Chapter 39: Chapter 39: Adult
Hearing Song Jianguo, Zhang Wenda, his face deathly pale, reached into his school uniform pocket. In the end, all he pulled out was his last lollipop.
He’d found a solution, but unfortunately, he didn’t have enough supplies.
He looked up at the at least twelve monsters before him, a bitter smile on his face. "I don’t think I can convince them to take turns licking a single lollipop."
Just then, the monsters in the distance spotted the Black Cat ship and began to close in, roaring as they came.
"What now?" Zhang Wenda asked, looking at his completely depleted Red Core.
It seemed he had only one option left, even if he knew the side effects were horrifying.
He stood up on the cat ship, grabbed a nearby bookshelf, and shouted at the stacks, "Give me knowledge! Give me the knowledge to solve this crisis!"
As he spoke, a book fell from a shelf above. Zhang Wenda snatched it out of the air and read the title.
But the title shocked him to his core: *How to Become an Adult Overnight*.
Zhang Wenda stared at the book, stunned. In that instant, something clicked. He held up the book and shouted at his surroundings, "You’re alive, aren’t you? The library!"
"This has been a trap from the very beginning, hasn’t it! No matter what I chose—whether I read the book or let those things catch me—the outcome would have been the same! Right?!"
Zhang Wenda’s voice echoed through the vast, empty library, but he received no answer.
Watching the monsters closing in, Zhang Wenda knew it was time to make a choice.
’Do we both become adults, or does one of us become an adult and get the other out?’
The answer seemed obvious. Zhang Wenda steeled himself and slapped the book right into Song Jianguo’s hands.
"Go on! It’s all up to you now! You can do it!"
Song Jianguo froze. She looked at the book, then back at the grin on Zhang Wenda’s face. Even if she didn’t understand the details, she’d been in the library long enough to know that opening this book was a very bad idea.
Her face flushed with anger. She was about to curse him out, but then the corners of her mouth twitched, and tears streamed from her eyes. "I knew it! I knew it! You were never this nice! You didn’t bring me here out of the goodness of your heart!"
"I can’t win against you! Fine! I know when I’m beat!" She viciously snatched the book from Zhang Wenda’s hands. But just as she was about to open it, a hand snatched it back.
"Hey now, I was just messing with you. Look at you, scared enough to cry. You really are just a little brat."
Song Jianguo stared in disbelief at the book now back in Zhang Wenda’s hands, as if she couldn’t process what had just happened. "Why?"
Zhang Wenda looked at the book in his hand, his mind drifting to the past. "No matter how much of a pain you are, that just means you’re overdue for a spanking and some discipline. But even if you deserve to be locked up, it doesn’t mean you deserve to be sold out. It doesn’t mean your dignity can just be trampled on by someone else."
"Besides, I’m way older than you. When real trouble hits, I’m not about to let a little kid take the fall."
The commotion was growing louder. The monsters were closing in. With a calm expression, Zhang Wenda slowly opened the book.
"I’m already grown up, anyway. This is just sending me back to where I belong. Besides, I’m curious to see what the ’adult world’ is like in a place like this."
The moment Zhang Wenda laid eyes on the words, the book’s contents lifted off the pages, glowing with a yellow light. The light finally formed a new yellow, scar-like mark next to Zhang Wenda’s Red Core, just like an absorbed Superpower.
This scene unfolded so unexpectedly that not only Zhang Wenda, but even the monsters, failed to react, freezing in place for a moment.
"Uh?" Zhang Wenda looked at the now-blank book, then at his own completely unchanged body. After a moment of rapid thought, he cleared his throat and spoke.
"Ahem. Um, this book seems to be expired. Could you bring me another one to take a look at?"
The moment the words left his mouth, the surrounding monsters roared and charged.
Zhang Wenda looked anxiously at the Yellow Core on his forearm. ’How do I use this thing? How do I use this thing?!’
A book titled *Basic Application of the Yellow Core* appeared before Zhang Wenda.
As the sky darkened, two giant canes came crashing down toward his head.
Just as they were about to smash into his face, he pressed down hard on the Yellow Core.
WHAP! WHAP! Two rolled-up newspapers smacked him on the head. Immediately, a clamor like a noisy street market erupted all around him.
"He’s hitting an old man! He’s hitting an old man!"
"Gimme candy, gimme candy."
"Oh, the morality of the world today! It takes all sorts, I suppose."
Zhang Wenda looked around. The monsters, the library, even Song Jianguo—everything from moments ago had vanished completely.
What should have been night was now high noon.
Cicadas buzzed in his ears. Restored to his original height, he found himself standing in a densely wooded park, where he saw seven or eight old men with their hands on their hips, glaring at him.
They poked and prodded him with their fingers and rolled-up newspapers, all while repeating the same phrases over and over.
"Meow~" A little black cat wearing a collar circled around Zhang Wenda’s pant leg.
"Everyone, please, just wait a second!" A thoroughly confused Zhang Wenda held up his hands, trying to reason with the old men he suspected were the monsters in disguise.
But no matter how he tried to explain, the old men and women seemed not to hear him, simply continuing to repeat the same lines.
Just then, a man carrying a badminton racket jogged by. Seeing the scene, he called out, "Don’t mind them. You can’t reason with them. They’re all prefabricated people."
"Prefabricated... people?"
Hearing this, Zhang Wenda took a closer look and realized the man was right. They didn’t seem to be real people. Their expressions were stiff, their speech was repetitive, and they even looked nearly identical.
Ignoring the crowd surrounding him, Zhang Wenda scooped up the Black Cat in one arm, easily pushed past them, and chased after the man with the badminton racket.
Everything had happened too quickly. He had so many questions.
’Is this the ’adult world’?’ he wondered. ’Is this what it’s like?’
Zhang Wenda clutched the cat and looked at his surroundings. Everything was different.
"Jianguo? Is that you, Jianguo?" Zhang Wenda looked down and asked the Little Black Cat loudly. But the Little Black Cat only mewled, trembling with fright.
’What are ’prefabricated people’?’ Zhang Wenda thought in disbelief, watching an old man sitting on the ground, intently eating candy. ’Are they not even human?’
Too much had happened, too fast. His brain felt like it was short-circuiting, unable to process anything.
Just as he chased the man out of the park, the scene before him made him freeze in his tracks. He saw a city.
It was a high-tech city built entirely of prefabricated people. Like living bricks, they were stacked and piled together to form overpasses and magnificent, towering skyscrapers.
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