“I’m just glad you’re okay.” Uncle Ben didn’t dwell on it.
After all, helping the FBI wasn’t a bad thing.
He took the bottle of red wine and left the study with Julian.
On the way to the living room, they passed the kitchen.
Julian poked his head in, only to have Aunt May push him back out.
Gwen also told him not to cause trouble.
Fine, they’d formed a united front.
Julian had no choice but to go to the living room, grab Peter, who was playing with his toys, and drag him to the alley to practice martial arts.
They started with the basics of lower-body stability—learning how to stand in a stance.
In Chinese martial arts, except for a very few external styles that require agile footwork, the essence of most techniques lies in a solid lower-body foundation.
Bajiquan, in particular, places the greatest emphasis on the lower body.
The main reason is that Bajiquan is all about charging head-on with brute force.
Techniques like the Three-Fold Gate Breaker explicitly state that you must sacrifice your body to force your way through the opponent’s center gate.
If your stance is unstable, you’ll probably get flipped over.
But if your stance is solid, even if you’re weaker than your opponent, at worst you won’t break through their defense—you won’t end up being countered.
You can always switch moves mid-strike or retreat if you’re pushed back.
Even the simplest Iron Mountain Lean requires a sinking motion.
It comes from the Bear Squat, one of Bajiquan’s Vajra Eight Postures.
The key is to squat down, store power, stabilize the lower body, then generate force from the waist and abdomen—sink and lean hard.
With the blessing of a Martial Saint, Julian could even make an enemy taste what inch-power short-impacts meant: a burst of raw strength hitting the opponent’s center gate.
If it didn’t kill, it would cripple.
And if the opponent somehow withstood it, he could follow up with additional moves.
Peter tasted the bitterness of training.
At first, it wasn’t so bad, but as time went on, it became harder and harder to endure.
Still, seeing Julian’s calm and relaxed expression only made Peter grit his teeth and push on, fueled by his admiration for Julian.
When Julian judged it was enough, he grabbed Peter and tossed him onto his shoulders as usual.
He pinched the Little Spider’s legs to relax his muscles, making Peter yelp in pain.
He was still young, and a second-generation gene kid at that—no need to push too hard.
Julian was still standing in front.
Back home, Uncle Ben saw Peter’s sweaty face and gestured that it was still early.
He told Julian to take the Little Spider to wash his face, then opened the red wine and set it aside to breathe.
At dinner, Gwen made a rosemary beef roll on an iron plate.
Though the cookware wasn’t right and the process was incomplete, the flavor was spot-on.
All three men gave two thumbs up—one for Gwen, one for Aunt May.
After eating, Aunt May and Gwen watched TV while Julian, Uncle Ben, and Peter cleaned up the dishes and washed them.
Then Julian found an old, thicker hoodie and a pair of sweatpants, left them in his own room’s bathroom, and took his pajamas to shower in Uncle Ben and Aunt May’s room.
When he came out, he exchanged a look with Gwen.
He didn’t understand what she meant—her eyes were a little mischievous.
He told her to go take a shower.
Why were her eyes practically gluing themselves to him?
Julian considered himself a proper BOY, so he sat down obediently on the couch next to Uncle Ben to watch the news.
Aunt May took Peter to shower as well.
Half an hour later, Gwen emerged from the room with a flushed face, wearing the hoodie and sweatpants Julian had prepared earlier.
To be fair, the clothes from the time Julian was 175 cm fit Gwen perfectly—hoodies were loose on her anyway.
Uncle Ben sat in the single armchair, so Gwen sat on the two-seater sofa, one at each end from Julian.
The TV was playing a drama series that Uncle Ben insisted on finishing.
When it ended, he walked away without looking back.
Julian stretched and turned his head toward Gwen.
The look in her eyes burned him, and then a pair of small feet were shoved into his lap.
A guest was a guest.
Considering that Gwen had been frightened during the day, Julian comforted her properly.
After more than ten minutes, Julian scooped her up in a princess carry—limp as a slime—and carried her to his room.
He pulled the blanket over her and then went to sleep on the couch.
I, Julian, am a gentleman.
But he hadn’t expected Gwen to be so emotional.
After a few words about the love and hate in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, she bit her finger, her eyes glistening with tears, and finally started sobbing quietly.
If it weren’t so late, if they didn’t have school the next morning, and if the setting were more appropriate, he’d have demonstrated how the ORA Stand works.
The next day, Gwen’s mother visited the Parker household.
The two families held a friendly meeting about Julian and Gwen’s relationship as classmates and expressed high praise for the Parkers’ parenting.
They noted that Julian’s gentlemanly behavior was the mark of a mature man and, in addition to bringing Gwen home safely, invited the Parkers to visit the farm for a hands-on tour to build a bridge of friendship between the two families.
Julian didn’t know how the rest of it was settled.
At least the FBI didn’t call him in to give a statement, which meant Aunt Tina had a pretty high rank or some serious backing.
A professional FBI agent like Tina wouldn’t leak case details to Gwen, so Julian didn’t get to hear any gossip either.
But during Christmas, Julian received two pieces of good news.
First, because of his perfect grades and his deep knowledge of biology, chemistry, and electromechanics, his school mentor had pulled him into the lab in December as free labor.
He helped the mentor break through some genetic technology problems, which earned him a full-ride admission offer to MIT—courtesy of the mentor’s connections.
