Galaxy Martial God Temple - The Amusement Park Kidnapping, Part 5
Siwoo let out a sigh of relief at my joke.
As expected, she caught on instantly. If I had just told her I was fine, she would have worried that I was secretly injured. Personally, I preferred cracking jokes to ease the tension in situations like this. I used internet slang from time to time, but since they were references from another world, Siwoo never understood them. Come to think of it, the reason she was so wary of my internet usage might have been because I kept spouting references she had never heard of in her life.
"No, but we haven't left the amusement park yet. I can see some boilers. It's a pretty spacious, windowless room. You're tracking my location, right? Are you getting a GPS signal?"
Hearing Siwoo's words, I spoke up so Cheon Soyeon could hear.
"Then if we just wait a little bit, the rescue team will be here."
Cheon Soyeon's face brightened at my words.
"Ah, this? I thought it'd be good to have a backup phone, so I bought one with my allowance. Since you didn't know I bought it, I guess you don't restore my deleted search history, do you?"
Since a three-year-old couldn't exactly walk into a store alone, I had naturally ordered it online. I timed the delivery for when Siwoo occasionally went out. I had actually bought quite a few things behind her back like that. Of course, those items were currently being safely stored in my main body's Inventory.
"No...! Don't do that. It has a Kids Lock on it anyway, so I can't even access any weird websites. That's an invasion of privacy."
Haha, I kept my promise. Keeping two sets of books is a basic survival skill, after all.
I had promised to keep a ledger, not to show it to her with complete transparency. I had been using my allowance to invest in various mutual funds and stocks, quietly growing my pocket money. The starting capital was so small that I couldn't make a massive fortune, but it was enough. Since I bought the phone with those investment returns, the total balance of my allowance account quickly returned to normal. It was only natural that Siwoo, who only did a quick glance at the total sum, never noticed.
"No...! It's because I have internet access that I was able to contact you like this in the first place!"
Hearing my desperate plea, Siwoo replied with a resigned sigh.
"Yeah, she's right next to me. I'll let you hear the ambient sound."
The phone had a feature that filtered out background noise to transmit only my voice, as well as a feature to transmit all ambient sounds. Conversely, I could set it so only I heard the other party, or let it play normally, or even use a speakerphone mode.
After adjusting the settings, I spoke to Cheon Soyeon.
"Cheon Soyeon, even if you speak softly, your parents will hear you. Go ahead and say something."
Cheon Soyeon nodded and whispered into the brooch-shaped communicator in my hand.
"Mom, Dad, I'm safe. Don't worry."
"You don't have to whisper that close. It can hear you."
Never underestimate 50th-century technology. The advancement of wiretapping technology during the New Cold War era made it possible to capture human voices no matter how quiet or distant they were. Few things drove technological progress quite like the relentless malice of humanity.
"Got it."
I put the strap into my Inventory and pinned only the brooch itself to the undershirt I wore beneath my clothes. The brooch was thin enough that it wouldn't be noticeable unless someone looked very closely.
"Let's tie our hands and feet back up. Once the rescue team gets close, the kidnappers will probably come to move us. If they see our bonds are loose, they might knock us out again."
"Yeah, but if we tie ourselves up again, we won't be able to move immediately if something happens."
"Don't worry. There's a knotting technique that you can undo instantly. Fold the rope in half like this, loop it over your thumb, and then..."
I taught her a binding method often used in escape magic tricks. To be precise, it was a trick that only looked secure but wasn't actually binding. Tied this way, a simple flick of the thumb would unravel it instantly. For the legs, I wrapped the rope in a way that made them look bound as long as her feet were pressed together, but would fall apart the moment she spread them slightly.
"Whoa... how do you know stuff like this?"
"The internet."
Right now, the kidnappers were too busy looking for a way to escape the amusement park to pay attention to us in the warehouse. But as soon as they realized their location had been compromised, they would act. For now, since Cheon Soyeon and I looked like three-year-olds, they wouldn't be on guard. The proof was that they had only tied us up and hadn't bothered with Acupoint Sealing or anything of the sort. To them, I was just an extra, and no matter how legendary the Heaven's Martial Body was, they probably figured a toddler couldn't have progressed very far.
But judging by Cheon Soyeon's Qi sensitivity alone, she had at least passed the Inception stage and was likely in the 3rd-rate realm. Perhaps, living up to the reputation of the Heaven's Martial Body, she was already in the 2nd-rate realm.
"What's your realm?"
Cheon Soyeon hesitated at my question.
"We need to assess our combat strength so we can decide whether to make a move, wait quietly for rescue, or figure out what to do if they take us hostage."
Because the call was still connected, I could hear Siwoo nagging me through the communicator to just wait quietly for rescue.
Honestly, if I were alone, escaping wouldn't be hard at all. I could just attack the kidnappers and let them kill this body. The kidnappers wouldn't care about the corpse of a kid who wasn't even their target, so they'd leave my body behind. Then, I could just create a new avatar, pretend to be dead, contact Siwoo, and go home.
