Extraordinary All-Rounder

The autumn morning wind, carrying waves of chill, continuously swept over the already half-bald poplar trees, occasionally bringing down one or two withered leaves from the branches. The yellowed leaves fluttered in the morning wind, just like a solitary boat lost in the vast sea, filled with a desolate and lonely atmosphere... On an empty ground enclosed by barbed wire near the east side of the funeral home, twenty-six death row prisoners in prison uniforms were kneeling in a row. Hundreds of fully armed armed police soldiers, with solemn expressions, stood guard at the four corners of the execution ground, their guns pointed at the prisoners in front, waiting only for the commander's final order to execute. Yang Hongtao knelt among the group of prisoners, his lowered body stiff like a dry wooden stump. He knew that it was too late to say anything at this point. Struggling or resisting would only accelerate his death. Originally in the courtroom, Yang Hongtao had once had the urge to retract his confession, especially when he saw his once deeply loved girlfriend Xiaoya and his boss Huang Lianshu, who had set a trap to frame him and send him to prison, enter the courtroom in an intimate manner. The towering rage nearly swallowed all his rationality. But when his gaze shifted to the tear-stained faces and concerned eyes of his elderly parents and sister's family sitting in the audience seats, the surging rage and the slightest instinctive desire to survive were immediately submerged by this warm affection! He knew that there was no way he could contend with Huang Lianshu. In fact, this was fundamentally an unequal struggle, and the two sides were completely not on the same level. Calming down, Yang Hongtao understood that even if he dared to tell the truth in court regardless of everything, it would be useless because he did not have direct evidence to prove that his boss Huang Lianshu was the mastermind behind that series of economic fraud and criminal cases. Even if the judge accepted Yang Hongtao's testimony, Huang Lianshu could completely push out another scapegoat to bear all the charges. At most, it would only cause Huang Lianshu to lose a sum of money. However, after the incident, Yang Hongtao would never escape Huang Lianshu's crazy retaliation and would still inevitably die. Even all his relatives related to him would also be implicated... Yang Hongtao did not want his parents and sister's family to be buried with him, so in the end, he could only grit his teeth and take on all responsibilities... After leaving the courtroom with a determination to die, Yang Hongtao thought he could really face death calmly. However, when he truly felt the cold muzzle pointed at the back of his head constantly emitting the breath of death at this moment, he still inevitably began to be afraid, like everyone else... Regrettably, whether Yang Hongtao could accept this outcome or not, everything that should come still came. With an order from the commander of the armed police force, a series of "clicking" sounds of loading bullets rang out behind him. The crisp sounds were like an invisible big hand solemnly knocking on the door of hell. "Prepare - Fire -" As the final order was given, neat gunshots resounded over the execution ground. At the same time, twenty-six 7.62-millimeter rifle bullets, burning with angry flames, whistled and drilled into the back of each death row prisoner's head. Just before the gunshots rang out, Yang Hongtao, who knew that his life was coming to an end and was infinitely attached to this wonderful world, naturally had images of every unforgettable face he had encountered in his short life flash through his mind like a movie... His kind mother, strict father, his sister who doted on him the most, the girl next door who had been his childhood sweetheart... Subsequently... Xiaoya's beautiful yet heartless face and Huang Lianshu's sinister and disdainful face were fixed in Yang Hongtao's mind, and then these two faces were infinitely magnified. Just like the legendary soul-capturing ghosts, they mockingly looked at Yang Hongtao, the death row prisoner about to be deprived of the right to live, with cold and stern eyes... The intense anger and unwillingness were like a raging fire constantly burning Yang Hongtao's soul. As the saying goes, extremes lead to reversals. When this anger and unwillingness burned to the extreme, Yang Hongtao's mood suddenly returned to calm. Whether it was by some strange chance or predestined fate, when life was about to end, the face that appeared last in Yang Hongtao's mind was actually an old face full of wrinkles! It was an old Lama that Yang Hongtao met by chance in a dilapidated temple when he traveled to Lhasa three years ago. The old Lama had kind eyebrows and eyes, like an enlightened