Villain? No, I'll catch up with the protagonist after passing the civil service exam.

The night was deep, and black police SUVs sped along the ring road.

Lu Jingyan gripped the steering wheel with one hand, the extremely faint system alarm still echoing in his mind.

This was definitely not an ordinary shooting star.

"Boss, something's happened!"

The tactical tablet in Su Xiaoxiao's hand suddenly emitted a piercing alarm sound.

The screen flashed red light wildly, shattering the tranquility of the carriage.

"Someone jumped from the Hang Lung Plaza in the city center!"

Zhao Tiezhu, who had been dozing off in the back seat, sat up abruptly upon hearing this.

"Why would someone jump off a building on a weekend? Young people these days have such poor mental fortitude!"

"This wasn't an ordinary suicide attempt!"

Su Xiaoxiao swallowed hard, her voice filled with a sense of horror as if she had seen a ghost.

"The local police station said that the kid jumped from the sixth-floor atrium and didn't die."

"He smashed a crater in the marble floor tiles on the first floor, and he's still alive and kicking!"

Lu Jingyan's dark eyes narrowed, and he slammed on the gas pedal.

The SUV let out a beastly roar and executed a perfect drift at the intersection.

"It seems that someone has already claimed that shooting star."

Fifteen minutes later, in the atrium on the first floor of Hang Lung Plaza.

Outside the cordon, a large crowd of onlookers had already gathered, taking photos with their phones.

"Holy crap! Did the wire break during filming?"

"That's incredible! Jumping from the sixth floor and still being able to stand and talk?"

"What is he shouting? The Dragon King? This kid's probably gone mad from reading too many novels!"

The onlookers were buzzing with discussion, and flashbulbs were going off everywhere.

Lu Jingyan led the special investigation team through the crowd and strode into the center.

The scene before us does indeed contradict the basic physics knowledge taught in nine-year compulsory education.

The hard, high-grade marble floor was forced to sag by half a meter.

Spiderweb-like cracks spread wildly in all directions.

In the very center of these ruins stood a thin high school student wearing the uniform of the No. 2 Middle School.

He brushed the dust off his school uniform pants without a scratch, not even a scratch.

"Hahaha! Fortune changes every thirty years!"

The high school student suddenly tilted his head back, put his hands on his hips, and shouted at the air above him with an extremely frenzied expression.

"System binding successful! From this day forward, I am the Dragon King who rules the city!"

"Those classmates who looked down on me, and that class beauty who rejected me, you'll all be trembling and crawling on your knees now!"

He was engrossed in his own delusional, wish-fulfillment fantasy.

He tried his best to twist the corners of his mouth into a wicked arc.

Unfortunately, due to facial muscle spasms, his smile looked like the aftereffects of a stroke.

Zhao Tiezhu stood at the edge of the cordon, holding a gun, staring blankly.

"Boss, does this kid have a brainstem defect?"

"Does he think he stepped out of a fantasy novel?"

Lu Jingyan didn't say anything, but stepped over the gravel with a cold face and walked straight towards the chuunibyou teenager.

Under the passive perspective of [Absolute Rationality].

He clearly saw a strange halo floating above the kid's head.

It was a semi-transparent system panel.

But it's different from those "regular systems" that were previously invaded by higher-dimensional attacks.

The edges of this panel are all blurry mosaics.

Occasionally, a few lines of garbled text would flash across the screen, and a low-quality Google pop-up window would appear saying "Please renew your trial version upon expiration."

This looks like a defective product cobbled together from scraps of code in some underground workshop!

"Hey! Don't you know the rules, officer?"

When the high school student saw Lu Jingyan approaching, he pointed his finger at Lu Jingyan's nose with extreme arrogance.

"I am now the chosen one with the Dragon King System!"

"Believe it or not, I can snap my fingers and make you..."

"Snapped!"

Lu Jingyan slapped him on the back of the head without any politeness, forcibly interrupting the boy's spellcasting.

"The chosen one, is it? The Dragon King has returned, is it?"

Lu Jingyan took out a pair of gleaming silver bracelets and neatly handcuffed the high school student's hands behind his back with a "click".

The high school student struggled desperately, muttering incantations under his breath.

"Don't underestimate a young man's potential! You ignorant NPC, how dare you obstruct the birth of my Dragon King!"

