Chapter Three: A Punch with the Force of a Megaton

From the first year of high school, then the second, and finally the third—until graduation—nearly a thousand days had passed since Xi Gu's awakening.

3,437,301 kilograms.

His bench press strength had finally reached this level.

Beyond that, all other aspects of his physical abilities had also risen steadily over this period.

First, his vision. At the outset, his eyesight was just enough for him to remove his glasses. A few days later, his vision reached 3.0. After a few months more, Xi Gu’s eyesight surpassed that of any human in history; he could stand atop a hundred-meter building and see the stitching patterns on the hats of people walking below.

And his vision kept improving. The distance he could see continued to extend, but more fundamentally, Xi Gu began to surpass the limits of humanity itself. At first, when exerting his vision to the fullest, he could see wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum, such as infrared and ultraviolet light. As time passed, the range of visible wavelengths expanded, and his eyes began to perceive hundreds, even thousands of colors unimaginable to ordinary humans.

They were neither gold nor purple, nor blue, black, or white, but rather bizarre hues that no human-made pigment could ever depict. These colors filled the world, visible even in the air itself.

His vision continued to sharpen. Beyond colors, Xi Gu began to see more: the tiny patches of skin cells on the human surface, the minuscule insects wriggling on body hair, peering through the pores to the crimson veins and muscles beneath… and much more.

This was not the end.

As his vision kept evolving, Xi Gu could perceive even finer details—not grains of sand measured in centimeters, not insects at the millimeter scale, nor cells at the micron level—but molecules and molecular clusters measured in nanometers, even angstroms.

If this progress continued, perhaps one day he would witness quantum transformations…

Xi Gu lamented this in his heart, yet he did not fall into madness.

Indeed, the control of his eyesight had long since been included in his training regimen and was now part of his skill set; he could freely choose what he wished to see, untroubled by the thought of being distracted during a conversation with a charming girl by the sight of mites crawling on her nose.

Unless absolutely necessary, Xi Gu generally kept his vision slightly above the normal human range.

The same went for his hearing. Even though his ears could now pick up radio broadcasts from across the ocean and the faint noise of cosmic background radiation, Xi Gu controlled his hearing, keeping it within ordinary limits, much like the "monkey covering its ears."

The saying "hear no evil" truly had its wisdom.

Of course, in important exam halls, Xi Gu would loosen his control over his hearing just a bit—after all, listening comprehension in English was crucial.

However, he never used his extraordinary abilities to cheat.

In fact, Xi Gu now approached life with composure, like a player with cheats in GTA V who still dutifully obeys traffic laws. It was ironic, deeply contradictory, yet truly his reality.

Though exams were trivial, if he began abusing his powers to flout rules, Xi Gu feared he’d develop a habit of undermining social order, and might one day lose control and, with a single blow, split the Eurasian continent in half.

If that happened, how could he ever again enjoy the games, anime, novels, films, and all the products of human civilization—now and in the future?

No matter how strong his body, Xi Gu was still just one person. At least for now, he felt he could not survive apart from society; even mentally, he couldn’t bear it.

Beyond sensory abilities like hearing and vision, Xi Gu had also transcended the limits of the human body in speed and neural response, racing down a path of unprecedented ascent.

When he first entered his second year of high school, his top running speed was 21 meters per second. This was a figure that would leave professional sprinters stunned, and Xi Gu could maintain this pace for over thirty minutes, enough to make marathoners weep—still within the bounds of comprehension.

But by the third year, that number became 590 meters per second, fast enough to create a sonic boom when running at full effort.

By the time he finished his college entrance exams and graduated, Xi Gu's speed had evolved to 8,100 meters per second.

8.1 kilometers per second—already surpassing Earth's first cosmic velocity.

He could now leave the planet, orbit the Earth!

His childhood fantasy of becoming an astronaut had become prophetic.

But of course, Xi Gu didn’t just dash into the sky or out into space. He only tried running at full speed once, and suddenly found himself hundreds of meters above the ground, his heart pounding wildly from fright.

Yet, even after falling from such a height, he was unscathed, merely leaving a crater over ten meters wide in the forested mountains below.

Nothing unusual—after all, the resilience of Xi Gu’s body had been growing by one percent every day.

By his second year, his body had become as tough as steel. At that point, even if he tried to pierce his skin with a knife, the blade would dull.

Not long after, wanting to test further, Xi Gu snuck into the city's rifle club at night and fired several rounds at himself—still, no damage.

Unable to find stronger weapons to test himself, he put the matter of his defensive capabilities on hold.

Yet after a thousand days, even without further tests, Xi Gu was certain he could now take a direct hit from a nuclear bomb without harm.

The reason was simple arithmetic.

Currently, Xi Gu’s physical strength was about 3,437,301 kilograms. At full punch, his maximum speed was estimated at 80 kilometers per second (based on control-based projections).

Thus, the kinetic energy generated from a single full-force punch was 10,999,363,200,000,000 joules.

That is, over one quadrillion joules of energy.

One ton of TNT is roughly equivalent to 4.2 billion joules, meaning that Xi Gu’s punch packed the power of over 2.6 million tons of TNT—more than a hundred times the force of "Little Boy," and about one-twentieth the yield of the most powerful weapon ever devised by humankind, the "Tsar Bomba."

As the source of this force, it was certain that Xi Gu’s ever-strengthening body would leave him unscathed after such a blow—so, if his punch equaled a hundred nuclear blasts, how could he not have the defense to withstand a nuclear detonation?

Furthermore, compared to the immense shockwaves produced by a nuclear explosion, Xi Gu's punch would concentrate all that energy into a single point, only dispersing once fully released.

In this sense, even the "Tsar Bomba," with its energy mostly in radiation and widespread effects, might not harm Xi Gu, whose body could withstand a hundred nuclear blasts at a single point.

Yet, actually, it had been a long time since Xi Gu had unleashed his full power—even in testing.

Roughly three months ago, before he grew as strong and fast as he was now, Xi Gu, on a rare day off, went to the local coast and ran across the water at over a hundred meters per second.

Once he was dozens of kilometers from shore, he dove into the sea, and at a depth of over a hundred meters, tested his full force with a punch.

The immense power became a surge through the water, and as it was a high-grade energy burst, the heat instantly raised the temperature of the surrounding sea for several kilometers by dozens of degrees, killing all fish and shrimp in silence. The kinetic energy continued, bursting out of the water and creating a wave over a hundred meters tall.

The energy release disrupted ocean currents in that area, which, combined with already chaotic airflows, triggered by the turbulent weather system, even sparked a small typhoon.

Drenched by wind and rain, Xi Gu slunk back to the shore, leaving behind a meteorological anomaly that puzzled the marine weather bureau and a typhoon that dissipated before reaching land.

Seeing the consequences of his actions, Xi Gu was filled with dread.

One could imagine: if a punch like that landed in a city, even aimed at empty air, the resulting shockwave and kinetic energy would be enough to destroy vast swathes of urban landscape.

It was precisely for this reason that Xi Gu stopped his "limit burst" testing.

“If I now possess a power equal to or greater than a standard nuclear bomb, then it’s only right to treat every test with the caution due to a nuclear weapon,” he thought.

And so, from that day forward, Xi Gu drew a line and abstained from such experiments.