"Savior"
"Yes, Mr. Su." Wang Shouye unconsciously clenched his fingers, his knuckles turning white. He took a deep breath and continued:
"According to the principle of maximizing benefits, Dongli Cang, the SS-rank superpower user, director of the Superpower Management Bureau, savior, Beast Tide Nemesis, and Humanity's Guardian Deity, is unquestionably the prime suspect. He possesses nearly every honor this blood-soaked age can bestow on a person: the admiration of the vast majority of the world's survivors, the loyalty of the strongest group of Awakened, and... an unimaginable appeal to the opposite sex."
"That's an outrageous claim." A smile began to appear on Su Luo's face.
"Not at all. Would you be interested in exploring the truth behind all this with us? It may be directly related to the source of superpowers, and even the future of this world." Seeing Su Luo's smile, Wang Shouye was delighted. He's willing to talk!
"Go on."
"First, there's the unbelievable speed of his rise. In just a few dozen days, he went from an obscure minor official in a border city to a giant commanding the world's strongest military force. His personal charm is so great that S-rank powerhouses willingly bow to him, and his luck with women is even more absurd, to the point of defying common sense."
Su Luo countered, "Heroes emerge in troubled times, and circumstances make the hero. As I understand it, some of the founding emperors in your history led lives even more legendary than his."
Wang Shouye smiled too and continued.
"Second, his foresight and precise planning. He can always predict the scale and movements of beast tides in advance, and every rescue comes at just the right moment, as if he had a script in his hand."
"Maybe he awakened a superpower like Prophecy?"
"Third, the selective failure of technology worldwide. All precision weapons and complex machinery have been reduced to scrap, but communications and livestreaming networks alone remain intact, even becoming smoother and more stable."
"Mr. Su, please think about it. Who benefited most from this 'technological catastrophe'? Dongli Cang, who rose to power through superpowers. The old era's system of military force was completely dismantled, while the Superpower Management Bureau under his control became the new era's sole central institution of force!"
"That still doesn't constitute a direct reason, and he recruited the Superpower Management Bureau's members himself."
"Prefect Wang, I don't know whether you've read any webnovels from Great Yong, but there's a concept that explains all this: the Protagonist Aura."
"I know. Defying the heavens and changing his fate, foreseeing the future, gathering followers, beautiful women throwing themselves at him, a savior..."
"But we don't believe it."
Wang Shouye's tone was resolute.
All these elements fit together perfectly, and Dongli Cang was the sole central beneficiary and driving force. Any one of them could be explained away as "luck," but with all of them combined, the probability was infinitely close to zero.
On the livestream, Dongli Cang made his move. He hovered in the air, and with a gesture, violent lightning tore through the clear sky. Like a thunder god descending to the mortal world, he instantly cleared a vast empty zone in the surging beast tide below.
The survivors on the distant city wall erupted in thunderous cheers, their tears at having survived the ordeal mingling with boundless admiration and gratitude for the figure in the sky.
\O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/ \O/
You came from Dandong~ and brought me a blanket of snow-white~
After watching for a while, Su Luo smiled again.
"Wouldn't that make you the villains, then?"
"Yes, we are the villains." Wang Shouye stood and bowed to Su Luo.
"Mr. Su, we're about to launch a probing operation. If you're curious about the truth behind superpowers, if you want to see what this world is really like, then we beg you... please lend us a hand at the critical moment!"
Su Luo stood and walked out of the room, neither agreeing nor refusing.
Wang Shouye straightened up and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
The expected preliminary goal had been achieved: they had successfully piqued the interest of this unfathomable mage from another world.
Wang Shouye turned and fixed his gaze on Dongli Cang's flawless face.
In this grand drama, all living beings were chess pieces; whoever stood in his way was a villain.
But the Great Yong Court had no choice. Ever since the Superpower Management Bureau had grown in power, it had repeatedly ignored the court's orders.
And since Dongli Cang's subordinates had brazenly killed an official appointed by the court, the conflict between the two sides had long since become irreconcilable. Dongli Cang and his supporters had long regarded them as "remnants of the old era" who had to be eliminated.
"How laughable. Our Great Yong stood at the pinnacle of the world for a thousand years, flourishing in both civil and military affairs, yet now we're being forced into a desperate gamble by some 'protagonist' who appeared out of nowhere." Wang Shouye shook his head with a bitter smile.
Two days later, Su Luo was reading a report on the global beast disaster.
His gaze swept quickly over the densely packed data before settling on two bolded statistics:
Great Yong survival rate: 21% Global survival rate: 9%
The mortality rate was outrageous. The figures looked as though they had been filled in at random. Billions of people had died for no apparent reason.
The mutated animals were at least D-rank in strength, and they attacked cities by the thousands. Humanity, deprived of heavy weapons, couldn't possibly stop them.
Apart from the Superpower Management Bureau, no organization could directly hold back a beast tide.
At the same time, the report showed that governments in countries outside Great Yong had basically collapsed, leaving them in complete chaos and anarchy.
In fact, Great Yong existed in name only too. Its influence extended to only a few provinces, while the other surviving provinces were directly administered by the Superpower Management Bureau.
With that thought, Su Luo left the room and resumed his research on mutated beasts.
Lying on the table was a mutated bull. Its horns had been abnormally reinforced, curving menacingly and measuring over a meter long.
As far as the eye could see, most of the specimens were cattle, sheep, and pigs, both dead and alive.
Yes, not tigers, leopards, or bears. Not wild animals.
Su Luo had previously wondered where the world had gotten so many large wild animals to attack the entire globe. Now he no longer wondered.
All the large wild animals in the world combined didn't come close to the number of pigs, cattle, and sheep.
In other words, one scene could occur.
Ten thousand flying sows attacking a city!
After dissecting another mutated beast, Su Luo put down his tools.
Compared with the elusive "superpower orbs," Mutated beasts actually seemed more "scientific."
Inside every mutated beast was a special energy filled with extreme malice and aggression. Lodged within the creature, this energy actively absorbed the biological energy produced when its host digested food, slowly growing and strengthening the host in turn.
In other words, mutated beasts gained their strength by eating; it didn't appear out of nowhere.
However, this energy seemed extremely unstable. Once it left a mutated beast's body, it rapidly dissipated, making it difficult to capture.
After being introduced into a human body through special means, it caused the test subject to undergo a horrific malignant distortion in a very short time, eventually melting into a writhing lump of flesh that had lost all human features.
It was a dangerous energy filled with malice and difficult to use directly.
Su Luo had no solution either. He could only surmise that the supernatural system to which mutated beasts belonged had little connection to the superpower system.
Using specially made biological containers and the basic Spell Permanence Technique, he managed to preserve a few samples.
Su Luo named it Aberration Energy.
After putting away the samples, Su Luo turned expressionlessly to look at the woman who had barged into his laboratory.
She was extremely beautiful. Even to Su Luo, whose eyes had been exposed to all manner of top-tier beautification filters and AI-generated images in the information age, her appearance and bearing were stunning, with an untainted purity and nobility.
But none of that mattered.
"Who gave her access?" Su Luo pointed at her and asked the assistants beside him.
"I did." One assistant raised a hand.
"You're fired, effective immediately." Su Luo coldly pointed outside.
"You, get out." Su Luo then pointed at the woman.
The woman froze for a moment, then quietly walked out.
Su Luo asked an assistant, "Who was that?"