"I always feel like there's something profoundly weird about the way your eyes track me." Logan stood there, motionless, but his gaze was fiercely suspicious, locking onto Huang Wen like a laser.
His unparalleled animal instinct—a sense refined over centuries of battle—told him that while the Grandmaster harbored no immediate malicious intent, the look in his eyes was one of calculation, possessiveness, and maybe a touch of predatory greed. It was the way a wolf looked at a prime cut of meat.
"It's nothing, Mr. Logan," Huang Wen replied smoothly, quickly diverting his gaze and forcing a bright, disarming smile. "Just the excitement of seeing my students receiving instruction from such a formidable individual. Well then, I will leave the Hall to you for now, Uncle Wolf. Please keep a strict eye on these kids. Ensure there is no slackening in their conditioning!"
"Uncle Wolf?" Logan repeated the strange moniker, his brow furrowing deeper, utterly perplexed by the young man's ease. He watched Huang Wen ascend the stairs, leaving him alone with the mass of buzzing, expectant students.
For a moment, Logan, Reece Fisk, and Zhong Qiang stared at one another in mutual confusion.
Then, Reece Fisk, recovering quickly from his terror, took charge. "Alright, everyone! You heard the Master! Back to the Siu Nim Tao forms! If anyone is caught standing around, they will be making way for the next group on the waiting list! We have the best instructor in the city now, let's show him our dedication!"
"This place is ridiculously cramped," Logan muttered to himself, looking around the Hall. The training space, once a generous 200 square meters, was now suffocatingly full. New students were crammed into every available corner, practicing forms, struggling with the wooden dummy, or waiting anxiously for their turn.
The Wing Chun Hall's popularity was both a blessing and an immediate logistical nightmare. It was genuinely overflowing, but without students graduating or proving their mastery, opening a new branch school was premature.
Both Reece and Zhong Qiang, eager to expand their Grandmaster's influence, felt a quiet melancholy. They were highly skilled cooks, but the kitchen—the Hall—was simply too small to handle the banquet.
Huang Wen, however, felt neither melancholy nor worry. He had completed the system-mandated task of flourishing the school, and everything else was just gravy. His immediate and singular focus was now solely on the two incredible rewards he had just unlocked. He returned to the privacy of his room, his heart thrumming with anticipation.
An Extraordinary Item Draw and an Extraordinary Skill Draw, both secured in under fifteen minutes. This is how legends are made.
He accessed the Task page, noting the pending missions:
Task Page Current Task: 0/1 (Incomplete)
Increase Zhong Qiang's weight to 75 kg (150 jin). Reward: One draw for a Mortal-Level Item.
Mission Not Accepted:
Eliminate Sheriff Yves, who is colluding with the Goren Gang. Reward: One draw for a Mortal Item.
Task 2/2 Completed (Rewards: One draw for a Super Item, one draw for a Super Skill. Draw now?)
"Draw the Super Item lottery first," Huang Wen commanded mentally.
A familiar, intense white light flashed in his mind.
"Ding! Congratulations, you have obtained a Super Item: Slow Motion Glasses (derived from a magical invention by Grey Wolf in the Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf world. These glasses can slow down the speed of everything you see by a thousand times, allowing your body to have more than sufficient reaction time)."
"Special Note: Slow Motion Glasses can slow down motion by a thousand times, making them a perfect match for the magical tuxedo! They are automatically sized and styled to complement the suit."
"Slow Motion Glasses? A thousand-fold decrease?" Huang Wen's jaw dropped slightly. He hadn't expected a piece of technology from a children's cartoon to be optimized into something so staggeringly powerful. A thousand times slower. With his own reaction speed already enhanced by his 105 Essence, practically no projectile—short of a weapon that instantly teleports—could threaten him.
He was thinking of the very limits of cinematic speed. What about speedsters?
He immediately thought of Quicksilver, specifically the X-Men film version, famous for his ridiculously expensive, slow-motion sequences. Quicksilver's top speed in some comic iterations reaches near escape velocity—around 11.2 kilometers per second.
If I wear these glasses, Huang Wen calculated excitedly, Quicksilver's speed is reduced a thousandfold. 11,200 meters per second becomes 11.2 meters per second.
"Ha!" Huang Wen chuckled. In the eyes of a normal person, 11.2 meters per second is fast, roughly the speed of an Olympic sprinter like Usain Bolt at his peak. But for someone with 105 points of superhuman Essence, that was pedestrian—a comfortable, almost leisurely jog.
