Chapter 1: A Colleague—no! A Pickpocket!
It turns out that what finally wiped out the age-old profession of pickpocketing wasn’t the police.
It was smartphones and surveillance cameras.
Unfortunately, in the current era, there were neither.
Spring, 1982.
Jiang Xia was sitting on a green-painted passenger train, on her way home.
The carriage was already packed to the brim. Everywhere she looked was a sea of gray, blue, and black clothing. Yellow urea fertilizer sacks stuffed with luggage were piled along the narrow aisle, and passengers with standing-room tickets sat on top of them, loudly chatting with complete strangers beside them.
Adults shouting, children crying, and the rhythmic clack-clack of the train rolling down the tracks blended into a deafening cacophony that made her ears ache.
None of it, however, dampened Jiang Xia’s mood.
Leaning back against her seat, she silently hummed a tune to herself.
I finally graduated from police vocational school!
Whatever else could be said about the 1980s, the guaranteed job assignment after graduation was enough to make people green with envy.
The moment she graduated, Jiang Xia received both her employment notice and an official assignment letter, informing her that she had been posted to the Zhouying Police Station in Changning City as a proud public security officer.
Changning was her hometown, and Zhouying Police Station was only a little over two kilometers from her house—a fifteen-minute bike ride.
A secure government job, close to home, with decent pay.
As for the few minor inconveniences… Jiang Xia didn’t mind them at all. She’d be serving the people either way, and it didn’t matter where she made her contribution.
Besides…
She also had a little secret that wasn’t exactly fit for public attention.
“Excuse me! Coming through!”
A man shouted as he squeezed laboriously down the crowded aisle.
He looked to be in his early thirties, so skinny he resembled a monkey. His face was equally narrow and sharp-featured. Though he claimed to be making his way through, his eyes darted everywhere, constantly sizing up the passengers’ clothes—and, more importantly, their pockets.
Hearing the commotion, Jiang Xia looked over and raised an eyebrow.
Oh? A colleague.
…Wait.
What colleague?
What’s wrong with my brain? He’s obviously a career pickpocket!
Without even catching him in the act, Jiang Xia could tell who he really was with a single glance.
She quietly kept her eyes on him.
As the man called for people to make way, passengers sitting in the aisle either tucked in their legs or squeezed closer to their seats, barely creating enough space for someone to pass through.
The aisle, however, was cluttered with bags and bundles, making every step difficult. The skinny man shuffled forward inch by inch, gradually approaching a passenger dressed in a black dacron jacket—a clear sign that he came from a fairly well-off family.
The passenger was completely oblivious to the danger, still chatting animatedly with the person across from him.
Suddenly, the skinny man stumbled as if he had tripped, lurching into the passenger’s shoulder.
“Sorry, sorry!” he apologized repeatedly.
But while his mouth was busy apologizing, his right hand shot forward, deftly lifted a black wallet, and just as smoothly slipped it into his own pocket.
The entire sequence was so fluid that not only did the surrounding passengers fail to notice, even the victim had no idea his wallet had vanished.
Jiang Xia rubbed her chin.
A Northern-school technique. To pull it off that cleanly… he’d have had to practice for at least seven or eight years.
Still lacks a bit of refinement. Another…
…Wait a second.
He actually dared to steal right under my nose?
Jiang Xia gently tapped the middle-aged woman chatting beside her.
“Auntie, could you keep an eye on my bag for me? I need to use the restroom.”
“Of course!”
The woman agreed warmly.
“I’ll make sure both your bag and your seat are safe.”
“Thanks, Auntie.”
Jiang Xia smiled her thanks, tucked her palm-sized notebook and pen into her pocket, stepped over the luggage scattered on the floor, and headed toward the restroom.
The skinny man reached the end of the carriage and paused there for a moment before turning around and walking back.
Jiang Xia met him head-on.
Only about half a meter separated them.
Yet that half-meter-wide aisle was occupied by three bulging urea fertilizer sacks, with two elderly men sitting on top of them, hands tucked into their sleeves as they chatted away in their local dialect.
Seeing someone trying to get through, the old man on the right reached down and pulled one of the sacks aside, making just enough room for the two of them to step through.
Jiang Xia squeezed a little closer to the seats on the left, making some room as well, and said politely, “Big brother, you go first.”
