Awakening

A thousand meters beneath the Northern Institute Research Center in Mountain Orange City, in a silent, deserted basement, stood five upright incubation chambers in a brightly lit room. A naked figure floated inside each one.

Suddenly, a naked man in one of the chambers snapped open his eyes.

It was as if he had been asleep for a very, very long time. His mind was completely blank. Only after a long while did his vacant eyes gradually come into focus.

Who am I?

That was the first question he asked himself.

I... I... I am... I am... I am... I am... I am Hong... I am Hong... I am Hong Mo. The answer surfaced in his mind, one word at a time.

As that question was answered, it was as if a floodgate had opened. Countless memories surged out, filling his entire mind.

Like an old computer that hadn't been used in years suddenly being flooded with a massive amount of data, Hong Mo's brain crashed. It hadn't completely died, though. Like an aging computer, it continued to run slowly, digesting memories that had once been familiar.

After who knew how long, Hong Mo finally opened his eyes again. His memories had completely returned.

Although his memories had come back, they only went as far as the moment before he'd passed out. He had no information at all about how he had ended up here. Still, it wasn't hard to guess. Judging by his surroundings, he'd become one of those legendary lab rats.

The incubation chamber was over four meters tall and reached the ceiling. It was filled to the brim with some kind of pale green liquid. Now that his memories had returned, so had his old habits. Hong Mo took a breath, and the liquid inside the chamber flowed through his nostrils and into his lungs.

"Cough, cough!"

Hong Mo had swallowed a mouthful, as expected. Only then did he realize there was no air in the chamber. Of course there wasn't. How could there be air in an incubation chamber? But if there was no air, how had I stayed alive? Does my body no longer need to breathe?

As the thought turned over in his mind, Hong Mo surveyed his surroundings. It was a fairly spacious room, but there was nothing unnecessary inside—only four other incubation chambers. Hong Mo was floating in one of them.

Where exactly was this place?

Hong Mo reached out with his left hand and touched the glass in front of him, wondering how strong it was. Suddenly, he jolted and stared at his left hand.

It was perfectly intact!

Hong Mo stared at his left hand in confusion. At his will, his fingers flexed and curled nimbly. He remembered Mao Shaohui blowing it to pieces with a single shot. Hong Mo really wanted to laugh. He didn't know why; he just did. When he'd lost his left hand, he hadn't said anything, but deep down, he'd been quite upset.

But now, his left hand had grown back, though he didn't know why.

He clenched his fist and punched hard. A dull thud sounded in the silent room. Still a little weak. It seemed he wasn't as strong as before. Hong Mo thought this over, then clenched and opened his fist several times. As he exerted himself, veins bulged along his arm.

Well, it wasn't bad.

Once he'd calmed down, the faint sound of trickling water reached Hong Mo's ears. His punch had cracked the glass wall of the chamber, and the liquid inside was now slowly flowing out.

So fragile!

The thought crossed Hong Mo's mind, but he didn't dwell on it. He followed up with another punch from his left hand. With a crash, glass fragments burst out from the point of impact and scattered across the floor with a series of crisp clinks.

Hong Mo climbed out of the chamber, letting the unknown liquid slide off his body.

Ahh~~! Hong Mo stretched, then tensed his whole body. The air around him seemed to compress, and a sharp bang rang out.

Well, who knew how long had passed? I hope I haven't woken up to some kind of apocalypse. Hong Mo suddenly remembered plots from certain novels, where the protagonist woke up after some experiment only to find the world had ended and a new age had begun.

It couldn't be that cliché, could it?

Hong Mo turned to look at the other four incubation chambers. He was somewhat curious about his four "companions."

Two men and two women. The women looked beautiful, judging by their faces, and seemed to be twins. But now the twins floated in their chambers with pale faces, their hair gently swaying, giving them an eerie air, like two corpses floating in water. No—they were corpses. There wasn't a trace of life in them.

One of the men was extremely burly, a full three meters tall, with well-defined muscles that seemed to brim with explosive strength. The other looked more ordinary, like an average person.

