Chen Tao's Origin Story, Part Three (Part Two)
I was Chen Tao.
When I was young, I was an aloof and strange child. People who didn't understand me often took my abnormal aloofness as the reason I constantly kept away from crowds, and they weren't wrong. When others were socializing, I was reading books or comics. When others were dating, I was still reading books and comics.
What could you expect from someone who, when invited to play basketball, would simply say, "No, I want to read"?
But that didn't mean I was lonely. I had stories for company.
When I was about eleven, I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the first time. For a long while afterward, I imagined that I was searching for the entrance to a secret cave. It was hidden behind a dense primeval jungle. To enter that mysterious realm, I had to hunch over and lower my head as I passed through a doorway like the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, and then... everything would suddenly open up before me. The shadows of backlit trees cast patterns that wound across the ground like pythons; autumn leaves nestled against the shadows beneath the gentle sunlight; white elk moved through the forest, so holy they seemed divine; elves draped in flowing light followed fantastical missions...
As my body developed, that imagination gradually reached its peak at the age of twelve. One day, I accomplished a feat that still astonishes me: I used my imagination to turn an eraser into a coin.
Oh, I didn't "imagine" it changing. I used my imagination to change it!
The eraser really did slowly flatten before my eyes, then gradually began to shimmer with the bright silver sheen of a coin. I entered a kind of extrasensory world, where