As the festive season of Christmas approached, the air in New York, already sharp with winter, was energized by Zhou Yi's long-distance conversation with his mother.
Zhou Lan, exhibiting a surprising dedication to her work—or perhaps, a sudden, intriguing interest in the continent's cultural offerings—had settled into Europe and planned to spend the entire holiday there.
This commitment raised Zhou Yi's eyebrows, prompting a brief, amused suspicion that the famously romantic atmosphere of France might have sparked a 'second spring' in his mother's life.
After all, he mused, the French were equally renowned for their casual arrogance, a trait his mother certainly matched when she felt like it.
The plan was quickly solidified: Zhou Yi would bring his younger sister, Sharice, to join their mother for a European Christmas. When Zhou Yi relayed the news, the mischievous girl was ecstatic at the prospect of a school-free escape and immediately presented a caveat: she wanted to bring her new best friend, Charlotte, along for the adventure.
Zhou Yi, always amenable to his sister's requests for company, readily agreed. The real, unspoken challenge, as always, was convincing the Academy's faculty.
This task of extracting his sibling and her friend fell to Zhou Yi, and it was complicated by the necessary diplomacy required for Ororo . Ororo was a teacher of formidable responsibility, and the prospect of two students traveling overseas, especially under the eccentric guardianship of Zhou Yi, required considerable reassurance.
Donning the unexpected role of chauffeur and diplomat, Zhou Yi piloted his Bentley toward Xavier's Academy for Gifted Youth . The moment he stepped out of the car and onto the manicured grounds, he spotted Xia Ruisi waiting impatiently in the grand hall's entranceway.
"Well, this is a rare sight, my little mischief-maker," Zhou Yi teased, instantly embracing his sister in a tight, theatrical hug and playfully pinching her cheek to elicit a reaction. "Did you run into a mathematical problem so difficult that only your dear, brilliant elder brother could step in to solve it?"
"You absolute brute, Yi!" Sharice shrieked, batting away his probing hand, her fingers twitching with the nascent potential of her teleportation powers—a gesture of defiance that made her look like a tiny, angry feline.
"I'm warning you, keep those massive hands off my face! And for the last time, I am not a 'mischief-maker,' you pathetic man. You will address me as Blink, do you hear me?"
"Hmm?" Zhou Yi exaggerated a gesture of cupping his ear, feigning confusion. "Were you speaking to me just now? I think your prolonged exposure to overly dramatic teenagers has given you auditory hallucinations, little one. Perhaps you should see the Professor about a hearing aid."
"Ah! You asked for that, you smug bastard!" Sharice launched herself at him, a flurry of small fists and feet, trying to deliver the kind of harmless blows that characterized their lifelong, playful battles. Without effort, Zhou Yi scooped his sister up, hoisting her onto his shoulder, and began a gentle but disorienting centrifugal spin.
The friendly, chaotic motion made Sharice scream, instantly making her feel terribly undignified in the academic setting. "Put me down right now, you arrogant demon! I mean it, put me down, or I will make you deeply regret your health insurance decisions this year!" she yelled, pounding his back.
Zhou Yi's grin widened into pure, unadulterated mischief. "My dear little sister, it seems your busy schedule of dimensional travel has made you forget exactly how terrifying your Elder Demon Brother truly is. Let's see how you hold up under pressure." With that warning, his large hand descended toward the region he knew to be her most vulnerable spot: her armpit.
Charlotte, Sharice's friend, had learned her famous, crippling tickle technique from Zhou Yi's original instruction. But Zhou Yi's application was on a completely different level.
He possessed an invaluable, intuitive understanding of human pressure points and the physiology of laughter, honed not in simple schoolyard scuffles, but through countless high-stakes, flirtatious interactions with various women and adversaries. His technique was that of a true master, far beyond the novice skills of a teenager.
Faced with Zhou Yi's expertly placed, devilish touch, Sharice instantly collapsed into helpless defeat. She exploded into a fit of uncontrollable, shrieking laughter, her entire body twitching and contorting like a landed fish.
Tears streamed from her eyes, the epitome of a tragicomic victim. Her humiliating state—far worse than anything Sharice could inflict—certainly drew immediate and considerable attention from the students milling around the lobby.
For a young man fueled by adolescent hormones and a desperate need for validation, this scene was a call to arms. A young man, whose appearance Zhou Yi mentally cataloged as "silly and aggressively boring," suddenly strode forward.
He had brown, slightly unkempt hair and, typical of a certain type of teenager, wore a perpetual scowl—a rebellious expression that suggested deep-seated arrogance and a profound internal grievance against the world.
This young man immediately generated a sharp, negative impression on Zhou Yi, who instantly found him less likable than the last young hero he'd met, Peter. That negative opinion was cemented the moment the boy opened his mouth.
"Hey! Dude, put the girl down right now!" the boy demanded, his voice cracking slightly with forced bravado. "Or you're going to find out the hard way that you should've invested more in catastrophic health insurance this year!"
Zhou Yi ceased his torment of Sharice, his playful smile vanishing, replaced by a deep, weary frown as he regarded the unwelcome intruder.
"Young man," Zhou Yi said, his voice dropping to a low, disgruntled register.
