"Myths, legends, and all records of the Extraordinary are fake? Says who, you?"
"Just because you haven't seen a Ghost, that means they don't exist? You've never seen a spider the size of a human head or a sperm whale, either. Does that mean they don't exist?"
"You think Magic is illogical? 'You think'? Who are you? Are you even qualified? Oh, you're sooooo amazing~"
"Done arguing. This place is a toxic cesspool, full of nothing but trolls."
Slender, strong fingers with well-defined knuckles flashed across the screen. The taps were gentle, yet full of force. After typing the last letter and hitting send, the message shot out over a smooth 5G network. At the same time, the phone screen, which had been displaying a forum app, went dark.
The black screen reflected the face of a black-haired teenager in a cyan shirt. He was handsome and bright, with a neat and fresh-faced look—definitely what you would call a clean-cut pretty boy.
A fallen leaf could be seen resting in his neat, layered hair.
After his daily sh*tposting and verbal sparring on the forum, Su Zhou felt refreshed and full of energy. He plucked the leaf from his hair, and even the ache in his back from the long, bumpy bus ride through the mountains seemed to fade away. He was practically glowing.
"Sigh, sh*tposting really is a great way to de-stress." He wiped his phone screen, got up from a tree stump by the road, and stretched like a cat. "Ah, that's the stuff!"
The vast primeval forest of the Kachin Mountain Area separated the Zhengdan Border, like a sharp sword cleaving the two nations in two. On one side lay Zhengguo's Dianzhou Land, and on the other, the Shan Country Mountain Forest.
On the edge of the mountain's primeval forest, outside the only hotel in the tourist village, a modest parking lot was already packed with cars from all over. Three tour buses with Chinese lettering on them were particularly conspicuous, occupying one corner of the lot.
Su Zhou stood in the shade of a tree by the road, breathing in the fresh air. He was waiting for the rest of his tour group to finish lunch so they could head to the observation point inside the mountain area.
July 23, 2014. Wednesday. Summer vacation. The Kachin Mountain Area, Shan Country.
Su Zhou, a 17-year-old high school junior, was spending his last bit of free time here before the grueling final year leading up to his college entrance exams.
He was heading to the Kachin Snake Valley, a wildly popular new tourist spot, to see for himself what the deal was with the "colony of Two-headed Serpents" that had been all the rage online.
"Ancient myths from northwestern Shan Country tell of a Seven-headed Snake God, and the Snake Valley was once a place of worship for it."
"For Two-headed Serpents to appear here... it's either a marketing gimmick or a sign that something mystical is reawakening. Either way, it's definitely not a coincidence."
Muttering to himself, Su Zhou spun his phone on the tip of his right index finger. A rectangular phone isn't well-balanced, making it difficult to maintain its dynamic balance on his fingertip. It constantly threatened to fly off.
But with just a slight wiggle of his finger, the teenager's incredible control would re-establish the balance, keeping it spinning. While twirling his phone, he glanced at the watch on his left wrist. 'One fifteen in the afternoon. Factoring in assembly and travel time, we should get there by three.'
'I can't wait.'
To reiterate: Su Zhou, 17 years old, student.
Lover of anomalies and kaidan, a skilled athlete, a man of action to the core, and a firm believer that all myths, legends, and tales of the Extraordinary are anything but fiction.
And also, a prospective Superpower User!
Because his grades on the province-wide final exams at the end of his junior year were good and showed improvement, his parents had rewarded him with one last chance to let loose before senior year. He chose to go abroad, to the primeval jungles of Shan Country, to see with his own eyes the two-headed monster snakes rumored to have the blood of the Snake God.
As for whether it was all a deceptive gimmick or if there were truly Extraordinary elements involved, Su Zhou had his own way of telling fact from fiction.
After all, as a Superpower User, he could actually see things that were 'out of the ordinary'.
Ten years ago, when Su Zhou was still in elementary school, he got into a fight—one against six—and made all six of them cry. Not knowing what to do with the child, his teacher kept him after school and called his parents to come in for a talk.
While he was waiting for his parents to come get him during Dusk, standing in the hallway as punishment and bored out of his mind, Su Zhou faintly saw what looked like whitish shadows drifting at the far end of the school corridor.
Ignorant and fearless back then, he stared hard to get a better look. The white shadow was actually a little girl, happily skipping and hopping around. Half of her face was blurry, with only faint blue specks of light where her eyes should be. When she realized Su Zhou could see her, she quickly dissipated into mist, vanishing from his astonished gaze.
Of course, no one believed him. They just said he was a mischievous troublemaker who did nothing but lie... but Su Zhou had truly seen it. He couldn't be bothered to argue with the adults about whether he was lying or not. Seeing was believing.
Ever since then, Su Zhou had been able to see strange shadows and hear the dizzying 'Spirit Sound' that no one else could.
Because of this, he developed a passion for all sorts of anomalies, eagerly delving into the myths, legends, and folk kaidan of various countries.
Of course, he didn't see these anomalies every day. But at the stroke of midnight, or just as the night faded and the morning sun was about to rise, Su Zhou could always see black or white shadows wandering the streets or his neighborhood, emitting the Sound of Ghosts that only he could hear and perceive.
If that were all, Su Zhou might have deluded himself into thinking they were just hallucinations from academic stress and only sleeping five hours a night—or perhaps Auditory Hallucinations, visual hallucinations, or even a brain tumor.
But in recent years, Su Zhou had encountered more and more strange situations. A few years ago, while passing through the city center plaza at night, he even saw the phantom of an old man in a military uniform smiling and waving at him.
'Young man, you've got a lot of spirit! Make sure you study hard!'
Although the old man in the uniform had only offered some ordinary words of encouragement, the fact that he quickly dispersed into the wind was undoubtedly an 'Extraordinary phenomenon'! This only made Su Zhou all the more fanatical on the subject, reinforcing his unshakeable conviction.
Moreover, perhaps because of that encounter, his physical condition seemed to improve steadily from then on. Now, he had grown so strong that it was starting to scare even himself.
To put it in simple, easy-to-understand terms: the Su Zhou of today could crush a marrow bone with his bare hands. He didn't need crackers to eat crab or lobster; a simple squeeze of his fingers was enough to shatter their thick shells!
The world's top athletes can run the 100-meter dash in under ten seconds. Su Zhou, despite having no formal training, had privately tested himself and could run it in under 11 seconds—the standard for a Level 1 National Athlete!
And his other physical metrics—weightlifting, endurance, swimming, lung capacity—were all on par with professional athletes. In some specific areas, he even surpassed them.
He could occasionally see Ghosts, his physical fitness was beyond ordinary, but he had yet to surpass the limits of humanity... Su Zhou called this current state of his 'prospective Superpower User'.