In the kitchen.

Yi Nanye tied her hair high with a band. Wearing an apron, she chopped meat at a speed no ordinary person could follow.

Jiang Yuan stood behind her, watching with curious interest. This was the first time he’d seen Yi Nanye use her ability with just part of her body. Before, her whole body had turned into a blur.

“By the way, have you ever had any assassin training or anything like that?”

“What made you think of that?”

“You just seem so different from people your age. If you were some kind of agent secretly trained by an organization, I’d understand.”

“Secretly trained agents, huh? Even if an organization like that existed, they’d definitely pick adults first.”

“Then what about you—”

Before Jiang Yuan could finish, Yi Nanye stopped what she was doing and suddenly turned around, pointing her knife at him.

“Don’t go prying into other people’s pasts.”

“Sorry. I’ll be more careful from now on.”

Jiang Yuan apologized at once. He figured Yi Nanye must have some painful past she didn’t want anyone else to know about.

“What’s with that look? Let me make this clear: we just aren’t close enough for me to tell you everything. My childhood was perfectly normal, so don’t go making things up.”

“Oh.”

Jiang Yuan only said “oh” in response. He wasn’t very convinced. If Yi Nanye had really had a normal life, she wouldn’t be the way she was now. What girl around her age knew how to fly a helicopter and use a gun? And she was with the military, too—she had to be pretty high up.

“Tch… You’re impossible. Are you trying to dig into my past and find some emotional weak spot? What do you think this is, a dating sim? I told you already, our sense of time is different. It takes normal people months, even years, to learn certain things.”

“But for me, a few hours or a few days is enough. And I was smart to begin with. Give a genius enough time, and you get someone like me.”

Yi Nanye told Jiang Yuan why she was so mature and knew so much. Put simply, her ability had given her a huge amount of time—and hearing that made him realize just how impressive she was.

Her ability really was convenient.

“I still don’t know how abilities work, but I feel like there has to be some kind of balance. You understand the conservation of energy, right?”

People had seen special abilities countless times in movies, TV shows, and games, so the idea wasn’t exactly new. Though abilities had now appeared in the real world, ordinary people still couldn’t get anywhere near them.

Compared with the apocalyptic disaster that would strike two years from now, what they’d learned from the few words of people from the future was even more shocking.

The things from the myths of every country, from ancient times to the present, would all awaken. The future would be an unbelievable age of mythology.

“How do they work? I feel like it’s instinctive. Like how you get tired when you run out of strength, or sleepy when you use your brain too much. Use an ability too much, and eventually you can’t use it anymore. You need to rest. Of course, it varies from person to person.”

Yi Nanye didn’t really understand it herself. It was like how ordinary people didn’t need to understand biology to know how to walk and eat.

“I see…”

“Why are you asking all this?”

“I’m just curious. Abilities feel so far away from me, but somehow they also feel strangely close.”

“You’re currently under strict orders not to learn anything about abilities. I’m only telling you because I’m in a good mood today. Don’t expect me to do it again.”

“Got it.”

Jiang Yuan nodded. The reason the higher-ups wouldn’t let him learn about abilities was simple: they wanted to make sure he wasn’t Codename Jiang, and prevent him from growing powerful too quickly and becoming uncontrollable if he slipped out of their supervision.

Knowledge like this, along with the results of various studies, was probably only shared with certain people—people like Yi Nanye, who was clearly on the right side.

The two of them chatted about their food preferences. Once Yi Nanye had finished cutting and skewering all the meat, she suggested moving the grill to the rooftop. Jiang Yuan had no objection.

A little while later.

On the rooftop of the high-rise, a helicopter sat parked nearby. Jiang Yuan and Yi Nanye sat in the open space, with the city’s nightscape spread out all around them.

In the bright firelight, the chunks of meat on the iron skewers sizzled. The rich smell of rendered fat filled their noses.

“Grilling meat on the roof of an office building. This is a new one—and a weird one.”

The night breeze was a little cool. Yi Nanye stared at the grill, eyes shining, and swallowed every so often.

“It really is weird.”

Jiang Yuan had thought life would be miserable after he came back, but it hadn’t been so bad. His meals had even gotten better. Everything he ate was supplied by the military, so the quality spoke for itself.

Take the meat grilling in front of him. The chunks were beautifully marbled, white fat streaking through the red lean meat like frost.

“How much longer?”

“Almost ready.”

“I think it’s ready to eat now.”

Yi Nanye stared hungrily at the meat and leaned forward until she was blocking the grill. Jiang Yuan was about to tell her to move back when the grill suddenly let out a sharp, fierce hiss.

The sound startled Yi Nanye. When she looked up, Jiang Yuan saw a few glistening strings of saliva still at the corner of her mouth.

One drop gathered there, growing larger before it fell onto the grill and made it hiss again.

“You… just added your own seasoning?”

Jiang Yuan gave her a rather disgusted look. Yi Nanye wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and smiled at him, silently telling him to drop it and pretend it had never happened.

“You can claim whichever skewer you seasoned.”

“What are you worried about? It’s no big deal. You had some of my saliva at lunch, didn’t you?”

“Huh…?”

Jiang Yuan sucked in a sharp breath. Yi Nanye’s bluntness was honestly frightening. She didn’t care about this stuff at all. The things between men and women didn’t even make her blush—she wouldn’t bat an eye.

“Can’t you care a little about the whole guy-and-girl thing?”

“What, can’t hold back anymore? You get an hour of free time every day, don’t you? Don’t worry, I won’t use the wristband to monitor what you do. You wash my clothes anyway, so I’ll let you use them before you wash them.”

“You can do that?”

“Relax. You know I’m pretty open-minded. It’s a fact that teenage boys have urges like that. I can’t be bothered to make you feel weird about it. If you get the urge, take care of it sooner rather than later. Just don’t go acting crazy all the time!”

Yi Nanye lectured Jiang Yuan as if she were teaching him a lesson, telling him not to make a big deal out of it. But the more open-minded she was, the less interested he felt.