A Guide to Humanity’s Extinction

July 10, morning, Old Jingmai District.

In the scorching midsummer heat, sunlight poured through the doors and windows. The customers were slick with sweat, but fortunately, the air conditioning in McDonald's was running, blowing a steady stream of cool air.

'Finally,' Ke Mingqing thought. 'Death Crow.'

At that very moment, the Theater Puppet stared at the two Death Crow members through a glass door and spoke in Mandarin with an Italian accent, "I will go with you."

What happened next was obvious: Ke Mingqing's puppet and Bai Ziling were taken away.

Seeing the group about to leave, a McDonald's employee looked up.

The staff remembered the two of them celebrating a birthday in the store earlier. A handsome young foreigner and a little girl with albinism—their physical features were simply too striking to forget.

Just yesterday, they had filmed a video of the pair celebrating. After being uploaded online, it had garnered a decent number of views and likes. The manager had even approved, saying it was good for the brand's image.

And so, the employees waved at the departing backs of the puppet and Bai Ziling, calling out enthusiastically, "Make sure you come back!"

Little did they know that the pair had just been abducted by a criminal syndicate. The people from Death Crow had likely tracked them down precisely because they saw that online video.

Ke Mingqing was well aware of this.

After all, he was the one who had asked the staff to record them singing happy birthday to Bai Ziling yesterday.

Sure enough, it had achieved the exact effect he wanted: letting Death Crow know Bai Ziling's location so they would come pick her up.

'Patience really does catch the big fish,' Ke Mingqing thought. 'If they hadn't shown up soon, I would have thought they really didn't want Bai Ziling anymore. Then I'd have been babysitting for two days for nothing.'

Pedestrians came and went along the commercial street. The entire intersection baked in the blinding sunlight, while a giant LED screen broadcast a cosmetics commercial.

The spokesperson for the commercial was the Roundtable Hero, Officer Girl. The woman, dressed in a Russian military uniform, took off her cap and held up the skincare product, flashing a dashing smile at the camera.

Bai Ziling clutched a sketchbook in her left hand and tugged at the Theater Puppet's sleeve with her right, following quietly by his side.

As for Jiang Qingzi and the man in the butler suit, they flanked the pair on the left and right, respectively.

Sandwiched between two A Rank super-human species, the Theater Puppet and Bai Ziling had zero chance of escaping.

The man in the butler suit led the way through the bustling crowd, gradually guiding them into a deserted alley. It was then that Jiang Qingzi, who had remained silent the entire time, turned his head and asked coldly, "Your name."

"Sanye," Ke Mingqing had the Theater Puppet reply.

"Answer seriously, or I'll kill you," Jiang Qingzi said.

"Giovanni."

The Theater Puppet stated the alias without a hint of emotion.

Jiang Qingzi continued, "Why did you approach her?"

The Theater Puppet going by "Giovanni" replied, "No reason. Isn't it normal to want to lend a hand when you see a lost child?"

"Are you a pedophile?" Jiang Qingzi scoffed coldly.

Hearing this, Ke Mingqing's eye twitched. 'What goes through your head all day?' he thought. 'It's bad enough you Death Crow people can't keep track of your own kid, but now you're slandering the good Samaritan who helped babysit for you.'

He rolled off his bed, so annoyed that he dropped to the floor and did five push-ups in a row. Then, controlling Giovanni, he mocked Jiang Qingzi in an icy tone, "You're projecting a bit too much."

Jiang Qingzi ignored him and asked Bai Ziling, "Ling, how did he treat you?"

Bai Ziling said nothing. She simply lowered her eyes and stayed glued to Giovanni's side.

"My name is Cosimo, and his is Jiang Qingzi. Don't be nervous. We just want to thank you for taking care of this little girl for the past few days," the blond man in the butler suit said. "Also, our leader wants to meet you."

"Your leader is?"

"Well... like you, he is Italian. Others call him The Pope." Cosimo smiled, reaching out to pat Bai Ziling's hair, but she dodged his hand.

After a while, the four of them walked into a remote, abandoned building.

The surrounding area was desolate, completely devoid of human presence. It felt as though not even the blazing midsummer sun could pierce the gloom of this lifeless wasteland.

Giovanni paused at the entrance to the ruins, shielding Bai Ziling behind him as he looked ahead.

There were three figures inside the abandoned building. Of the first two, one wore a black priest's robe and an inverted cross necklace, while the other was entirely wrapped in pitch-black bandages, hanging upside down in midair like a dark mummy.

These two were The Pope and the Bandage Man, both of whom Ke Mingqing had seen before.

At this moment, however, there was a third, unfamiliar figure in the building—a woman in a white formal dress.

