Superman Termination Manual

After finishing today's morning run, Ke Mingye went to Hong Ge Food Street and enjoyed some shumai and soy milk. He then took the subway home.

Upon arriving, he unlocked the door and as it swung open, his gaze swept through the hallway. The living room was still emptily quiet.

Ke Mingye sat down on the couch and idly scrolled through his phone. The old wall clock ticked away, its hands turning to 8:30, when finally some activity stirred in the living room.

Ke Youqing and Bai Wenna woke up. One sat at the dining table reading a newspaper while the other fried eggs in a skillet, chatting about their plans to go on a honeymoon next week.

Ke Youqing, unable to argue, had agreed to the plan. It looked like the Labor Model Hero would be missing from Huanjing for a while.

Ke Mingye sat on the couch, silently listening to the couple's conversation.

"Dad and Mom are traveling, what about Ke Yongzhu? Without them, isn't our little brother basically going to be surrounded and turned into a dragon meat hotpot by the Ninja Sect?" he thought.

Ke Mingye was like a reed swayed by the wind since the system's tasks either involved helping the Ninja Sect to chop down the dragon of calamity or helping Ke Xiaomo to destroy the Ninja Sect. Whose side he would take depended entirely on Ke Xiaomo's mood.

But wasn't it also important for a fence-sitter to have at least a bit of backbone?

So, he planned to be like his older brother, to prepare well and aim to possess formidable combat abilities before July 4th arrived.

The minute hand of the clock moved to 8:45 AM, and his older brother, Ke Xiaomo, arrived home.

Sweat dripped from his forehead, soaking the white T-shirt sticking to his defined muscles. His damp hair hung over his eyes. It seemed he had undergone several intense training sessions early in the morning. Such intense training would be lethal to an ordinary person.

Ke Mingye didn't understand the extent of Ninja training, though he could somewhat imagine it.

From movies and TV shows, he knew many ninjas trained by hanging upside down from cliffs. Those who survived this were absolute tough guys.

However, he felt that honing one's determination by performing a "Superhero-style landing" from a thousand meters above the city was more effective. Or navigating life surrounded by eight superhuman family members who could squash him with a slap, playing the charmingly evil role of "strange thing"—every day was a brush with death...

Now that was a real way to train one's resolve, right?

Though, it did seem somewhat life-threatening.

Ke Xiaomo took a shower, changed clothes, and then went back to his room for a nap.

Bai Ziling, Bai Zini, and Ke Yongzhu had sneakily stayed up playing "Star Monopoly" in their room, so they hadn't woken up yet, except for Bai Zini, who had sneaked out of the back window early in the morning to fight crime.

The oldest brother and sister, however, were up.

Bai Qiuwu hurried out the door after breakfast. She needed to attend an intensive course for college entrance exams and was pressed for time.

Ke Yinzhi, yawning, sat down next to Ke Mingye, resting one arm on the back of the couch and quietly flipping through Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground."

Ke Mingye sat next to Ke Yinzhi, unreservedly opened the mall panel, main with an attitude of 'if you find out, I'll just die.'

As usual, he skipped the first two pages and directly flipped to the skill specialty page.

In his understanding as a gaming guru, skills were the real deal; everything else was just supplementary—to purchase gear would only be considered when his skill slots were filled and when he desperately needed other ways to enhance his abilities.

[Current Mall Coins: 12,260]

[①: Day of the Chosen (D-grade skill, 11,500 Mall Coins) (specifies a date more than 60 days from now, on that day, you will receive a one-time skill named "Chosen One," which doubles all your attributes for 1 hour after activation) (Cooling period for Day of the Chosen: 60 days)]

[Note one: The skill cannot specify the same date twice.]

"What future soldier?"n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Opening gambit critical hit, Ke Mingye thought what kind of weird skills the system was offering. Could he even predict what would happen two months into the future? Just surviving this summer should call for champagne, big brother system.

But then he had another idea.

"Using it every two months, this skill could be activated a total of five times within a year... those are five days I can harness a massive boost skill that doubles my attributes, making battling the likes of 'Terrifying Crow Man,' 'Diviner Zeus,' and 'Alien Mom' a breeze."

"If I randomly set it two months ahead, there's a good chance that I'll be busy with family issues on that day, unable to make full use of the doubled attributes, wasting this amplifying skill."

"But what if all the dates are set during the last five days before the final mission deadline?"

"In those final five days, I could whip out this skill against tough guys every single time."

That was the plan, but Ke Mingye still felt it was too idealistic: doing this equated to borrowing from the present to invest in the future.

So he looked at the skill listed below.

[②: Blood Burst (C-grade skill, 30,000 Mall Coins) (Skill effect: Transforms your health proportionately into physical fitness and neurological reaction attributes; the more health sacrificed, the greater the increase in attributes.)]