Tony's Nightmare

"Ah!" Tony Stark jolted awake from another nightmare.

"Hey, darling, what's wrong?"

The sexy woman beside him had been awakened by him, but showed no impatience. Instead, she came over thoughtfully and comforted him in a soft voice.

"Did you have a nightmare?"

Tony took several rapid breaths, accepted the bottle of mineral water his bedmate handed him, and drained it in one gulp.

He reached out and wrapped an arm around the long-legged supermodel with her curvy figure, smiling as he concealed his true feelings and teased:

"I dreamed those two big beauties of yours were fake, and it scared me awake. Haha..."

"You're awful. They were already this big when I was in ninth grade. How could they be fake?"

After flirting for a while, the woman wanted to do something that couldn't be written about, but Tony refused her.

The two of them embraced and lay back down. The woman soon drifted off to sleep, but Tony remained awake for a long time.

This was not the first day he had suffered nightmares. He had been having them for nearly half a year.

At first, the nightmares had been rather vague, but lately they had become clearer and clearer.

At first, he only had one every ten days or half a month, but now it happened almost once every two or three days.

Every nightmare contained the same scene: a boundless flood sweeping in and turning all of New York into a vast expanse of water.

God, this was New York. It was by the sea, sure, but how could there possibly be such a massive flood?

Besides, who was he? He was Tony Stark, a super-rich billionaire.

No matter how severe the flood was, what did it have to do with him?

The earliest dreams ended there, and he had not cared in the slightest. But as the dreams became clearer, he observed that man through his private satellite.

The man's indifferent expression and the icy coldness in his eyes, as though human lives were no more than grass, pierced straight through Tony's heart via the ultra-high-definition satellite feed, making his breathing quicken and his heart seem to stop.

Even now, long after waking from the nightmare, that gaze still lingered in his mind.

Days of nightmares had left Tony with a pair of dark circles beneath his eyes.

As for that, Pepper Potts said, "Tony, if you keep indulging yourself like this, I'm afraid you won't live to see your fortieth birthday."

Naturally, Tony would not tell Pepper that nightmares had been tormenting him. That would be far too embarrassing.

"Oh, Pepper, I've actually had a new idea. It's been tormenting me so much that I can't sleep peacefully even when I doze off."

Tony brushed her off casually. "Don't worry. Once I assemble it in the lab, everything will go back to normal."

As for what this new idea was?

Oh, Stark never worried about ideas. If Pepper wanted to see them, he could come up with a dozen at any time, each one capable of shocking the world.

Pepper sighed. Whether Tony was telling the truth or lying, there was nothing she could do. She could only pray that this overgrown child would mature someday.

After fooling Pepper into leaving, Tony began thinking of a way to solve the problem.

Since it had already appeared, he would just find a way to deal with it.

There was no problem in this world that could stump Stark.

First, he needed to know whether that person truly existed or was merely a fabrication of his dreams.

If the man was real, Tony would find him and bury him in money. Then all the problems would be solved.

If he could not find the man in the real world, that meant he was fictional. Tony was not some shut-in, and there was no way he would fear a two-dimensional character.

He picked up a drawing pen and began to sketch.

As an engineer, Tony had solid drawing skills. Before long, he had drawn the face of the man from his dream.

"Jarvis, search for this person worldwide. List everyone with a similarity of 95%—no, over 90%—in descending order of similarity."

He had expected the task to take a long time or return tens of thousands of results.

He had just gotten up to grab a cup of coffee when Jarvis submitted the search report.

"A candidate with 99% similarity has been found. Would you like to view it?"

Hm? That efficient?

Ninety-nine percent was practically an exact match.

Could there really be such a person in the world?

"Show me!" Tony forgot all about the coffee and sat back down immediately.

Jarvis projected a three-dimensional image of a man before him.

"Zhan Liu, of Chinese descent, claims to be a person from another world. He currently operates the 'Ultimate Limit Hall' in New York City's Chinatown, where he teaches martial arts from another world..."

"A person from another world? Wait, what's that on his forehead? Decoration?"

"That is a third eye."

"So he really is from another world! Why hasn't the media reported on him?"

"Many people online believe he is actually a Mutant, and that it is one of his mutant organs."

"I see."

Tony was well aware of the conflict between ordinary people and Mutants. The politicians at the top in particular regarded Mutants as pests and wanted nothing more than to wipe them out. How could they possibly publicize them so openly?

"Have I... met him?" Tony thought hard for a long time, but still could not understand why he had dreamed of the man. It was not as though he were some beautiful woman.

"After cross-referencing your respective travel routes, no intersection between the two of you was found."

"Then that's strange." Tony rested his chin on his hand and pondered carefully.

"Although I don't know much about psychology, since I dreamed about him, and it was a nightmare, then theoretically, I should be afraid of him. For example, maybe he beat me up in real life or something."

"Of course, no one can beat up Stark. I'm just giving an example."

"I understand, sir. You have no external injuries and no medical examination records."

"Jarvis, you really ought to learn to be a little more humorous."

"I am learning, sir."

"All right. Maybe I saw him online at some point and his appearance scared me... Am I really that timid?"

"No, sir. Based on big data comparisons, you are braver than the vast majority of people in the world."

"That's a very nice compliment, Jarvis."

"I was not complimenting you, sir."

"Haha... Telling the truth is the best compliment."

Now that he had found the real person behind the man in his nightmares, Tony naturally intended to deal with him in the way he was best at.

"Jarvis, have Happy come see me. I have something to tell him."

A moment later, Happy appeared before Tony.

"Happy, go acquire that Martial Arts School. He can name any price he wants."

"No problem. Leave it to me. I'll get your new toy for you as quickly as possible and at the lowest possible price."

Happy did not ask Tony why he wanted this done, because he had handled countless similar matters before. Some had reasons, but more had none at all. Perhaps they were simply decisions Tony had made on a whim, slapping his forehead and acting impulsively.

It did not matter.

Tony had the right to be willful. After all, he was that rich.