"System! Issue me a kill mission! I want him to bleed to death on the spot!"

Lu Jingyan retaliated with a crisp, sharp slap, making him see stars.

"Murder? You should know about Article 232 of the Criminal Law, the crime of intentional homicide."

Lu Jingyan pointed to the broken marble under his feet.

"The crime of intentionally damaging public or private property, involving a huge amount, is punishable by imprisonment for up to three years."

"With such limited ambition, you haven't even left the beginner's area, and you're already planning to go to juvenile detention center for further study?"

Lu Jingyan lifted him up like a chick, a cold smile playing on his lips.

"Does your system cover compensation? If not, then have your parents sell their house to pay for it."

The high school student's arrogant expression froze instantly.

"How dare you grab me! I have a system inside me!"

"System, quickly grant me the Invincible Golden Body!"

He frantically called out in his mind.

However, the poor-quality system panel flickered twice and a line of red text popped up.

[Insufficient balance, please top up before use. Top-up link: Click to bind parents' bank card.]

The high school student was completely dumbfounded.

"This stupid system requires you to spend money?!"

"Take him back to the station and have forensic doctor Qin perform a full-body forced disinfection."

Lu Jingyan disdainfully tossed him to Zhao Tiezhu, then turned to look at Su Xiaoxiao, who was scanning the scene.

"Have you found anything?"

Su Xiaoxiao looked at the instrument in her hand, her brows furrowed.

"Boss, there is no trace of high-dimensional energy on him, but he does emit strong artificial electromagnetic radiation."

At 1 a.m., the provincial department's special investigation team's forensic laboratory.

Under the stark white light of the operating room, Qin Mingyue held a pair of extremely precise medical tweezers.

She picked up a silvery substance, ten times smaller than a sesame seed, from under the microscope.

"Team Leader Lu, this substance was extracted from the subcutaneous blood of that high school student at the back of his neck."

Qin Mingyue placed the tiny substance into a transparent evidence bag, her gaze more solemn than ever before.

"This is not some high-dimensional energy creation; it is an extremely advanced nanomechanical chip."

"It can stimulate neurons with microcurrents, creating the illusion of being bound to a system."

"As for why he didn't die after jumping from the sixth floor..."

"This is because the chip instantly released an excessive amount of synthetic adrenaline and bone strengtheners."

"But this is an extreme way to deplete one's life force. In less than three days, this kid will suffer from muscle atrophy and become paralyzed."

Lu Jingyan looked at the nanochips in the evidence bag, his eyes gradually turning cold and sharp.

"A man-made, substandard system?"

"They package electronic products as cheat codes and exploit human greed to mass-produce protagonists."

"It seems the mastermind behind this is a tech geek who's an expert in psychology and nanotechnology."

Just then, the door to the adjacent technical department was suddenly pushed open.

Clutching her tactical computer, Su Xiaoxiao stumbled and crawled into the forensic room, her face ashen.

"Boss! Something terrible has happened! This is a disaster!"

She shoved the computer screen directly in front of Lu Jingyan, her hands trembling so much she could barely hold the computer.

The screen displays a high-precision electronic map of the entire Jinghai City.

At this moment, the map is covered with countless glaring red dots!

Each red dot represents a signal source with the exact same frequency as that nanochip!

"I just cracked the chip's underlying code using reverse engineering."

"Its local area network frequency band has been captured."

"This inferior pseudo-system can not only replicate itself."

"It can also be used to disperse microparticles over large areas of the air via drones!"

Su Xiaoxiao swallowed hard, her voice filled with barely concealed fear.

"There are at least 100,000 red dots on the map!"

The entire forensic room fell into a deathly silence.

One hundred thousand ordinary people who obtained a shoddy system, thought themselves the chosen ones, and were ready to turn the tables and slap them in the face at any moment.

Zhao Tiezhu gasped, goosebumps instantly rising on his thick arms.

"One hundred thousand system hosts? Isn't this just mass-producing lunatics?!"

Lu Jingyan stared intently at the map flashing red light, the fury in his eyes almost tangible.

"Since he dares to wholesale a large army of people in this society governed by the rule of law."

"Then I'll build him a super prison that can hold 100,000 sewing machines right here and now!"