“Is this a superpower? I just deactivated that welded-door effect myself…”
“I remember trying to mentally cancel it before, but it didn’t work. So does it only deactivate when I personally touch the door?”
Wu Zhong summed it up. The ‘doors’ he’d used acted like they’d acknowledged a master. Doors he closed could only be opened by him; doors he opened could only be closed by him. No one else could move them.
Including the gas pedal! Ugh, this is really bizarre.
Fortunately he could remove the effect, but not from afar—he had to touch the door to do it.
Thinking of that, Wu Zhong froze for a moment. “Oh no… what about that elevator?”
He went over it carefully. If elevator doors and car doors behaved like that… hadn’t he, before leaving, also closed the unit door on the first floor…?
The firefighters and the property security were still inside.
“No way!”
Wu Zhong jolted. No wonder when he got off the bus he saw crowds gathered in the complex watching the commotion—turns out he’d welded the unit entrance shut!
He sprang up and immediately planned to go back and check.
The boss was startled and stopped him. “Why are you going back during work? Still riled up? Young people, don’t be too impulsive.”
“If you’ve got grudges, play games on your phone and you’ll forget them.”
Wu Zhong joked casually. “What, you think I’m possessed? Can’t I take a day off today?”
The boss glared. “Don’t spout nonsense in broad daylight!”
No matter what he said, Wu Zhong insisted on going back. “I’m beat. I’m exhausted. I’ll go home and catch a nap—can I take half a day off?”
Hearing that, the boss didn’t stop him.
After all, Wu Zhong was the model worker, a mainstay of the shop. Ever since he’d been working overtime every day, customers’ cars were usually fixed the same day or the next day.
The boss actually worried about his health, so when Wu Zhong finally asked for leave he felt relieved.
Wu Zhong ran out of the shop and dashed to Yiheyuan, to the outside of his unit.
Man, when he arrived he was dumbstruck.
A crowd had gathered; residents were whispering among themselves.
He saw firefighters taking the entire entrance gate off and loading it onto a truck.
“Bro, what happened?” Wu Zhong sweated as he asked people along the way.
Someone nearby said, “This complex is just rotten.”
“First the elevator jammed and trapped residents. The firefighters finally came and rescued people, but then the access gate wouldn’t open. The firefighters all jumped down from the second floor.”
“The property management couldn’t open it no matter what, so you see, the firefighters just chiseled the connection and took the frame off.”
Wu Zhong stared at the building—there was just a hole now where the gate had been; the wall edge was chiselled away.
“Why not just cut the lock cylinder? Why take the whole frame off?” he asked.
The passerby replied, “They tried sawing the cylinder, but even after it broke the gate still wouldn’t push open. A bunch of firefighters rammed it and ended up knocking the wall next to the frame to pieces, so they just removed the whole frame.”
Wu Zhong’s eyes widened. His ‘ghost-weld-door’ ability had literally welded the gate shut.
Whether there was a lock or not, no one could open or close the door.
Even a sawed-off lock cylinder couldn’t open it!
An invisible force had welded the door’s state shut—only he could move it?
The stranger the doors behaved, the more it felt wrong the longer he thought about it.
No—he had to deactivate the effect right away.
Playing curious, Wu Zhong edged closer to the truck and casually tapped the big iron gate with his fingertip.
Clang—because the gate was lying at an angle on the truck and the lock cylinder had been sawed off, his deactivation caused the gate to swing open under gravity.
Everyone looked over. Wu Zhong had already withdrawn his hand and stood among the crowd, pretending curiosity.
The firefighters tried pushing and pulling—the gate was back to normal, opening and closing freely. They murmured in amazement.
Luckily the onlookers didn’t overanalyze it; they just joked, “Weird—loaded on the truck and now it’s fine by itself.”
Though odd, people treated it as a curiosity, and Wu Zhong quietly breathed easier.
He left the crowd and rushed into the building. The elevator doors were still wide open; he hurried upstairs to deactivate the effect.
But the property staff had blocked it with plastic barriers. “Hey, that elevator’s broken. Don’t get near it.”
Wu Zhong moved to the other elevator. “I’ll take the other one…”
He pressed the up button and silently willed the deactivation—and it worked.
Just as he was about to step into the elevator, the supposedly ‘broken’ one on the other side suddenly closed by itself.
As suspected: a door controllable by a button could be deactivated by touching the control.
Both elevators used the same control system.
“Is it fixed then?” Wu Zhong feigned surprise.
