Gwen Stacy felt that today was the unluckiest day of her seventeen years of life, bar none.
At breakfast, she had merely worn a cropped athletic tank top. Just one, the kind with a high waistline that actually showed very little, but her father, George Stacy, the New York Police Department chief renowned for his uncompromising impartiality, had looked her up and down as though inspecting a crime scene, set down his coffee, and launched into a fifteen-minute lecture.
"Do you know how many creeps are out there?"
"Dad, we don't have classes today. We're visiting a science expo, and our teachers and classmates will be with us the whole time."
"A science expo isn't an invitation to exhibit human anatomy."
Gwen Stacy rolled her eyes and went back to her room to change into a conservative black long-sleeved shirt she could have worn to a funeral. Only then did her father nod in satisfaction and return to his now stone-cold coffee.
Her bad luck wasn't over yet.
When they gathered at school, her good friend Betty came running over excitedly with two cups of hot cocoa, suddenly stepped on her own untied shoelace, and pitched forward. Not a single drop of either cup went to waste. It all landed on Gwen Stacy's freshly changed black shirt.
"Oh my God! Sorry, sorry, sorry!" Betty fumbled in a panic, scrubbing wildly at Gwen Stacy with tissues.
Gwen Stacy looked down at the spreading brown stain on her chest. After a long silence, she forced a smile. "It's fine. I thought this shirt was too plain anyway. Now it has a pattern." Betty nearly cried when she heard that.
By the time they reached the science expo's exhibition hall, Gwen Stacy thought her bad luck ought to be over. She stood with her classmates in front of the genetic modification exhibit, listening to the guide talk about genetically modified spiders and the potential applications of biological silk. Her classmates were all yawning, but she listened with rapt interest. She was quite interested in this stuff.
Suddenly, a flash of white light exploded across her face from a corner of the exhibition hall, as bright as an aircraft's landing lights, blinding her completely. Right after it came an earth-shattering bellow:
"Peter! Say cheese!"
The sound drove Gwen Stacy half a step backward. She covered her eyes, the white flash seemingly still burned into her retinas, her ears ringing. Everyone in the hall fell silent at the roar. Squinting through her dazzled vision toward its source, Gwen Stacy saw a burly man who definitely stood over two meters tall in the corner, wearing a hoodie and carrying a professional camera.
The burly man's smug expression froze instantly. He lowered the camera, opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again.
"Fuck."
Security guards headed toward the burly man. Her classmates began whispering. Gwen Stacy stopped rubbing her eyes and realized he hadn't been shouting at her, but at a skinny boy with glasses standing up ahead. His face was bright red, and he was now pretending not to know the burly photographer. The chubby boy beside him kept asking, "Peter, who's that? Who's that?" But the boy named Peter merely covered his face with his hands, like an ostrich trying to bury its head in the dirt.
Gwen Stacy had no time for that nonsense, because she was starting to feel something was wrong.
Something had bitten the back of her neck. A burning sensation climbed up her spine, then spread through her limbs. Her heartbeat accelerated, her skin grew hot, her fingertips tingled, and the things before her eyes seemed to shift nearer and farther away. She hurriedly pulled off whatever had bitten her and brought it closer for a look. It was a bright red spider with blue markings.
"Gwen Stacy? Are you okay? Your face is so red-" Betty leaned closer.
"I'm a little dizzy." Gwen Stacy braced herself against the display stand beside her. "Maybe my blood sugar's a little low."
As her classmates scrambled to support her, only one thought remained in Gwen Stacy's head: That spider was venomous.
Gwen Stacy didn't know how she had gotten home, but her anxious father was sitting beside her now.
"It's okay, Gwen Stacy. Dad's here. It's okay."
She wanted to say, "Dad, I'm fine. A spider just bit me," but her lips were numb and wouldn't move at all. After that, she truly couldn't remember anything.
When she woke again, she was lying in her own bed, the covers pulled up to her chin and a cool towel resting on her forehead. A glass of water and a plate of untouched sandwiches sat on her nightstand. It was already dark outside, and light from the streetlamps filtered in. She heard voices in the living room, an argument conducted in hushed tones. Her father and mother were debating whether to take her to the emergency room. Her mother said, "The doctor said it was just an allergic reaction," and her father said, "An allergic reaction wouldn't leave her unconscious this long."
Gwen Stacy tried moving her fingers. They moved. She raised a hand before her eyes and turned it over twice. Nothing had changed. She pushed herself upright on the bed. Aside from a slight itch where she had been bitten on the back of her neck, everything else seemed back to normal-
Wait.
Gwen Stacy stared at her wrist. Something on the surface of her skin seemed to have caught the light just now, giving off an extremely faint sheen, like some sort of transparent coating. But it appeared for only an instant, vanishing with a blink. She poked her arm with a finger, and her finger simply stuck to her sleeve. It stuck! There was a faint suction between her fingertip and the fabric. It took her roughly three seconds of effort to pull her finger free, and the fabric made a faint popping sound.
Gwen Stacy sat on the bed, staring at her fingers, her face a spectacular mixture of excitement, fear, and confusion.
She tried pressing her entire palm against the nightstand. It stuck to the surface, as though a layer of suction cups had appeared out of nowhere between her palm and the wood.
"What the hell-" Gwen Stacy kept her voice as low as possible.
In the living room, her parents were still arguing. Her mother clearly had the upper hand, because her father's voice had dropped until only an occasional indistinct syllable remained.
After making sure the door was closed, Gwen Stacy quietly climbed out of bed and placed both hands against the wall, followed by her feet. She discovered that she was actually sticking to the wall.
