Chapter 46
Bai Hewei looked down at the building block that had rolled to his feet, feeling somewhat dazed.
Why does this thing look so incredibly familiar?
There had never been any toy building blocks in his home.
Even if Bai Hewei wanted to deceive himself, it was impossible.
He closed his eyes, then opened them again, hoping this was just an illusion caused by pulling an all-nighter.
Unfortunately, the building block was still resting right by his feet.
“No, how did it get out? Wasn’t it still inside the box, which hadn’t been opened at all?” Bai Hewei massaged his temples. “I didn’t even go near it, and I definitely wasn’t the one who took it. Who is it? Who framed me by deliberately planting this thing on my body?”
Even if Bai Hewei was incredibly slow-witted, he knew this thing had to be worth a fortune.
Several captains from the Special Operations Department had been dispatched, and even Mister Number One had stepped in on behalf of the Central Research Institute—this alone proved the item’s monumental value.
Moreover, it was the very bounty that those small-time thugs had stolen.
Now that the stolen good had shown up inside his own house, he wouldn’t be able to clear his name even if he had a hundred mouths.
Bai Hewei couldn’t care about anything else now.
Resistance means a severe sentence; you’ll rot in jail. Confession means leniency; you get to go home for the New Year!
Bai Hewei immediately dialed Wen Zhiyi’s phone number.
There was no helping it; calling Huo Ling or An Tingyu at a time like this probably wouldn’t do any good. The item was wanted by the Central Research Institute, so he ultimately had to contact them.
As luck would have it, the only person he knew from the Central Research Institute was Wen Zhiyi, and he happened to have the man’s number saved.
What was he waiting for?
The call rang for a good while before it was picked up.
“Chief Wen? It’s Bai Hewei. That building block from earlier somehow ended up inside my house. You guys should check if the building block inside your box is still there. Better yet, why don’t you just dispatch someone to come pick it up?” Bai Hewei explained the situation crisply in a few words. “Let’s get this straight first—I didn’t steal it. I just finished taking a shower, and it tumbled right out of my pocket.”
At that moment, Wen Zhiyi was inside the Central Research Institute, preparing to hand things over to the personnel from the Special Operations Department.
Upon receiving Bai Hewei’s call, Wen Zhiyi politely hung up, then immediately ordered Luo Chuan and the others to break the box open.
Sure enough, the box was completely empty.
“Impossible. This box never left my hands.”
“Where did the item inside go?”
“Could someone have activated a superpower to teleport the item out?”
“But the detectors didn’t show anything abnormal either.”
Several captains went pale with shock. They had taken such airtight precautions; could someone truly have bypassed their senses and detection instruments to teleport the item out from right under their noses?
“You all may leave first,” Wen Zhiyi said, looking as though he had long anticipated this outcome. “You don’t need to involve yourselves in this matter any further; our side will handle it.”
“Understood.”
The captains exchanged glances. Sensing the underlying complexity of the situation, none of them wished to be dragged into it any deeper.
Wen Zhiyi sighed. After a long pause, he called Bai Hewei back.
“Mr. Bai, is that building block currently with you?” Wen Zhiyi inquired.
“It’s on the floor. I didn’t dare pick it up, worried it might be something like a landmine that triggers if you touch it. My parents and grandmother still live here, after all.” Bai Hewei recalled that Mister Number One hadn’t opened the box on the spot either, which suggested this thing was probably rather bizarre and shouldn’t be touched carelessly.
Having lived this long, Bai Hewei still possessed a basic level of necessary caution.
Besides, what if this building block served as a superpower medium for some Evolver? He absolutely had to act with extreme care.
“It’s fine, you can pick it up,” Wen Zhiyi said with a sigh. “Originally, this matter shouldn’t have been disclosed to you. But since things have already reached this point, we have no other choice. For my subsequent words, Mr. Bai, you can just treat them as a story.”
“I understand the rules completely,” Bai Hewei quickly voiced his loyalty.
