Awakened Bloodline

On his eighteenth birthday, Leon rolled over when he got out of bed and crushed the bedframe.

Everything at home had become fragile to him; a brush against it would shatter it, a touch would crack it.

It was as if overnight, he had been transported into a world made of hydrogen, where every brick and tile was as thin as paper.

When Tony heard the commotion, he kept exclaiming, "Oh my God," amid the wreckage. He gave up on holding the birthday party and hurriedly gave Leon a full-body examination.

Strength: thirty tons. Speed: one hundred meters per second. His body was impervious to blades!

Overnight, everything had changed beyond recognition!

And that was not all.

Leon could feel himself continuing to grow stronger beneath the sunlight.

Tony's research confirmed it as well. When Leon's cells were exposed to sunlight, they remained continuously active and underwent exponential leaps in improvement.

"This is practically Superman!" Tony stared in stunned amazement. "I wouldn't even be surprised if you suddenly shot heat vision tomorrow."

Leon froze for a moment, then suddenly understood what had happened to him. He nodded. "Tony, you're right. I really am Superman now!"

A piece of inexplicably comprehensible information surfaced in his mind.

--Upon reaching the adult age of eighteen, the ability granted by the original world has been unlocked. Kryptonian Bloodline awakened. Space-Time Travel ability awakened!

There was no need to explain the Kryptonian Bloodline. It was the signature race of the neighboring DC world; all they had to do was bask in sunlight to grow stronger.

Unfortunately, he seemed to possess only an ordinary Kryptonian Bloodline.

Simply soaking up the sun probably would not be enough to reach the level of Silver Superman or Gold Superman.

As for Space-Time Travel, it was exactly what its name implied.

As long as he had sufficient stored energy, he could travel freely through other times and spaces.

Whether he could only travel within the Marvel Zhou or break beyond Marvel and reach broader Zhous remained to be tested.

But no matter what.

His cheat had finally arrived!

Leon's joy was written all over his face as he hugged Tony and cheered.

Tony immediately broke two ribs and his shoulder blade in tribute, and was admitted to the operating room that very day.

That night, Leon stayed beside Tony's hospital bed, both annoyed at his own carelessness and puzzled as to why this cheat had waited so precisely until he came of age.

It had wasted eighteen whole years of his life!

If his bloodline had awakened when he was young and he could have absorbed sunlight from childhood, he might already have been able to do whatever he wanted.

Maybe when he was one year old, when Howard and his wife were assassinated by Bucky, he could have taken the opportunity to kill Bucky instead!

Did cheats these days have underage anti-addiction restrictions too?

But he had lived for over twenty years in his previous life. How was he still considered a minor?

Leon was utterly baffled.

Three months later, after discussing it with Tony.

Leon applied to the university to defer his enrollment by three years.

He boarded a manned spacecraft personally built by Tony and flew into deep Zhou space.

The spacecraft remained in orbit between Earth and the sun.

There was no day or night here. Every minute and every second was spent under sunlight.

Half a year passed.

One hundred and eighty days.

Throughout that time, Leon kept himself strapped to a titanium alloy plate, facing the sun's rays directly.

He could feel the surging power flowing through his body like rivers, constantly stirring up towering waves.

Even his breaths carried immense force, like thunderous winds and roaring lightning!

"The original plan was to soak up the sun for two and a half years. By then, it would be right before the Chitauri invasion, and I should have enough strength to protect myself."

He clenched his fist. "But now it seems that half a year is already enough!"

Leon was somewhat cautious.

More than a decade spent living in constant fear beneath the shadow of the Time Management Bureau.

Had given him a severe fear of insufficient firepower.

Whenever he went out, he wished he could bring along a mercenary squad, every one of them carrying a machine gun and rocket launcher.

After his Kryptonian Bloodline awakened.

He had gained the right to pursue power.

He even wished he could plunge directly into the sun, sleep there for ten or twenty years, and only then return to the world.

The current Leon could not quite be called a seeker of the Dao, but he possessed the same relentless pursuit of power as an ascetic.

Stronger! Keep getting stronger! Become stronger than everyone else!

More than a decade of unease had filled Leon's heart with a craving for power.

"No, it's not enough. It's still nowhere near enough!" The next second, Leon rejected the complacency that had just arisen in his heart.

He clenched his fists tightly, his marble-like muscles bulging. "I've only spent half a year in the sun, and I'm already getting full of myself. I really deserve to die!"

"Kryptonian power isn't enough either. I only have an ordinary Kryptonian bloodline, and there's a limit to how strong I can get just by absorbing sunlight!"

"To become stronger, I won't be a Kryptonian... ah, no. Besides soaking up the sun, my next step is to find more sources of power!"

"Magic, technology, martial arts—anything is fine. I'll try every method of becoming stronger that I can find on Earth first!"

After half a year of sunlight, Leon had now awakened every ability possessed by Man of Steel Superman.

Heat vision, freeze breath, bioelectric field... including Super-Brain!

With Super-Brain, the speed at which he learned knowledge and abilities would now be unprecedented.

Reading a book to learn a skill would be as fast as copying electronic data from a disk.

From then on, the only thing limiting him would be the speed at which knowledge could be input, not the speed at which he could comprehend and integrate it.

Leon could now say arrogantly: the speed at which language fed knowledge into him a few bytes at a time was as slow as a snail crawling across the ground!

"But before that..." Leon tilted his head, his gaze drifting toward Earth.

His ears twitched, and his sight shifted in the direction Tony's voice came from, passing through layer after layer of obstruction.

The spacecraft's hull, Earth's atmosphere, dust on the surface...

Other than lead, nothing in the world could block his vision.

In less than a second, he saw Tony sleeping inside a cave somewhere in the Afghan desert.

"Obadiah, Bucky, and Hydra... it's time to settle these matters once and for all."

For eighteen years, he had bowed and scraped. Then his bloodline suddenly awakened; today, the dust had cleared and light had emerged, and only then did he know that he was himself!

With power came confidence.

Though he felt deep down that these powers were still far from enough.

Leon also knew that he truly possessed the qualifications to do a few "small things" on Earth.

"Tony, I'm coming to save you," Leon said softly.

He casually grabbed a pair of pants floating in the air and put them on, then drifted forward and gently pushed ahead with his right hand.

Everything was silent in the vacuum.

There was no sound at all.

The spacecraft hatch, which could not be damaged even by an impact of tens of thousands of tons of force.

In an instant, floated down slowly like a thin black robe, gradually drifting away through Zhou space.

Leon lowered his head and floated out of the cabin.

He stood between Earth and the sun.

Golden sunlight covered half his body.

On the other side was the azure Earth.

He looked up at the sun, then down at Earth, as though he had become a god of the world, capable of holding up heaven and earth with every gesture.

But Leon knew it was all false.

He still had a long way to go.

Suppressing the heroic spirit rising in his heart once more.

Leon bent forward, paused briefly, then shattered the air in an instant and shot straight toward Earth.