Chapter 564: Superpower Emergence
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
Chen Chen only came up with this name because he thought of a TV series he once watched called The Boys.
The backdrop of the TV series was that it was a world where humans and superhumans coexisted in the same society. The civilization of the world was identical to the real world and humans with superpowers were treated just the same as any other commoners would be.
In a world where superpowers were commonplace, there existed individuals with superpowers but did not possess any proper skills to make a proper living and afford rent at all.
There was a financial company known as Vought International that specialized in making celebrities out of people with superpowers. They would dedicate their efforts to branding selected individuals into international stars.
With the influence of Vought International, superhumans no longer had to be reclusive hermits bound to the downtown area, but international celebrities boasting millions of fans. They would partic.i.p.ate in business activities arranged by the company and star in reality shows and talk shows, and even in their TV dramas. They were in an entirely separate category of celebrities.
They did occasionally partic.i.p.ate in crime-fighting, promoting the agenda of upholding justice, but it was mostly done to upkeep their picture-perfect image. At the core, they were merely products of capitalism sold under the guise of heroism.
Chen Chen had taken a similar approach to penetrate the entertainment market by branding the combat police as the BHB Combative Police Force or otherwise known as the bionic combat police.
Chen Chen gave disabled, retired policemen another chance at glory by transforming them into robocops and had them enforce the law on behalf of local policemen. He would then use this opportunity to create the image of superheroes around these n.o.ble, once-retired police forces.
Chen Chen did not do this out of interest in the revenue in the entertainment industry since he had no shortage of funds. All he wanted was to normalize the use of mechanical law enforcement.
As long as the public was in favor of using robots to enforce the law, he could eventually monopolize the police force in many local districts and turn the local police force into a robotic force headed by Blacklight Biotechnology.
Chen Chen’s long-term plan was slowly paying off. With the four major continents endorsing the bionic police, many other regions in Earth Federation began purchasing the XTN robots produced by Blacklight Biotechnology. The use of these XTN robots eventually extended into the army as well.
Over the years, the production of the XTN robot series under Blacklight Biotechnology had been optimized to create a stable military industry chain. It brought Blacklight Biotechnology tens of billions of dollars in profits every year.
Back to the topic at hand, the reason Chen Chen named the drug as L compound was that he had considered the implications of it.
Being injected with this drug was equivalent to having Chen Chen’s psionic seed implanted into a person. The person would receive the gift of psionic powers, but Chen Chen could also use the subject as nourishment for his growth to improve his psionic and Field strength.
This quickly gave rise to another problem. Only roughly thirty-thousand vials of this L compound could be created yearly, which meant thirty-thousand humans with psionic powers. Chen Chen quickly realized the logistic problem being that he did not have enough subjects.
The reason Chen Chen used felons as experiment subjects in the first place was that it was far more affordable than cloning humans. Clones took at least half a year and millions of dollars to fully mature. Meanwhile, acquiring felons from other countries would only cost somewhere in the range of ten thousand to a hundred thousand.
Even after all these years, Chen Chen had only expended several thousand felons for his many unethical types of research. Considering that most countries, especially the influential continents would not put a price tag on their citizens, his reliable source of felons had always been a handful of closely connected countries near Namibia.
Some other small countries or revolutionary armed forces were willing to sell as well, but their subjects were not death row criminals, but the local, poor people from their slum who were brought in forcefully. Naturally, Chen Chen would not accept this.
Chen Chen would not be so shameless as to act like a n.o.bel saint, but even he would not stoop to such a point of intruding on the basis of human morality.
Since Chen Chen wanted to raise his Field potency but wanted to avoid claiming the lives of the innocent, he naturally arrived at this idea – to build a utopia where commoners and people with superpowers could coexist.
This was something that Chen Chen had given a considerable amount of thought to as well. With the ever-increasing frequency and severity of dangers faced, only improving the technological standards of the world was no longer enough. In this case, strengthening mankind as a whole was a viable route.
A tactful approach had to be taken to achieve this. Things like T-virus, G-virus, and the black goo were ruled out since they were weapons of ma.s.s destruction and may be the catalyst to the all-out implosion of mankind. Moreover, it would not be used responsibly by mankind.
Apart from these options, the C24 chromosome was not viable as well since it was just as dangerous as the T-virus.
After ruling out the unappealing options, the L compound was what remained.
Chen Chen planned to use this thing to manufacture the first batch of superhumans. The most critical component for this working out was that there had to be at least a ten percent chance for the L factor in their genes to be inherited by future generations.
This meant that there had to be a certain possibility that the offspring of the people injected with the L compound would be born with psionic powers.
Using this method, there would be more humans with psionic powers in time.
Meanwhile, the lucky ones blessed with psionic power could hone their strength over time. The stronger they became, the more valuable they were when Chen Chen eventually decided to fuse their consciousness with his.