To Huang Wen, observing the world through these lenses, Quicksilver would no longer be a blur of cosmic velocity. He would be reduced to a human moving at a high-level sprint. Huang Wen could then effortlessly anticipate every move, every punch, and every taunt.
Imagine the scenario, Huang Wen fantasized. Quicksilver, arrogantly believing he is invisible and untouchable, zipping around me, preparing a thousand rapid-fire attacks. I simply wait, watch him move at the pace of a heavily laden snail, and when the moment is right, I punch him.
"It would be like Superman seeing the Flash," Huang Wen laughed aloud. "The expression on Quicksilver's face when he realizes he's not only visible but also slow would be priceless! This is more than useful; it's a game-changer for avoiding any kind of ambush or gunfire."
Huang Wen took out the glasses—a sleek, modern design that perfectly complemented the sharp tailoring of his Magical Tuxedo. He put them on, the world instantly taking on a strange, fluid viscosity, where dust motes hung stationary in the air and the slight shifting of the floorboards could be analyzed in slow motion. He nodded with immense satisfaction, storing the item back in the system.
"Now for the skill draw." Huang Wen eagerly commanded, "Draw the Extraordinary Skill lottery."
"Whoosh!" The familiar white light returned, this time with a bizarre twist.
"Ding! Congratulations, you have acquired the extraordinary skill: Steamed Bun Grenade (Explosive Imprint Technique) (Originating from an anti-Japanese war drama, after optimization, any inanimate matter that you bite and ingest with mental focus will gain a mysterious kinetic power, allowing you to mentally control it to explode at will)."
"Special note: The larger the volume of the object you ingest, the greater the potential explosive power, but this only applies to inanimate matter."
Huang Wen was speechless, a genuine, slack-jawed silence descending over him. He had truly thought the gun-fu technique was the strangest thing the system would ever produce. He was wrong.
"A Steamed Bun Grenade? A war-time food-based explosion skill?"
He paused, a strange thought clicking into place. "Wait... when you think about it, this ability is functionally similar to the ability of the little girl Yiyue in The Legend of the Condor Heroes, where she uses brainwaves to control the explosion of the lollipop she has bitten."
The core mechanism was the same: unusual physical contact followed by remote, mental control over a kinetic explosion.
"One is a lollipop, one is a steamed bun, but the fundamental constraint is the same: the power scales with the size of the ingested object, and it only works on non-living material. This means it doesn't have to be food!"
Huang Wen's mind, fueled by 105 Essence and 99 Qi, began to run terrifying calculations.
The explosive power scales with volume.
If he were to, say, discretely take a tiny, almost invisible bite out of a piece of concrete, he could cause a devastating explosion—perfect for remote sabotage or destroying a structural pillar.
But the sheer upper limit of this power was what truly horrified and excited him.
Putting aside all reasonable constraints: what if Huang Wen could manage to endure the discomfort—the taste, the grit, the sheer volume—and physically bite into a vast expanse of matter, such as the Earth itself?
Could I make the entire planet explode under my mental command?
The thought was instantly followed by another, darker calculation. If he were to fly to Saturn's moon, Titan, where Thanos retreats, and take a symbolic, powerful bite of the planetary surface... wouldn't he be capable of destroying the entire celestial body before Thanos could ever return?
"Good heavens," he whispered. "The power of a bomb the size of a small planet... that's not Extraordinary; that's Nexus level power, controlled by a single, focused thought."
The complexity must be the limiting factor, Huang Wen reasoned. "I would have to bite the actual soil or rock. Biting concrete or steel would be difficult and painful, even with my Adamantium-tough bones. And the greater the mass, the greater the required mental energy to stabilize and trigger the reaction."
He began to consider the technique as less of a silly food skill and more of a terrifying form of molecular manipulation. He didn't just have Kung Fu skills and a suit; he now had an internalized, world-breaking mutant-level power.
"Does this classify me as a mutant now?" Huang Wen pondered, a nervous yet excited energy coursing through him. Regardless of the classification, the Steamed Bun Grenade was now his most potent, hidden weapon. He would have to test the practical limits: what is the largest, hardest object he can physically bite, and what is the maximum mass he can mentally control without giving himself a brain hemorrhage?
The path to ultimate power had just taken a bizarre, culinary turn.