Since it’s a banned drug, there’s a reason it’s banned.
Use this drug, and a person’s body becomes infected with a pathogen called “Black Element”—it’s fatal, and there’s currently no cure.
The more you use, the worse the infection, and the faster you die.
But once you’ve used this drug, even a single time, that person’s ending is already sealed.
At first no discomfort shows at all; in under two months, signs of frequent dizziness and vomiting appear, followed by weakly collapsing bedridden and unable to rise, gradually losing all appetite, until finally dying amid muddled, semi-conscious agony.
The longest anyone in history has lived after using it is ten years—spent, in the years that followed, in ceaseless pain.
Not only that—certain abilities carry other side effects on the spot.
The physical-enhancement type’s is the most obvious: after the body is enhanced, the muscles swell explosively, but when the drug wears off, the extreme atrophy of those muscles may cause the person’s original muscles to waste away along with them.
That’s not likely, though—he’s only thirteen, what could he possibly be so troubled about…
“Little Six, are you in any clubs?” Yiwen lay against his desk, cheek turned to look at Mi Xiaoliu.
“Clubs?”
“Yeah.
With an ability like yours, Little Six, training up a decent physique can strengthen the ability, you know.
If you’re not in a club, want to join the tennis club with me?” He winked at Mi Xiaoliu.
Jim’s take: when Yiwen winks, even a guy like him feels his heart flutter.
“Does a good body not get hungry?” Mi Xiaoliu asked.
This unexpected question actually left Yiwen at a loss for how to answer her.
An inexplicable, faintly sour ache in his chest.
“Everyone, quiet down for a moment.”
Three students wearing red shoulder insignia walked in—by the looks of it, upperclassmen a year or two ahead of them.
People from the Student Council.
“We’ll take up two minutes of everyone’s time.
Our class has classmates with self-healing abilities, right?
Raise your hands.”
Including Mi Xiaoliu, seven people could be seen raising their hands.
You have to understand, self-healing espers aren’t exactly a dime a dozen—for a class of under fifty to produce seven was an incredibly improbable phenomenon.
Two of the Student Council members came up to the multimedia station, plugged in a USB drive, and opened the slideshow they’d prepared in advance.
It was image after image of grim hospital scenes.
A man weeping after an amputation; a child who’d lost all his hair to chemotherapy; a girl about to enter the operating room, still smiling and giving a thumbs-up to the camera—and set against them, the weeping family members at their sides looked all the more piercing…
Set to sorrowful music, one heartrending photo after another was projected.
These agonizing images instantly quieted a class that had still been whispering among itself.
Though most understood that whatever the Student Council had come to do had nothing to do with them, no one in the class was a troublemaker; no one failed to read the mood at a time like this.
The lead boy, hair parted down the middle, stood at the front:
“A lot of us are probably newly transferred in, right?
Before I came in, I saw many people keeping their heads down, not fond of talking.” He glanced at Mi Xiaoliu.
“I know some of you may have just awakened your abilities—that people who were once familiar and dear to you suddenly, deliberately distance themselves from you, and then you feel a little lost facing the future, that sort of thing.
This is all normal.
Everyone here, including us and some of the school’s teachers, has been through it.
But really, what we’ve run into isn’t the sky falling or anything…”
First came an opening meant to build rapport and soothe emotions, and then he stepped aside and gestured with a wave at the sorrowful, tragic images on the projection.
“As we can see, while we enjoy our carefree, comfortable school days—yes, I’d say we already count as carefree—there are countless despairing families in this world who have no choice but to face devastating pain and disease.
They sell their houses; they sell off every last thing they own.
Because the one lying in the hospital bed might be their parent, their child, their wife…”
“Yet even when they’ve scraped together the money, all they can buy is a sliver of a slim chance at surgery.
For a century now, the things that have tormented us most have been injury, illness, and parting.”
“Today, our medical treatment keeps advancing with the emergence of every kind of self-healing esper, and many illnesses once considered terminal have already been conquered by us…”
Hearing this, even those who’d just awakened their abilities and were still bewildered understood what these people had come to do.
“Our school is currently holding a voluntary blood drive open only to self-healing espers.
The blood you donate will go toward medical research to save these despairing patients.
To you, this is merely an ordinary blood donation—yet these 400ml (about 13.5 fl oz) of blood might save countless families.”
“The hospital will remember the name of every donor.
As self-healing espers, you may not have the chance to fight evil head-on, yet you still have the chance to become heroes behind the scenes, saving others…”
A string of sorrowful, stirring rhetoric ran from the start of the ten-minute break to its end.
Even the chubby teacher, who’d prepared his lesson and was already standing at the door, felt too embarrassed to cut them off.
Everyone except Mi Xiaoliu—the other six all signed their names.
After Sasha explained to her what blood donation meant, she bowed her head low, and just as when she’d been drawing Memory Fragments, subconsciously hugged her arms.
Hugged them tightly.
“You’re not taking part, classmate?” The lead Student Council member walked up to Mi Xiaoliu.
His memory was fairly good, and he’d remembered that among the people who’d just raised their hands was this inconspicuous little wallflower—because the head-down, silent student he’d used as an example had been her.
Mi Xiaoliu shook her head.
Disgust—that was probably what this feeling was.
On her very first day she’d learned what the word “disgust” meant, stemming not only from physical nausea but also from psychological discomfort.
On hearing that someone wanted to draw her blood, the revulsion erupted like magma from a volcano.
A revulsion born of instinct—there was even an impulse to send the red pen in her personal storage space straight into this boy’s brain, even though he wasn’t forcing her at all.
“Self-healing espers who take part in blood donation can enjoy certain social benefits, such as…” This Student Council member wanted to keep persuading.
The recovery mechanisms of many self-healing espers all differed; who knew but that the blood of some overlooked one might yield a miracle drug to cure all ills.
“Any more and it becomes moral coercion, you know,” Yiwen reminded him in a gentle voice.
Hearing this, the Student Council member helplessly took his sign-up sheet and left.
Though it really was moral coercion, after Mi Xiaoliu refused to donate blood, many in the class seemed to start privately gossiping about her again.
It wasn’t that they felt she absolutely had to go donate or anything—it was because she didn’t fit in.
The other six had all signed up; she alone stood out this conspicuously.