The property staff, unfazed, said calmly, “This darn elevator is sluggish and dangerous. Don’t use it. Take the other one.”
Wu Zhong hummed and took the other elevator home.
He was already certain: he’d inexplicably obtained a ‘weld-door’ power.
Although the power felt dumb as hell, at least it was a superpower.
He should study it properly…
But ten minutes later, he’d finished his assessment: this ability was even more garbage than he thought.
First, he couldn’t sense any energy—it was as if there wasn’t any power at all.
When he used any door himself, everything seemed completely normal; he couldn’t perceive the effect he caused…
Only after he used it did the door become abnormal—others could no longer open or close a door he’d touched, unless he actively deactivated it.
“What good is this?”
Wu Zhong’s first thought was to make money with it—no choice, he was broke.
But think as he might, how could this power earn money? He couldn’t figure it out.
One thing in its favor: the definition of ‘door’ was quite broad.
Since he’d welded the gas pedal before, he thought of ‘electric switches’.
He could flip his own breaker, and again everything worked normally for him.
After thinking it over, he decided to go downstairs and flip the entire building’s main breaker, then wait nearby for the property staff to handle it.
This complex was old; the breakers used to trip all the time. No one would suspect someone had deliberately pulled them.
After a while, property staff came to check the breaker.
“Damn, something’s out of order again!” the property staff groaned.
Wu Zhong strolled over. Indeed, no matter how the staff fiddled, they couldn’t push the breaker back.
They rushed to find an electrician while Wu Zhong watched and chatted with the staff.
When the electrician arrived he was baffled too—couldn’t understand why the breaker was jammed and wouldn’t reset.
“It’s confirmed: an electric gate is still a door, or rather… any control switch or circuit ‘gate’ counts as a door.”
Wu Zhong thought, I can make any door acknowledge a master so others can’t use it—so what?
How to leverage that?
Should he become an electrician and secretly sabotage someone’s breaker so nobody else could fix it, then come back and fix it himself?
How much money would that make? Not worth it compared to working overtime.
Also, too many unexplained faults would be impossible to justify.
Honestly, he still felt uneasy about today’s unit door incident.
Luckily the firefighters were working and probably didn’t have time to investigate the ruined gate.
Seeing the property staff sweating, he felt a bit guilty and checked his phone—the owners’ group chat was already ripping into property management…
Today was elevator accidents, broken unit doors, and power outages; property was in a mess.
“Want me to give it a try? Maybe it’s just jammed and a bit of force will fix it,” Wu Zhong offered.
But the property staff told him to stay away.
The electrician warned, “Don’t meddle. These breakers are old; just replace it.”
The veteran handyman started reconnecting wires and replacing the switch.
In a few minutes, they got the building’s power back online.
“…” Wu Zhong stood there dazed.
When the electrician put the replaced breaker aside, Wu Zhong quickly reached out and touched it, deactivating the lock.
He asked casually, “So it’s fixed now?”
The electrician shrugged. “A small problem.”
“…” Wu Zhong scratched his head.
Indeed it was a small problem. Although his welded-door ability was a strange supernatural power, you could just replace the door. The firefighters had done that with the unit gate; now the electrician had done the same with the breaker.
He wasn’t locking the circuit itself—the electricity still flowed. The electrician even rewired things and fixed it.
Wu Zhong’s plan to profit by breaking doors then “fixing” them was dead in the water.
Too risky and not lucrative—no point even thinking about it.
He trudged back home, looked around, took out his phone and scrolled, feeling aimless.
Good news: he had a superpower.
Bad news: he still had to go to work.
He thought for a long time. The power couldn’t defeat enemies or boost combat ability.
It couldn’t let him fly or teleport to increase mobility.
It couldn’t produce wealth or enhance social charm.
“This is useless as trim!” he swore.
“If a novel protagonist awakened this sort of golden finger, wouldn’t they faceplant?”
Wu Zhong lay there for a while, increasingly dissatisfied.
No—he needed to calm down and think thoroughly. It must be useful somehow.
“Door—door—what other doors are there?”
“House doors, car doors, gas pedals, breakers… what about departments?”
“Taoist sect, Buddhist sect, Confucian school… the Southern Gate?”
He raked his hair, thinking wildly—he even thought of the “scandal gate” thing.
But the problem: even if those are ‘doors’, how could he open or close them?
Only doors he personally used first would acknowledge him and lock for others.
How could he close a Buddhist gate? A Taoist gate? The Southern Gate? The scandal gate?
