"Humanoid Wish Machine?"
Ji Donglai raised an eyebrow as he looked at the entry, his eyes full of surprise.
"Yes, Team Leader Ji." Elder Yang replied, "This is the entry provided by Valuable Item Appraisal. This life-form from another world is, in essence, a humanoid wish machine."
"The so-called cultivation techniques are simply things they manifest after making wishes. I suspect every person from that other world is a miniature wish machine capable of making wishes for themselves."
"Interesting. So everyone has superpowers? That's the truth behind martial arts!" Ji Donglai said, a hint of regret in his eyes.
After all, they didn't have the Wish Machine entry. That proved they couldn't practice those techniques.
Superpowered people had always been astonishingly poor at defending themselves. Their abilities developed abnormally in a single direction, leaving their strengths and weaknesses glaringly obvious. If they could make up for that with the otherworldly cultivation techniques, it would be excellent.
"Team Leader Ji, the real point is the Meme entry that came before it," Elder Yang reminded him. "This miniature wish machine can copy and multiply itself."
"Any life-form capable of independent thought that comes into contact with it will be irreversibly infected and turned into a humanoid wish machine."
Ji Donglai was startled. "You mean..."
"Yes. The dozen or so people with entries, including F-Superman, should now have another Meme added to theirs: Wish Machine."
Elder Yang gave a wry smile. "To prevent the Meme from spreading further, Dragon Hidden Base has now been sealed off and placed under quarantine. No one is allowed in or out."
"I'm afraid that won't be necessary." Ji Donglai covered his face with one hand, speechless. "There are probably people coming and going at the hundreds of other places where Energy Tides erupted. We can't stop it now."
Ji Donglai fell silent for a moment, then said, "Let's leave it at that for now. Keep studying the experimental subject. I've found an even better one here. Once we capture it, I'll send it over to you."
Before he could hang up, he saw a video call request from King of Bad Jobs. A bad feeling stirred in his heart.
"Boss, we've got trouble," King of Bad Jobs said with a cheeky grin on the screen. "Guess what? Hey, I lost the guy I was chasing. What a proper mess."
Ji Donglai's face darkened. He couldn't be bothered to entertain him, and replied perfunctorily, "Fine. Write up a report later. Give me a thirty-thousand-word reflection on what went wrong this time. And don't video-call me again. If you need something, have your operator contact me."
"Come on, Boss, why are you getting worked up? Yi jiao wo li gi—"
Ji Donglai didn't give King of Bad Jobs the chance to spout old internet memes from before the Great Cataclysm. He hung up at once, then said to Elder Li with a headache, "The experimental subject I mentioned just escaped. I'll send it to you once it's been captured."
Elder Yang nodded, then asked curiously, "Was that King of Bad Jobs just now?"
After Ji Donglai confirmed it, Elder Yang understood.
King of Bad Jobs was notorious for cracking old jokes at any time and in any place. Sometimes he would cram two or three trending internet memes and regional jokes into a single sentence. Nearly everyone had heard of him.
That afternoon, after Fang Can finished his lunch break, he heard a series of thunderous booms in the distance.
"Are they demolishing buildings over there?"
Fang Can frowned slightly. Something felt off. The sound in the distance came in a long series of rumbles.
He wasn't the only one. The students in the classroom all craned their necks to look toward the explosions. When they looked up, they saw countless enormous pillars of fire surging into the sky.
"This has to be a battle between superpowered people!" someone exclaimed.
At that moment, the entire city could hear the tremendous rumbling, and an intangible pressure emanated from the West District of Z City.
It felt like being late for work or school on a Monday morning. Everyone felt a weight settle in their chest and a faint sense of panic. The closer they were, the stronger the feeling became.
Ten kilometers away, it felt like the panic of being late for work. Five kilometers away, it was the pressure of getting the wrong result on a gacha pull. One kilometer away, it was the terror of realizing you were standing before an audience wearing nothing but your underwear...
Within a hundred meters, it was beyond mere pressure. Ordinary people who came close would lose consciousness instantly.
"This feeling..." Fang Can frowned. "Why does it seem so familiar? Could it be a mental-type superpowered person?"
As Fang Can thought, the enormous pillars of fire began to spread. Along with the rumbling, they pushed toward the city center, followed by air-raid sirens that rang throughout the entire city.
As the sirens blared, the whole city began evacuating in a practiced, orderly fashion. Incidents like this happened several times a year, so people were used to them.
Fang Can quietly followed the rest of the students out of school, but everyone knew this would turn out to be another false alarm.
Battles between superpowered people usually didn't last long. They were over within minutes.
Sure enough, less than two minutes later, while Fang Can was still going downstairs, the air-raid sirens stopped. The pillars of fire in the distance had vanished, and a teacher turned around and told everyone to go back to class.
"I knew it. It's always like this..."
"What a letdown. If they'd held out a little longer, we wouldn't have had to go to class today..."
"Boring. I want to see blood running in the streets..."
Hearing his classmates' quiet complaints, Fang Can didn't join the discussion. Instead, he wondered whether that inexplicable pressure from earlier had really been a coincidence.
The little interruption caused by the superpowered battle didn't throw him off. Fang Can continued going through the motions, pretending to be an ordinary student and studying step by step.
Compared with his life in the other world, where he practiced until his hands cramped every day and sometimes even had to injure himself to improve his talents, studying here was practically luxurious.
But the more comfortable it was, the more uneasy Fang Can felt, as though he was wasting his time in the classroom.
After all, with the possibility of being transported to another world at any moment, who knew what awaited him there? Any improvement would be worthwhile.
Knowing that this inexplicable restlessness wouldn't help him, Fang Can casually swallowed a pill of arsenic while studying, using the calm of Genius Mode to suppress his negative emotions.
"I can't spend too much time at school. I could learn everything we're studying now in a single night. Next, I should think about how to move beyond the school's curriculum."
Fang Can calmly pondered how long Talent 2 would take to heal him if he broke his arm or leg.
He also considered whether the extra study time would be worth the cost.
After weighing all the possibilities, the school day passed quickly. When Fang Can got home, his arm paused slightly as he reached into his pocket for his keys. Then, as though nothing had happened, he opened the front door.
But only he knew that his Extreme Misfortune Brings Prosperity talent had activated on its own. The heightened intuition that came with it let him sense that a predator at the top of the food chain was lurking somewhere inside the room.
Before you continue