I am a female swordsman.

She cheated.

He secretly connected to the computer cluster at Shinra Corporation headquarters, allowing the system to allocate a portion of its massive computing power to help him calculate the game. The result was predictable: Sephiroth's still-developing body couldn't handle the subsequent massive calculations, leading to frequent errors.

Although he might not have lost to Sephiroth on his own, Yomi still managed to win cleanly and decisively by cheating in order to achieve his goal.

A hint of resentment flickered in Sephiroth's turquoise eyes after his defeat; for him, defeat was a rare word. While he held Yomi in high esteem, a burning desire for Yomi's acknowledgment of his victory raged within his still-developing heart. But faced with Yomi's calm, deep-sea-like expression, Sephiroth, upon entering the office, finally and for the first time genuinely lowered his innate pride.

“You really enjoy going down there.” A barely perceptible smile appeared on the cold, dignified face of the Shinra Chairman. “In that case, every Wednesday afternoon, if you have time, you can take that elevator up to play chess with me. I’ll have Theresa grant you access to it.”

“Yes, Speaker’s Chamber…Yellow Springs.” Sephiroth’s eyes gleamed with anticipation.

He looks forward to seeing the woman he feels a deep connection with through blood again.

After Sephiroth left, Huang Quan looked at the mess that hadn't been cleaned up, and his scarlet eyes seemed to be flashing with a different kind of light.

………………

"His growth rate is simply frightening. In just one month, he has completed all of Shinra's warrior training courses with a perfect score. Judging from the training courses a few days ago, even the former No. 1 warrior would only have a 60% chance of winning against him after comprehensive evaluation."

Dr. Hel, the head of the Angel King and the father of Mako, looked at Sephiroth's various data and uttered a voice that sounded like a dream.

This reminded him of a hypothesis proposed by a scientist in the 1980s.

Superman Transformation.

The Superman catastrophe is a tipping point. When it arrives, the old rules and patterns will be gone forever, and new rules will begin to dominate the world. As people get closer to this tipping point, it will have an increasingly greater impact on human affairs until it becomes a consensus. But when it finally arrives, it may still be unexpected and unimaginable.

"It's really too fast. Some of the moves and experience were clearly not achieved through learning, but rather mastered in a form that we cannot currently understand." Huang Quan, dressed in a researcher's white lab coat, scanned the friendly scene of himself playing chess with Sephiroth with his inorganic gaze.

That gaze didn't care at all that he was among them.

Snapped! !

With a clap of his hands, Huang Quan switched part of the floating information screen to the background and activated another light screen. On the light screen, also a laboratory scene, the refined-looking deputy of the Mind Plague Project team awaited Huang Quan's summons. Upon seeing the Speaker's pop-up window appear, the deputy immediately stood at attention, hands at his sides, ready to receive orders.

How effective is the mind generator device?

"Reporting to the Speaker, no abnormalities have been found; all frequency bands are within acceptable fluctuation ranges. In particular, there are no abnormal signs in your area."

"Impossible!" Dr. Hell interrupted his deputy. "We've observed abnormal activity in the Genova cells. The test subject definitely received information from the ocean of the mind; this reception is based on his state, so it's impossible for information to appear or disappear without reason."

"Where do you think we went wrong?" Huang Quan wanted results, not an argument.

She can accept failure, but failure is meant to be fought and won, not used as an excuse to escape.

Dr. Hull pondered for a moment.

"There's still too little information about Genova cells. If..." Dr. Hel hesitated for a moment, glancing at Huang Quan's cold expression, before continuing, "...if we had more information about the company's exploration of the primitive regions of Europe twenty years ago, perhaps we could find the answer."

Twenty years ago, the first Shinra councilor was searching for a myth passed down by word of mouth.

Legend has it that in ancient times, a great terror descended from the sky, and the extreme greed and malice from the stars nearly plunged the earth into eternal darkness.

In their pursuit of this ancient myth, the first generation of Shinra council members reportedly suffered heavy casualties. At the same time, they discovered what they called the real world from the corrupted ancient creatures deep underground, causing some of their entourage to go mad and live in constant fear.

For security reasons, Shinra Corporation sealed that part of the secret with extremely high security.

They will only reveal some information when necessary.

The level of secrecy in this real world is so high that it's almost demanding. This demandingness is relative to the already complex and rigorous regulations and procedures within Shinra.

In Shinra, information about the real world is an open secret. It's public because of the project built around it: the Chaos Algorithm. The Chaos Algorithm project has very few members, almost like an empty department, just a handful. And these are the employees who weren't completely insane, or whose insanity wasn't too severe, from the initial team.

"can."

After thinking for a long time, Huang Quan slowly uttered these two words.

