The Search for Superpowers

In this world, if anything can last forever, it is not youth and beauty, which last a mere handful of years before vanishing in an instant. Wealth and fame can be gained or lost overnight, and people’s feelings are fickle. A New Year’s card written ten years ago in a child’s crooked hand, saying “Yang Lang ❤️ Hermes will always be best friends,” is still tucked away in the back of a drawer, but the bond between the two people who made that promise has long since fallen apart.

If anything can still be called eternal...

“Of course it’s ability. Ability never disappears. It only grows stronger as its owner trains. Human lives are so short. Instead of wasting time chasing things that vanish in the blink of an eye, you’d be better off working to improve the abilities you already have. Don’t you think, Lang?”

That was how the foreign boy Hermes, handsome as a god, once answered. He was seventeen or eighteen then, with pale blond hair and brilliant blue eyes. Yang Lang had loved looking into his eyes. Whenever their gazes met, he found himself drawn in, unable to look away. Hermes’s eyes seemed to have the power to bewitch people. That year, he used that very power to deceive the simple, kind people of the small town in Yang Lang’s hometown. He claimed he had come all the way to China to see his former classmate Yang Lang, whom he had met when they were elementary school exchange students, but after swindling everyone out of a large sum of money, he vanished without a trace.