Mastering the Sword Manual, sweeping across the globe

But the accumulated emotions inexplicably vanished without a trace.

It's like flipping through an old photo album from many years ago. The people in the photos are clearly yourself, and the hardships you experienced are real, but your heart is no longer stirred. All that's left is a faint "Oh, that's how it happened."

A long-lost sense of lightness returned to his heart.

Old Zhao clicked his tongue, looking somewhat bewildered yet strangely relieved. In the end, he simply shook his head and muttered, "This is weird..."

However, those feelings weren't exactly pleasant, so once they're gone, they're gone...

That should be right, right?

65. Time to stock up.

10:40 AM.

Zhang Qiliang logged back in, and the system quickly sent him lunch reservations from nearby locations.

The sun became scorching, casting a warm glow on the helmet and work clothes.

In the pickup area of ​​a chain fast food restaurant where the food preparation speed was acceptable, Zhang Qiliang ran into a delivery rider he often saw. This guy was a bit outgoing, and Zhang Qiliang learned from their last chat that his name was A-Feng.

The two leaned against the wall next to the counter while waiting for their number to be called. Next to them were other customers from other platforms, all staring at the numbers flashing on their order pickup screens.

"How are the orders today?" Zhang Qiliang asked casually, his gaze sweeping over the extra-large insulated box on the footrest of Afeng's electric scooter.

"Don't even mention it," Ah Feng wiped the sweat from his forehead, his face looking rather gloomy. "This morning was a complete waste of time. I got five orders in a row, all from office buildings in this business district, thinking things would go smoothly for a while. But as soon as I finished picking up the last meal and turned out of the alley near Lao Sichuan, some scoundrel spilled some oil on the ground. I didn't see it, and the car slid and overturned."

"The food in the box was mostly spilled, with soup and liquids," Ah Feng sighed, his tone filled with pure heartache and frustration, not much anger. "Five orders, four of them I have to lose money on. The last customer didn't say anything, but I still feel really bad. This whole morning, not only did I not make any money, I'm even losing money. This damn road..."

Zhang Qiliang listened, and when his number was called, he took the packed lunch bag. As he passed by Afeng, he reached out and patted his sweaty shoulder and back twice: "Be careful next time, watch where you're going."

Ah Feng felt a heavy pat on the shoulder, which was then released. The irritability and frustration that had accumulated due to the unfortunate accident inexplicably dissipated a little.

He shook his head, watched Zhang Qiliang's departing figure, and muttered, "...I understand."

The resentment I felt towards my carelessness, the road conditions, and my luck today seemed to dissipate with those two slaps, leaving only the calculations for the upcoming orders—I had to catch up this afternoon.

……

Around 2 p.m., in front of a narrow freight elevator in a high-end office building, five or six delivery riders from different platforms were crowded together, each carrying a large or small food bag and staring at the slowly changing floor numbers.

The air was stuffy and filled with the smells of various foods.

The elevator was still lingering on the tenth or twentieth floor.

Next to Zhang Qiliang was a very young rider, who looked to be just over twenty years old, with dark skin, standing silently.

“This broken elevator…” Zhang Qiliang turned his head and looked at the young rider beside him: “Brother, taking so many orders is a bit risky.”

"What can we do?" The young man smiled bitterly, his eyes fixed on the blurry figure reflected in the elevator door. "If we don't take more rides, we won't make any money."

"How much did you earn today?"

"Only 50..." The young man gave another bitter smile: "I left at six in the morning... Damn it, today was so unlucky. The orders were fragmented, the places were far away and the pay was low, and the timing was also very tight."

"That's pretty unlucky..."

"Who says otherwise? Sigh! I wanted to quit last month, but other jobs... either require a degree or technical skills, which I don't have." The young man spoke calmly, without much emotional fluctuation, simply stating the facts, but a heavy sense of powerlessness, as if bound by invisible ropes, permeated the air.

The elevator arrived with a "ding," the doors opened, and everyone rushed in, making the already cramped space feel even more crowded.

Standing slightly behind the young man, Zhang Qiliang, amidst the slight weightlessness of the escalator's ascent, raised his hand and gently pressed on the young man's shoulder, offering a casual gesture of support: "You're still young, you have a long road ahead of you, keep going."

The young man's body stiffened slightly, and then he felt a strange warmth on his shoulder, like a faint warm current seeping into his neck and shoulder.

The heavy, suffocating feeling in my mind, caused by repetitive fatigue and uncertainty about the future, vanished instantly.

The young man looked at his free right hand in surprise.

When the door opened again, the steps I took outside were much more steady than when I entered.

……

As evening falls and the city lights come on, food delivery orders experience another small peak.

Zhang Qiliang waited outside a popular bubble tea shop for a large order from his company.

Another older rider next to me was sighing and looking at his phone.

