A Dragon Can't Be a Hypothesis

One day, the world gained a new kind of extremely dangerous criminal who had committed no crime. Just thinking about something could warp the world, or turn passersby on the street into drooling, monstrous abominations.

Once, imagining something couldn't turn you into a murderer. Now, any evil thought could become reality in an instant.

They were pitiable, too. Just imagining a loved one getting hurt would turn the world before their eyes into a blood-red hell.

Imagining losing their most precious possession would make it decay into foam in an instant.

Imagining a skyscraper collapsing, the ground caving in, a volcano erupting, or a gas explosion...

Jin Ying: Cut it out. Now.

In a flash, the wind swept through like fallen leaves, and the distortion stopped.

The world: "..."

Sticky black spores should have blanketed every inch of the accident site. But with a single word from her, everything within a hundred miles was sparkling clean.

Jin Ying: Okay, that's a wrap.

She was one of the newly emerged "Altered" and "Enchanters," but she was too lazy to bother, so she landed herself in prison early and offered her services to the state.

She was a rare "Altered" who could keep her thoughts under control at all times.

But she wasn't an ascetic. She lived as she pleased, because she knew that even if she accidentally thought of something awful, it wouldn't come true.

It was all thanks to a special method that didn't work for other Altered:

She would add something truly impractical to her terrible imaginings: something genuinely fantastical, absurd, and straight out of a fairy tale. That way, the world wouldn't accept her imaginings, and they wouldn't come true.

So if she imagined her family being hit by a car, well, the car didn't hit them. It hit a dragon munching on corn instead.

If she imagined a building collapsing, well, it didn't collapse. A sleeping dragon smacked it back into place with one wing.

If she imagined explosions, falls from high places, cities submerged by floods, or scorching lava, the dragon's black scales, as hard as city walls, and its invincible magic easily held it all back. Then it turned around and slapped the distorted world in the face.

Jin Ying: Hahahahaha! You can't beat me. There's nothing you can do. I'm just that strong!

As clever as she was, all she wanted was a steady government job and to suppress the supernatural across the world.

Until one day, she met a police officer.

He was young, but looked like an uncle, slick and exhausted, with huge dark circles under his eyes every day.

She'd also heard that he'd been in a car accident, jumped from a building, fallen into the sea, survived an explosion, been scalded by boiling water, and broken his arms and legs rescuing people. He had metal pins all over his body, and set off the security scanner with a constant stream of beeps.

Looking at him, she did have a bad feeling.

Then one day, right in front of her, he painfully transformed into a beast. Dark scales gleamed all over his body as he spread wings that blotted out the sky, enfolding her as tightly as a black cocoon.

So he, too, was the product of a distortion.

He asked, "Are you afraid?"

Jin Ying was silent for a long, long time, trembling with fear, until she finally asked, "You... Uncle, do you like eating corn?"

Blurb dated: 2022.11.19

Theme: Anyone can be a hero