I, the World’s Strongest, Have Failed the Civil Service Exam Thirty-Nine Times – CH58

Chapter 58

As a Command-type evaluator, every time Jonathan used his ability, it was meticulously calculated.

With an ability like his, once someone was on guard, it became exceedingly difficult to put to good use. Only by unleashing it at a critical moment could he catch the enemy completely unawares.

And the sole reason he had bided his time until now was to catch Bai Hewei off guard with a sneaky blow.

At such close range, and with Bai Hewei unprepared for his specific ability, he was bound to fall under its influence.

Judging by the strength with which Bai Hewei clutched the backpack, his ability had indeed taken effect; it was just that Bai Hewei was still fighting back with everything he had.

In fact, there were already faint signs that Bai Hewei was beginning to break free from its grasp.

Is this truly the world’s strongest evaluator?

No one knew the sheer terror surging through Jonathan’s heart at this moment.

The defining characteristic of Command-type evaluators was that the fewer words they used when unleashing their ability, the weaker the effect, and the greater the expenditure of evolutionary energy.

Furthermore, the more harmful the command was to the listener, the more fiercely the target would resist.

For instance, if he were to command someone to commit suicide, given Jonathan’s current strength, he could only force evaluators below B-grade to obey blindly.

When using his ability, Jonathan was well aware that the more detailed the command, the more compliant the target would become. Naturally, the effectiveness of the command also depended on the opponent’s state.

If Bai Hewei had been completely off his guard right now, Jonathan might even have been able to command him to take his own life.

Unluckily for him, Bai Hewei was wary of him, and Bai Hewei’s inherent ability was overwhelmingly powerful. Even at such close range, the effect Jonathan’s ability could produce was severely limited.

Bai Hewei’s strength far exceeded his wildest imagination.

If it had been any other member of Team [Interdict] in his place, they would have long succumbed to the ability, let go of the backpack, and walked away.

Gauging the urgency of the situation, Jonathan gritted his teeth, pulled out a vial of evaluator serum from his thigh pocket, and jammed the needle directly into his throat.

As the serum surged down his throat, his depleted evolutionary energy was replenished immensely—far exceeding its normal bounds.

Instantly, the aura emanating from Jonathan turned dangerously dense and heavy.

He had already taken evaluator serum before; injecting it a second time imposed an immense burden on his body, and the backlash he would face afterward was far from negligible. But if he didn’t inject it now, how else could he hope to repel Bai Hewei?

If he could force the world’s strongest evaluator to taste defeat, it would be well worth even if he had to lie in a hospital bed for two years afterward!

Jonathan’s eyes turned bloodshot, his voice raspy and harsh.

[Let go of the backpack. Go down to the second floor and enter the dream state just like the others.]

With the command made more detailed, the effect theoretically should have weakened, yet Bai Hewei felt the force controlling his body grow progressively stronger.

Bai Hewei fought with everything he had to wrestle back control of his own body from the ability.

[Let go! Go to the second floor!]

Blood began to seep from the corners of Jonathan’s mouth.

Bai Hewei’s posture contorted slightly.

His legs had already begun to shift, yet his hands remained locked in a death grip around the backpack, refusing to release it.

Why? Why was Bai Hewei still able to resist?!

Jonathan couldn’t comprehend it.

At this moment, his ability had been amplified to its absolute absolute limit—he could easily command an S-class evaluator to die right now.

Yet he was merely telling Bai Hewei to let go of a backpack.

Could the gulf between him and Bai Hewei truly be this vast?

I didn’t even command him to harm himself!

Though Wen Zhiyi and the other researchers couldn’t see the actual visual feed, they could hear the exchange and deduce Bai Hewei’s current predicament from the dialogue.

“Jonathan is actually a Command-type evaluator?”

“He must be carrying evaluator serum on him. His voice changed when he used his ability the second time!”

…

In a matter of seconds, all available files on Jonathan were compiled at the Central Research Institute.

Yet from those files, it was impossible to gauge Jonathan’s true ceiling.

“Right now, both Team [Interdict] and the Special Operations crew are trapped on the second floor. The only person who can assist Bai Hewei is Pullman. Chief Wen, I suggest we have Pullman go up to help.”

