[NR] No Superheros - Chapter 794 (Patreon)

Rosha, “Wait a second. So there are casting stats, we just can’t see them?”

Jason shrugs, “There are technically stats irl, but you can’t see them and they wouldn’t be useful. The supernatural and mystical just have a tendency to flatten some things that makes it easier to judge.”

Rosha, “Why does it sound like magic makes things more boring? Also, what do you mean by them not being useful? Knowing exactly how much you can lift or what have you at least sounds interesting to know.”

Jason raises an eyebrow, “So you want to know how much strain the tendon in your left pinky finger can take? How about the specifics of a small bundle of muscle fibers in your cheek? Honestly, it tends to be less about weight and more about contraction force and how securely things are attached.

“Not that magic removed those individual physical restrictions. Rather, in my limited experience, what magic and cultivation does to the body is share the load. Individual muscle fibers don’t matter because the magic spreads the strain out across the entire body to some extent.”

Courtney, “Don’t muscles and such already do that? After all, a single muscle fiber certainly can’t lift what an entire arm of them can.”

Jason, “That’s more akin to the old trope where some hidden master shows how easy it is to break a single chopstick, but a bundle of them isn’t so easily broken. Magic just gives you a bigger chopstick.”

Courtney frowns, “I’m not certain if your analogy holds up to material science, but then again, we are talking about magic and cultivation. Though speaking of which, does using magic in NeoRealm have any negative effect on our irl cultivation?”

Jason shakes his head, “You will be fine. I have a little bleed-over because I basically copied what I was doing in one to the other. Oh, and the concepts I cultivate. Neither of you are doing that, so the chances of any bleed-over is basically none. Otherwise, we’d probably have ‘superheroes’ or some such jumping and flying around irl.”

Courtney, “There should be some people out there with powers.”

Jason, “I didn’t say they would exist. I said they’d be out and about. The kind of people who this would happen to? The kind of powers that would bleed over?

“Given our culture, it would be people in literal tights, calling themselves by pseudo-names, and fighting each other. It takes a certain kind of need for them to drag the power over and that power needs to match them in a way that they wouldn’t be able to hide.

“This isn’t some main character from a novel where they realize the danger and hide their abilities until something forces them. A person who gains the power to fly? They won’t be able to resist flying. A person who can throw fireballs will not feel bad about throwing them around.”

Rosha, “Well, even if they did exist, it sounds like they’d get captured and the information removed from the net.”

Jason laughs, “You know? There’s some truth when it comes to tropes. Why do supervillains always get out of jail? Well, that is partly because the legal system when the genre originated was basically like that for the rich. However, superpowers that sit outside of regular cultivation or magic?

“You can’t jail them. Well, I mean, sure, you can catch them. Maybe stick a handful of them in prison. Keep them in a coma so they can’t do anything to escape or some such. But power like that is like a flame, and attempts to hide it are like covering a fire with a paper bag.

“Give it time and the bag itself will burn, revealing the fire now bigger having been fed. Maybe it won’t be the powered you have in a coma, but with each one smothered, more will rise up because theirs is the power of ego and will. Though it is also possible that someone you think is in a coma ends up bursting out because of their power.”

Courtney, “How do you even know that? You didn’t have a secret third life or something?”

Jason shakes his head, “Nah, but abnormal powers can crop up anywhere. And you would think with cultivation being widely known, there wouldn’t be a need to hide such things. You’d be wrong.

“Powers like that are on a different axis from cultivation or magic. Cultivators? Yeah, their long lives mean they can be hidebound and powers upset things. After all, being able to fly when you aren’t even a few decades old? Stuffy old cultivators will riot over someone weaker than them flying better than them. So yeah, we don’t have that kind of thing irl.”

Rosha, “I think we might in the future.”

Jason shrugs, “Oh, as long as people keep poking holes in the dimensional boundary and letting in new power types, it is almost inevitable. But by that I mean sometime in the next thousand years.”

Rosha, “No, I mean it sounds like the kind of thing that is actively happening. In my space game, I heard rumors of people vanishing and had Courtney look into it.”

Courtney frowns, “That did happen, but they were just people going missing. I found nothing out of the ordinary. Which, admittedly, is exactly what I’d find if the government wanted someone to vanish, but there wasn’t a reason to vanish them.”

Rosha snaps her fingers, “Exactly! There wasn’t a reason to vanish them. But I heard rumors of them discovering things or some such.”

Jason shrugs, “I doubt it is this. However, I guess we should keep an eye out for it.”

Courtney, “Why are you so doubtful about it?”

Jason, “The current world isn’t the best situation for such powers to appear. If they were to appear, I would have expected them to have appeared when the corporations and the rich were at their height.”

Courtney, “And of course if they had, we’d know about it.”

Jason nods, “The pressure vessel that is ‘super powers’ isn’t strong enough to last till today.”