67. My Best Friends Are Making Out

My Best Friends Are Making Out

When the plate was nearly empty, Grandma Lin leaned back in her chair with a satisfied sigh and asked, “Tell me, sweetheart, have you seen my nephew? Lia said he is recovering and told me not to worry, but…”

She fidgeted.

“…well, worrying is the privilege of old people, is it not?” She gave a small laugh, but it sounded a little forced. “And he vanished rather suddenly a few hours ago, so I wondered whether you might know. Since you are friends…”

“Oh, he’s missing, is he?”

Yes. He was definitely missing.

“He is probably back in his laboratory. You know boys and their toys.” Unless a friendly red-haired girl was nearby. In that case, matters might be very different.

“Do not worry. As long as the base is not under attack and he does not leave it, with all the powers we have now, he will not accidentally hurt himself. None of us will.”

Probably.

As long as we were not actively trying.

“I suppose… I am just a worrier, you know. When I do not know where he is, I imagine he is getting himself into trouble…” She gave another faint laugh. “I have been like this ever since his mother left and never came back…”

I… had no idea what to say that would be both true and not worrying, so I said nothing.

Because I knew where Cheng Rui was.

I only wished I did not.

Not because he and Chi Li had been making out for more than twenty minutes, but because of how I had found out.

It turned out that if your super senses were good enough to see people through walls, they were also good enough to see them through clothes.

Or through skin.

Or through muscle and organs.

The only reason I had not seen any of that before was that I had not really been looking.

Once you had seen it, though, there was no unseeing it.

No matter how much you wanted to forget. I could deliberately choose not to look, but every so often I forgot, and then someone’s internal organs appeared just as clearly as their face.

That was why there had been cookies.

All the cookies.

I had considered trying alcohol, but with my constitution, drinking to forget was not going to work even if I wanted it to.

Maybe I could persuade Grandma Lin to brew magically enhanced drinks?

The idea definitely had potential, so I added it to my list of possible entertainments for the near and not-so-near future.

Speaking of entertainment, sex might be ruined, at least until I learned to control these new senses better.

Nothing kills the mood quite like being able to see the billions of parasites living on and inside any potential partner. If that were not enough, being able to see them essentially flayed or reduced to a skeleton would finish the job.

Back in my private quarters in the base, otherwise known as the girls’ bathroom, I simply dismissed my Super Suit and stripped out of the torn, filthy, bloodstained clothes that smelled as unpleasant as they looked.

The extremely practical ability to change clothes and clean myself on demand often tempted me to invest more points in that particular power.

Only the lethal threat of an alien invasion, which demanded that every resource go toward even the faintest chance of survival, had stopped me.

Force Adjustment once again proved to be a girl’s second-best friend. It gave me a steaming hot bath, while a door locked with Nearby Object Manipulation ensured I could remain undisturbed for… research.

Yes. Let us call it research.

Then a simple fact ruined the lovely experience of slowly easing myself into pine-scented, magically purified water.

Near-boiling water was no longer hot enough.

Objectively, the water was as hot as before. It even felt hot to the touch, but the sensation was hollow, because the effect it had on my enhanced physiology was no longer the same.

My baseline body had become too resilient, too stable. Even without any active enhancements, it no longer responded to water the way it used to.

And because I was still going to grow stronger, this problem would only get worse, now and in the future.

Unlike my sensory problem, this was, at least from one angle, a simple matter of physics rather than a complicated biological or psychological mess outside my ability to solve.

Well, biology would become a problem if I tried to simply weaken my body enough that it could still feel a hot bath properly.

Aside from reflexive reinforcement against harm, my powers would not let me affect my own body that way.

Changing my physiology without perfect control would badly disrupt my body chemistry, enough to kill me instantly.

Water, on the other hand, was inorganic and largely inert, so I could adjust its physical properties with relative safety.

I altered the cohesion between water molecules by an order of magnitude, turning it thick as honey without making it sticky, since the adhesion remained unchanged.

Then I made the same small adjustment to the molecular collisions that had heated the water in the first place. The water returned to the viscosity of ordinary soapy bathwater, but every bubble swelled enormously until a loose blanket of foam covered the whole pool.

That was acceptable.

I dipped a toe into my new and very special bathwater and found it as warm and comfortable as I remembered.

It steamed a little more. When I jumped in, it even hissed slightly. Other than that, nothing particularly concerning happened.

So what if the higher temperature made the water a little more corrosive? That only added flavor and texture to the bath.

I played with it for a while longer, making sure the mortar between the bricks would not melt or dissolve in liquid at the temperature of molten lead.

I also noted which pipes had illegally high lead content, which formerly plastic pipes were degrading rapidly, and, in general, which parts would need to be replaced if I wanted to continue having hot baths in the future.

So far, as long as my powers, especially Force Adjustment, remained up to the task, the plan seemed viable for the foreseeable future.

I lay back in my modified, absolutely not experimental, definitely-not-explosion-prone bathtub and pushed all my other worries aside.

Then I began thinking about something that had changed even more than my attitude toward Lia or my understanding of my super senses.