“Agreed. With Pullman there, in a two-on-one scenario, Bai Hewei can break free from Jonathan’s control and snatch the backpack.”

“But Pullman is currently trying to wake his sister and the Special Operations team! If he leaves, what if Shirley and the others sink too deep into the dream to ever wake up?”

“Besides, even after the ability ends, the severe lingering effect of a dream-type ability is that the longer one remains submerged in it, the harder it becomes to distinguish dream from reality—even for the dream-type evaluator themselves.”

…

Thus, Pullman remaining behind to wake them up was also for their own good once they regained consciousness.

“What time do you think it is right now?! Bai Hewei is obviously more important!”

“The real question is, does Jonathan’s backpack even contain the data? Personally, I think having Bai Hewei level these ruins directly is the smarter play.”

“Given our current technological level, even if we secure the data, the number of ability-containers we can manufacture is limited. Rather than that, it would be better to destroy everything outright. That way, as long as Bai Hewei remains alive, he stays the world’s strongest—unassailable by anyone.”

The researchers naturally prioritized different outcomes.

There were simply too many unknowns at play.

For instance, did Jonathan’s backpack actually contain the data?

Was the data genuine?

Even if they obtained it, could they actually manufacture a finished product?

On the flip side, if Pullman abandoned his efforts to wake the others, would it leave permanent psychological trauma on Shirley, Zhang Fuzhi, and the rest?

Weren’t those people also individuals they were sworn to protect?

Striking a proper balance between duty and human empathy was extraordinarily difficult.

“Chief Wen, what do you think?”

…

Wen Zhiyi remained silent for a moment, simply operating the controls for the robot.

“The robot can’t even see right now—what can it possibly do?”

The others were baffled.

“Bai Hewei is wearing restrictors,” Wen Zhiyi added softly.

“Two of them, in fact.”

Wen Zhiyi offered a brief clarification, “He isn’t being suppressed by Jonathan—he’s fighting Jonathan while wearing literal shackles.”

The sheer abundance of evolutionary energy inside this forbidden zone had actually amplified the effect of the restrictors on Bai Hewei’s body.

Wen Zhiyi didn’t do anything drastic.

He merely maneuvered the small robot to crawl from Bai Hewei’s shoulder to his neck, where it clamped onto a necklace equipped with a restrictor.

The robot’s pincers pinched down hard on the pendant.

Click.

“I really hate that high-and-mighty, bossy tone of yours,” Bai Hewei gritted his teeth, glaring at Jonathan with fury in his eyes.

“Looking at you right now, you remind me of the boss I hated most in the past!”

Bai Hewei had been in the workforce for so long—how could every supervisor he met have been decent?

In truth, bad bosses were the norm.

There had been one manager in particular who was insufferably bureaucratic. Upon learning that Bai Hewei lacked connections, was a mere temporary worker, yet happened to be good-looking, he made Bai Hewei’s life a living hell.

He loved ordering Bai Hewei around to work unpaid overtime. If a task went well, it was thanks to his stellar leadership; if it went poorly, it was because Bai Hewei was incompetent and unfit for a permanent position. Any time responsibility needed to be pinned, it landed squarely on Bai Hewei’s shoulders, and he constantly farmed Bai Hewei out to do favors for other departments to build his own personal clout.

At his absolute breaking point, Bai Hewei had even drafted his resignation letter.

Fortunately, that manager was transferred away shortly after, replaced by his current supervisor, Zhang Peng, which allowed Bai Hewei to stick it out.

Now, hearing Jonathan speak in that exact same domineering tone, Bai Hewei felt as though that insufferable boss had come back from the dead.

If that manager ever dared to return, Bai Hewei swore he would use his Special Operations connections to draft a flurry of report letters straight to the Disciplinary Inspection Commission.

As Bai Hewei finished speaking, he heard a faint cracking sound against his chest.

In an instant, an immense surge of power erupted from within him!

Like a long-suppressed flash flood breaching a dam, it tore downward in a roaring torrent, swallowing anything that dared stand in its path!

