Infinite Flow Male Protagonist

"This is so damn hard!"

Wei Xiuming, who had taken a full-on psychic blast earlier, lay facedown on the ground. When nobody was looking, he edged toward a corner, doing his best to keep the monster tearing through the base from realizing he was perfectly fine. The monster had complete confidence in his own abilities and had no habit of finishing off his targets.

Wei Xiuming had been in this world for more than two years, and only today had he finally gained control of this body. He'd had some truly rotten luck.

Still, he had to thank the original owner. It was only because the original owner's consciousness had taken the hit for him that Wei Xiuming had a chance to remain.

He looked back over his previous life and found there was hardly anything worth remembering. He'd even filled in most of his knowledge of Naruto through countless fanfics. He couldn't understand why he'd been granted the kind of transmigration opportunity usually reserved for a protagonist.

After coming to this world, Wei Xiuming hadn't gained control of this body. Aside from the original owner's unusually strong will, his background had doomed him to be nothing more than a tool. Even with Wei Xiuming occupying his body, he couldn't escape that fate.

This tool even had a very cool codename: Weapon X.

That's right. This was the world of X-Men.

Colonel William Stryker, a major villain who had been beaten to death by countless transmigrators over a hundred times, was even more forceful and ambitious than he'd been in the movies.

Turning mutants into weapons through experimentation was only an insignificant part of the X-Weapon Project. It involved far more projects than the ones publicly known, and the original owner—the tool Wei Xiuming now inhabited—was the product of one such weapons program.

The program extracted the genes of powerful mutants and used them to create embryos through artificial breeding. While the subjects were still infants, Master Illusion would implant suggestions in their minds, turning them into effective weapons. Compared with the bizarre range of mutant abilities, the standardized, modular X-Weapon market was much larger.

The source of the genes they'd chosen was the world-famous Magneto, Erik Lehnsherr.

The program had gone through three generations. The first was based entirely on cloning, and ultimately succeeded in producing ten individuals.

A knockoff was still a knockoff. The clones' abilities never matched those of their original, though they were still extremely powerful. But compared with the larger-than-life Magneto, they didn't measure up. Forced maturation and overuse of their powers on missions also caused them to age rapidly. If the clones were sent out frequently, an entire batch would die off in less than two years.

Drugs could keep the clones alive, but the cost was too high—several times what it took to cultivate Magneto's cells from embryos to adulthood. So the first-generation program was abandoned.

The second generation was a revised version of the first. To extend the clones' lives, the scientists used less maturation drug during cultivation and gave the embryos more time to develop, lengthening their lifespans.

Perhaps Magneto had already been quite old when they obtained his blood. The clones still aged faster whenever they used their powers.

Even so, they were far more useful than the investment required to produce them.

Unfortunately, the scientists in charge of the cloning program were stupid enough to run a comparative experiment. Some of the second-generation clones weren't brainwashed by Master Illusion, and inherited part of Magneto's personality. Once they'd grown to a certain point, they rebelled, inflicting heavy losses on the base's personnel and property.

After that, all the mature clones from this version were eliminated. Only one embryo was retained for cultivation. This was the third-generation Weapon X—the body Wei Xiuming now inhabited.

As one variable in a controlled experiment, the deranged scientists came up with a particularly heartless idea.

The surviving subject wasn't a simple clone, but the product of genetic engineering. In addition to Magneto's genes, they'd gotten hold of a blood sample from Deathbird. They combined the two sets of genes, then cultivated the result into an embryo.

The subject developed at the same rate as an ordinary human embryo. When the second-generation clones rebelled, he was still growing in an Artificial Amniotic Membrane and wasn't caught up in the fighting.

Later, the original owner was born like an ordinary baby, then made to grow at an accelerated rate. Master Illusion gradually planted suggestions in his mind, while the boy received professional training until he became a killing machine.

The original owner's powers manifested when he looked sixteen. Because he combined the genes of two mutants, he had two abilities: accelerated healing and magnetic field control. Like the clones before him, his powers were weaker than those of their genetic sources, but the problem of his lifespan had been solved.

After one disaster after another, William Stryker shut the program down. The original owner was its sole surviving subject. Two scientists gave him a name using their own surnames: Clark Kent.

The timing of Wei Xiuming's arrival in this body had been a remarkable coincidence. He could have taken control of it, but just then, Master Illusion had attempted to influence the original owner's mind for the first time. His ability interfered with the process, and Wei Xiuming failed to merge with the body.

But with the original owner's consciousness blocking him, Wei Xiuming wasn't controlled either. Instead, he became something like a second personality.

In this state, Wei Xiuming couldn't affect the outside world. He could only passively receive information, like watching a movie from a first-person perspective. To keep from losing himself, he repeatedly replayed his memories—all the way up until just now.

Not long ago, William Stryker and several of his Weapon X operatives had launched a surprise attack and captured Professor X. Stryker brought him to this base hidden inside a dam, then had his own son, Master Illusion—Jason Stryker—implant illusions in the Professor, indirectly controlling his thoughts.

Stryker hadn't done this for any reason other than to carry out his long-standing goal: completely wiping out the scum he saw in mutants.

With Professor X and the brain-wave device he'd previously forced Magneto to replicate, Stryker could locate every mutant in the world. Then he could kill them all on a mental level, and after that, the world would be "clean."

Faced with extinction, the X-Men and Magneto's group had joined forces to attack this US military base in Canada.

Among them, one man of East Asian descent stood out. He radiated the glow of a protagonist from head to toe, had ambiguous relationships with several of the X-Men's good-looking women, and was living the life of a winner.

During the attack on the dam, he'd also proved a powerful asset, displaying multiple abilities. With curved shots and Mind Storm, he'd laid out wave after wave of US soldiers throughout the base. His ability to clear a room was MAX.

The original owner had been one of the defenders, but before he could use his power over metal, he'd taken a full-on Mind Storm. That was when Wei Xiuming learned just how ruthless that fellow from his homeland really was.

Wei Xiuming had spent two years as an adult soul trying to overcome the original owner's consciousness and Master Illusion's methods, without success. But under Mind Storm, neither of them lasted even one round before collapsing completely. And then Wei Xiuming was free.

"That's definitely the protagonist of an Infinite Flow story. No doubt about it."

Recalling the style of Infinite Flow protagonists, Wei Xiuming, still lying on the ground and pretending to be dead, reached his conclusion.

To be honest, Wei Xiuming admired those Infinite Flow protagonists. The ability to adapt to power systems from different worlds alone was enough to make most people jealous.

After all, the gap between one person and another was greater than the gap between a person and a dog. In some worlds, humans were closely related to monkeys. In others, they were the products of alien genetic engineering. In some, they were formed from soil made of a creator god's remains. And in still others, they were shaped by deities to resemble themselves.

Because of their different origins, only the people of a given world could wield that world's power system.

Yet the Infinite Flow protagonist could cultivate anything, from the traditional martial art of Wing Chun to Gun Fu and curved shooting, then Daoist Magic or sorcery, and finally Primordial Dao Attainment at the story's climax—all without a hitch. It was truly enviable.