A Guide to Humanity’s Extinction

Ke Mingwei had just rushed back from the police station, still wearing his light blue uniform. His breast pocket bulged around an old Nokia phone and the corner of a red cigarette pack.

He looked up, frowning, his gaze stern on Ke Mingqing.

Ke Mingqing stood frozen in the doorway, supporting his backpack with one hand.

He thought to himself, ’Are you kidding me? This body’s dad is actually Rain Crow? No wonder he didn’t react when I talked back to him on the school bus.’

Father and son stood facing each other in silence—one framed in the doorway with his back to the setting sun, the other in the shadows of the entryway.

The reddish afterglow stretched their shadows long and thin across the wooden floor.

Ke Mingwei took a deep breath. It took him a long moment to speak, breaking the silence that hung over the hall.

He crossed his arms and measured out his words.

”I heard everything about what happened on the school bus from my colleagues at the station.”

”Oh.”

Ke Mingqing gave a casual reply and walked straight into the house without lifting his head. But Ke Mingwei stepped into his path, his 1.88-meter frame blocking him like a wall.

”Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?”

Ke Mingwei’s tone had turned noticeably cold.

Ke Mingqing sighed and looked him straight in the eye. ’So you figured you couldn’t lecture me on the bus while wearing a mask, and waited until you got home to take it off and scold me again?’ he thought.

’As expected of the terrifying crow man, quite the flexible thinker... If you love lecturing so much, I’ll just listen.’

He hung his head and muttered, ”I know, old man. I just wanted to protect the others.”

Seeing his normally stubborn son yield so quickly, Ke Mingwei froze, his anger dissipating by half.

He fell silent and scratched the stubble on his cheek, wondering if his tone had been too harsh.

Hadn’t he started fighting criminals with the exact same mindset?

There was one fatal difference: Ke Mingwei had become an esper at sixteen, whereas Ke Mingqing had never shown any such traits.

In his routine annual genetic tests, Ke Mingqing’s results had unfailingly shown him to be an ordinary human.

Ke Mingwei thought for a moment, rested a hand on his hip, and sighed.

”There absolutely cannot be a next time. This is serious... It’s not just about your safety. Did you ever consider that if you provoked that criminal, he might have taken his anger out on everyone else on the bus...”

Ke Mingqing cut him off. ”I know, I know. You mean I could have gotten a whole bus full of people killed, right?”

Ke Mingwei stayed silent for a moment, then nodded.

”Isn’t that exactly what Rain Crow said? Why do you sound just like him?” Ke Mingqing asked, looking up. ”Old man, did you two have the same language teacher?”

Ke Mingwei frowned slightly. ”That just shows this Crow-whatever-his-name-is made a valid point. You should listen to him.”

”Yeah.”

’You’re pretty good at playing dumb, old man,’ Ke Mingqing thought. ’No wonder you’ve kept it from the family all these years. Not a single one of the other six people in this house knows who you are.’

Right then, the phone in Ke Mingwei’s breast pocket rang.

”There’s still business at the station... I’m heading out.” Ke Mingwei grabbed his police jacket from the wall, draped it over his shoulders, and walked toward the door without looking back.

On the threshold, he paused, glanced back at Ke Mingqing out of the corner of his eye, and warned him,

”By the way, you are not allowed out tonight. Stay home and behave yourself, understand?”

Ke Mingqing nodded helplessly.

Ke Mingwei hesitated, looking as if he wanted to say something else, but the phone in his pocket kept ringing.

With a dark expression, he left without even closing the front door.

Ke Mingqing breathed a sigh of relief. This was the one day in his life he was most thankful he used to be an orphan.

He tossed his backpack onto the shoe cabinet and waited until Ke Mingwei’s footsteps faded before walking over to close the door. Just as he reached for it, a hand pressed against the other side of the wood, stopping him.

Through the crack, he saw a girl in a blue-and-white school uniform. She had a clear, pretty face and a chilly demeanor, her hair tied in a high ponytail with a black hairpin.

This was his younger sister, Xia Zili. She was sixteen, the same age as Ke Mingqing.

Her surname was Xia because of a family rule: girls took their mother Xia Wenna’s surname, and boys took their father Ke Mingwei’s.