"Are you certain you haven't been overindulging in badly written gangster films? If I were you, I would take approximately three seconds to accurately assess the situation before deciding if running away is the wiser course of action."
Zhou Yi maintained his calm demeanor for two reasons: firstly, the boy was Sharice's classmate, and secondly, he did not want to face the combined, disappointed glares of Ororo and Jean Grey for publicly humiliating one of their students on school grounds.
Otherwise, given Zhou Yi's own youthful history as a notorious high school campus bully—a phase where countless arrogant quarterbacks and star athletes ended up with black eyes and dental bills—the boy would already be receiving a painful, immediate lesson in humility.
The young man, however, was blissfully unaware that he was addressing a seasoned veteran of public humiliation. He remained stiffly persistent, pulling out a battered Zippo lighter with a dramatic flourish, clearly intending to escalate the situation.
Zhou Yi sighed internally, shaking his head. Of course, he thought. Of all the personality types, this is the one the world's cunning old foxes love to cultivate.
Easy to provoke, easy to manipulate, and completely expendable. These types, utterly consumed by their self-centered fantasies of heroism and defiance, are the ones who can be discarded without causing a ripple of public sympathy.
With a dismissive, almost weary flick of his wrist, Zhou Yi motioned the boy away. His good mood, earned from the playful wrestling with his sister, was utterly spoiled by this adolescent display of misplaced righteousness.
Sharice, finally released and gasping for breath, was equally unenthusiastic about her would-be savior.
"John, my affairs are entirely my concern," she stated flatly, adjusting her clothes with an air of annoyance. "You are completely irrelevant to this situation. I explicitly ask you, do not appear before me again."
The boy, John, flushed a deep, painful red. He had seen the object of his admiration utterly reduced to helpless giggles by this smug stranger, and now he was being openly, surgically rejected.
Everyone harbors a desire to be the hero, but John, blinded by his own towering ego, could not process the truth. He felt his pride violently wounded. He externalized his shame, channeling the burning psychological trauma into irrational rage directed entirely at Zhou Yi.
That intense psychological injury was the catalyst for his madness.
The Zippo lighter flared, and a small, conventional flame leaped into John's hand. As he channeled his mutant power, the flame began to grow, expanding rapidly until it reached the dimensions of a regulation basketball.
Zhou Yi finally felt a flicker of intellectual curiosity: the boy was a Pyro-kinetic—a mutant who could control and manipulate thermal energy.
But his execution revealed a fatal, crippling weakness: he could only manipulate existing flames; he could not generate them spontaneously or summon them from thin air. His power was derived, not innate, forever condemning him to the lower tiers of thermal control.
No matter how skillful his manipulation, without the ability to create a potent, elemental core, he could never threaten beings of true power.
Zhou Yi sighed deeply, delivering his final, calm warning.
"Young man, I am giving you one last, clear chance. Turn around, walk away, and I will erase this entire embarrassing display from my memory." His voice was calm, but the tone of command was absolute—the classic style of a powerful figure dismissing an irrelevant bystander.
This final, patronizing dismissal was the last straw. John gritted his teeth, his face a mask of wounded pride and furious determination, and he hurled the flaming sphere at Zhou Yi.
The scorching flames crackled, and as the basketball-sized sphere traveled the short distance across the lobby floor, it expanded exponentially, growing to the frightening, incandescent size of a fully grown elephant's head.
Neither Zhou Yi nor Sharice flinched. The enormous fireball, in their eyes, was nothing more than a ridiculous, oversized firework—a parlor trick.
To Zhou Yi, this thermal energy was meaningless. He needed only to raise his index finger.
An invisible, powerful psychic force—an absolute command over the electromagnetic and kinetic properties of the air—acted upon the flame.
The enormous, roaring mass of fire was instantly arrested mid-flight, seemingly snagged by nothing. John's frenzied efforts to push the attack forward were futile, the source of his power completely and instantaneously dominated.
In the space of a single, slow breath, the elephant-sized fireball was compressed, refined, and drawn inexorably toward Zhou Yi's fingertip. The immense energy was condensed into a tiny, contained flame, no larger than a child's thumb.
With an infinitesimal psychic adjustment, Zhou Yi shaped the minuscule flame. It was no longer a fire. It was a masterpiece of thermal sculpture: a tiny, dancing figure of a young girl, gracefully pirouetting on the tip of his finger, its light delicate and entirely contained.
This was true fire mastery—not control, but effortless elemental sculpture and subjugation.
John, sweating profusely and frantic, didn't even see the artistry. He was still flicking his empty Zippo, attempting to summon more power, unable to comprehend that his power had been utterly stolen and mocked.
Zhou Yi had no intention of teaching this clumsy man a prolonged lesson. He simply flicked his wrist. The flame-sculpture vanished. In its place, the captured thermal energy instantly erupted and transformed into a ferocious, crackling, emerald-green beast.
It roared—a sound heard only in the psychic scream of the thermal energy—and shot directly toward the young man who had dared to challenge him.
For such an ungrateful, persistent idiot, a harsh lesson designed to shatter his self-centered fantasy of power was the best course of action.