In the fourteenth year of Qi's revival, exoskeletons have entered thousands of households: wearing armor to go to work, wearing armor to boxing, and wearing armor to fight in underground boxing rings; no one believes in slow and stupid kung fu anymore.
Zhou Lei is a pile driver at the construction site in the west of the city, nicknamed "Pile". He has been following the lame old man in the materials yard for ten years to stand on the pile that no one can look down upon. It wasn't until a man-eating alien beast was dug out from under the foundation, and a cult that used the bones of alien beasts to make knives extended its black hands to the people around him - that he realized that what the old man taught was not a stake, but a root.
Others rely on Qi crystals, auxiliaries, and sixth-generation competitive armor to take shortcuts; he wears a scrapped military-standard prototype armor "Old Black" and takes the stupid route: Qi is fuel, armor is a furnace, and people are fire. Fist is the soul of armor, and armor is the edge of fist. Shortcuts are the fastest, stupid efforts are the furthest.