The evolutionary energy within Bai Hewei surged outward from his body.

An endless, boundless current of energy overflowed from him, enveloping his entire frame.

His mouth.

His nose.

His ears.

His eyes.

Layer upon layer of evolutionary energy coalesced like a suit of physical armor, shielding him from every form of external harm.

Standing so close to Bai Hewei, Jonathan naturally sensed the anomaly immediately.

What on earth is this?!

Jonathan could only feel that in a split second, the power exploding from Bai Hewei completely eclipsed even the surge he had gained from injecting the evaluator serum.

For a moment, Jonathan was entirely stunned, overcome by an overwhelming sense of absurdity—like a cheater who had turned on hacks, only to find their opponent was running god-mode.

How is this even logical?!

To Jonathan, the entire world seemed to have gone mad.

In that very same instant, Bai Hewei realized he could move his body again.

What’s more, Jonathan’s voice sounded as if it had been muted, completely muffled and indecipherable.

The influence of the Command ability was rendered utterly meaningless.

If he couldn’t hear it, it naturally couldn’t affect him.

Bai Hewei felt as though an immense weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

He stretched his wrists slightly, and the force attempting to manipulate them vanished like a fly swatted away, disappearing without a trace.

Pfft!

Jonathan suffered an immediate, violent backlash.

His throat felt as though it were being pierced by thousands of needles; he wanted to speak, but merely opening his mouth brought unimaginable, excruciating agony.

Did Bai Hewei make a move?

No, Jonathan had seen it crystal clear—Bai Hewei hadn’t lifted a finger.

It was that small robot that had snapped the necklace on Bai Hewei’s neck.

Jonathan instinctively glanced at the floor, catching sight of the shattered object.

That wasn’t just a necklace.

It was a restrictor!

The expression on Jonathan’s face was instantly replaced by pure terror.

He couldn’t fathom it.

What kind of monster is this?!

Bai Hewei had been fighting him for so long, yet he had been wearing China’s latest experimental restrictor the entire time?!

In his understanding, such devices were meant to bind criminal evaluators!

In fact, normal offenses wouldn’t even warrant a restrictor of this caliber.

Yet in China, evaluators above B-grade were issued evaluator badges—nominally badges, but functionally restrictors.

Bai Hewei had been an evaluator for such a short time.

So short that he hadn’t even realized he could actually take off the pendant around his neck.

Prolonged restriction and suppression had led Bai Hewei to believe that his suppressed power was his true capability.

Furthermore, that restrictor continuously absorbed external evolutionary energy to suppress the ability inside him.

When a giant dragon was freed from even a single chain, it was more than enough to strike absolute terror into anyone standing before it.

“Let go of it first!”

Bai Hewei uttered the command plainly.

As if possessing a mind of its own, Jonathan’s body obediently released its grip on the backpack, dropping it.

[Don’t listen to Bai Hewei—get up!]

Realizing something was terribly wrong, Jonathan hastily tried to use his ability on himself.

Yet Bai Hewei wasn’t using a Command-type ability at all; he was using his impossibly vast, overwhelmingly immense evolutionary energy to physically oppress him into submission.

Meanwhile, the robot resting on Bai Hewei’s shoulder suddenly plummeted and shattered into pieces.

It was the closest object to Bai Hewei.

Thus, when the surge of evolutionary energy erupted from him, the robot was the first thing to take the brunt of the damage.

“Mr. Number One!” Bai Hewei instinctively reached out, only to catch a handful of broken scrap.

“You killed Mr. Number One.” This time, Bai Hewei was genuinely furious.

And when Bai Hewei got furious, his face usually went completely expressionless.

Jonathan felt immensely wronged—what did some stupid robot have to do with him? Yet he also knew that the current Bai Hewei was in no mood to listen to reason.

His very existence defied reason itself.

“RUN!”

A sudden voice echoed from the communicator on Jonathan’s person.

In the very next second, Jonathan turned and bolted without an ounce of hesitation.

The evolutionary energy around Bai Hewei began to expand continuously.

Energy of such terrifying intensity directly impacted even the second-floor corridor.

Along the corridor walls, a recessed light fixture began to flicker wildly.