Xia Zili wrinkled her nose slightly, staring at him with a cold expression.

”Please come in, young miss,” Ke Mingqing said respectfully, releasing the door. Then he offered a quick defense: ”Why are you looking at me like that? You make it seem like I saw you before I tried to close it.”

Xia Zili didn’t answer. She simply looked up, gave him a glance, and brushed past him.

The moment she crossed the threshold, a superhuman status panel appeared above her silhouette against a pitch-black background.

[Superhuman Codename: Magical Girl Ember]

[Type: Magical Girl]

[Danger Rating: B+ Rank]

[Superhuman Profile: Magical Girl Ember’s magical attire is a gothic deep black dress, its hem like a black rose. Her weapon is a dark gray, floral-patterned umbrella—”Cinderella.”

She is a quasi-A Rank magical girl signed by the Magical Girl Company. Her three masters are known as the Magical Girl Three Giants: Xi Ziyue, Mizumio Akari, and Utuna.]

[Currently Known Weaknesses: 1. A magical girl who has killed someone runs the risk of falling and becoming a witch. The player may attempt to induce this process.]

”Crap, both the old man and my sister are superhumans... Then what about the rest of the family?”

’So the original owner of this body lived with several superhumans for years and never noticed a single thing off about them?’ Ke Mingqing thought.

In the original owner’s memories, Xia Zili had clung to him when they were little.

Once she hit puberty, though, she had become a different person—unusually cold to everyone in the family, walking away the moment her parents started to lecture.

Usually, when she got home from school, she would toss her backpack onto the sofa, lock her bedroom door, and shut everyone out. Every now and then, she would run away without a word and ignore all the family’s messages.

When she came back the next day, she would offer an excuse like ”I stayed at a classmate’s house last night” and refuse to give them a single word more.

Now Ke Mingqing understood why the change in her had been so extreme.

First, she had hit her rebellious phase.

Second, gaining power beyond an ordinary human’s at her age made it hard to keep a level head with a teenager’s mindset.

She probably felt she had to study hard at school and save the world at the same time, which made it easy to lose patience with the people around her. She was likely thinking: ’I’m carrying so much, dealing with all this pressure, and I still get lectured when I get home? Do you muggles even have the right?’

Over time, she had naturally started avoiding her family.

By now, the sun had sunk below the horizon and the sky had darkened. Across the city, the lights of countless homes came on against the night, stretching into the distance like a long dragon woven from the warmth of daily life.

In the entryway, Ke Mingqing and Xia Zili walked into the living room in silence, like two strangers.

Ke Mingqing went to the water dispenser and poured himself a cup, while Xia Zili dropped her backpack on the floor, sat on the sofa, and turned to watch him.

She lowered her head, thinking for a moment, then did something rare and started a conversation.

”What you did... is all over the school website.”

”And?” Ke Mingqing asked dismissively.

Xia Zili stared at him without moving, speaking only after a long pause. She looked up, then lowered her eyes again. Her lips moved as if she wanted to ask, ”Did you get hurt?”, but what came out was the exact opposite.

”It was hilarious... Don’t do something so hilarious next time. If people find out you’re my brother, I’ll be embarrassed.”

With that, she grabbed her backpack from the sofa, stood up, and headed for the stairs to the second floor.

Ke Mingqing watched her go, thinking, ’Why is everyone in this family so awkward?’

He went up to his own room on the second floor, closed the door, sprawled in his leather chair, and stared sideways at the family portrait on the wall.

As his gaze moved across the faces of his eldest brother, his second sister, his third sister, and his mother, a thought struck him: since his younger sister and his father were confirmed superhumans, the other four were probably hiding secret identities too.

Tick-tock...

Tick-tock...

The blood-red countdown hovering above his head was still ticking away without a pause.

Ke Mingqing looked up at the prompt panel suspended just below the ceiling.

[Time remaining on the countdown: 179 days, 04 hours, 1 minute, 35 seconds.]

[If you fail to complete the ultimate mission—”Exterminate Superhumans”—within the specified time limit, your life will be terminated by the system.]

”If all six people in my family are superhumans, then that means...” He pillowed his arms behind his head. ”As a level-one rookie who hasn’t even left the starter village yet, I’m already surrounded by a bunch of max-level bosses?”