American Adventure: My Uncle is Don Quixote

Li Wei jumped down from the last pipe, his feet landing steadily on an elevated platform against the warehouse wall.

He looked back at his masterpiece.

Five dark brown streams of water were gushing down from different spots on the ceiling. The murky, stagnant water, mixed with rust particles and large chunks of sediment, was like five evil dragons, indiscriminately washing over the tens of thousands of neatly stacked cases of substandard beverages below.

Water was already starting to pool on the floor.

[Mission: The Kingdom’s Vermin—Complete]

[The plot of the old nobles has been crushed! Those inferior liquors will perish in the putrid, stagnant water, never again to flow into the glasses of a tavern.]

[Mission reward has been distributed: Free attribute points +0.5]

Li Wei pinched his nose and smiled faintly.

Gaining 0.5 attribute points in a single night was far more efficient than the weekly competitions.

He had now saved up 1.6 free attribute points. It was time to find a chance to level up again.

The job was done, but Li Wei didn’t leave right away. Instead, after walking another lap near the warehouse walls, he returned to the fire control room and put the cover back on the alarm host’s maintenance panel.

From the outside, it would just look like the alarm system had failed due to age.

After doing all this, Li Wei walked out through the side door above the loading dock, next to the warehouse wall.

When he stepped out of the warehouse, he found that it had started snowing.

Thick snowflakes were practically being driven sideways into his face.

The ground was already covered in a thin layer of white, and it was slowly getting thicker.

Li Wei looked at the soles of his shoes, then at the snow-covered ground in the distance.

If he just walked out now, he would leave a clear trail of footprints in the snow, leading from the warehouse’s side door all the way out of the industrial park.

’Although the blizzard will cover my tracks soon enough, what if the workers get here early?’

Li Wei wasn’t about to leave any loose ends.

He turned, walked to the warehouse’s outer wall, and stepped directly onto its vertical surface.

[Sky Stepping (Level 1)]!

His body defied the basic laws of physics. He moved horizontally along the wall, just like Spider-Man.

He walked along the warehouse’s exterior wall for about 200 meters, circling around to the other side of the industrial park, then used a double jump to leap away.

When he landed, he deliberately chose a muddy patch of road that had already been churned up by truck tires, ensuring any footprints he left would be completely indistinguishable.

Li Wei pulled his hood tight and walked for two hours through the blizzard. Only after reaching Manhattan did he call an Uber to take him back to Fortress City Apartments.

「The next morning at 7:45 AM.」

The blizzard in the industrial park had raged all night, only starting to die down around 5 AM.

The snow on the ground was now about 20 centimeters deep. The only marks on the industrial park’s roads were a few ruts left by snowplows.

A white Ford pickup truck pushed through the lingering flurries and slowly pulled into the warehouse area’s parking lot.

A middle-aged white man in gray work clothes jumped out of the truck. His name was Dennis, and he was the supervisor Gatorade had temporarily hired to look after this shipment.

He had received a weather alert the previous evening and knew a blizzard was coming, but he wasn’t worried—the warehouse was old, but it was still a proper warehouse. Shielding it from wind and snow wouldn’t be a problem.

He was planning to do another round of inventory checks. In one week, they were scheduled to start shipping the goods out to distribution centers.

He bundled up his down jacket and trudged through the ankle-deep snow to the warehouse’s side door by the loading dock.

Then he froze.

The door was ajar.

The side door was cracked open, leaving a gap of about 10 centimeters between the door and the frame.

Dennis frowned, gave the door a push, and then looked down at the electronic key card lock.

The latch was slightly deformed, looking as if it had been forced open.

"Damn it... Was I high when I left yesterday? Did I forget to lock the door?" he muttered.

Cursing under his breath, he reached out to push the door open.

As soon as he pushed the door open about half a meter, an indescribable stench assaulted him.

It was a horrific smell, a mixture of rust, mold, and something else he couldn’t identify, so strong that Dennis nearly threw up.

He instinctively took a step back and almost tripped over the threshold.

"My God... what is that smell?"

He covered his mouth and nose and peered through the opening.

The entire warehouse floor was flooded.

And because of the slope of the floor, the water had pooled and risen halfway up the lowest layer of cardboard boxes.

Dozens of neatly stacked rows of cargo boxes were completely submerged at the bottom in the black water. The corrugated cardboard had completely collapsed, like sandcastles washed away by a dark tide, and the boxes were toppling crookedly into the filthy water.

Some of the boxes had fallen apart, and the bottled drinks inside were floating haphazardly on the water’s surface. They mixed with the rust that had fallen from the ceiling and the soggy, disintegrated cardboard, resembling a foul witch’s brew and exuding a lethal stench.