"They deducted money?" Zhang Qiliang asked.

“Exactly,” the rider turned his phone screen around, showing a notification from the platform. “For that hospital delivery, the family specified that it had to be delivered to the third-floor ward door. I searched for ages before finding the elevator, and even after going up and coming down, I was still three minutes late. The system flagged it as timed out and deducted money. I appealed to customer service, and they said it was because they ‘didn’t fully consider complex environmental factors,’ which was completely useless.”

The rider angrily put away his phone. "They make all the rules. We work ourselves to the bone, and if we're not careful, half a day's work is for nothing."

The milk tea shop employee called out a number and handed out two large bags of beautifully packaged drinks.

Zhang Qiliang took the bag; it was very heavy.

As I passed the old rider, I patted his arm, which was taut with anger, with my free hand. The texture was rough; it was the result of wind and sun.

"That's the rule, don't get angry, just plan your time better next time."

The old rider was taken aback by the pat, and the anger that had been burning in his chest due to the unfair judgment strangely cooled down a lot.

He opened his mouth, wanting to utter another curse, but found that the intense anger he had felt earlier had subsided, leaving only a faint sense of helplessness.

"...Okay." He muttered, got on his bike, and was already thinking about how to speed up the next fare.

……

As night deepens, the city lights shine brightly.

Zhang Qiliang finished delivering his last order, and it was already past nine o'clock at night.

At the entrance of an alley behind a snack street, he saw a female rider squatting next to her electric scooter, looking worried about her flat rear tire.

The lights were dim, and the female rider's face was full of fatigue and anxiety.

Zhang Qiliang stopped the car.

"The tire burst?"

The female rider looked up. "Yeah, I think I got a nail in my pants. This place... it's in the middle of nowhere, and I don't know how long it will take for roadside assistance to arrive. I still have two deliveries to make..."

Her voice was choked with sobs, a sound of utter despair from a long day's work gone awry at the last minute.

Zhang Qiliang looked at the deflated tire, then at the lunchbox that hadn't been taken out of the insulated box in her car.

"There seems to be a repair shop nearby, it might still be open. Let's push it over and take a look."

After saying that, Zhang Qiliang reached out and grabbed the handlebars of the electric scooter, and with his other hand gently supported her slightly trembling shoulder: "Don't worry, we can always solve this."

The moment she was helped up, the female knight felt a surge of panic and helplessness, like a tide hitting a dam. Although the problem was still there, the panic that had almost overwhelmed her subsided considerably.

She took a deep breath, wiped her eyes hastily, and steadied her voice: "...Thank you, sir."

The two pushed the car together to a small repair shop with dim lighting at the other end of the alley.

No problem, it will be fixed soon.

The female rider thanked her profusely and left, rushing to deliver the two takeout orders that might already be overdue.

……

When Zhang Qiliang returned to the station, it was already past eleven o'clock.

The station was empty, with the charging station indicator lights glowing dimly, and the air still carrying the lingering smells of sweat, smoke, and takeout packaging from the day.

He parked the car, sat down on the old sofa where Lao Zhao usually sat, leaned back into the slightly sunken foam, and closed his eyes.

In the darkness, the fragmented touches, brief conversations, fleeting faces and voices of the day, along with the heavy burdens that he had quietly removed from them, began to silently emerge and flow.

Ah Feng's frustration at spilling five meals, the young rider's uncertainty about the future, the veteran rider's resentment at having his pay docked, and the female rider's panic when she gets a flat tire.

There are even more, more subtle fragments, some of which even the rider himself may not be clearly aware of:

While waiting side by side at a traffic light, the middle-aged rider next to me stared at the winding route on his phone map, and let out a barely audible sigh from deep within his chest—it was another order from the system that took a long and congested route, with just enough time allotted.

At the entrance of a popular mala tang (spicy hot pot) restaurant where there's always a queue, a tanned delivery rider repeatedly refreshes the order pickup code, muttering unconsciously, "Hurry up, hurry up," his fingertips tapping anxiously on the handlebars, fine beads of sweat beading on his forehead—the invisible whip that might come with fines and bad reviews for being late.

In the dimly lit stairwell of an old residential building at dusk, as we passed each other, I overheard another delivery rider pleadingly on the other end of the phone, his voice low and almost begging: "Baby, be good, Daddy will be home after delivering the last few orders, you go to sleep..."

The weariness and guilt in that voice were so intense they were almost palpable.

During the hottest part of the afternoon, while taking a short break under the shade of a tree, an old rider rolled up his trouser leg, revealing a plaster on his knee, and casually remarked, "Old arthritis, an occupational hazard in this line of work." Then he grinned and said, "But today the sun is strong, and there are many orders"—his smile revealed a sense of forbearance and normalcy.