Pullman raised his head, his [Dispersal] ability grinding to a halt as he muttered to himself in disbelief, “How did it come to this?”

Who on earth pissed off Bai Hewei this time?!

The evaluators deep in the dream state were affected as well.

“Did… did the world just lag for a second?” Huang Silin rubbed his eyes. “Wait, where am I? Who am I?”

“What am I wearing?” Shirley snapped awake, staring at her attire with a face full of utter confusion.

“Dammit, why am I being experimented on here?!” Cecilia kicked away the researcher trying to stick a needle in him, fuming with rage as he bolted for the door.

“Sigh, boss, you’re right, I’ll go revise my report… Revise my ass! You’re an outsider and you think you can boss me around?!” Zhang Fuzhi slammed the documents straight into the face of the man opposite him. “Wait, where am I?”

“This… this can’t be a dream, right? Let me slap myself to see if I wake up.” Wei Yan gritted her teeth and delivered a ringing slap straight across her own cheek.

…

Inside an underground research facility.

The white-haired old researcher stared at the readings on his screen, his expression unnaturally grim.

The communicator he had given Jonathan doubled as an information-gathering device.

Yet in a single instant, the evolutionary energy reading transmitted from Bai Hewei’s end had shattered all known limits.

If he hadn’t ordered Jonathan to run immediately, that communicator would have been turned into scrap metal just like his student’s robot.

So… that is my student’s ultimate trump card?

Knowing full well that this forbidden zone was the No. 0 Research Institute’s domain, he had sent his team in anyway.

He wasn’t afraid of his mentor taking action; he was afraid his mentor wouldn’t take action.

With Bai Hewei around, no matter what was inside this forbidden zone, everything Jonathan and he were trying to accomplish was an exercise in futility.

All Wen Zhiyi had to do was help Bai Hewei remove his restrictions at the critical moment.

“Bai Hewei has been wearing a restrictor the entire time—and likely more than one. In that case, all the previous intelligence gathered on Bai Hewei has to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch,” the white-haired researcher couldn’t help but chuckle softly, though the laughter soon felt hollow and pointless.

Half a century ago, China hadn’t even taken its first steps in the field of evaluator research.

Yet today, they had not only cultivated tens of thousands of researchers, but even the world’s strongest evaluator had been born among them.

To keep the rest of the world from perceiving Bai Hewei’s true strength, they had placed restrictors on him before he even mastered his own power.

Even Bai Hewei himself likely had no idea how vast his own strength truly was.

What a brilliant calculation.

To think that someone like Bai Hewei was actually willing to obey such orders!

“…That’s terrifying. The robot actually shattered,” several researchers at the Central Research Institute almost dropped their eyeballs onto the floor.

That robot had passed rigorous durability testing during its production.

It could malfunction, short-circuit, or lose signal, but being reduced to literal scrap wasn’t supposed to be an option.

It was beyond repair now.

“The destruction of the robot can be logged in the report as well,” Wen Zhiyi offered a slight smile. “Did you capture the signal just now?”

“Captured! We’ve locked onto the coordinates—the Central Special Operations ace squad has torn through space and crossed over!”

The moment the robot on Bai Hewei shattered, a fragment from inside had ricocheted onto Jonathan’s person.

At such close proximity, the signal inside his communicator was naturally picked up.

As long as they dragged his mentor out, they would sever the snake’s head completely.

Team [Interdict] would no longer hold any advantage over them.

Evaluators from the ace squad materialized one after another across a desolate wilderness.

Following the coordinates transmitted moments ago, the target should be somewhere nearby.

“No need to search inch by inch. The top-secret directive permits us to act freely, so long as we aren’t spotted by satellites.”

With that, an evaluator spread his hands wide.

Across the wilderness, the earth began to fissure inch by inch, as though the forces deep within the planet’s crust were intensifying drastically.

All the satellites could detect was the precursor to a localized earthquake.

“They certainly came fast,” the white-haired old man sighed, gesturing for the guards outside the door to escort him away.

Out in the wilderness, an evaluator holding a bullhorn was broadcasting a pre-recorded message from Wen Zhiyi.