He didn't know them. Hong Mo finally confirmed that he'd never seen any of the four.

None of the four was breathing or had a heartbeat. To Hong Mo's surprise, this reminded him of something from his memories: the zombies trapped in a room in the movie Resident Evil.

Probably not, right? What did he mean by that? Zombies, of course. Once the thought had entered his mind, it wouldn't go away so easily. Hong Mo even wondered whether he was a zombie who'd changed and then regained consciousness. What a clichéd plot. Hong Mo pinched himself. His body was still a little stiff, but it was nothing like a zombie's rotting flesh.

He couldn't figure it out!

Hong Mo couldn't be bothered to think about it anymore. Even a genius with an IQ of 200 couldn't work anything out from so little information. Besides, his own IQ probably wasn't that high. Ignoring his four "companions," Hong Mo walked toward the door.

As for breaking the chambers and letting them out?

Come on. Hong Mo didn't have time for that. Curiosity killed the cat. If these things really were like the zombies in the movies, he couldn't be sure how things would end for him.

The door was made of alloy, fitted tightly together with no gap at all. But that wasn't going to stop Hong Mo. After all, his superpower was electromagnetism.

He pressed his right hand against the alloy door. At his will, current flowed into it, and he expanded his superpower field.

Ugh~~~~! Hong Mo clutched his forehead as a stabbing pain spread from between his eyebrows. It took quite a while to subside. What was going on? A bad feeling passed through Hong Mo's mind. Something had definitely gone wrong with his body, but what?

Hong Mo tried repeating what he'd just done. First, the current—no problem. He still had his superpower. Then he expanded his superpower field to probe the surroundings. Another stabbing pain shot through him, but since he was prepared, it wasn't as unbearable as before.

The moment his superpower field expanded, it reached less than ten meters beyond his body before recoiling as if it had been jolted. At the same time, pain stabbed between his eyebrows.

Damn!

Hong Mo cursed inwardly. He and Mu Siyu had come up with the name "superpower field." It was an energy field they'd awakened some time after gaining their superpowers. They'd discovered that the superpower field could amplify their abilities by infusing it with their energy.

For example, electric current needed a conductor, such as metal, to flow. To travel through the air, it needed an extremely high voltage—lightning, for instance, exceeded a billion volts. The current inside Hong Mo's body certainly didn't have that kind of voltage, yet it could travel through the air because of his superpower field. And perhaps because his power was electromagnetic, Hong Mo's field had a wide range, like an electromagnetic field, making it possible to search a large area.

But clearly, there was something wrong with his superpower field.

Hong Mo rubbed his forehead, then slowly released current again. This time, he didn't use his superpower field, but as the current spread, the room's electrical wiring still appeared in his mind.

Found it! The control switch for the alloy door.

Hong Mo was delighted. He sent current into the switch, and the heavy alloy door slid open to either side. Beyond it was another room, just like the one he'd come from, with rows of incubation chambers. The room was enormous; Hong Mo couldn't see where it ended. Inside the chambers floated all kinds of living things.

Or rather, parts of living things' corpses.

At the sight, Hong Mo's stomach tightened. There was no blood or gore, but the neat, sterile space made the silent pressure even worse. Hong Mo turned his head, and in the chamber beside him, a large-headed infant had just turned to face him. Its deformed body and tiny, underdeveloped frame were visible through the skin of its head; Hong Mo could almost see its complex brain.

The dead infant's lifeless eyes seemed to possess a strange power, drawing Hong Mo's attention and holding it fast.

Ugh!

Hong Mo covered his mouth, fighting back his nausea as he slowly headed outside. What the hell was this place?

What Hong Mo didn't know was that the instant he opened the door, a piercing alarm suddenly rang throughout the entire Northern Institute Research Center. Hong Mo could control current and open the door directly, but he had skipped the step of entering an access code. To the entire security system, his action looked like a direct intrusion—and a top-level one at that, since this was the very bottom of the Northern Institute Research Center, deep underground.

The piercing alarm rang through the research center. A white-haired old man hurried toward the monitoring room.