"Oh my god... oh my god... what the fuck..." Dennis was completely stunned. "Where’s the inventory guy? The security guard?"

He fumbled for his phone and first dialed Kearns, the regional operations director for Gatorade.

"Kearns... Kearns! Something’s happened at the warehouse!"

"What... oh... Dennis, what is it?" Kearns, clearly still in bed, sounded annoyed on the other end of the line.

"The pipes burst! The warehouse is flooded! All the goods are soaked!"

"What did you say?!"

Kearns was wide awake in an instant.

Forty-five minutes later, Kearns arrived on site with his assistant and two engineers.

As he stood on the loading dock, wearing a mask and looking at the scene before him, his face was as crumpled and foul as the soggy cardboard boxes stewing in the water.

The engineer waded through the knee-deep filth to inspect the area, then came back to report his findings.

"It’s a burst in the fire sprinkler pipes," the engineer said, taking off his black-water-soaked rain boots with a look of disgust. "There are at least four or five rupture points, all concentrated at the pipe valves and aging joints. This warehouse’s fire system hasn’t been maintained for at least seven or eight years. All the water that came out was stagnant water and rust from inside the pipes."

"Last night’s blizzard dropped the temperature to minus 15 degrees Celsius," he said, wiping sweat from his forehead. "When the stagnant water in the pipes froze, it expanded, cracking the already aging joints and valves. That’s where the dirty water came from."

"What about the fire alarm system?" Kearns asked, his face grim. "Why didn’t it go off?"

"The alarm host is shot, too," the engineer said, showing photos he’d just taken to Kearns, who was unwilling to go down himself. "The circuit board is covered in dust, and the insulation on several wires has peeled off. This machine has been nothing but a decoration for a long time."

"Where’s the warehouse security guard?" He turned to look at Dennis, who was standing a short distance away, surveying the warehouse. "Didn’t he notice anything during his nightly patrol?"

"Not sure. Probably got drunk," Dennis said, scratching his head. "Haven’t been able to reach him."

Kearns closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

"Can’t reach him?" He snapped his eyes open and glared at Dennis. "Then what the hell do I need you, the warehouse supervisor, for? You’re fired! And I’m not paying you the rest of your fee!"

"Calm down, buddy," Dennis shot back, refusing to back down. "I just did my job. And this is clearly an act of God. If you have a problem, you can take it up with my union!"

Kearns was speechless. He was furious but couldn’t vent his anger.

’The union. The union. The goddamn union.’

"Don’t touch anything yet," he said through gritted teeth. "I need to make a few calls."

He walked out to the parking lot and made three consecutive calls in the biting wind.

Millions of bottles of beverages, all a total loss.

What was more critical wasn’t the loss of the goods themselves. For Gatorade, the cost was only a few hundred thousand dollars; their model was different from Li Wei’s, who outsourced everything.

But the lost time and the impending FDA food safety regulations were the real problem. Once a food storage environment suffers this level of contamination, regardless of whether the product itself is contaminated, everything must undergo a full disposal procedure for biohazard risks.

Just the testing, assessment, and report generation would take at least eight to twelve weeks.

And the Super Bowl was only three weeks away.

His first call was to Gatorade’s legal department to report the incident.

The second was to the insurance company, a commercial insurance firm called Atlantic United Insurance.

The third was to his superior at Pepsi headquarters, the person responsible for ordering the production of this batch.

After a dozen or so seconds of silence, the person on the other end sighed and said only one thing: "Understood. There’s nothing to be done about the situation now. Just focus on minimizing the losses."

Two hours later, the claims adjuster from Atlantic United Insurance also arrived on the scene with two assistants.

"Mr. Kearns," the adjuster said, shaking Kearns’s hand, "I need to know, what is the insured value of this shipment?"

"10 million USD."

The adjuster nodded and fell silent for a moment.

"I have to be upfront with you," he said. "According to the terms of our policy, a loss of this magnitude requires a third-party incident assessment before the claim can be processed."

"What are you implying?" Kearns’s brow twitched. "Are you suggesting that Gatorade, or rather, the Pepsi Group, would commit insurance fraud?"

"No, but we still need to rule out human factors," the adjuster said, pushing up his glasses. "A claim of 10 million USD exceeds our internal approval threshold. This case must follow the special procedure for large claims."

"How long will that take?"

"Normally, two to four weeks," the adjuster paused. "However, given the coincidence of the pipes bursting at the exact same time the fire alarm system failed... I will be asking law enforcement to assist in the investigation. Please understand, Mr. Kearns."

That afternoon, two detectives and three forensic technicians arrived at the scene.

To the anxious Kearns’s surprise, what stood out was the lead detective’s physical appearance.

He was so distinctive that for a moment, Kearns forgot all his troubles and could only stare.

He had a limp.