eminent monk. However, through some persuasion, Yang Hongtao was fooled into spending five hundred yuan to buy a jade pendant from him that would cost at most five yuan on a street stall. The jade pendant was engraved with the famous six-syllable mantra of Buddhism in Tibetan. According to the old Lama, this six-syllable mantra was the mantra of the great compassionate Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. Long ago, Avalokitesvara herself practiced and achieved Buddhahood by chanting this mantra. After selling the jade pendant, the old Lama also enthusiastically taught Yang Hongtao to recite the six-syllable mantra several times. However, at that time, Yang Hongtao always felt that the tone of the Lama reciting this six-syllable mantra was a bit strange, like a foreigner speaking Chinese. Perhaps it was precisely because of this that it left an extremely deep impression on Yang Hongtao. And at this moment of death, he somehow thought of that cunning old Lama and subconsciously recited the six-syllable mantra taught by the old Lama in his mind. "Om Mani Padme Hum -" However, what Yang Hongtao never expected was that at the same time as the six-syllable mantra rang out in his heart, he seemed to see six huge characters fly into the air and turn into six white halos of different sizes. The white halos emitted a sacred glow and enveloped him entirely. Before Yang Hongtao could realize what exactly was happening, these six halos began to shrink rapidly. Although Yang Hongtao's body still knelt there, in his feeling, he was like a fluffy marshmallow being brutally kneaded and suppressed by the six halos and quickly turned into a small rock candy. In just the blink of an eye, Yang Hongtao completely lost control of his body, and all his consciousness was compressed and concentrated by the six halos to a point in his mind. And at this time, a hot bullet had already forcefully drilled through the skull at the back of Yang Hongtao's head with a deafening gunshot, passing through his mind with an unstoppable bloody breath... Whether it was a coincidental chance or not, the bullet, which symbolized death, passed precisely through the center of the six strange halos as it passed through Yang Hongtao's head, without the slightest deviation. And the six white halos disappeared without a trace precisely at the moment the bullet passed through, as if turning into an invisible net pattern engraved on the small bullet. However, the hot bullet did not hesitate in the slightest, passing by with a gentle sweep, and then sprayed out of Yang Hongtao's wide-open mouth, "Ding", falling to the ground seven or eight meters in front of Yang Hongtao. After the gunshots rang out, the twenty-six death row prisoners all fell to the ground one after another. Each corpse had a peanut-sized blood hole on the back of the head, like the eyes of demons from hell. The armed police soldiers who had completed the execution task began to quickly clean up the execution ground. First, forensic experts used special tools to drill into the bullet holes at the back of the dead bodies to make sure the prisoners were completely dead. Then, the soldiers worked in pairs to carry the corpses onto the vehicles according to the numbers. Subsequently, logistics personnel came to simply clean the blood-stained ground and collect the spent bullet casings and bullets together. These things were all to be processed uniformly. Every time a certain amount was accumulated, they would be transported to the arms factory to be melted down and recast into various bullets. Originally, according to regulations, after each execution by firing squad, the staff responsible for cleaning the scene must collect all the spent bullet casings and bullets from this execution. However, sometimes, probably due to the angle of the shooting, individual bullets, after being fired out of the prisoner's mouth, would directly enter the ground in front of the prisoner. And of course, the staff could not dig up the entire execution ground just to find one or two bullets. So it was not a problem to collect two or three fewer bullets each time. This time, three bullets were not found, and the staff responsible for cleaning the execution ground did not pay much attention either. Seeing that the blood on the ground had been covered tightly with loess, they packaged the found bullets and casings, got into the vehicles one after another, and left in a cloud of noise from car horns and thick black exhaust from exhaust pipes... Yang Hongtao felt that his consciousness was like an extremely compressed piece of cheese, tightly bound in a cold and hard bullet. No matter how hard he struggled, as soon as he touched the invisible net pattern on the surface of the bullet, he would be bounced back to the center of the bullet. And at this...