Abnormal Crisis

The guest appearance was very simple.

It was just the charity gala scene in Iron Man 1, where William, as an aristocratic businessman, shook hands and exchanged greetings with Tony Stark.

This guest appearance also let William meet Stark's "real-life counterpart," Robert Downey Jr.

As for Megan, it seemed that her role had been greatly expanded because of William.

Originally slated to be the female reporter in the opening scene, she had been directly changed into a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent operating alongside Coulson, preparing to participate in a series of future Marvel films.

It could be said that Megan had obtained the highest-level resources directly because of the kidnapping incident.

Moreover, when William was leaving the filming location, Megan had hinted:

"Boss, I've been a devout Catholic since I was little... So, would you like to have dinner together sometime?"

William knew exactly what Megan meant.

She was merely being influenced by the Bridge Effect and Money Power.

He politely declined her, then went to Marvel's headquarters to ask about the comics involving USS and UBCS.

Unexpectedly, Marvel had actually created Abnormal Crisis.

It turned out that all kinds of rumors about the Athabasca Incident had already spread. Although the Canadian Government had officially clarified that some kind of super bacteria had broken out in the town,

quite a few people still suspected that the story was true. They believed the government had conducted some illegal experiment, which had resulted in a bacterial leak.

In this era of extremely poor image quality, someone had already uploaded a video online showing a formation of Umbrella helicopters heading toward Athabasca.

Netizens guessed that the government might have been unable to clean up its own mess and had ultimately asked Umbrella for help.

And Marvel's editors, who were already rather chuunibyou, gained a huge amount of inspiration from the internet.

Thus, Abnormal Crisis was born.

The story of the first chapter was roughly as follows:

The heroine was named Jill Valentine, originally the only female member of the 2nd Canadian Joint Task Force (JTF2).

After retiring, she returned to her hometown of Edmonton to work as a police officer and lived a peaceful life.

Then, after a series of disappearances and incidents of "people eating people" occurred in Raccoon City, north of Edmonton,

(Athabasca had been redefined by Marvel, changing it from a small- to medium-sized town with a population of two thousand into one with a population of fifty thousand.)

the chief dispatched Jill to Raccoon City to assist the local police in investigating the cases.

As soon as she arrived at the town's police station, she encountered an "individual" whose face had been brutally gnawed on. After being attacked, she embarked on a flight of self-redemption.

At the end of the story, Special Forces S, an Umbrella unit tasked with handling abnormal incidents, arrived just in time.

A gunner sergeant from STARS, Carlos Oliveira, repeatedly rescued Jill when she was on the verge of danger.

Then, before the government carried out a full-scale bombing, Jill, Carlos, and the other STARS members took most of the survivors with them and fled Raccoon City.

The first chapter ended with Jill riding in a helicopter and gazing at the city being bombed in the distance.

After reading the artwork in his hands, William could only say that these editors truly had wild imaginations.

He had merely told them about the concepts of the UBCS and USS units, yet Marvel had managed to come up with STARS.

It was unbelievable.

Moreover, Jill and Carlos's appearances, personalities, and other character settings resembled those of Resident Evil 3 Remake from William's Original World.

Jill was breathtakingly beautiful.

Carlos was strong and dependable.

The day William read this comic was also the second day after Abnormal Crisis went on sale.

Its sales immediately surpassed those of the original Super Hero series.

After all, the chuunibyou teenagers and netizens of the real world were all extremely interested in the Athabasca Incident.

Combined with Jill's character design and Umbrella's mysterious image, it instantly drained those people's wallets.

Furthermore, on forums across the major websites, the most frequently discussed topic was whether Umbrella possessed Special Forces for dealing with abnormal phenomena.

Some people even wanted to sign up directly.

Whoa.

Still, this was within William's expectations.

The system had said to conceal things from ordinary citizens as much as possible, but it had not said that society could never learn about them.

What if a Containment Operation became too large for the governments of the world to conceal?

Letting people prepare themselves psychologically through the media would prevent them from finding it impossible to accept and collapsing. It was much like all those movies from the Original World depicting battles against aliens.

Then Umbrella could use Halsey's brainwashing technology to gradually reduce the impact of the incident to a minimum.

Not bad.

Marvel had perfectly fulfilled William's expectations. It was time to throw another wave of money at them.

Microsoft's average share price was only twenty-eight dollars.

Hmm...

How cheap.

Sorry about this, Mr. Bill Gates, the world's richest man.

Umbrella immediately began buying Microsoft stock on a massive scale, becoming the largest shareholder in the blink of an eye.

William needed to get Xbox created and make Abnormal Crisis the launch game for the first console in this world.

By then, Umbrella's influence among the youth of North America and even the entire world would become tremendously significant.

Cultural influence would be established.

Actually, on the Forbes list of the world's richest people at the beginning of the year, the first and second places belonged to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

What about William?

He had not even made it into the top ten.

William was still being mocked by Wall Street newspapers. They claimed that he was afraid of the world learning how badly Umbrella was losing money, which was why he did not dare take the company public.

He wondered how those Wall Street idiots would mock him after he acquired Microsoft.

But William did not care about those rumors at all. Besides, as long as Umbrella was seen as a conscientious company by the ignorant masses, that was enough.

There had to be public opinion before there could be profits.

Otherwise, those newspapers would have vanished from the face of the earth long ago.

William's original plan had been to head to Hollywood on the West Coast and inspect the filming progress of Starship Troopers 2.

But he was afraid that a certain madwoman would lose her temper, so he worked overtime and handled all the matters above in New York within a week.

On February 14, 2007, he returned to Troy Base in Halifax City.

After arguing face-to-face with Andre, that old brawny man, William hurried to the entrance of The Hive's Underground Facility in the city center.

On the second floor of The Hive Research Center, in the employee residential area,

under the protection of Hunk and the other Alpha members, William followed a USS operative to Halsey's dormitory.

After leading William and the others to the door, the USS operative assigned to protect Halsey said with a slightly strange expression:

"Boss, Dr. Halsey hasn't been in a very good mood lately... You'd better be careful."

"Hmm?"

William wondered if she really needed to be angry just because he had been late by a few days.

Still, he nodded and said, "I understand."

He then pressed the call button for the sleeping quarters and said, "Halsey, open the door. Didn't you say you had some new equipment to introduce to me?"

However, there was no response even after a long while.

Just as he was about to press the button again to remind her, Halsey's somewhat bashful voice came through the speaker:

"C-Come... come in, but only you!"

"Okay."

Whoosh—

As the automatic door opened and closed, William walked into Halsey's dormitory.

But when he saw Halsey, he could not help exclaiming:

"How did your skin turn this color?!"