“Teacher, stop hiding underground like a rat. The No. 0 Research Institute should have been wiped out long ago.”

“Teacher, I told you long ago that at your age, you’re due for Alzheimer’s. If you retired quietly, people would still bring you flowers. Why must you insist on causing trouble like the younger generation?”

“Teacher, the theory you proposed back then has already been disproven by me. You’re simply unfit for research—you’d be better off finding a school to teach at.”

“Teacher, does the God you’ve believed in for so long really care to look at you?”

The bullhorn continuously blasted Wen Zhiyi’s pre-recorded words.

Though there were no explicit curses, the evaluator holding the bullhorn felt a bit guilty.

Even when killing a man, you don’t humiliate him like this—Chief Wen’s words are brutally harsh.

Yet remembering those scum who did horrific things under the guise of research, the evaluators felt that Wen Zhiyi was actually being far too gentle.

Having served on trans-national missions for so many years, they had witnessed no shortage of the “dark side” of these research facilities—performing atrocities that even slave societies wouldn’t commit, all in the name of science and democracy.

A civilized tongue simply couldn’t vent their anger.

Listening to Wen Zhiyi roast someone else was genuinely therapeutic.

The squad leader even flew a full loop around the wilderness holding the bullhorn, terrified that the target might miss a single word.

The other squad members either stared at the sky or looked at the ground, remaining tacitly silent as if they knew nothing.

“Doctor, they are insulting you,” the evaluator escorting the old man couldn’t help but say. “Do you need me to take action?”

“He’s deliberately trying to provoke me. Move, quickly,” the old man shook his head. “If we linger any longer, we’ll be spotted.”

The white-haired old man took a deep, lingering look at the evaluators holding the bullhorn, recalling the moment five years ago when he had handed an offer letter to Wen Zhiyi.

“This is an offer letter from the No. 0 Research Institute. Are you really not going to consider changing your citizenship?” the old man had said softly. “The No. 0 Research Institute is a place steeped in political factions. All that talk about ‘science having no borders’ is just a lie to fool outsiders. Your country’s approach to evaluators is fundamentally different from other nations. If you come to the institute, you will be fighting a lonely battle.”

When the old man spoke those words, he believed he was acting with complete sincerity, purely out of concern for a rising star of science. Yet in Wen Zhiyi’s eyes, such actions were nothing more than high-handed arrogance.

“Teacher, I don’t believe ordinary people can only oppress, exploit, and rule over evaluators. Evaluators are human beings, and their friends and families are human beings too. The notion that evaluators must be controlled simply because they possess the capability to harm others is entirely flawed.”

“The wealthy can still ruin countless families through their riches; those in power can embezzle funds and drag people into the gutter; the young can bully the elderly through physical strength; adults can oppress children through their status. Heck, in other countries, those with guns and those without are equally unequal. So why must evaluators and ordinary people be pitted against each other?”

“Is it that evaluators and ordinary people are inherently opposed, or is it that you are creating the opposition?”

“Teacher, I will make you see the day when evaluators and ordinary people walk hand in hand. Just because you couldn’t achieve it doesn’t mean we can’t. Evaluators have abilities, ordinary people have technology—neither will lose to the other.”

Back then, the old man had dismissed Wen Zhiyi’s words as nothing more than youthful self-righteousness. Yet looking at the evaluators pursuing him today, it suddenly struck him that Wen Zhiyi had spoken the truth all along.

Can evaluators and ordinary people truly coexist in harmony?

The bullhorn looped several times, yet no one appeared.

“Pull back. Looks like my teacher has already fled,” Wen Zhiyi wasn’t discouraged. He had operated on a trial basis anyway; catching the man was a bonus, but failing to do so was fine too.

“If we linger any longer, we’ll have to write another situational report for the Foreign Ministry,” the lead evaluator chuckled, vanishing into the wilderness alongside his teammates in the blink of an eye.

“Run then! Look at you—where else can you possibly run?” Bai Hewei stood with one hand on his hip, smiling at Jonathan with a full-blown villainous aura. “Even if you scream for help, no one’s coming to save you.”

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