Chapter 2

Finally, I had settled on my superpower. When I made a certain gesture and shouted a short spell, my skin would gain absolute defense.

After activating the power, the next time I peed, my urine would magically gain 0.666 milliliters, I would lose 5 hairs and 3 eyebrow hairs, and my body would process 100 extra red blood cells.

Whenever those hairs hit the floor, 8 E. coli bacteria and 2 paramecia would randomly appear in the world.

After the extra hundred red blood cells were metabolized, a single H₂O molecule would appear in the sky, and my bank account would gain 330 thousand dollars.

The gesture came from a little-known fantasy movie I had seen once, and I had it memorized perfectly. The watchers would need some time just to figure this out.

Since there were no limits on using my superpower, I decided to try it immediately.

When I shouted the spell, the watchers around me got excited. They clearly recognized it as a water-spraying wizard from an animation.

"His superpower is spraying water," a young man shouted.

Too bad for him, it was wrong.

The voice appeared again. [Incorrect guess.]

Seeing that no water had come out of my mouth, the others started analyzing whether I had hidden some condition when creating my superpower.

Some guessed that my gesture blocked the spell from working. Others thought there was a delay after the gesture before water would spray.

They tossed out all kinds of wild theories, but none of them were even in the ballpark.

I ignored them. They couldn't limit our actions anyway; they could only sit back and watch.

After a bit, the other dozens of survivors like me finished creating their superpowers.

Unfortunately, some young girls and old men didn't even really get what a superpower was, so they couldn't come up with anything. It didn't take long for everyone to guess their powers, and they got erased by the will of the world.

One survivor was pretty sharp. He gave himself a superpower that could make himself completely unnoticeable to everyone.

But the watchers had clearly played this guessing game a ton of times before. Even though they couldn't sense the survivor with low presence, they just started rattling off a whole list of superpowers that had stumped them in the past.

And sure enough, the ability to lower one's presence was on that list.

I couldn't waste any more time. I had to find a restroom quickly. The second part of my superpower still hadn't triggered.

Tonight, I'd need to find a place to stay, and I had to make sure I ate well.

In just a short while, another dozen survivors in the starter zone had already been wiped out.

These watchers were way too experienced. They'd even put together a pro team to analyze our every move.

Those unlucky survivors who got erased basically got taken out by the watchers' notebooks.

They rattled off every kind of rule-breaking power one could imagine, like lowering one's presence, vanishing from sight, being undetectable, unspeakable, or indescribable.

We could make up whatever powers we wanted, but the will of this twisted, rule-based world always had the final say.

Some of the more ridiculous powers just flat-out didn't work.

Like, someone tried to set it so a simple hand sign would send them straight back to the real world, but that kind of creation was doomed from the start.

Powers that made the owner immortal or totally invincible obviously didn't work either.

In the end, we were nothing but playthings snatched up by this twisted world, just for its own entertainment.

The clueless survivors who couldn't figure out what was really going on were dead and gone, just like that.

I took a satisfying leak and scored a cool 330 thousand bucks in my account.

By the time I was done in the restroom, all the other survivors had finished creating their superpowers too.

Just then, a new rule dropped. [New rule: Watchers, please return to your normal lives. Do not verbally disrupt the superpower users. Keep your guesses to yourselves.]

I was actually pretty happy about this rule. Honestly, having a crowd of people constantly guessing my superpower, treating me like some kind of circus act, was getting old fast.

Luckily, I'm not the shy type. If I was, this would be way worse than getting erased.

I knew there were people noticed the 330 thousand dollars that just showed up in my bank account.

But I couldn't care less. At most, they might guess that after I made the gesture and shouted the spell, my account would increase by 330 thousand dollars.

If they thought that was the whole extent of my superpower, they were dead wrong. I didn't believe anyone's observation skills were sharp enough to notice the few hairs and eyebrows I lost while going to the restroom.

I wasn't worried about forgetting my superpower either. The gesture I used to activate it was the easiest thing to mess up, but I remembered it perfectly.

The 0.666 number wasn't hard to remember. My birthday was May 3, so I set it so that I would lose five hairs and three eyebrows. Five plus three equals eight, so eight E. coli bacteria. Five minus three equals two, so two paramecia.

Trading a hundred red blood cells for 330 thousand dollars and a drop of water was basically the perfect power.