On my way back from school, I stopped by a family restaurant. No employee suddenly started breathing fire, no men in black or beautiful girl showed up to have a gunfight over me. Aside from my friend spilling Coke all over my uniform, the day was so calm that I almost couldn’t believe it. Thankfully Febreze managed to cancel out the sugary smell, or else I would have demanded cleaning fees from him, seriously.
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Next day after that, I decided to stop checking the news sites altogether because there was just no change at all. I even lost the motivation to check. There had been nothing ever since I woke up to my telekinesis two whole days ago, so I thought that only checking the newspaper would be more than enough.
The telekinetic pain also got a lot better, so I tried using telekinesis again, at which point I discovered that although the range and everything else remained the same, the output had changed. I could now barely move up to 4 g, I could also feel that my telekimuscle had grown a bit in size. 4 g! It’s amazing! 1 g! It went up by 1 g! But it’s still just 4 g! That’s not even enough to move a single pencil! Fuck!
If I took into consideration the day that I rested due to telekinetic pain, the rate of growth was 1 g per two days. Which meant 182 g in a year. After an entire year, I still wouldn’t be able to move a 500 ml bottle of water. If I kept diligently training every other day, then I’d be in my middle ages by the time I could make a cat float. U~~WA~~AH. So pathetic! You think I’m stupid? If I do normal muscle training, no, more like, even without doing muscle training I can already throw the cat. Forget a ball, I could even play catch using the cat. Don’t underestimate me-ow.
Though this might have seemed like a privileged problem—considering how normal people couldn’t use telekinesis—I began to think that learning one or two more English vocabulary words would be more useful than training my telekinesis. At any rate, even if I revealed myself to the public and managed to get the whole supernatural phenomenon thing confirmed (after what I was sure would be a ton of trouble), all that’d be waiting for me would be the awful life of someone who went viral for a while before sinking back into obscurity. Studying earnestly, enrolling in a good university, and entering a good company like normal people do was definitely a far better prospect.
However, with that said, it didn’t take that much time or effort to do the training, so I decided to keep at it.
But honestly, I was feeling quite disappointed about the whole thing. It was entirely different from the superpowers that I’d dreamed of when I was a child. No mysterious guy had shown up, no invaders from space had shown themselves, no agent from an organization had made contact, and no door to another world had opened up. Even if a mysterious guy showed up, rather than using my 4 g telekinesis to resist, it’d definitely be faster and far more effective to just throw a flowerpot at the guy or even just punch him with my bare fist. Telekinesis seemed seriously meaningless.
It was at this point that I got it. This entire time, what I had wanted wasn’t superpowers, but the extraordinary days that came with superpowers. Well, extraordinary days would be dangerous in extraordinary ways and that would suck too, so what I wanted was something that I could enjoy to a certain degree while guaranteeing my own safety. Or perhaps an ability that allowed for more flexibility... that would have been great. The only thing I could think of doing with 4 g telekinesis that could only go in a straight line was throwing thumbtacks one by one like caltrops. But even then, it would be much faster to just chuck a whole bunch of them with my bare hands. Haaah. There goes all my excitement. Right down the drain.
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The human ability to adapt is a frightening thing. After ten days, I’d already grown used to being able to use telekinesis. Thinking about it now, if you handed a laptop to someone from the Heian period, surely that person would start off confused but then gradually get used to it, just like I did. Though they would probably be shouting all the while about it being witchcraft or something. Perhaps even telekinesis would be a widely accepted part of physics for someone living a thousand years from now.
I wasn’t experiencing abnormalities with my health either. On the fourth day, I purposely fell and hit my head so that I could be hospitalized and have them do a detailed examination. But the results came back all green.
As for the telekinesis experiment notebook, I had just started the third page and was steadily gathering detailed data.
Firstly, whereas I had expected the growth in output to be in increments of 1 g, it turned out that I had merely jumped the gun. It grew like 3 g → 4 g → 5 g → 7 g → 9 g → 11 g. Apparently, it grew at an exponent of 1.3 every time. That rate was way better than what normal muscles could achieve. After punching it into my calculator, I found out that if I maintained this pace, after a month it would become 118 g, and after a year it would become more than 1640 trillion tons. Numbers are crazy. Even heroes from fiction would go pale in the face at those results. I looked it up, and apparently Mt. Fuji weighs 1.15 trillion tons. Isn’t that scary?
However, I didn’t know whether there was an upper limit or not, so I purposely kept my expectations in check. The limit being at, say, 100 g seemed entirely possible. And also, there was always the possibility of the ability leaving me as suddenly as it came.
Furthermore, I could only grab solid bodies. Because I couldn’t see air, I couldn’t picture myself grabbing it and so it didn’t work. Liquids were hard to grab, and the time I tried lifting 11 g all at once, it just overflowed and splashed everywhere. The fact that it did float up enough to splash all over meant that it did work, but it felt like trying to scoop water with a ballpoint pen. Moving fire was impossible, and bending light was, of course, also impossible. I didn’t even feel like I could do anything about fire and light.
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Regardless of tests or the class field trip, I diligently continued training night after night. After two months passed, I’d become capable of moving 8 kg. The output had reached the point where I wouldn’t be embarrassed to call it a proper superpower. This was enough to move most things that I would normally move with my hands in my everyday life. Succumbing to my inquisitiveness, I tried dropping my eraser and picking it up with telekinesis during class, but I didn’t get caught. Either it wasn’t seen altogether, or it was seen but the person who saw it thought they’d just seen wrong.