Chapter 25: Young Man! Do You Crave Power?

On that night, Peter Parker tossed and turned, almost sleepless throughout the night.

Guided by destiny, he had indeed found the potentially invaluable formula among his late father's possessions. In this life, he had gotten to know Dr. Connors of Oscorp early on, and he decided to show him the formula.

Just then, his phone received a new email notification.

Emails sent in the middle of the night were rarely anything serious.

A glance! "Behind the Cold Genius Lies an Unseen Side? Is this the suppression of humanity or the loss of morality?"

"Is this junk mail again?" He was about to dismiss the email, but the image attached to it caught his attention.

The image displayed his childhood friend, Gwen Stacy!

Despite an immoral feeling of guilt, his right hand seemed to have a mind of its own as it instinctively clicked on the email.

It had to be admitted that the sender had an eye for photography.

It was a comparative image. Both had a pose with their left hand on their waist and a confident stance. On the left was Gwen, while on the right was a masked woman standing atop a building in a black and white skintight suit.

Peter immediately realized that the figure on the right was the new sensation on the internet, the new Spider-Woman of New York City.

People have their own habits, and if someone didn't recognize it, Peter couldn't not recognize it. That pose, that stance, it was undoubtedly Gwen!

Continuing to read, there was a short video. It featured Gwen gracefully dodging attacks from criminals with agile movements, flipping over cars in a splendid manner; Gwen swung between buildings on her web, emitting gleeful laughter.

All the evidence pointed to one fact! "Gwen is Spider-Woman!?" This discovery left Peter astonished.

Approaching the end of the email, there was a bold red line of text: "Young man! Do you crave power?"

This sentence struck a sensitive chord within Peter's heart.

Being beaten by Eugene at school doesn't mean Peter is a pushover, but that frustration ultimately becomes a fuse.

What truly stimulates Peter is the long-standing suppression he has endured in his daily life!

The elite high school aspired to Ivy League colleges. Is that where ordinary people go?

The annual tuition fee was as high as fifty thousand dollars.

Even with scholarships and student loans, which managed to reduce the total cost to a bit over ten thousand for Peter and Gwen, there was still a feeling of suffocation.

His aunt and uncle, who were his guardians, were just ordinary workers.

In such circumstances, he couldn't afford any extravagances.

The lives of those wealthy kids around him unknowingly weighed down on Peter.

Forget about those privileged children; even someone like Thompson, with his father being a retired football star, felt out of Peter's league.

The intense feeling of inferiority brought about by his social status and background had built up over time, resulting in the creation of the chatty Spider-Man in history.

The result was that, even though Peter knew the email was suspicious, he still couldn't resist reading it to the end.

Just below that red line, there was a question: "What do you desire the most... an apple or power?"

One icon depicted Gwen in her black and white suit, while the other was a mysterious web.

Facing these two strange and mysterious choices, even though Peter was going through puberty and felt like he desired an apple, compared to that, he genuinely craved power! The kind of power that would elevate him beyond the ordinary.

Gwen was tempting, but having power like hers would make Peter just like her, right?

With trembling fingers, Peter tapped the "power" option.

Suddenly, his phone screen went blank.

For a moment, he thought it might be a malicious prank.

Soon, a line of text appeared on the screen: "Young man! Since you've chosen power, you're fated to suffer from an unfortunate destiny! This is the price of power..."

Below this text was a photo.

Having not been in there for a long time, Peter still recognized Gwen's room at a glance. A red arrow pointed to a spot above Gwen's desk.

While Peter was in a daze, a five-second countdown appeared on the screen. Before he could react, the countdown ended, and the screen went blank.

This email had an auto-destruct feature?

"I... What's this..." Peter's mind was in chaos. He knew he shouldn't trust an email of uncertain origin. Yet, combining Gwen's recent secretive behavior and her distant attitude, he instinctively realized that everything in this email was true.

"Gwen becomes a superhero, and she doesn't even let me know?"