This was amazing. No, more accurately-this was so cool.
She moved a hand upward. Her palm clung securely to the vertical wall. When she lifted it, it left no marks, and the paint remained intact. She tried moving her other hand, then her feet. Now her entire body was clinging to the wall, half a meter above the floor, like a bewildered giant gecko.
Footsteps suddenly approached outside the door. They were so quiet she would never normally have heard them, but now she seemed to hear them perfectly clearly.
Gwen Stacy slid off the wall faster than she could register, landed on her backside at the edge of the bed, and grabbed the covers and towel to cover herself. Her movements were so fast that even she found them unbelievable. At almost the exact same moment, the door opened, and her mother stood in the doorway holding a glass of warm milk.
"You're awake?" Her mother smiled in relief. "How do you feel?"
"Much better." Gwen Stacy accepted the milk with a sweet smile. "Just still a little sleepy."
"Then get some more sleep. We'll call you out tomorrow. Don't go to school."
"Okay."
The door closed. Gwen Stacy put the milk on her nightstand and looked down at her open palms, the corners of her mouth slowly lifting.
She rolled out of bed and walked over to the wall. This time, she didn't use her hands. Instead, she raised a foot and tried pressing its sole against the wall, first her left, then her right, standing at a right angle to the wall. She lifted one foot higher, then the other. She tried taking three steps along the wall like that, until her whole body was more than a person's height off the floor.
Gwen Stacy turned toward the window. Outside lay New York at night, countless lights stretching into an unbroken expanse, with the occasional siren drifting over from afar.
Suddenly, she really wanted to try it. If she could climb and walk on walls, what about the buildings outside?
Just then, her father's voice came from outside the room. "Another case. I'll be working late tonight. Get some rest, and remember to tell Gwen Stacy not to spend too much time on her phone." Then came the sound of the door closing.
Gwen Stacy sighed softly. Never mind. She wouldn't worry him. She would get a good night's sleep and figure out these powers tomorrow. George Stacy might be an old stick-in-the-mud, but he really did need fewer things to worry about.
Gwen Stacy lay back down, pulled the covers to her chest, and closed her eyes.
But her fingers were still unconsciously picking at the covers, her fingertips sticking and releasing over and over with faint little popping sounds.
Her phone screen went dark. Then it lit up again. An unfamiliar number had sent a strange text. Gwen Stacy picked it up and glanced at it.
"What will you do with these powers?"
Gwen Stacy's smile froze.
She sat bolt upright and looked around the room. No one. She ran to the window and pulled back the curtains. Outside were only a quiet street and cars parked along the curb. The apartment building opposite was dark, without a single figure in sight.
She stared at her phone screen, a chill running down her back. Then she looked at the message again.
She thought for a long while, then typed a few words and sent them:
"Who are you?"
The reply came quickly. Just one sentence:
"Someone who got you bitten by a spider today. I'm sorry."
Gwen Stacy stared at the screen in a long silence. That big guy behind the camera today. The one who had shouted something and frightened the spider into biting her. Was it him? He was apologizing?
Gwen Stacy typed another line:
"Who exactly are you?"
The reply was only two words:
"I'm sorry."
After that, the number never replied again.
Gwen Stacy stared at her phone for a long time. She had wanted to tell her father about this bizarre incident, but her finger hovered over the call button before she finally put the phone down. She pulled the covers over her face, thought for a moment, then threw them back and gazed at the ceiling, the corners of her mouth slowly curving upward.
She didn't know who this man was, but the way he spoke to her-for some reason, she found it a little funny.
He had scared a spider onto her, as though that were some enormous deal. How strange.
She rolled over.
Never mind. I'll think about it tomorrow. But what exactly does that guy want? Will the old man run into any danger, going out this late?
Meanwhile, on the rooftop of an apartment building three blocks away.
Lin Xiao stood beside a water tank, holding a pair of binoculars and looking with a complicated expression at the Stacy family's newly curtained window. A strawberry lollipop hung from his mouth, swiped from Peter's schoolbag.
Lin Xiao took the lollipop out of his mouth, his thoughts returning to a few minutes earlier. Out of curiosity, he had gotten Doupao to fill him in on everything related to Gwen Stacy. He had seen Gwen Stacy's ending in The Amazing Spider-Man, falling from a tall building and breaking her neck...
"Here's to you in another world. This time, I'll protect you."
As soon as Lin Xiao finished speaking, the Stacy family's window opened. A figure in a dark bodysuit, with a shapeless piece of black cloth covering her face, climbed out through the window. With the soles of her feet against the wall, she walked straight down, her movements unpracticed but clean enough.
The lollipop nearly fell out of Lin Xiao's mouth.
"Fuck, what the hell is that crazy girl doing this late? When I catch her, I'm kicking her ass with my size forty-five boots."
He swallowed, shoved the lollipop back into his mouth, pulled up his hood, and went after her.
As he ran, a blue light flashed before his eyes.
Ding-three-star mission "Save New York Police Department Chief George Stacy" triggered. Mission location-
Lin Xiao didn't even look. As he ran, he mentally swiped the glowing screen aside and shut it off, moving as quickly as though he were scrolling through short videos.
"Quit bothering me. Can't you see I'm busy?"
The glowing screen disappeared. The lollipop bobbed in the night wind.
He failed to notice that, before the blue light vanished, the bottom line of the mission description was pulsing faintly, as though desperately trying to remind him of something:
Time remaining: 02:00:00. Reward: freely assignable points ×5.