However, Chen Chen decided that he would not absorb the humans with psionic powers, at least not until they died of natural accidents or old age. When that happened, the psionic power they had spent all their lives honing would be submitted to Chen Chen and nourish his psionic growth...
Just like what the Consciousness Stealer did.
This was Chen Chen’s ultimate plan.
Compared to the Consciousness Stealer’s ruthless approach, Chen Chen’s was far more humane comparatively. After several centuries, as more psionicists pa.s.sed on, Chen Chen’s psionic power would grow exponentially.
Another decisive factor was that Chen Chen had access to two worlds for him to carry out his plans simultaneously...
“The total population in the real world borders around eight billion people. Meanwhile, due to circ.u.mstances, the parallel world only has a population of around a billion people.”
A month later, Chen Chen looked at the two thousand vials of L compound packaged together in the first round of production, a pensive look came upon him. “The brainless Black Knights are good for nothing. It does appear that this strategy applied in the real world is a far more reliable approach.”
“Of course!”
Little X chimed in. “Since you’re going for the long haul, well-thought-out approaches like this will always be better. Besides, psionic powers will be greatly beneficial for mankind since they’ll be able to defend themselves in times of crisis.”
“I’m more concerned about social order.”
Chen Chen shook his head. “The existence of psionic power will inevitably bring about social turmoil. I’m worried about the potential of society spiraling out of control because of this, it will not be any good for either Blacklight Biotechnology or human civilization as a whole if something like that were to happen.”
“If that’s what you’re concerned about, we can always start small first.”
Little X advised. “It’ll be like dripping a drop of ink in the ocean. Couldn’t we avoid violent turbulence if we start with making very minor and subtle changes?”
Chen Chen chuckled upon hearing this. “That’s true, a mere drop of ink in the ocean will be almost unnoticeable and in time, we can begin pouring in more ink gradually... So be it, let’s start with releasing a hundred vials of L compound vials during the first month, then we can tweak the numbers from there on.”
“Hm!”
Little X responded, “I think you should be more concerned about the ongoing ‘Mankind Anti-aging Project’. The average human lifespan is long enough as is and is expected to surpa.s.s a hundred years very soon. This means that your psionic powers harvesting efficiency will be similarly affected.”
“That’s alright, I can afford the wait.”
Chen Chen shrugged, a faint spark appeared in his eyes as he said this, “The Consciousness Stealer has been slumbering for several centuries and is expected to continue to do so. The worst that can happen is that it wakes up earlier than we expect it to, in which case I can simply abandon the parallel world and retrieve my body from there. The point now is that the significance of this plan working out is more important than the mission of killing the Consciousness Stealer.”
“Understood!”
Little X saw the point Chen Chen was trying to make. It seemed that the discovery of the L compound had changed their trajectory and inspired Chen Chen to set up a thousand-year-plan. Compared to this, the original task of killing the Consciousness Stealer was not as important anymore...
...
John Oppenheim stood in front of a mirror. Greeting him was his reflection, a handsome-looking young man who wore a dazed expression.
John Oppenheim was an ordinary blue-collar worker. He went to an ordinary university and lived an ordinary post-graduate life. He worked in an electronic company as a programmer.
This was the way his life was meant to be, an ordinary lifestyle until the day he died. However, everything changed for him on the day a meteorite fell from the sky...
It happened almost half a year ago.
Half a year ago, a meteorite merely the size of a regular fist landed in his backyard in the middle of the night. When he picked it up upon discovering the next morning, his hand was plastered with an unknown liquid.
The unknown liquid came from within the meteorite.
Shortly after that, John began having strange dream sequences. Before he managed to make sense of these cryptic dreams of his, the military came to his doorstep.
Dozens of military members clad in intimidating protective suits came to his house and took him away. He was then taken to a concentration camp.
Just like that, John was locked up for three whole months.
The entire time he was in the concentration camp, he was not informed of what was happening. However, he had a suspicion that it must have had something to do with the meteorite he came into contact with.
Just as John thought he was doomed to spend the rest of his life in a foreign concentration camp, the military suddenly put him on a plane and took him back to his city.
Shortly after that, the military issued a notice and told him and many others that they had contracted a lethal and highly infectious disease, which was why they had to be quarantined for the last three months.
The good news was that they were the lucky ones that managed to survive it. This terrible plague the meteorite brought had claimed close to two million victims worldwide in the meantime.
Although John Oppenheim came out the other end of the tunnel with his life intact, he was still haunted by weeks of repet.i.tive nightmares. The freakish isolation experiment he experienced had traumatized him and nearly pushed him to the edge of insanity. He only managed to recover from it quite recently.
When John woke up on a certain day, he immediately sensed that something was off.
Everything that happened last night seemed like a mirage. He had the slightest recollection of how he managed to get home after work and how he went back to his bed. Furthermore, there was an aching numbness coming from the back of his neck.
