Puzzle Madness

Chapter 91 Exploitation
Doudou opened his arms and made a big shape in his arms:

"It's a big company, the Asia-Europe Post! I even saw their ad at the entrance to the Children's Palace. Those people I told you about earlier should all work for the Asia-Europe Post."

Ai Xi shifted in her armchair, her entire upper body turning. Her brow furrowed, her fingertips nervously grasping the tip of her penknife, even drawing a drop of blood.
"A multinational corporation like Asia-Europe Post has a psychic department? Do they want to capture you for research? What's the approximate level of your psychic abilities? Will there be psychic police officers who come to arrest you?"

Ai Xi's question made Doudou ponder it seriously:
"You won't mess with me lately, right? I seem to be the most powerful one among them - maybe I am the most powerful one?"

"It's hard to say. The last guy I met was a bald guy who wasn't wearing any clothes; he folded the auntie I mentioned into a piece of cloth and took her away. I think he can fold space or jump through wormholes. Oh no, I forgot what Doraemon said."

"It looks a bit like Alien, with that bald head coming out of someone's throat. No, it should be said that it came out from the breaststroke!"

"Scary, right? Anyway, it's outrageous and quite entertaining—though I slapped him in the face before he ran away."

Ai Xi's brows relaxed again. She put her broken index finger into her mouth and shook it.
"That's good. It's pretty much what I thought. I also think you should be the most powerful one - that bald guy just ran away quietly. If he could deal with you, he would have come out of your mouth."

She looked around and suddenly seemed to remember something:
"Speaking of which, Doudou, do you have X-ray vision, infrared vision, X-ray vision, or the ability to see very far away? Like Superman's? Or a weird sixth sense, like Spider-Man's premonitions, etc."

Doudou raised his hands and propped up his eyelids.
Buzz! The eyeballs spun like motors, turning into a gray, blurry mass at an alarming speed.
"I have night vision, so I can read or play games at night without turning on the lights. I don't have any other problems, otherwise I wouldn't have done so badly on my final exam last semester; I could have gotten a higher score on my math test just by glancing at it."

Ai Xi seemed accustomed to this horrific sight, and only squeezed out a "hmm" sound from her throat. She jumped off the stool and began to pick up the debris in Doudou's room and grope under the table.

After searching for a while, she picked up a screwdriver from the toolbox and began to dismantle the telephone in Doudou's house, which was no longer connected to the fixed line:

"Then maybe someone is monitoring you right now. Recording your daily relationships, purchases, interests, and so on, gathering intelligence to study you: that way, they can use your personality to find ways to deal with you."

She was picking through the disassembled telephone, examining the parts:

"Like, you've been saving up to buy a handheld game console? What if they use a Magic Swan II to try to entice you into child labor? Like joining the special forces, helping with secret experiments, or something like that?"

Doudou followed her to the phone and jumped onto the tower of videotapes. He squatted at the top, his eyes still darting like crazy:
"Oh—now that I think about it, it's quite possible. Big companies don't lack money, so they'll definitely try to bribe me."

After reinstalling the phone, Ai Xi started fiddling with the desk lamp again. The rumbling of cars outside the window made the room noisy.
"Yeah, it might not be that simple. If you don't agree, they might sell out all the MD cartridges at Mong Cai Electronics City, or send someone to intercept the cartridges you ordered by mail. In any case, they won't sell you the game, leaving you with nothing new to play."

"I'm sure you're scratching your head in frustration, but you don't have a good solution. School is about to start, and you can't go out of town to buy it. So you have to ask something of them, and you have to do what they say—"

"Then the initial demands are probably not excessive, and then they slowly boil you like a frog in warm water; they threaten you while giving you benefits, and before you know it, you'll become a hired thug."

"I don't need to fight you head-on, but I can still make you feel uncomfortable. There are already a lot of cunning people in school, and there are definitely even more cunning people in society."

"Anyway, if it were me, since I realized I couldn't beat you, I definitely wouldn't insist on continuing to fight you head-on; I'd attack from the side."

Doudou squatted at the top of the tower, his body motionless; but his head turned 180 degrees, his gaze circling back and continuing to follow Ai Xi, like an owl:

"Huh? They're so bad! Then I have to memorize the names of these institutions and organizations. When I have time, I'll go find them and destroy them directly. Otherwise, it will be very troublesome."

The lamp wasn't bugged either—Ai Xi paced around the room again, searching for other suspicious locations.

"You can't say it's bad, it's just that—people are definitely afraid of the unknown. They might still be trying to make friends with you or something like that. I can't really say friendship, there's a word for it: Ah, gentleness."

