was no time for speculation, not with a monster like that—there were more important things to do:

Perhaps it was the adrenaline, or perhaps it was the excitement and fear brought on by the memory of just moments before; [the client]'s body trembled as if it had been electrocuted:
"Yes. Yes - right here, right here."

[The client] had come to Mong Cai looking for the right place – and now she realized there was no better place; like the treasure in Beowulf guarded by the dragon.

The package is absolutely safe here: the protector of the package is far beyond the imagination of ordinary people.

"Ahhh"

She dug her fingers into her open mouth, over her broken and fallen front teeth, and rubbed them vigorously, rotating them until the two dentures came out of her gums.

[The client] peeled off the resin shells of her dentures, stuffed them back into her mouth, and swallowed them along with the blood gushing out of her gums. The stuffy feeling almost choked her to death.

Now, she was left with two long, narrow tubes—the [client] had to fit them together, screwing them together along the spiral line.

According to Asia-Europe Post: This is the "special package" she carries with her: at least the container containing the special package.

[The customer] pulled out the BB phone plugged into her belt, flipped it open along the center line, opened the outer shell and the broken screen, pulled out the circuit board and battery, and the exposed silicone conductive buttons; because her fingers were shaking and twitching, she almost broke the parts.

Then he pulled out the data cable with a needle-shaped connector and the small microphone in the collar from the seam of the blood-soaked hoodie.

Putting these parts together, it becomes a portable terminal without a visual panel but with voice and single-button input: the shell of the BB machine is just a disguise, and this seemingly simple terminal is an experimental product from other companies.

[Customer] inserted the data cable into the round tube and pressed the lonely silicone conductive button——
Tick, tick, tick. Tick, tick, tick.
She used an octopus code, an extension of Morse code, to input numbers one by one into the terminal until she had completed the long and complicated series of numbers and stored them in the tube.

This string of 189 digits was what she brought out from the Asia-Europe Postal Service.
Perhaps it was the key to some experimental weapon, or perhaps it was just a minor sexual quirk of the Asia-Europe Post's top executives; she didn't know; someone else was needed to decipher it.

Division of labor and collaboration are the most important cornerstones of success. [The client] does not have many areas of expertise; at least not enough to complete the entire task alone.

After entering the sequence, [the client] moved the terminal with trembling arms:

She recalled her current neighborhood, building number, and floor number; she continued to input this information into the terminal using the conductive silicone keys—this time using radio signals transmitted on a specific frequency band. Finally, the [customer] pressed the keys in a rhythmic pattern, and the varying intervals of frequency formed a secret code:
[Set this location as a safe house].

(End of this chapter)