The Most Random System

"And you guys? How’s tonight’s haul treating you?"

The air seemed to solidify.

The lead thief and the hydraulic cutter guy had their eyes glued to that blinding chunk of Gold in Lin Li’s hand, their Adam’s apples bobbing with difficulty.

Then they lowered their heads to look at the few pitch‑black e‑bike batteries in their own canvas bag...

The huge, suffocating "wealth gap" instantly drowned them both.

After a brief silence, the lead thief finally seemed to find his voice again. He let out two dry laughs, the sound raspy like a broken bellows:

"Ha... haha... we... also got, got quite a, quite a bit..."

He subconsciously hitched up the canvas bag full of batteries, trying to add some sense of weight, but his voice only got smaller and smaller, laced with barely concealed embarrassment and total lack of confidence:

"You guys have six, seventy pieces, we also have six, six, seventy, seve—six, seven hundred bucks, yeah."

Six, seven hundred is more than six, seventy, WIN!

Win my ass.

Lookout Man was obviously not a first‑time thief; he’d even been busted before for sticky fingers and thrown inside.

Back when he got caught, and again when he was released, people would always ask him if he didn’t feel ashamed to be a thief.

Lookout Man snorted in his heart every time. Even if the situation forced him to put on a repentant act, deep down he never took it seriously.

But right now.

He clearly felt a certain emotion.

Shame, awkwardness, a feeling of being too pathetic to show his face.

For the first time ever, he felt this kind of emotion about his identity as a thief, ffs!!

He felt like he was totally not fit for the stage, wished desperately he had a proper job, TAT!

You gotta know, in reality the batteries in the bag weren’t even worth six, seven hundred; that price was him already rounding up on a good day with a little creative reporting...

And here he was asking these two on the other side if they wanted to split the batteries here. Looking at it now, how the hell could those two possibly be interested in this crap? His behavior was starting to look suspiciously clownish.

"Oh oh, that’s not bad either," Lin Li praised.

Lookout Man: "..."

But then Lookout Man jolted, and asked anxiously, "Bro, stealing this big, aren’t you afraid of getting caught..."

Of course what he cared about wasn’t Lin Li and the stool, but himself.

What he stole were just batteries; even if someone discovers it and reports it tomorrow, the cops they send won’t be many, and they definitely won’t deploy much tech.

But if he got dragged into Lin Li’s case, then it’d be a whole different story.

Six, seven hundred grand, that’s absolutely a major case.

And just his luck, tonight he was operating together with them. Even though there were no cameras here, once they check the surrounding roads and focus in on him, that’d be a huge problem!

"Relax," Lin Li seemed to read what was going on in Lookout Man’s head, and chuckled easily, "being afraid of getting caught? Of course we’re afraid. But first condition is: they gotta catch us."

"Brother, I’ll say it again, the bros have prepared thoroughly."

"Let me spell it out for you: we did our homework. Take this house for example—nobody’s home right now, and they won’t be back for another three days. And you think they’ll notice anything in three days?"

"Haven’t you noticed we didn’t take anything except the gold? You think it’s because nothing else is worth money? No way. There’s at least another hundred‑plus grand worth of stuff in there we could’ve stolen."

"The only reason we didn’t touch a thing is precisely so this family won’t realize anything’s wrong. All this gold is stored in that safe whose password we already know, and we even went out of our way to make a batch of fake Gold. We’re doing a switcheroo, and not just any switch—weight and texture all closely matched!"

"Which means when they come back in three days, even if on a whim they decide to go check their Gold, they’ll see there’s ’still’ some in the safe and won’t think they’ve been robbed."

"Given the current gold price, they’re not gonna just casually take their Gold out to cash it. So by the time they find out, we’re talking at least a few months, maybe years, even ten‑plus years down the line."

"Bro, tell me, by then, you really think they can still catch us?"

stool, Lookout Man, hydraulic cutter guy: "(゜▽゜)!!"

Lookout Man, hydraulic cutter guy: They’re actually this badass? (゜▽゜)?

stool: We’re actually this badass? (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧?

"Bro... that’s... that’s insane..." Lookout Man stayed silent for a long time before finally speaking, his voice a bit dry.

If it’s like this, then yeah, a lot of the worry in his heart did lighten.

But what took its place was the sourness making a comeback.

And a kind of resentful greed was burning too.

The image of that glittering Gold just now kept replaying in his mind; with that seventy, eighty grand gap, saying he didn’t secretly wish he could take their place would be a total lie.

There were a few moments when Lookout Man even felt an urge to threaten them with reporting them—maybe he could carve out a cut for himself?

But it was only for a few moments; those thoughts were quickly crushed.

Not because Lookout Man had any moral bottom line, but because he was kind of intimidated by these two "senior" offenders in front of him.

Whether it was their calm demeanor, their casual tone, or the scale of the crime they’d committed, none of it was something he could compare to.

Plus, since they were able to gather this much intel in advance for this job and even specially manufacture a batch of fake Gold, their level of initiative and meticulous planning was basically screaming at Lookout Man that they weren’t some rookie punks or hot‑headed idiots.

Who knows if they have some contingency plan, or people waiting to back them up outside?

If his attempt at blackmail backfired and he ended up getting himself completely dragged under, that’d be way too not worth it.

Lookout Man let out a sour little laugh, uglier than crying:

"Then... bro, you guys go ahead, we... we’ll get back to our own work too."