These ethereal things were obviously out of reach and impossible to test.
“Maybe I should apply to the government and try to get a steady job,” he muttered. “After all, I do have a superpower.”
He lay back down.
He glanced outside—the weather had worsened, dark clouds gathering, lightning flashing.
Since this morning the weather had suddenly turned bad, so he hurriedly brought in his clothes.
He fried a quick egg-fried rice and scrolled through short videos.
A local video popped up.
Someone had filmed abnormal storm weather around Five Elders Peak on Mount Lu—there were light spheres and mysterious creatures on the summit.
The footage was shot by tourists. Mount Lu was normally a foggy, mesmerizing sight like an immortal realm.
Suddenly the clouds and light warped, the atmosphere boiling.
On the viewing platform a massive vortex opened; the air surged violently.
The wind sped up to the point of a sonic boom, roaring toward the center, compressing and exploding.
Tourists who were caught unawares were swept up; only the filmer, who was halfway up the mountain, held tight to the railing or he’d have been blown away.
On Five Elders Peak’s restricted area everything was ascending—the scene looked like a doomsday blockbuster.
He swallowed another bite of rice.
The mingled clouds, light, and wind made a striking sight.
Most bizarre was at the climax—a boom, a rebound of air, and a fierce, magnificent dragon head burst out of the light.
It was really a dragon: huge horns, majestic mane, gleaming scales.
It looked a bit distorted, the light and shadow wavering as if formed from gas—a mirage-like apparition.
“Ha—an AI at first glance,” Wu Zhong scoffed and shoveled in two more mouthfuls.
He watched a few more clips of Mount Lu’s strange cloud lights—local fire services had arrived.
Halfway up the slope, tourists clung to railings waiting for rescue. The rails were solid—some were carved straight from rock.
Whoosh! More monsters emerged from the storm eye. They ignored the tourists, darting about in the clouds as if summoning wind and rain, feeding materials into the vortex.
One looked like a deity, others had bird heads and human bodies, some had cow horns and wings.
Feathered beings were the most common—people with plumage protruding from their heads and wings growing from their ribs, brightly colored.
But these images were hazy, bodies like flowing air—mirage-like.
When a local rescue helicopter arrived its rotor wash shredded those seeming bodies, but the chopper was soon sucked in, slammed into the cyclone and exploded; the fire vanished into the storm.
The grim scene, paired with stirring music, made the videos feel like a commercial blockbuster—if a little blurry.
“After all these years and still garbage special effects—can’t they film more clearly?” Wu Zhong said, finishing his meal calmly.
He noticed the clip was posted by Mount Lu’s official cultural and tourism account—oh, that explains it.
He checked the comments. People were roasting it: “My demon-refining pot lost to the mortal realm has finally been found.”
“Looks like mythic monsters—ancient aberrations.”
“Isn’t that myth?”
“Spiritual energy revival—myths returning to reality?”
“Looks like creatures from Classic of Mountains and Seas—are they tasty?”
“The horned one is delicious, pressure-cook it three hours, tender as hell. Add star anise and chili—divine.”
“I don’t eat beef.”
“This is ancient cuisine! Our ancestors’ gourmet picks.”
“I’ve hotpot’d for ages. Finally I can sear dragon intestine, dragon brain, dragon tripe?”
“Dude, my mouth is watering.”
“Tsk, a bunch of evil cultivators. The 749 Bureau can’t contain this. ‘Dog head’.”
“The end times’ method was to seal us demons. What you call spiritual revival is billions of evil cultivators pouring onto Earth, shouting they’ll conquer the heavens.”
Wu Zhong nearly died laughing in the comments. He casually replied: “With my natural cow-and-horse bones, giving me an Immortal cultivation manual would be useless—let me just make money.”
Then he swiped the video away.
Soon he saw a hurricane weather warning advising tourists that the Mount Lu scenic area was temporarily closed.
Forecasts said the region would face prolonged gale and heavy rain.
“Rainy season always has this crap weather,” Wu Zhong snorted. Northern Gan Province was notorious for freaky weather—forecasts often missed the mark.
Like last year in the provincial capital Hongdu there were thousands of lightning strikes in a single night.
Two years ago there were severe convective winds that tore building walls open and sucked residents into the sky.
Three years ago Poyang Lake partially dried into grasslands and desert in many areas…
As a local, Wu Zhong was used to these things—nothing to freak out about.
Right now he had three thoughts: make money, make money, and make money.
…