She had platinum blonde hair, crimson eyes, and red earrings. Most notably, her facial features bore the visible marks of being stitched together with thread, particularly around the corners of her eyes and lips.

Giovanni stared at the woman, and a super-human species status panel slowly surfaced in his vision.

[Superhuman Codename: "Puppeteer: Bai"]

[Type: Esper]

[Danger Rating: A+ Rank]

[Superhuman Profile: Bai's ability is controlling "Puppet Threads." She specializes in turning the corpses of Espers into puppets and utilizing their abilities in combat.]

Ke Mingqing raised an eyebrow. He couldn't help but feel that this woman looked somewhat similar to Bai Ziling.

Currently, the woman in the white dress was sitting on a high stone slab. Leaning back with her palms pressed flat against the stone, she stared blankly out the window at the ruined streetscape.

Noticing his gaze, she turned her head, her crimson eyes locking onto Giovanni.

Their eyes met, and for some unknown reason, she momentarily blanked out.

"Her name is Bai," Cosimo introduced with a smile, standing straight with his hands behind his back. "And this is our leader. Others call him The Pope, but his name is Lorenzo."

Pausing for a moment, he glanced up at the Bandage Man. "As for the bandage guy, you can just call him Bandage Man. Though, he does technically have a name. It's Bill."

"What do you mean, 'technically have a name'? I'm offended," the Bandage Man scratched his head and shot a length of bandage toward Cosimo.

Smiling, Cosimo raised his right hand. Pitch-black fur suddenly sprouted across the back of his hand as it swelled violently. His fingers extended into sharp wolf claws, shredding the bandage in an instant.

'So this is a werewolf? He can even do partial transformations,' Giovanni thought, raising an eyebrow. He hadn't even caught their movements, but for them, this was clearly just everyday horseplay.

"Where is everyone else?"

Jiang Qingzi looked up and asked the platinum-blonde woman.

"They all went to the underground casino to play," Bai teased. "Not like you closet lolicon creeps, hovering around a little girl and even bringing back a fellow countryman of the boss."

Flipping through a copy of Shonen Jump, the Bandage Man muttered, "That's a bit unfair to me. I just stayed behind to guard the base."

"Boss, I brought him back," Cosimo said.

At that moment, the leader of Death Crow, The Pope Lorenzo, cast his gaze over from a distance. His grayish-blue eyes quietly stared at Giovanni.

"Name," he asked.

"Giovanni."

"Giovanni, I have a few questions for you. I expect honest answers."

"You'll get them," Giovanni said. "It's not like I have a choice in the matter, anyway."

Lorenzo tilted his head. At the same time, the Bible in his hand suddenly began flipping its pages without any wind, rustling loudly until it stopped on a specific page. Only when the book fell still did he ask, "Why did you approach this girl?"

Giovanni replied, "I just happened to see that she had no one looking after her."

"Matteo. Does that name ring a bell?"

"I have no impression of that name," Giovanni said.

"Is there any connection between you and White Jack?" Lorenzo thought for a moment before asking next.

"I don't know the person you're talking about."

"One last question."

Lorenzo suddenly stood up, pacing over slowly from a distance and stopping right in front of Giovanni.

The two locked eyes, and Giovanni remained silent.

"A year ago, I stole an ability from an Esper. It allows me to temporarily enter a 'world made of words.' I'd like you to witness it."

As he spoke, Lorenzo suddenly reached out, gently lifting his index finger and pressing the tip against Giovanni's forehead.

At that moment, Giovanni's eyes widened slightly.

As if experiencing the symptoms of semantic satiation, the entire world in his vision suddenly grew unfamiliar.

He watched as Lorenzo's body gradually transformed into words arranged in the shape of a human: hand, head, face, mouth, heart, blood vessel, cell—

And it wasn't just Lorenzo; the surrounding world had turned into the exact same thing. Text and symbols danced through the air. Some were elements from the periodic table, while others were more specific names.

It was as if this ability was trying to use words to deconstruct everything in the world.

Giovanni turned his head, finding that all the figures of Death Crow had been broken down into pale words, bouncing chaotically in the air before ultimately piling back up into human outlines.

From a distance, the density of these words was enough to make someone with trypophobia faint on the spot.

"Look closely at my brain," Lorenzo—no, a dense, chaotic string of text—said.

Giovanni looked back at the word-built Lorenzo, focusing his gaze on the other party's "head." Yes, it had to be the head; after all, the text labels said so.

"What do you see?" the string of text asked.

Giovanni's vision pierced through words like "Cerebrum" and "Brain Matter," and he suddenly saw something different.

