I got home, went to my room, threw my bag on the empty chair, jumped onto my bed, and buried my face under the pillow.
A few minutes later, I heard my mother outside my room asking me, “Tell me how many chapattis you want to eat today. Don’t complain later that I didn’t bake enough for you.” Her words came to an abrupt halt when she reached my door. Probably because she saw me hiding under the pillow like a kid scared of thunder.

The work I put in my apology must have worked because she wouldn’t have run after me and come to my room otherwise. It didn’t give me any happiness, however.

Anjali’s no had always been a sure but hypothetical thing until now. I always knew she wouldn’t agree to be with me, but to hear it from her, in her voice, from her mouth, in her words…

No matter how I said it, it was a torment.

I hoped my mother wouldn’t ask me what happened and she didn’t. She retreated from my room and caught Abhey on the way to his room in the hallway and asked him that question instead, an earshot away.

“Did something happen to Sahil at school?”
“How would I know?” Abhey answered in a lackluster manner. Then he must have remembered something because he jumped and asked, “Wait, why do you ask?”
“He’s Lying in his room with his head under the pillow.” I could hear the worry in my mother’s voice. It was thick and sticky. I had a premonition she would not leave any stone unturned until she got an answer. I was proved wrong.
“Hmm… well, I would know anyway.” Abhey said. Then I heard his footsteps going away.

I debated between going for lunch and staying in my room. The latter was going to make my mother so anxious. She would later make my father anxious, who would then come to ask me what happened. I could handle my mother, but it would be an entirely different matter if my father got involved. Then my problem would become a family issue and family issues have tendencies to spiral out of control.

Down as I felt, I pulled myself off the bed. Changed out of my school clothes into something comfortable and walked out of the room.

My mind was usually a whirlpool of thoughts. I had so many thoughts I couldn’t keep them down. I repeat my conversations and actions in my mind to find the mistakes and their solutions. That evening my mind was devoid of thoughts. It was just silent. I was not even in a daze that you get in after taking too much fever medicine.

I was just lost.

I took a seat at the table. My mother served me lunch. She said one thing or another. I faked a smile and dug into the food. Before long I had finished it. Then I went to wash the dishes. I didn’t know what I washed or for how long. When I came to, I was in my room, lying on the bed and staring at the fan.

It was 10:00 pm.

I got up to take a leak and heard the TV crying out in my parent’s room from the lobby, telling me they were still awake. Abhey’s door was jarred, the lights inside dim and soothing. I went to check up on him or to be in someone’s company and found him sleeping. It was a very unusual thing for him. He usually stayed up late. Sometimes even past midnight. I closed his door and went away. I didn’t bother my parents and didn’t want to eat.

I was taking a leak in the toilet when I remembered I had forgotten something very important. I had forgotten to test out my latest superpower, battery.

The superpower was different from my imagination. I thought it would be like those golden cores in cultivation novels that exist in a different plane inside the body. The battery however was very much a real and physical thing.

As soon as I got the skill, I had a feeling as if something was asking my permission to act, to take root. It was a personal, very humble sensation. At first, I was a little scared of the consequence, then thinking that there was no getting over it, I still acted like an adult and made it appear in a somewhat hidden out of way place on my body. I put it under my left armpit. Not directly, in there, but on the side of my chest where it would remain hidden under my arm even if I were shirtless and wouldn’t trouble me much either if it got bigger, which I hoped it wouldn’t. There was a sharp pain when I permitted it to grow and then I didn’t feel anything much afterward other than a little bump on my bicep of the left arm. It was a physical thing.

I didn’t have time to check it out in the school, but now that I was looking at it, it appeared surprisingly normal. It looked more like a slightly bigger and harder ear tag. I could feel its capacity. It was barely full but had enough capacity to store sunlight for the next few days. The best thing was that I could actively use this stored sunlight and convert it into biological energy over the night. A tiresome operation, so I decided to automate it over the next few days.

I just hoped my parents wouldn’t think this thing was a tumor and try to take me to a doctor. Otherwise, it’d be a lot of fun trying to explain to them that it was a harmless thing. Thankfully, I could detach the battery from my body, though it couldn’t be attached back and only a new one could be grown later. So even if my parents found out I could always pluck it up and throw it out, and pretend it fell off on its own.

The only fly in the ointment was that I couldn’t see the amount of energy I expended to use my powers. I felt a need to rectify this as soon as possible.