“Five years ago, Evolution Day commenced, and a vast influx of Evolvers emerged. In reality, however, a scattering of Evolvers had been cropping up even before Evolution Day; they were simply highly adept at disguising and protecting themselves, rarely drawing the notice of the outside world,” Wen Zhiyi explained slowly. “And once Evolution Day began, these individuals who had already awakened previously started undergoing a secondary awakening.”
“Isn’t that basically a super-evolution?” Bai Hewei was instantly reminded of an anime he had watched during his childhood. “What, do they turn into their Ultimate Form?”
Wen Zhiyi let out a soft chuckle. “A tiny minority of individuals are indeed like that. In reality, though, the number of Evolvers who awakened before Evolution Day was already small, making secondary awakenings an even rarer phenomenon. However, whether it’s a primary or secondary awakening, none can escape the alterations within their evolutionary factors.”
“On the day of Evolution Day, across various regions of the globe—particularly in densely populated areas where Evolvers appeared in clusters—a peculiar toy building block would frequently manifest.”
“Initially, no one paid any attention to these building blocks; after all, they appeared utterly ordinary, devoid of any evolutionary energy.”
“However, when a few underground research facilities began dissecting the corpses of certain Evolvers, they discovered an anomaly in one of the bodies.”
“When this individual was still alive, his Evolver rank was merely D-class. Yet by the time his corpse was delivered to the underground lab, it had become C-class. If it were merely a rank discrepancy, it could be chalked up to a measurement error. But the staggering part was that the deceased had clearly been a strength-type Evolver in life, yet the dissection proved he had become a mental-type Evolver. He couldn’t possibly have undergone such a radical transformation in a short period of time.”
“Refusing to believe in coincidences, the laboratory thoroughly searched the deceased’s former residence, along with every person and object he had interacted with. But the volume of items was simply too vast. Left with no choice, the lab employed the most primitive method—controlling variables. Moving forward, they stopped posting bounties for Evolver corpses, targeting low-level living Evolvers instead.”
“They sent these low-level Evolvers one by one into the room where the evolved corpse had resided, had them interact with the people the deceased had known, and repeat the actions he had taken.”
“Screening them one by one.”
“In the end, someone among that group of Evolvers truly succeeded in evolving.”
“Thus began a new round of the control-variable method. This time, the researchers finally pinpointed a tiny building block.”
“Word is, the deceased had discovered it near a Forbidden Zone when he was still alive.”
No one knew how many low-level Evolvers’ lives had been sacrificed, but they had ultimately secured a result.
The underground labs were ecstatic, launching extensive research into this building block in an attempt to uncover the secret to triggering a secondary evolution in Evolvers.
While it appeared to be a building block on the surface, it was actually a cluster of energy condensed to the absolute extreme, even harboring a slight property of being “alive.”
Human understanding of evolutionary energy remained far too superficial; current technological means could only utilize, guide, and measure it, but were entirely incapable of thorough analysis.
They knew what it did, but not why it did it.
It was exactly like how humans can know how to light a fire without fully understanding the mechanics of thermal kinetic energy.
Some suggested that these building blocks might be the root cause behind ordinary humans turning into Evolvers. Others hypothesized that they were extraterrestrial artifacts—an alien conspiracy.
“Consequently, that underground lab dispatched operatives everywhere to hunt for more building blocks, wishing to trigger a comprehensive secondary evolution for all their Evolvers in one fell swoop.”
“As it turned out, the newly discovered building block didn’t fulfill their desires. Instead, it stripped all the Evolvers present of their abilities, reducing them to ordinary humans.”
“As for the building blocks discovered by other laboratories, half of the Evolvers died during the secondary evolution, while the other half suffered a complete backlash and went insane.”
The power of the building block was exactly like a blind box.
If luck was on your side, you could undergo a secondary evolution, or even alter the type of your superpower.
If luck was poor, turning back into an ordinary human was the best possible outcome; failing that, dying directly from the backlash was entirely standard.
Furthermore, the higher an Evolver’s rank, the more relatively flawless the arrangement of evolutionary factors inside their body already was, meaning they would actually be less susceptible to the building block’s influence.
However, the building block also displayed a property identical to the Forbidden Zones—it would actively trail behind powerful Evolvers, drawn by their presence. Sometimes it could even traverse tens of thousands of miles to manifest beside a certain Evolver, only to abruptly vanish into thin air one day.
