"Hey, Tendo..."
When Tendo returned to the ranks, Caroline gently bumped him with her shoulder. She blinked her emerald eyes, lowering her voice, and asked curiously, "Were those things you said to Kong just now true?"
Tendo pushed up his sunglasses, a sly curve forming at the corner of his mouth. "Guess?"
Caroline frowned, thought deeply for a moment, then gave her answer. "Although the Star Core surgery has a high failure rate, anyone who can walk off the Star Core operating table alive and persevere until now must have adapted to the Star Core implanted in their body."
"While Chen Kong hasn't displayed any Star Core abilities in the past two years, he also hasn't shown any rejection to the Star Core, acting as normally as an ordinary person who hasn't undergone Star Core surgery."
"But if you think about it from another angle, Chen Kong being too normal makes him seem somewhat abnormal."
Thinking this, Caroline immediately looked curiously at Chen Kong, who stood not far away. She couldn't imagine that such a seemingly weak person could have possibly deceived everyone. Could it be that Chen Kong truly had a unique Star Core, as Tendo said, merely lacking the right activation conditions?
Sensing Caroline's gaze, Chen Kong, who was not far away, immediately lowered his head a bit awkwardly, not daring to meet Caroline's eyes. After all, though Caroline hadn't really bullied him, she, like Chen Xing, was arrogant to the bone. The only difference was that Caroline's arrogance was contained and subtle, while Chen Xing's was overt and flamboyant. Therefore, both Caroline and Chen Xing looked down on the weak Chen Kong from the bottom of their hearts.
However, out of respect for Tendo, Caroline had never spoken harshly to Chen Kong. More specifically, she hadn't spoken to Chen Kong at all in the past two years. It was as if, in Caroline's eyes, only Tendo was a person, and Chen Kong was merely air.
Cold violence was also a form of violence.
As for Tendo...
In a sense, Tendo was even more arrogant than Caroline and Chen Xing. But his situation was a bit different from the other two. Tendo's arrogance was an equal arrogance. He equally looked down on everyone. If put in Tendo's own words, there wasn't much difference between Chen Kong and Chen Xing for him. Because people don't care which ant in a group is big or small.
It was because of this that Chen Kong could distinctly feel "respect" from Tendo. Although it was a bit embarrassing to admit, Tendo, who saw him and everyone else as ants, was indeed the only one among the 36 people in Stars who didn't shun him and never treated him as an anomaly.
Seeing Caroline curiously observing Chen Kong, Tendo smiled, pulled a mint candy from his pocket, and popped it into his mouth. A clear mischievous glint flashed in his azure eyes behind the sunglasses.
Of course, he wasn't lying. As a transmigrator, he knew better than anyone how special Chen Kong, the protagonist, truly was.
Ultimately, the reason Chen Kong hadn't awakened his "Star Core" ability wasn't because his Star Core surgery failed. Quite the opposite, his Star Core surgery was very successful. So successful, in fact, that he was the only one present, besides Tendo and Chen Xing, who had a "perfect demi-star" with 100% compatibility.
However, unlike Tendo and Chen Xing, their Star Core compatibility was dominant. Chen Kong's Star Core compatibility, on the other hand, was recessive.
The reason for all this stemmed from Chen Kong and Chen Xing's mother, who had a special identity. Their mother wasn't an ordinary person. She was a rare, humanoid Star Beast that had long lived in human society.
Therefore, if Tendo and others were demi-stars formed later through Star Core surgery, then Chen Kong and Chen Xing were innate demi-stars.
It was just that due to some special reasons, Chen Kong's bloodline leaned more towards his father's "human" side, while Chen Xing's bloodline leaned more towards her mother's "beast" side.
This led to the two of them: one with an ordinary appearance and weak strength, and the other with an outstanding appearance and formidable strength.
Actually, if it weren't for Tendo's preemptive "scene-stealing," in the original plot, the true strongest among the 36 individuals in Stars wouldn't have been Tendo, but Chen Xing, Chen Kong's sister. The strongest sister and the weakest brother – a standard alternate dimension anime setup.
Therefore, Tendo, who was familiar with the entire plot of Stars Season 1, knew very well. While Chen Kong might look no different from an ordinary person right now, that was just how he appeared.
The actual situation was that the so-called "human-like" was actually Chen Kong's innate ability – an absurd ability that could nullify all Star Energy. But precisely because this ability was too exaggerated, it even affected Chen Kong himself, causing the Star Core implanted in his body to be completely suppressed and thoroughly nullified.
However, as long as Chen Kong could realize this, he would be able to temporarily suppress his Star Beast bloodline and then activate the power of that Star Core. From this perspective, Chen Kong and Chen Xing were truly anomalies among the 36 individuals in Stars.
Because everyone else, including Tendo, only had one Star Core. But these two essentially had two. One was their innate bloodline, and the other was the acquired Star Core implanted through surgery. They were essentially openly cheating.
If Tendo hadn't also already activated his own cheat early on, there's no way he could have suppressed the inherently max-level Chen Xing. As for Chen Kong, Tendo wasn't too concerned about him.
Because while this guy also had astonishing potential, before experiencing the plot of the final assessment, he simply couldn't grasp the "key" to unlocking his own abilities.
This was the original plot of the first six episodes of Prequel of the Stars: Embers – a popular storyline built around sibling conflict. However, this plot was based on the premise of Tendo not being present. Now that Tendo was here, he naturally wouldn't let these siblings hog all the limelight.
After all, even if you are the protagonists of Stars, who says the protagonist must be the most popular character in the anime? He, Tendo Simei, was absolutely set on taking the number one popularity spot!
And while Tendo and the others were waiting for Yun Meng to announce the contents of the final assessment, hundreds of meters below them, in a VIP room within the Embers Organization's Base 13, many unfamiliar figures who were not members of the Embers Organization appeared one after another.
These individuals, male and female, young and old, all shared one commonality: each of them possessed the aura of a high-ranking individual cultivated from years of being in positions of power.
Regardless of their identities in the outside world, their purpose for being here now was singular: to see what this epoch-making Stars Project, as described by Embers, truly was. If the project was indeed as miraculous as Embers claimed, then they wouldn't mind allocating a portion of their resources to join this great project early.