The cold, sticky feeling of rainwater seeping into the collar, the suffocating heat inside the helmet under the blazing sun, the stinging pain of fingers numb from the cold wind, almost unable to grip the handlebars, and the heart-stopping terror with every sudden stop and every near-collision with vehicles or pedestrians...

Anxiety, helplessness, forbearance, fear, and numbness—the pain flows like a tangled stream, converging from every corner of the city and from those tireless figures, into our senses.

Zhang Qiliang chewed quietly.

They are not violent; most of the time they are silent, suppressed or accustomed to by their owners.

They are endless, like the invisible dust beneath the city's roads, constantly being crushed and stirred up by countless wheels, only to silently settle again.

There are too few of them.

Compared to the nearly 1500 million peers, this is far too few.

Compared to the numerous vampires who leech off this industry, they are far too few.

Not in a hurry.

Do not worry.

Mastering the sword manual, I'm making progress every day.

The "Extending Oneself to the Holy Scripture" will soon reveal several more wonderful methods that will come in handy.

The only minor issue is that the mental effort I've put into my colleagues these past two days hasn't been very consuming; it's less than the energy a normal adult would need in a year.

But after a few days, the effortless method of injecting thoughts and absorbing negative energy with a wave of the hand would be incredibly taxing on an entire city.

Hmm, I should go and get some stock.

Thinking about it, Zhang Qiliang opened his phone, opened the photo album, and the most recent pictures were information he had casually saved a few days ago after his phone "recovered" from its malfunction.

"In X City, X Province, there are several mentally disabled men in a brick factory who have been controlled by the foreman for many years. They are forced to carry and pack bricks, working 12 hours a day without rest all year round. They have been beaten and verbally abused by the foreman, who also forces them to take painkillers when they are sick."

This kind of mess must involve a lot of people, right?

As usual, it's a workday today, so I'm working overtime!

66. Add some food.

Note: This chapter and the following one or two chapters are a combined version of multiple events, not all the facts, and contain some artistic embellishments. The main purpose is to remove some overly cruel content to avoid upsetting the reader.

A shelter in Lingjiang City, Xiwang County, a certain province.

The noise from the next room came through the thin walls; it was the creaking of a bed frame being shaken violently, mixed with indistinct sobs.

Liu Junpeng paused the TV series playing on his phone stand, which was being played at a very low volume, sighed, and stood up from the old chair in the duty room.

He took out a bunch of keys strung together with iron rings from his pocket, walked to the other side of the corridor, found the corresponding slightly rusty key, inserted it into the lock, and turned it open.

Behind the door was a small room, resembling an old-fashioned dormitory, about twenty square meters.

The walls were already yellowed, with some of the paint peeling off to reveal the inner layer. The floor was a badly worn cement floor with some dark stains in the corners.

Three rusty double-decker iron bunk beds were placed against the wall, leaving a narrow aisle in the middle.

The room was stuffy and hot, with only a dusty ceiling fan slowly turning overhead, emitting a regular hum, and the air it stirred still carrying the lingering smell of disinfectant.

Currently, six men with intellectual disabilities live here.

They were all wearing only vests or were shirtless, with the same dark blue shorts that were provided to them, revealing their lean limbs.

Under the lights, the scars on the exposed skin resembled a poorly drawn map, recording a journey unknown to outsiders.

Almost everyone had injuries.

On the bed by the window, a thin young man lay on his side, with several dark purple bruises crisscrossing his back. The edges of the bruises had turned yellow, and the shapes were so regular that they looked like they had been left by being repeatedly whipped with some kind of flat, strip-shaped object.

Below his shoulder blade, there was a fist-sized dark red mark, with an uneven scab formed after the skin was broken.

Another middle-aged man huddled in the corner had dark, dotted or small circular scars all over his arms and calves. Some of them were sunken and much darker than the surrounding skin, like permanent marks left after being burned by something at high temperature.

The swelling at his ankle joint had not completely subsided; the skin was taut and shiny, with an abnormal bluish-purple color.

Chen Dayong was a bald, stocky man with a prominent long scar on his face. On the outside of his thick arms, there were several obvious scabs left from broken skin, but what was more striking was a wide purplish-black bruise on his rib area.

Zhou Xiaohui, who slept on the upper bunk by the door, mostly covered himself with a tattered thin blanket, but when he reached out and picked at the sheets, a clear ring of lighter skin was visible on his wrist, as if he had been tightly bound by something for a long time. This contrasted with the dark skin around him. He also had similar marks on his ankles, but they were from a longer time ago and were more blurred.

Even Wang Fugui, who was always drooling and grinning foolishly, had some old, round scars about the size of fingernails scattered on his belly and sides under his lifted vest. They were whitish in color and had slightly raised edges.

Some of these scars are dark in color, clearly recent; others have faded into ugly marks, telling tales of a more distant past.