Raging Undercurrents

The Third Cafeteria was always noisy at lunchtime.

Lin Mo and Zhou Ming carried their trays and struggled through the crowded masses.

After much difficulty, they found a table in the corner that had just been vacated.

Lin Mo had ordered two servings of red-braised pork, two marinated chicken legs, a serving of stir-fried greens, three liang of rice, and a large bowl of free seaweed and egg-drop soup.

"Lin Mo, you've got quite an appetite today." Zhou Ming clicked his tongue as he looked at Lin Mo's piled-high tray. "I've never seen you eat this much before."

"Growing up." Lin Mo answered indistinctly and stuffed another large piece of red-braised pork into his mouth.

The aroma of the meat exploded across his palate—the richness of the fat, the firmness of the lean meat, the salty sweetness of the sauce...

His taste buds seemed to have been magnified several times, and every bite brought an ultimate sense of satisfaction.

"Damn, isn't your eating posture a little too exaggerated?"

Watching him wolf down his food, Zhou Ming couldn't help swallowing. "Anyone who didn't know better would think you hadn't eaten for three days."

"Hungry." Lin Mo responded indistinctly and shoveled in another large mouthful of rice.

He was truly hungry.

The craving for energy that came from the depths of his cells nearly drowned out his reason.

He felt as though he could hear his stomach roaring, his blood boiling, and his muscles greedily absorbing nutrients.

Zhou Ming shook his head and began eating as well, but his gaze kept drifting toward Lin Mo despite himself.

"Seriously, aren't you acting a little strange today?" Zhou Ming finally couldn't hold back any longer.

"What about me is strange?"

"It's hard to say..." Zhou Ming looked him up and down. "It's like... you've gotten a little bigger? And the way you're eating—it's as if you've become a different person."

Lin Mo paused for a moment, then continued shoveling rice into his mouth. "You're imagining things. I stayed up late last night, so I'm especially hungry today."

"What were you doing up late? Watching porn again?"

"Studying." Lin Mo kept a straight face.

"Studying what? Human anatomy?"

The two exchanged a glance and burst out laughing.

Zhou Ming didn't press him further. In college, who didn't have a few odd quirks?

There was even a guy in the dorm next door who got up at five every morning to meditate.

Lin Mo breathed a sigh of relief, but remained wary inside.

The changes brought by the increase in his Attributes were more obvious than he had imagined.

An ordinary person might only think, "He looks pretty good today," or "He seems a little more muscular."

But someone familiar with him, or someone with keen powers of observation, would definitely notice something unusual.

He had to be more careful.

He slowed down his eating, doing his best to make himself look more "normal."

But just then, an accident happened.

Lin Mo reached out to pick up the soup bowl.

Crack!

The ceramic bowl split along the rim and broke in half!

Soup splashed everywhere, spilling all over the table.

"Damn!" Zhou Ming jumped in fright. "When did you get so strong?"

Lin Mo stared at his fingers, stunned.

He hadn't used any force at all just now!

No—or rather, what he considered "normal strength" had already far exceeded that of ordinary people under the enhancement of Tier 3 Attributes.

"The cafeteria's bowls are really poor quality." Lin Mo quickly recovered and complained while cleaning up the mess. "This needs to be reported."

"Give me a break. You're just too strong." Zhou Ming rolled his eyes. "Then again, you were pretty strong even when you held a pen before."

That did give Lin Mo a reasonable explanation.

As an art student who had held pens and carving knives for years, it was perfectly normal for him to have more strength in his hands than ordinary people.

He took the opportunity to change the subject. "By the way, you said those people who were unconscious in the hospital woke up this morning? And their health had improved?"

"Yeah!" Zhou Ming immediately perked up.

"My relative said that after those four people woke up, the doctors gave them a comprehensive examination.

"Guess what? Their indicators were frighteningly good!

"Blood pressure, heart rate, blood lipids, muscle mass... everything was at an athlete's level!"

He lowered his voice. "What's even stranger is that after one of them woke up, he casually bent the iron railing beside the bed! It was solid iron!"

Lin Mo's heart jolted.

Internal Test Players!

Those four people were definitely Internal Test Players!

The game's Attributes had been brought back into reality, so their physical abilities had increased dramatically.

"What did the hospital say?" Lin Mo asked.

"What else could they say? A medical miracle!" Zhou Ming scoffed.

"But I heard the higher-ups sent people to investigate and took all four of them away. They said it was to 'cooperate with research.' Who knows?"

Lin Mo fell silent.

The government had already noticed.

That made sense. Overnight, large numbers of cases of "sudden coma—brain death" had appeared across the country.

And with people waking from comas with abnormally enhanced physical abilities, how could such a major incident possibly remain hidden?

He simply didn't know how much the government had learned.

"Did your relative say anything else?" Lin Mo pressed.

"No." Zhou Ming shook his head. "The hospital issued a gag order and forbade people from spreading rumors.

"But I heard it isn't just our city. Similar cases have appeared in many places across the country. There are rumors online that it happened overseas too!"

"Overseas?"

"Yeah! It's even trending on Twitter. From the looks of it, it's spreading like some kind of plague—it's happening all over the world!" Zhou Ming swallowed, then abruptly changed the subject. "And there's something even stranger."

As he spoke, he hurriedly pulled his phone from his pocket, tapped the screen rapidly, opened a video, and held it out. "Look at this. It was filmed at the market in the western part of the city this morning."

The video quality was extremely poor, as if it had been secretly filmed with an old-fashioned phone.

The footage showed a pork stall, where a bare-chested, burly man was confronting several people in uniform.