Other than that, there was nothing.

　　After a glance, he almost cursed out loud. As he reached to close the webpage, James Carter paused, stared at the circular combination of numbers on the screen, and exclaimed in a low voice, “Huh? It’s clearly just a bunch of capitalized numbers, so why do I see the character for ‘fire’?”

　　The circular combination looked like a color blindness test chart, except it was only black. Dense black characters formed a circle. Normally, it would be impossible to see anything else in this bizarre jumble of numbers, yet he saw the character for ‘fire’.

　　In an instant, the blurry ‘fire’ character became clear, right in the center of the circle. The other capitalized numbers’ strokes faded more and more, becoming just a background color. As James Carter kept watching, he saw the black ‘fire’ character suddenly turn red, swelling and enlarging as if it was about to leap out of the computer screen.

　　Boom!

　　With another glance, the fiery red ‘fire’ character, as if made of burning flames, really did leap out of the computer screen, jumped into James Carter and entered his brow. This bizarre change made Big James scream and jump up.

　　The next moment, waves of warmth and inexplicable insight surged into his mind. In his terror, James Carter suddenly had an intuition: his body was undergoing strange changes in the flood of warmth sweeping through him. His whole body felt warm, as if soaking in spring sunlight. His scalp grew hot, and as he followed the impulse in his heart and opened his mouth, a burst of flame whooshed out, spreading and burning in midair.

　　James Carter was stunned, dumbfounded!

　　……

　　A few minutes later, still in the spacious living room, James Carter was trying all sorts of things in a paranoid daze: waving his hand to create a fireball, opening his mouth to shoot a pillar of fire, transforming into a man of fire with a thought. In all these attempts, he truly went crazy.

　　How could he suddenly become a superhuman? Wasn’t this kind of supernatural power only found in fantasy novels?

　　He had gained fire powers after reading that novel called 【我不是在开玩笑】—did he really get superpowers from it?

　　Is this really not a joke?

　　In the midst of this madness, the warmth flowing through his body gradually faded, and the feeling of being able to control and create fire also slowly disappeared. James Carter was dumbfounded again.

　　A few minutes, and the fire power was gone?

　　The dissipation lasted thirty seconds, and he returned to his previous state as an ordinary person.

　　No matter how many experiments he tried, he could no longer control the power of fire. James Carter even took out a lighter and tried burning his finger, only to find that he was just a bit more heat-resistant than before. After a few seconds of flame, it still hurt enough to make him grimace.

　　“Hallucination? Was it all just a hallucination? Damn it, how could I possibly gain the power to control fire just by reading a novel online? That’s absolutely unscientific…”

　　But he noticed that some of the burned wooden furniture, bookshelves, books, and so on in the study still existed, some half-destroyed and still smoking. He was dumbfounded again.

　　What the hell is going on??

　　He stood dazed in the study for a long time. Then James Carter slapped his forehead, let out a strange cry, and ran to the bedroom. He took out the HIV test strips he’d bought before, the blood sampling needle, drew blood and tested it. After waiting ten or twenty minutes, James Carter was so excited he burst into tears—negative!

　　He didn’t dare get too excited, didn’t dare hope too much. He went out, drove his sports car to the provincial people’s hospital, had his blood tested again—still negative!!