The problem, however, was Cheon Soyeon. Even if I was just an innocent bystander dragged into this, I couldn't just abandon a three-year-old baby. Though, looking at the way she spoke and acted, I highly doubted she was actually a normal three-year-old.
"Look, I know it's rude to ask a martial artist about their realm, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Besides, even if your realm gets exposed now, you have the Heaven's Martial Body, so you'll grow in no time anyway. That's probably why these kidnappers are doing something this crazy right in the middle of the Cheon Clan's territory, right?"
"I... suppose."
With a reluctant expression, Cheon Soyeon silently mouthed the words: 'I'm in the 2nd-rate realm.'
"Hmm, I see. Escaping on our own is out of the question then. Let's wait for rescue."
Just as I said that, Cheon Soyeon looked toward the door.
"The kidnappers are coming."
Cheon Soyeon and I quickly stuffed the gags back into our mouths.
The door swung open, and two kidnappers walked in.
"Damn it! Even the ventilation shafts are sealed! This wasn't in the plan!"
"Calm down. This place was abandoned thirty years ago when the amusement park was renovated. It's not even on the internal maps, so they won't find it immediately. The hacking team said the park's management system has no control over this building anyway."
"Still, shouldn't we regroup with the parent-monitoring team? It's nerve-wracking with just the two of us."
So they were split into multiple teams. The fact that only two people were handling the actual kidnapping was good news.
"No, we're better off hiding here. Remember when you first came here for the scouting mission? You were thrilled that there was such an inconspicuous spot. I guarantee you, their search won't reach this far in a single day."
"I guess so. This park is ridiculously huge... *Sigh*. Damn it, everything was going so well when the monitoring team managed to separate that brat with the Heaven's Martial Body from her parents!"
It seemed Cheon Soyeon getting separated from her parents wasn't due to her or her parents' carelessness. Although this was a futuristic sci-fi world, it was also a wuxia world known as the Galaxy Murim. When it came to wuxia, formations were a staple. They had likely used some kind of illusion formation to naturally separate her from her parents in the crowd. Or perhaps some advanced technology I didn't know about.
"By the way, are those brats still asleep?"
"They should be awake by now. We only used enough drug to knock them out for twenty or thirty minutes."
"Are they pretending to be unconscious? Pretty smart."
Uh-oh, they realized we were faking it. Well, I had expected as much. I slowly opened my eyes and looked at them. Both kidnappers were wearing balaclavas—the classic thief masks with only the eyes cut out.
"Should we put them back under?"
"No need. That drug is expensive. We had to get a particularly pricey one to make sure we didn't damage the Heaven's Martial Body, so we need to spare it."
Since we were tied up and gagged, they didn't see any need to waste more drugs on us.
Just then, the kidnappers' radio crackled to life.
It seemed to be a transmission from the guys they called the monitoring team. The rescue team... those incompetent fools. How did they let themselves get spotted? They should have moved in complete secrecy!
"What?! No way! How do they know we're here?!"
The kidnappers panicked upon realizing their location had been compromised. Just then, one of them, who had sharp eyes, grabbed me by the collar and hoisted me up. Having spotted the phone hidden beneath my clothes, he roared in fury.
"You little brat! You hid a phone?!"
Blinded by rage, the kidnapper slammed me toward the ground, intending to crush me to death. At this rate, I was going to die!
"I'll kill you—! Argh!"
I pulled a one-handed sword from my Inventory and thrust it straight into the kidnapper's abdomen, piercing his Dantian acupoint. No matter how much I had trained, this was still the body of a toddler. I didn't possess the physical strength to pierce a Dantian even with a sword.
So, I decided to take a gamble.
I used my internal Qi to violently force my arm's physical strength to its absolute limit. Normally, my muscles would have ruptured, or my bones would have shattered under the sheer force of the muscle contraction. But perhaps thanks to the adrenaline of a life-or-death crisis, or perhaps because I was already primed to take the next step as Cheon Soyeon had mentioned before we were kidnapped, I succeeded on the very first try.
Having succeeded once, I now understood how to reinforce my physical body with internal Qi.
I had reached the 3rd-rate realm.
"Aaargh...! Gaaah!"
With his Dantian shattered, the internal Qi stored within backflowed violently, causing the kidnapper to collapse in agonizing pain. The higher one's realm, the more dangerous a shattered Dantian was, but conversely, the harder it was to shatter. Seeing how easily his Dantian had broken under the force of a 3rd-rate strike, it seemed this kidnapper hadn't reached the Peak realm.
Well, whether they were in the Peak realm or not, the law of the Murim was simple: if you let your guard down, you die. This was his punishment for ignoring the ancient wisdom of always being wary of the elderly and children.
Watching the kidnapper writhe in agony, I let out a soft chuckle.
"Ta-da! It's a magic trick that makes a sword appear!"