“Where did… the Awakened… come from…”

The Myanmar tour guide gurgled, the sound of his lungs blocked with blood. His once shrewd eyes were now dull and lifeless, his head twisted a full 180 degrees.

His atlas vertebra had been shattered, his nerves and trachea torn apart by his own vertebrae. His head lolled like a broken doll; he was beyond dead.

After all, with his neck twisted like that, even earth-shattering secret techniques would be useless.

“Sir?”

Maw Ba, who was parking the bus, heard Ko Ang’s dying gasp. In the driver’s seat, he instinctively drew his gun, but as he turned his head, before he could see anything, an angry foot lashed out, carrying the sound of wind and thunder, striking him squarely on the chin, which seemed to be presented directly to it.

“Ugh.”

The blow to his chin was so powerful that even a boxer would have been knocked unconscious. Maw Ba was just an ordinary man with some training, and he immediately went into shock, collapsing to the ground, unconscious and possibly dead.

The entire bus fell silent.

“That hurt… was that magic just now?!”

A voice, both pained and delighted, came from the young man. After dealing with the obviously problematic tour guide and driver, Su Zhou, his face flushed and his head throbbing, finally had time to catch his breath.

“Magic really exists in this world!”

Even after taking a direct hit from a mental secret technique that made him see stars and almost fall over, Su Zhou was still ecstatic: “Hahaha! Strange tales and legends, true strangeness! After all these years, I’ve finally caught one!”

Then, he released his grip, letting the tour guide’s corpse fall to the ground. Su Zhou took deep breaths, calmed his mind, and tried to restore his vision, which was blurred and glitching like a broken video game.

After a moment, the blurring subsided, and the initial pain lessened. Of course, Su Zhou still felt a little dizzy. How to describe it? It was a bit like the time he crammed for the high school entrance exams, staying up for days to memorize everything, a slight stinging pain deep in his brow and mind.

“To think, just a random tour guide actually knows magic!”

Patting his cheeks a few times, Su Zhou, unaware that the guide was actually a high-ranking local leader, felt his face burning. He didn’t know if it was from the mental shock or the lingering rage from seeing the man casually kill someone.

Of course, the most likely reason was the excitement of finally encountering another ‘supernatural being.’

Rubbing his temples, Su Zhou shook his head, trying to clear his mind: “What was that just now? Some kind of ‘mental shock’ from manga and novels?”

Regardless, Su Zhou turned and crouched down, skillfully starting to search the tour guide’s body.

Sure enough, he also had a gun on his waist.

But compared to the gun, this mysterious and strange fellow seemed to value and be more skilled in that strange and mysterious ‘secret technique.’

“Having a gun and not using it, what an idiot?”

Catching his breath, his heart still racing, Su Zhou thought for a moment, then picked up the two guns from the tour guide and the driver. After checking the safety and bullets, he put them in his pockets for self-defense.

He ignored the dead and unconscious men on the ground and sighed softly at the body of the man who had been killed: “I’m sorry, I wasn’t careful enough to stop it in time.”

“But I’ll send him down to keep you company.”

With that, Su Zhou stepped forward and decisively stomped on the driver Maw Ba’s neck, breaking it. His tone was calm, almost cold: “A life for a life, that’s the only thing I can do for you.”

He was still inexperienced.

From the moment he felt sleepy, Su Zhou knew something was wrong.

A high school sophomore, he only slept five hours a day. He had long since developed a habit of not feeling sleepy during the day unless he was faced with a whole textbook of advanced mathematics problems. How could he possibly feel sleepy right after lunch?

Moreover, that strange sound was very similar to the spiritual sounds emitted by various ghosts that he occasionally heard… but unlike the disturbing, frightening, and unsettling sounds made by those specters, this sound had a strange holiness, as if it was specifically designed to lull people to sleep.

“If I hadn’t been listening for ten years, I probably would have fallen for it.”

Objectively assessing the power of the other party’s secret technique, Su Zhou looked down again, staring at the tour guide with his head twisted 180 degrees and the driver with his neck broken. His expression became serious.

According to the tour guide, they were going to use him and the others as ‘sacrifices’ for some evil plan.

Therefore, their actions were clearly not impulsive crimes for extortion, but rather served an extremely important plan!

“And most importantly, this plan is currently being carried out! God knows how many people have died because of it!”

Su Zhou certainly knew that randomly killing people was wrong. His father had repeatedly told him that teaching him to exercise and sending him to combat training wasn't to bully ordinary people, but to live up to his innate talent and to protect himself in dangerous situations.

But as a member of a police family that included his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and even ancestors who were all police officers and constables, Su Zhou, who possessed superpowers, had a worldview that was more aligned with ancient ‘madmen’ and ‘knights.’

Facing evil people who harm others, killing them was justified and right, an act of eliminating evil for the people!

As the saying goes, ‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ especially with superpowers. Ever since he could see ghosts and crush bones with his bare hands, Su Zhou had realized that he would not use his abilities for evil, but he would also not stand idly by and watch evil spread.

Of course, there were also practical considerations.

“The other party is a large organization, and there should be many supernatural beings. Well, it’s a good thing I killed them first, otherwise, how could an ordinary high school student like me, alone and helpless in a foreign country, vulnerable as a cream cracker, possibly fight them?”

Facing armed robbers, outlaws who dared to kidnap dozens of citizens from Zheng, one of the world's superpowers, Su Zhou only had one choice: to act decisively, ruthlessly, and kill them all before their reinforcements arrived.

Thinking of this, Su Zhou couldn’t help but feel a little ‘excited’—he subconsciously clenched his fists, seeming eager to try.

The ‘mysterious power’ that the already-dead tour guide used when explaining the sights and resisting him, that true ‘magic,’ was truly mysterious. It could devour souls and impact the mind.

So, that’s what real magic is like?

If so, how many people in this organization know magic? Are they unafraid of the consequences of kidnapping a large number of Zheng citizens because they possess some powerful magic as a ‘trump card’?