“No, no, young lady, you should go first.”
The pickpocket, nicknamed Skinny Monkey, was in an excellent mood after a successful haul. Seeing that the person approaching was a pretty young woman, he became even more gentlemanly.
Leaning back, he grinned and said, “Well, ladies first, right?”
“Oh, then thank you, Big Brother.”
Jiang Xia’s lips curved upward. As she brushed past him and stepped over the luggage, her left hand moved ever so slightly. Without the pickpocket noticing a thing, she slipped the wallet belonging to the passenger in the dacron jacket out of his pocket and concealed it within her sleeve.
The moment the action was completed, a familiar voice that only she could hear sounded beside her ear.
[Ding! Congratulations, Host, on completing a theft. Free Experience +1]
Jiang Xia’s expression didn’t change. She continued walking toward the restroom.
She was a transmigrator with a system.
Before transmigrating, Jiang Xia had been an art teacher at a cram school that prepared students for the national joint entrance examinations, specializing in sketching and figure drawing.
Art students usually underwent intensive training before the exams, often drawing until one or two in the morning. Jiang Xia would occasionally stay late to guide them. That night, she had worked until two-thirty in the morning and was starving, so she went downstairs with a few students to buy some street food.
But while crossing the road, a car suddenly went berserk, ran a red light, and charged straight toward them. Jiang Xia only had time to shove the students beside her out of the way before she herself lost consciousness on the spot.
When she opened her eyes again, she had arrived in 1979. She had become a fourteen-year-old middle school student named Jiang Xia, who had nearly drowned after bravely rescuing two children who had fallen into the water.
Under the lingering influence of the original owner’s emotions, she had muddle-headedly told a reporter who came to interview her that she wanted to attend a police academy and become a police officer.
The government officials who later visited to commend her took those words seriously. With a wave of the hand, they directly granted her a special-admission spot at a public-security vocational police school in the provincial capital.
Everyone was delighted with the arrangement.
Everyone except Jiang Xia, who stared at the suddenly appearing system in complete bewilderment.
Entering the restroom, Jiang Xia slid the latch into place.
A pale blue screen, visible only to her, immediately appeared before her eyes. Across the top were eight bold characters:
[Criminal Master Training System]
At the bottom, gray text scrolled continuously.
Skills Yet to Be Unlocked:
Drug Manufacturing
Mastery of Dismemberment
Counterfeit Currency Production
…
…
Even though she had seen it countless times, Jiang Xia still couldn’t help falling silent for a couple of seconds.
What kind of transmigrator gets a system like this?
I’m a police officer.
A police officer!
Every single one of these skills was serious enough to get someone executed a hundred times over. The system was practically mocking her to her face.
That was Jiang Xia’s little secret.
This damned system.
Its purpose was to cultivate the world’s greatest criminal mastermind. As long as she committed crimes, it rewarded her with experience points. Once she accumulated enough experience, she could exchange it for all sorts of criminal skills.
She had to admit, the system was easy to level up, its rewards were straightforward, and it was incredibly practical.
It just happened to be a tiny bit devoid of conscience…
…and catastrophically life-threatening.
Three years ago, Jiang Xia had stared at the system in a daze for hours, wondering what sins she’d committed in her previous life to end up with something like this.
To make matters worse, the garbage system had forcibly given her a beginner skill:
Pseudo–Grandmaster-Level Theft.
The skill itself was excellent. She could steal from even veteran pickpockets without them noticing a thing.
There was just one tiny drawback.
Sometimes her hands refused to obey her.
Like the muscle memory developed by professional athletes after years of training, once she acquired the theft skill, she would unconsciously swipe other people’s belongings whenever she wasn’t paying attention.
It scared Jiang Xia half to death.
She had gone to great lengths to break the habit, and eventually managed to get rid of most of it. Originally, she had planned never to use either the skill or the system again for the rest of her life.
But after studying the damned system a few more times, she realized…
…it wasn’t completely useless after all.
Jiang Xia opened her character panel.
The system instantly displayed a three-dimensional model of her, accompanied by a list of information.
[Name: Jiang Xia
Personal Skills: Theft Lv.5, Sketching Lv.3, Tracking Lv.2, Grappling Lv.1…]
Jiang Xia tapped Tracking, then allocated the experience point she had just earned to it.