Second, during a one-day farm trip to Gwen’s place on Christmas, Wenqu activated on a pony.
[Discovered excellent genetic template.
Recorded: Raid.
Lacking 40% necessary data.
Cannot analyze, cannot optimize.
Submitted Divine Strength gene template.
Martial Saint receiving.
Data insufficient.
Martial Saint rejected.] Divine Strength was easy enough to understand, but Julian couldn’t quite figure out Raid.
In the interpretation, “Raid” implied a long-distance rapid march with an assault element.
It certainly included endurance genes.
“Raid” also meant fast strike—did it include speed too?
Data was incomplete.
He’d pretty much flipped through all the biology books he had.
For speed, he could only try physics books to fill the percentage.
Fortunately, only 40% was missing—he should be able to finish it quickly.
But time waited for no one.
He had to report to MIT in February next year, meaning he had to complete Raid’s data within these two months at home.
Also, if he remembered correctly, Tony would be captured in February and wouldn’t escape until May.
Iron Man was about to appear.
Julian debated whether to step in and stir things up.
He thought for a while without reaching a conclusion.
He decided to first see how Raid performed.
If it was ideal, he’d go to Afghanistan.
If it was mediocre, he’d just wait for Iron Man to show up and then try to build a relationship as a fellow alum.
The following days were relatively monotonous: reading, studying, training Peter, and going shopping with Gwen.
After all, she was still going to school here next year, while he had to go to college in Cambridge.
Their relationship progressed quickly.
Gwen spoke sweetly, her little mouth as if smeared with honey—the days were full of promise.
But Raid gave Julian some trouble.
It involved many aspects.
Even reading Einstein’s theory of relativity increased the percentage.
Mechanics, wind resistance, wilderness survival, protein being six times that of beef—you couldn’t imagine something that didn’t increase the percentage.
But the increments were really small.
Sometimes he’d finish a whole book and see no movement at all.
He kept accumulating bits and pieces until mid-January, when he finally reached 100%.
This time Julian was prepared—he had plenty of food ready and didn’t collapse from hunger like on Halloween.
[Wenqu: Raid analyzing.
Enhancing body endurance and speed, tenfold index.
Raid optimizing.
Data incomplete.
Perfect optimization failed.
Optimization base 50%.
Submitted Raid genetic template.
Martial Saint receiving.
Martial Saint received.
Saved Raid genetic template.
Save successful.] Again 50% optimization.
Julian genuinely felt it was absolutely necessary to visit Kamar-Taj.
The remaining 50% optimization must be on the magical side—either at Kamar-Taj or in Asgard.
Asgard was full of family drama, and honestly, Julian really didn’t want to get involved in those domestic affairs.
After the Martial Saint finished its work, Julian tested it.
The thing he feared didn’t happen: Raid didn’t overwrite Divine Strength but instead built upon it, perfecting the genes to gain greater power.
He lived quietly for two days, then went to the outskirts of New York to test Raid a little.
First, endurance.
It improved his physical constitution—if you run as fast as you can but your body falls apart halfway, you can’t piece yourself back together.
Second, stamina.
Julian ran for five hours before his body declared an emergency—mainly because he ran out of energy, not because he couldn’t keep going.
As for speed, the measured limit was about Mach 1.
He could only reach the speed of sound.
Going faster was difficult, and he could feel his leg muscles starting to tear.
Julian sat heavily by a lake, panting.
He pulled chocolate, beef jerky, and energy drinks from his bag and wolfed them down until the pack was empty, finally catching his breath.
Julian noticed that Wenqu’s base multiplier was fixed.
For example, the tenfold index was based on a normal adult male’s baseline.
That meant if the speed gene wasn’t optimized, a normal adult male’s sprint speed was 5 to 7 meters per second, so the fastest he could get was only 70 to 100 meters per second.
That was still thanks to Divine Strength.
The truly unreasonable part was Wenqu’s optimization bonus, which let speed combine with Divine Strength to reach Mach 1.
And that was still the tech-side optimization.
The magic-side optimization was bound to be even stronger—he just wondered if he could get something like Speed Force, becoming a man of lightspeed.
That said, the issue of energy replenishment was a major headache for Julian.
It wasn’t obvious now, but once he faced an evenly matched opponent and needed to go all out, the energy problem would be a critical weakness.
He couldn’t eat while fighting—even if the enemy gave him a chance, it would look ridiculous.
One meal of charging, two minutes of fighting?
Another problem: Julian lifted his foot and looked at his ruined shoes and a leg that was purple and blue.
Clothing was easy to solve—he could research new materials and later design a combat suit with the money he earned.
If worse came to worst, he could try to mooch Tony’s nanotechnology.
But his body’s recovery ability was a serious deficiency.
Just now, when testing his top speed, his leg muscles had sustained damage.
If it were Hulk, the Little Spider, or Captain America, they’d be hopping around in no time.
For him, it would take at least two days to recover.
Even though his current physical strength was high and enemies might not even be able to hurt him, if he did get injured, he’d be out for the whole season—that was unacceptable.
Without professional equipment or a professional team, studying photosynthesis or accelerated healing was unrealistic.
Julian also tried observing various plants, animals, and even solar panels, but Wenqu ignored them all.
That left him frustrated.
Still, the gains from Raid were considerable, which somewhat comforted his bruised heart.
As for the next template, he would have to wait for Wenqu’s fate—he still hadn’t figured out the trigger condition for Wenqu.
Tough life!