"There's no need to be too averse to interacting with strange organizations. After all, as long as you don't intend to destroy the Earth, you still have to interact with other humans."

"These aren't the little hooligans at the school gate. If you beat one away, the rest will be scared away."

"If you take down one Eurasian postal service, you'll probably have to take down all the other big companies too—because they'll definitely feel the same pain, get scared, and eventually unite to fight you. Before you know it, it'll be you versus six billion people."

"Six billion people can't all be bad, we can't just arrest them all and beat them up. Oh, the socket is suspicious too." Click! DouDou's head turned back. He scratched his nose, but his thoughts drifted to something else:

"Eh? I haven't thought about that. Tell me, can I defeat six billion people?"

Ai Xi half-knelt in the corner and began to dismantle the socket embedded in the wall - it was said that this was also a popular place to place monitoring devices:

"You can't win now, right? Well, definitely not? It's hard to say. Anyway, even if you win, who will make game consoles for you, develop games for you, and make movies for you? That would be boring, wouldn't it? You're not some villain who wants to conquer the world."

"Are you going to conquer the Earth and build a super entertainment empire? Probably not. You're too lazy to even be a team leader; hahahaha."

She laughed as she spoke, her eyes narrowed into two upward arcs:

"Oh, so I'm just saying there's a possibility. Don't be impulsive. It won't develop into a fight against the entire Earth. I think the Asia-Europe Post wouldn't dare to really cause you any trouble. If they make you angry... Didn't you say that several superpowered people couldn't beat you—"

"Besides, you're sitting here peacefully, you haven't disappeared or anything, and there aren't any troops surrounding you. So we can assume that we can't do anything to you for the time being."

"No one would do business at a loss, especially a large company or enterprise like this. Even the two of us know to wait for sales when we want to buy things!"

"So I think the most they can do now is spy on you, track you, collect your information, etc. If I'm sure of doing this, I'll do it once I'm sure."

As he spoke, Ai Xi became lost in thought; even the screwdriver in his hand dropped down:
".Or maybe there's some other way they can use you to make money, like a cash cow—didn't the news last semester say a lot of cockfighting betting parlors were shut down? What if they send out superpowered people to fight you, and then get some wealthy people in suits to watch the broadcast and bet big on your win?"

"This kind of superpowered cockfighting seems pretty lucrative, and you don't have to be stronger than you to operate it. Even if they discover you and they definitely can't beat you, you can still bet on how long the superpowered person can last in your hands, how you'll kill them, and so on; everything is available for gambling."

"Maybe it already exists now, like a boxing match or the NBA; some kind of superpower fighting competition, it's quite interesting to think about it--"

Ai Xi picked up the screwdriver he had dropped and held it in front of his face, looking at it carefully.
"Since you're so strong, your very existence is valuable. I don't even need to defeat you, or even communicate with you. I can still find ways to make money from you."

"So it's too late for them to win you over. After all, you don't have any deep hatred with them. At most, they have offended you."

She tilted her head and gently pressed the scar on her face with the base of her palm:
"But since they've offended you, and you're so powerful, big companies will definitely be scared—they'll have to find ways to hurt you. At least they'll know there's a way to deal with you. That way, people like them will feel at ease. Otherwise, it's like having a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, making them all feel uneasy."

"Maybe we need to think of a way to prevent them from hurting you."

Doudou jumped down from the videotape tower and found a place to sit next to Ai Xi:

"We'll talk about that later! Studying and living are more important. Think you could try conquering the entire world? Just kidding. The fun in life should be sustained over time—otherwise, all that fighting and killing will take away a lot of the fun."

"Ah, why are we back to the same topic again? That superpower fighting competition sounds pretty cool. Can we apply for a patent?"

Ai Xi reinstalled the socket, raised his hand and patted Doudou's shoulder:

"What patent? Don't flatter me. Anyone can come up with something like that. You have a pretty good brain."

"It seems they haven't had time to install bugs in your house yet? There aren't any in several places—I was worried just now, but now I think about it. If you've been home these days, these people wouldn't dare sneak in."

She stood up and then pulled Doudou up with her:
"Doudou, you're more like one of those characters from literary works that are more detached from reality. At first, I thought you might be Force-sensitive after watching Star Wars."

Doudou was stunned when he heard this, and then he seemed to be thinking about it:
"Will it be similar? I don't feel like a Jedi or Sith type. Eh? It's hard to say. I might try something like that; a Force choke or something."

(End of this chapter)