Nimo

Exhibit A: Yang Cheng's dad.

Exhibit B: Xin Ya's dad.

Don't they look so similar??

In 41 AC, Yang Cheng is 27 and Xin Ya is 16. Age difference = 11 years. Yang Cheng lost his parents at age 6, so that gives 5 years for Baba Yang to start a new family and have a new child (Xin Ya).

But woah woah woah, hold on, Duck! Yang Cheng's parents both died!! How can a dead man start a new family?? Well, dear Tumblr user, allow me to explain.

Xin Ya's dad is a Hero Affairs Commission officer, meaning he's already involved in the hero world. Not only that, he appears to be buddies with Yan Mo! When Yang Cheng's parents were attacked in the alleyway, they were saved by E-Soul, who is an MG hero serving under Yan Mo. Coincidence?? Probably. But I'm about to get crazier so hang on!

Yan Mo says to Yang Cheng that he should help with his business since he "tied [YC's] strings of fate." We're led to believe that he's implying that giving YC the E-Soul actor job led to him becoming New E-Soul and growing closer to Xia Qing because of it, but!!!!! What if—what if—he was implying something that happened a much, much longer time ago? It's revealed later on that Yan Mo specifically reached out to Yang Cheng when he was freshly out of his orphanage to offer the acting job. It looked like there were other candidates, but he chose Yang Cheng, who had 0 Trust Value.

WHAT. IF. Yan Mo and Xin Ya's (YC's???) dad were working together to see if they could create a perfect Zero/New E-Soul candidate by giving a child a great, loving, fulfilling childhood... and then cruelly tearing it away from them, only to be saved by Old E-Soul, leaving that child with 0 Trust, an idol he desperately wants to meet/be like, and a very strong sense of justice... and then letting that kid grow up in an unfair world where Trust dictates your worth as a human, exposing that child to the injustices of the world and wearing away their confidence until they become easier to manipulate? Yang Cheng is on his own without any protection now that he's an adult and has to leave the orphanage and stop receiving government care? Boom, target finally available. Hire him. Earn his trust. Find something he cares about. Endanger it. Make him go viral and give him the Trust he's been obsessed about his whole life. Turn his idol who is meant to embody his sense of justice into his fake, corrupt enemy. Now he can't trust anyone but himself. Make him believe that he is justice—that he is a truer E-Soul than E-Soul. Take his side. Help him. Nurture him. Make him lose the only things he has left—his friends, his identity, and, finally, his trust in himself after he kills E-Soul and learns that everything was a scheme and he was being controlled. All he has left is being E-Soul, and in order not to lose that too, he has to be obedient and do as you say. Voila, a perfect puppet who only sees the bad in the world and desperately craves to right the wrongs. To make the world just. And he needs greater power to do that, so he must become X. 🦾

(Do we actually ever see Xin Ya's mother? If not, maybe she was in on it too and Yang Cheng and Xin Ya are actually full-siblings. Which is to say, Yang Cheng's parents stage their deaths to use Yang Cheng as an experiment with Yan Mo, then they bugger off to start an actual family by having Xin Ya. But Xin Ya also has dead parents so maybe either karma caught up to them or Xin Ya was experiment #2 using the same method, but she's just built different and found a good community who loves her. And a dog. And this lowkey actually all started because I was thinking about Yang Cheng and Ahu's 0 to 1 moments and how Youzi and Xin Ya parallel each other and it got out of hand haha.)

AS FOE DRAGON BOY!!! We already know his shitass presumably parents were abusing him and trying to strengthen him by... drowning him? And it worked lol. Why were they trying to make him stronger/develop powers? Sus. Yan Mo also somehow knew about Dragon Boy even though this dude was just some random brat swimming in a frozen lake. And he straight up told him he would be a Zero candidate right from the start. So what if DB's parents were also part of this experiment like YC's parents to create a new Zero from childhood, but instead of raising a kid with love, taking everything away from them, and manipulating them into wanting to cleanse the world of badness for the sake of misguided justice, their job was to raise a kid with malice, give them things things they've never had, and manipulate them into wanting to cleanse the world of all the things they personally hate or disagree with for the sake of revenge and self-fulfilment?