Coming out of the bathroom, I went out for a stroll to cool my head. I was in a low kinda slow mood and needed some time for myself. We didn’t have a backyard but we did have a wide front yard with a flower garden that my parents very carefully grew and adorned. There was an old eucalyptus tree growing on the far corner of our front yard near the gate where a few squirrels lived. I had fun with them from time to time. At night, all these beautiful things seemed a little off, covered in a haze, unable to revive that same sense of comfort that I felt around them in the daytime.

There was no moon in the sky and the wind was as cold as my heart. I only stayed outside for a few minutes before going back inside. I was wide awake and didn’t feel like doing anything. I pulled my books out, but couldn’t study either.  Could have forced myself to read but it wouldn’t have achieved anything. I started thinking about my future instead. Not a future where I finish high school, pass the entrance exam, get into a college, job, marriage, have kids, death. That kind of future no longer applied to me. I was sure of that.

With a new superpower every day I didn’t know where my future lay. I could end up in a secret government facility if I was not smart enough or I could end up running everything from the dark. I really didn’t want the former to come true. The only way for that to happen was if no one knew that I had a superpower. I meant no one could know: not my parents, not Abhey, and not my friends. No one!

I also would have to use my power in a way that wouldn’t leave suspicious crumbs for the government to follow later. I was smart enough to understand that everything you did on the internet left a mark and there were foreign intelligence agencies keeping a tight eye on all the activity. So I didn’t even think about putting out any word on a platform or social service.

I also decided that If one day I needed to appear in front of the public then I would take another identity or create a fake one that was so far away from my real identity that no one could figure out the truth.  

As for what I would do with my superpowers—I was still indecisive. My powers were still very grounded and real. There was nothing much extraordinary about them except disguise. I was still very much a human with nothing over others besides my learning ability. I was still no good with a stick or a shield. I had no combat or defensive capabilities. My perception was my weakest attribute. I had no way of knowing if someone was holding a grudge or planning something insidious against me.

I needed powers to cover all these areas without excluding strengthening my intelligence. I also needed a better way to read books. Reading, and memorizing books word by word, and line by line wasted too much energy and headspace.

If that wasn’t a headache enough, I also needed a way to make money. Money to feed my energy needs, to create an infrastructure from where I could run my future operation, to buy. Money was the most important asset that I was missing. Every operation needs two things, money and people. And I was missing both. Money was easier to get but difficult to hide. People I could find easily with the right superpowers. How could anyone hide their insidious thoughts from me if I could read their minds and knew their innermost secrets?

I was sure there was a power like that that could tell me everything about a person: from their strengths and weaknesses to their thoughts, about the probability of them taking various actions, the chance of them doing something, their bad deeds, their affiliations, with a built-in lie detector. A power that could analyze a person from head to toe and tell me how much curly hair they had eaten in their lifetime.

It would get it in the future.

My main priority now was to quantify my abilities and body qualities. I wanted to see at all times how much energy was stored in my body and how I was using it. A power that could put numbers to my skills and tell me how much energy I consumed when I burn a page into my memory and how much energy I get from photosynthesis. I was tired of just winging the numbers all the time.   

When midnight struck and the feeling of contentment reached its zenith, I spoke my mind and the system responded with this:

[The Daily superpower system has heard your wish!]
[Digital vision allows you to perceive everything in the world in data form. Allowing you to collect and analyze data faster and more efficiently.]                                               
[Task level: E]
[Verbally count numbers until the task is completed.]
[Would you like to accept the task to acquire the ability? Yes/No]

This was an interesting task. There were two things.

First, I could now say that the tasks weren’t increasing in strength with the number of superpowers. And they were dependent on the superpowers themselves. Meaning, the battery power that I had acquired in the morning was stronger than the rest of the powers I had acquired in the past.

It also meant that I didn’t need to worry about the tasks exploding in difficulty later and if some task was too high level for me or too difficult to perform I could postpone it for the moment until I was strong enough to complete it. Or perhaps, that was what the task level suggested in the first place—the danger level!

If I were stronger, say I could count to infinity in a second, then perhaps this task wouldn’t even be an E-level task. Perhaps, the system would simply give me the power and be done with it.  

“One…” I said and giggled. I was not lucky enough to complete the task on the first number. If the last task was a test of my inner strength, then this time the system was testing my luck.

“Hopefully, I wouldn’t have to count to infinity. I only have one day, after all,”

Second, I should not have jinxed myself.