Besides criminal skills, she could also spend experience points to improve skills she had already learned—that is, she could use the system’s rewards to level up legitimate, beneficial abilities.
That’s how Jiang Xia had quickly discovered a loophole in the system.
If she stole a wallet from a pickpocket and returned it to the victim, she had technically committed a theft, satisfying the system’s requirements. At the same time, she earned experience points while protecting an innocent person.
It was the perfect exploit.
Closing the system interface, Jiang Xia took out her homemade sketchbook and pencil and rapidly began drawing the pickpocket’s face.
She knew full well that this was dangerous.
It would be all too easy to become obsessed with leveling up her skills and gradually lose control.
So she always kept herself in check. She never went looking for pickpockets on purpose. Only when she happened to catch one in the act would she steal the wallet back—and, while she was at it, send the thief to prison.
Because of that, her skills had progressed very slowly. Even now, she had only raised Tracking to Level 2, and more than half of that progress had come through her own study.
Without using an eraser or even sketching construction lines, Jiang Xia started with the eyes.
In just two or three minutes, a portrait almost identical to the pickpocket’s face emerged on the paper.
This was a skill from her previous life.
Like her theft ability, it relied heavily on muscle memory. After years away from drawing, she had only recently recovered about seventy to eighty percent of her former proficiency.
This guy’s handwork is excellent. Someone definitely trained him.
There’s a ninety-nine percent chance he’s part of a gang.
Once the train arrived, she would hand the portrait over to the railway police.
With the pickpocket’s likeness, the officers might recognize him, trace the rest of the gang through him, and wipe out the entire operation in one sweep.
Closing the sketchbook, Jiang Xia slipped it back into her pocket, left the restroom, and, as she passed the passenger in the dacron jacket, quietly returned the wallet to its rightful place.
This time, she had gained experience, the passenger hadn’t lost a single cent, and the pickpocket gang was about to be completely wiped out.
It was a total victory. As the saying went, she was winning so hard it was like Qin Shi Huang touching an electric wire—an internet meme meaning she was absolutely crushing it.
…
Skinny Monkey was making his way back to the carriage where his gang leader was waiting.
Completely unaware that someone was about to turn him over to the police, he also hadn’t noticed that the wallet he had stolen had mysteriously vanished.
His mind was occupied by only one thing:
The young woman who had just brushed past him.
She was really beautiful.
He could still seem to smell the faint scent of roses lingering around his nose. It was the fragrance of the pomade she used in her hair, and amid the sweat-soaked train carriage, it had seemed exceptionally pleasant.
His thoughts gradually drifted in a decidedly less respectable direction.
Just as he was indulging in his fantasies, someone suddenly patted him on the shoulder.
“What are you thinking about, Senior Brother? You’re completely lost in thought.”
The person who had tapped him was Dongzi, the third junior disciple their master had recently taken in. He was standing right in front of him.
“Nothing.”
Skinny Monkey turned his head and replied casually,
“I was just thinking… I probably landed a big score just now.”
“That’s great!”
Dongzi’s eyes lit up.
“Found yourself a fat sheep?”
“He was wearing a dacron jacket and even had a wristwatch.”
Skinny Monkey lowered his voice as they walked forward.
“Too bad Master forbids us from touching watches.”
Ahead was the connection between two train carriages. There weren’t many people there.
An old man sat quietly in the corner, leisurely smoking a traditional long-stemmed pipe.
His temples were gray, and he wore an old-fashioned eight-panel cloth cap. Curled slightly into himself with his head lowered, he looked exactly like an elderly farmer who had spent a lifetime working the fields.
But Skinny Monkey didn’t dare treat him casually.
This was his master.
A notorious gang leader of pickpockets from southwestern Shandong.
In his younger days, his hands had been so fast that he was said to be able to snatch a bar of soap out of a pot of boiling oil.
Now, however, age had caught up with him. His body had weakened, and his hands were no longer as steady as they once were. That was why he had begun taking on apprentices.
The moment Skinny Monkey saw him, he instinctively reached into his pocket, ready to hand over the stolen wallet.
But as soon as his hand touched the pocket, his heart skipped a beat.
It was empty.
There was nothing inside.
Where was the wallet?
Where the hell had the wallet he had just stolen gone?!