They acted exactly like two magnets. If separated by a vast distance, there might not be much connection between them. But once the distance closed, they would be relentlessly drawn together.
Yet if you flipped the alignment of the two magnets, they would suddenly repel each other.
Formulating bold hypotheses while seeking careful verification.
Wen Zhiyi deduced that every single building block might possess a “distinct personality.”
Some building blocks could trigger evolution, while others could induce devolution.
There were even building blocks that existed purely to torture people, delighting in rewriting the evolutionary factors inside an Evolver’s body to refashion a completely new individual.
Therefore, even though they were researching the exact same building blocks, the findings produced by different laboratories were completely polarized.
The reason Wen Zhiyi refused to let Evolvers touch the building block was precisely because they remained ignorant of this specific block’s “personality,” making a rash approach highly dangerous.
Yet the common traits shared by these building blocks were also highly apparent—the longer an Evolver possessed a building block, the more physical and mental issues would continuously manifest.
Once the alignment of an Evolver’s internal factors was fixed, attempting to rewrite it through sheer external force—whether through evolution or devolution—was no different from violently reshaping their body and mind. A torment of this caliber was absolutely not something that could be easily alleviated by medication or other technological means.
Even the top-tier Evolvers who desired strength above all else could not endure this brand of torture.
In fact, for top-tier Evolvers, the existence of the building block carried far more risks than benefits.
Securing a building block might allow them to take a step further, but they were already top-tier powerhouses; advancing another step wouldn’t change their treatment packages much.
However, if the building block ended up resetting the evolutionary factors inside their body, they might plummet directly from S-class to D-class. Furthermore, they were already accustomed to using their specific superpower; if it suddenly switched to another type, wouldn’t they have to start everything from scratch?
Consequently, these top-tier Evolvers actively steered clear of the building blocks instead.
“The current Evolver serums, along with the energy instruments used to disperse the energy of the Forbidden Zones, were all initially derived from research data on these building blocks,” Wen Zhiyi said calmly. “At present, only the laboratories of a select few nations possess these building blocks. But it is dynamic—at its core, it is a cluster of energy, meaning it can vanish at any moment. According to our detection data, ninety percent of the building blocks in the world currently reside deep within the Forbidden Zones.”
“Three years ago, the Central Research Institute was attacked by a few spies who had managed to infiltrate, and a building block was stolen. Under the relentless pursuit of the Special Operations Department, those spies fled into a Forbidden Zone. Shortly afterward, their life signs vanished, and the building block’s whereabouts became unknown,” Wen Zhiyi said. “If I am not mistaken, the piece by your side is the very one that was stolen back then.”
And this affair would inevitably implicate a covert faction hidden within their nation.
How did this building block emerge from the Forbidden Zone? How did it end up stashed inside a spy’s safe box? How many hands had it passed through along the way? And how many cadres who appeared to be serving the people on the surface had secretly been turned into foreign operatives?
Tailing this lead to conduct an investigation would likely uncover problems far deeper than routine issues.
Suffice it to say, several powerful leaders in the city would inevitably be stripped of their posts.
“Uh, I don’t really care about any of that. I’m already the strongest in the world; even if I evolve further, it’s pretty much the same,” Bai Hewei said, crouching down to lazily kick the building block on the floor. “But can it lower my rank? I actually wouldn’t mind dialing back my strength a bit. Would turning into a regular S-class work?”
If these words were overheard by other Evolvers, they would likely curse Bai Hewei to high heaven for being thoroughly ungrateful.
“According to the records compiled by those underground labs, the Evolvers whose superpowers were rewritten by the building block almost all committed suicide because they couldn’t withstand the agonizing pain,” Wen Zhiyi sighed. “It’s said the pain rating completely exceeds the limits of human endurance. One of the Evolvers was a drug addict, and even hitting himself with drugs couldn’t help him hold out; he eventually went completely insane.”
Hearing this, Bai Hewei instantly snapped his foot back.
Tch, why did my foot have to pick right now to get itchy?