The young man felt a faint sense of betrayal.

"No, well, I just wanted to check Gwen's room. Some mysterious person secretly placed racy pictures in a girl's room; that's too much. I have to find out who did this and make sure Gwen's privacy isn't violated."

Driven by intense curiosity, the next day, Peter first went to Dr. Connors to hand over the formula. Naturally, this earned him the doctor's praise and even an invitation to participate in his inter-species research project.

This made Peter feel a strong sense of respect and, of course, a subtle sense of superiority over Gwen.

However, before Gwen's internship ended, he slipped away and went to Gwen's house.

"Oh, Peter! Are you here to see Gwen?" Gwen's mother was the one who spoke. Like her husband, Mrs. Stacy had long regarded Peter as a half-son and a future son-in-law.

"Yes. Is Gwen not back yet?" Peter lied with a guilty feeling.

"She's still at her internship. Did you forget?"

"Ah! Right! Oh my god! I actually forgot."

"Is there something important?"

"Not really, should I wait for her in the living room upstairs?"

"Of course, Peter."

Using their trust in him, Peter naturally went to the second-floor living room, escaping Mrs. Stacy's gaze. He then couldn't resist slipping into Gwen's room.

The door wasn't locked; Gwen had let her guard down this time.

While Peter was curious about the girl's bedroom, he was more interested in that particular spot.

As if compelled by fate, Peter approached the box that represented destiny...

"Peter! What are you doing?"

Guided by a certain meddlesome time traveler, Gwen returned home early.

Of all the luck, she found Peter in her room, not just in her room, but finding the thing she had hidden away.

Peter turned pale, and he hurriedly explained, no, he artfully explained.

"Gwen! No, I just heard something strange and came in to take a look."

Not saying anything would have been better, but upon hearing that, Gwen subconsciously looked in that direction. It was then that she noticed something that terrified her—she hadn't killed the mutated spider that had bitten her, the one that had turned her into Spider-Woman. Instead, she had been secretly keeping it. In this life, she had entered Oscorp, planning to further study her condition.

Who could have guessed that the spider, somehow, had managed to open the acrylic box that could handle hamsters? By now, it had climbed to the edge of the cabinet above Peter's head.

"Ah—"

She let out a scream, hesitating at the critical moment. She wasn't sure whether she should reveal her superhuman abilities to stop what was about to happen.

In that moment of hesitation, the spider pounced on Peter's neck as he turned around, giving him a bite.

Peter had never imagined that the secret behind Gwen's power was a spider!

Just like countless versions of himself in parallel worlds, he had been bitten by a spider again.

In extreme pain, he let out a cry, inadvertently knocking over many things. In his guilty conscience, he ignored Gwen's attempt to help and roughly pushed her aside, almost crawling out of the house.

Equally guilty, Gwen, ultimately still a high school student, was overwhelmed by countless terrifying consequences: the spider bit me, I've mutated, and what about Peter? I haven't even confirmed whether this power will kill me, let alone him. What if he dies? Won't that be on my head?

Overthinking led to hesitation. Gwen hesitated, and just as she emerged from her house like a regular person, where was Peter's figure?

It's not her fault she couldn't find him, because as soon as Peter left the house, he hopped onto a random bus, and with the driver hitting the gas, he was out of Gwen's range of perception.

Gwen had just been standing in her room, and this whole scene, including Peter's current dazed wandering outside her house, was being broadcast on a Rolls-Royce's onboard TV screen a kilometer away.

The Lance sisters were astounded.

Diana: "Ange, did you... raise a superhero?"

"Sort of!" Ange finished her champagne in one gulp.

Sarah cautiously asked, "If it's safe, could you turn us sisters into spider women too?"

"Spider-Man? No, no, no! Spider-Man has a curse. Why would you want to be Spider-Man?" Ange's words scared them.

That's right!

Spider-Man's curse... perhaps it's a fated tragedy.

The greater the power, the greater the loss!

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