However, even after rubbing his hands over his neck to inspect it, he could not find anything noteworthy.
Unbeknownst to John, there was a tiny red dot on the part where he felt the sting, damage left behind by a needle head...
After that, he looked at the time and saw that it was time to head to the office. Although he managed to keep his life over the last eventful half-year, he did lose his job in the process. It took him two months before he finally landed another job.
For someone like John who was close to his thirties at this point, it was not easy to stumble into this job. He quickly shaved off his patchy stubble and threw himself into a suit before hurrying off to work.
John got into his car in a hurry and drove toward the city center. His house was located in the suburbs, the most common single-family home seen in Northern America. Such houses were extremely common in the suburbs of Northern America, known for their generous s.p.a.ce and affordable prices. Most people living in Northern America lived in such houses as well.
It was as much a blessing as it was a curse for him since this meant John had to drive an hour to the city center every day to work. His original plan was to find an apartment in the city nearby the office but failed to find an apartment that satisfied his requirements.
This was the disadvantage of living in the suburbs. After half an hour had pa.s.sed, John found himself gazing helplessly at the endlessly backed up highway. When the traffic light at the intersection finally turned green, he immediately flicked the turn signal and swung the steering wheel in another direction so he could cut into another lane.
John planned to take an alternative route that should help him shave some time off this lengthy commute.
Unfortunately, the moment he spun the steering wheel and swerved into another lane, he suddenly felt his car quaking quite violently. He heard the all-too-familiar sound of an abrupt crash and he quickly turned around to verify that the back of his car had been hit by a pickup truck.
“Blasted!”
John furiously clapped the steering wheel while spitting profanities.
“You complete idiot, don’t you know how to drive!”
The enraged owner of the pickup truck got out and took rapid, purposeful stomps toward John.
It was a textbook redneck. He had a large turban wrapped around his head to hide his bald spot and a giant patch of beard that would put most dwarves to shame. The lower half of his face and his bulging nose were burning with red.
Irritated, John stepped out of his car as well and made a big show of waving his arms about. “There’s a ma.s.sive traffic jam ahead and I’m just trying to take a detour, can’t you see me putting on my signal?”
“Little white boy, when did you put on your signal lights?”
The redneck roared. John could immediately smell the strong scent of alcohol.
“Woah, woah, woah...”
John held his arms in front of him in a defensive position and stumbled backward innocently. “Sir, could you not get so close to me. Also, it would be nice if you could be more civil...”
“Little boy, I’ve seen pigeons larger than you!”
As soon as the redneck said this, he suddenly shifted his temperament and smiled to reveal rows of pale yellow teeth. “Well, anyway. You’ll have to compensate for the damages you’ve done, let me take a look...”
The redneck turned around, swinging his wide hips side to side as he inspected his darling pickup truck, “S***. Would you look at this, you ruined the high beam. You’ll have to at least pay me a thousand dollars for that!”
“A thousand dollars, are you kidding me?”
John immediately felt nauseous. He knew it was impossible to reason with someone like this. “I’m sure you can tell that my car absorbed most of the damage. Also, you’re the one trailing...”
“Little boy, who do you think you’re speaking to!”
Like an unpredictable storm, the redneck suddenly piped up again upon hearing John’s reply. He glanced at the onlookers observing the early-morning drama from inside their cars, then he stepped forward and grabbed John by his collar. “I think a suit-wearing royalty like you needs someone to put you in your place!”
John felt a tremendous force throwing him off balance. He was not a helpless, feeble man the drunken man would lead one to believe since he was 1.82 meters tall and relatively fit. However, when compared to the bearded redneck that easily stood more than 1.9 meters tall, he was heavily outmatched.
“Maybe if you get down on your knees and lick my b.u.t.t, I can consider letting you off this one time.”
The drunken redneck continued running his mouth, making sure that the people nearby could hear his drunken slurs and witness his might.
“B*stard...”
A flash of anger glimpsed past John’s eyes but he was not foolish enough to convince himself he could put up a fight against this person. However, he could not find a way out of his predicament as well since his shirt collar was locked in the redneck’s iron clutches.
The redneck’s aggression, coupled with the onlookers who seemed entertained with his troubles, made John irrationally angry.
“Not going to kneel?”
The redneck challenged John again. “Then I shall teach you a lesson, boy...”
John winced, his mind a whirlwind of anger and fright. It was at this moment when he suddenly felt something conjured and materialized from the depths of his mind and a part of him instinctively summoned this ent.i.ty from the depths of his mind. Immediately after that, the redneck’s expression became contorted with horror as he let go of John’s collar before he was flung away violently!
“Bang!”
The redneck was slammed into his pickup truck!
“Oh my G.o.d!”
“What was that...”
The onlookers exclaimed...