They were the names of emotions.

"Calm," "Bored," "Dull." These were the words he saw.

"Exactly," Lorenzo said calmly. "Most of the time, this ability is useless and runs the risk of putting the user into a state of 'information overload.'"

He paused. "But through this ability, I can glimpse other people's emotions, getting direct feedback on exactly how they feel in the moment."

As The Pope's voice faded, the world in Giovanni's eyes suddenly returned to normal. People were just people again, no longer masses of text composed of the names of organs and tissues.

"And then?" Giovanni asked, puzzled. "What are you trying to tell me?"

"I generally use this ability as a lie detector. After all, the emotional words that appear in a person's mind when they lie are largely the same. No one can truly deceive their own subconscious," Lorenzo said. "But here lies the problem—"

At this, he raised his eyes to look at Giovanni. "Guess what I saw in your mind?"

Giovanni remained silent.

"Empty, empty—empty." Lorenzo uttered the same word three times in a row. "Those are the only words I saw in your mind. And that means you are a person with almost zero emotion."

He paused. "Why is that?"

'Isn't that a stupid question?' Ke Mingqing thought. 'Because the thing standing in front of you is just a puppet.'

He wasn't panicked at all. Even if Lorenzo saw through the truth, it didn't matter. It was just a puppet; if it died, it died. At worst, he would just swap identities in a few days and try contacting Death Crow another way.

Giovanni remained expressionless and said without hesitation, "Due to the side effects of my Esper ability, I lost all my emotions starting from the age of ten. I'm sorry you can't use my emotions to discern whether I'm lying."

Lorenzo fell silent.

Suddenly, he caught sight of the platinum-blonde, masked woman out of the corner of his eye and abruptly changed the subject. "Bai, I'm curious. Why do you harbor such specific emotions toward him?"

Right now, in the world Lorenzo saw, Bai's anatomical structure was disassembled into a mess of jumbled words.

And in the exact moment she secretly cast her gaze toward Giovanni, words like "Nostalgia," "Sorrow," and "Resentment" suddenly surfaced in her mind.

This was exactly what prompted Lorenzo's question.

'Jesus, lady, who are you?' Ke Mingqing made Giovanni turn his head to look at the woman sitting in the corner, thoroughly bewildered. 'Don't tell me you've fallen in lust with my puppet?'

Bai fell silent for a moment before tilting her head. "Boss, are you sure your ability isn't acting up? It's my first time meeting him. I have no reason to lie."

Lorenzo stared at Bai silently, his gaze profound, as if thoroughly dissatisfied with her answer.

"I'd advise against lying in front of the boss," the Bandage Man chimed in while still flipping through his copy of Shonen Jump.

Bai sighed, speaking in a nonchalant drawl. "Fine—sometimes you just get this weird feeling. How should I put it?"

As she spoke, she raised a finger to her pale chin. She lowered her eyes, raised them again, and suddenly curled her lips upward in a faint smile, murmuring softly, "Hmm... like a feeling of being old friends from the very first meeting?"

Lorenzo remained expressionless.

He could tell Bai was still lying, but he didn't press the issue. He simply withdrew his gaze, sat back down in his original spot, and turned his head to look at the street outside the window.

"Cosimo," he called out.

Cosimo walked over with a smile and said to Giovanni, "The boss is very interested in you, so you have two choices."

"What choices?" Giovanni raised an eyebrow.

"The first choice is to show off your ability right here. It has to be an ability that interests the boss, just like the rest of the members here." Cosimo shrugged. "Of course, if you want to claim you're just an ordinary person, there's nothing I can do about that."

He paused, his pupils suddenly constricting into high, vertical wolf slits. "After all, the second choice is waiting for you: death."

Giovanni looked straight into his eyes. After a moment of silence, he said, "I choose the first. But I have one condition."

"Speak."

"I want everyone here to come at me together. Use whatever methods you want and try to hurt me within one second," Giovanni said calmly. "But if that second passes and I haven't fallen, then let me join Death Crow."

The next moment, he suddenly raised his hand. Hovering above his palm were three small paper dolls, each with a different expression.

One of the paper dolls threw its arms in the air and shouted, "God is dead!" The second doll said with a stern expression, "Spirit is the essence!" The last paper doll was squatting on the ground, drawing circles and muttering, "We must step out of the cave!"

The young man in the flight attendant uniform slowly lifted his eyes, and the three paper dolls in his palm instantly ceased their clamor.

"Lorenzo, what do you think of this proposal?" he asked.

The Pope slowly turned his head to stare at the scene, a subtle change rippling across his expression.

"Then as you wish," he finally spoke after a moment of silence.

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