Only she herself truly knew how heavy those two words were. The malice of this world was gradually seeping from the disguise into the sunlight. The weirdo was just a sign; the more she knew, the faster she would go mad.

Chapter Fifteen Early Forgetting

Recently, Huang Quan, who had been able to relax due to the reduced frequency of strange incidents, has had to get busy again for various reasons.

In summary, it's very simple.

Currently, there is no high-intensity military guarantee like Yomi's in dealing with threats. Some threats are so terrifying that even rigorously trained Shinra warriors might not be able to handle them. Shinra is striving to grow, but its pace of growth cannot keep up with Yomi's.

The Shinra of today.

It's like a person wearing many shackles, staggering forward on the road.

The pace of progress is slow, and for various reasons, these shackles are both a burden and a protection. Removing the shackles would certainly allow us to run faster, but that would be like a runaway train, rumbling along with its passengers towards a devastating future.

The more you try to achieve perfection, the more you realize that perfection does not exist in this world.

On a rare day off.

Mado Yomi, now the successor of the [Scattered Sakura Sword Style], held a cup of red tea in her hand, gazing down from the empty high-rise. This was her residence in this guise, and also the former home of the true successor of the [Scattered Sakura Sword Style]. Due to a large-scale attack by monsters that caught the city completely off guard, it was nearly abandoned. Without security, property prices plummeted, bankrupting real estate developers. Of course, out of nostalgia and mourning, Mado Yomi continued to live here, like a visible but untouchable ghost.

What's quite amazing is that the infrastructure, such as water and electricity, is still there in this ghost town.

It's just that no one maintains it anymore.

Huang Quan liked to sit at the highest point of this dead city during his breaks, holding a cup or two of black tea, watching the azure sky and the white clouds drifting slowly, completely detached from worldly concerns.

Such scenery is gradually becoming unseen in areas controlled by Shinra!

The number of Mako Reactors is constantly increasing, and the massive amounts of burning materials are converted into energy to power all the facilities under its control at an unimaginably low cost. However, at the cost of this, Mako smoke produced by the Mako Reactors has begun to fill the sky, looking like a menacing monster.

Shinra is destroying monsters, and Shinra is becoming a new monster.

"Hey, is it black tea again today?"

As Huang Quan was leisurely squinting and lost in thought, a panting voice suddenly came from behind her.

He sat down without ceremony and picked up another cup of black tea.

The young man, soaked in sweat, naturally took the black tea from Mado Yomi's side. He happily tilted his head back and gulped down the sweet and bitter tea to relieve his fatigue after exercising.

"Phew... Ah!! I'm alive again!" The man with thick black hair looked relieved.

"Apart from black tea, there's nothing else."

Mado Yomi, already accustomed to the mannerisms of men, adjusted her black-rimmed glasses, a faint smile playing on her lips. In this ghost town, the human population was extremely small; even scavengers and beggars wouldn't choose it as their dwelling place. While the proportion of humans among the residents was low, the proportion of freaks was very high.

The difficulty of meeting another person is self-evident.

Huang Quan stumbled upon this man while he was jogging and was suddenly attacked by a strange creature. Following the principle of helping those in need, Huang Quan intended to rescue him from the creature's jaws, but an unexpected event occurred. The strange creature was smashed to pieces by the man's single punch.

That's right, it was blown up.

It's not an exaggeration or description, but a literal description of bones, muscles, and blood plasma bursting open in an instant, creating a visually striking scene.

From then on, Huang Quan and this man became just casual acquaintances.

His name is Saitama.

"Mr. Mado, you should change things up sometimes. Don't you get tired of drinking black tea all the time?" Scratching his thick black hair, Saitama wasn't ashamed at all about his freeloading and demanding behavior. After all, he was unemployed and short on cash, so getting as much free food as possible was always a good thing.

What Saitama finds particularly regrettable is that he can only ever get afternoon tea at most from Mado-san's place.

As for dinner or lunch, I've never been able to get a free meal.

This might also be related to the timing of their occasional meetings. Huang Quan always chose to gaze at the azure sky in this ghost town during clear, cloudless midday hours. After all, he was a wealthy man with many employees under his command; Huang Quan couldn't afford to slack off.

"Black tea is sacred and should be approached with sincerity," Huang Quan, dressed in a stiff and plain-looking manner with glasses, said in a devout tone.

"It's just black tea..."

Saitama lay down on the ground, basking in the warm midday sun. Suddenly, he felt incredibly distant from the world, even the whistling wind seemed faint. He couldn't quite make out what the girl with glasses had said to him. When he finally snapped out of his near-death state, Saitama sat up abruptly.

He looked at his hands, as if confirming something.

"Um, Yomi-san. I think I've gotten stronger."

"Mmm." With a clearly perfunctory tone, Mado Yomi lazily squinted her eyes, looking like she was about to fall asleep.

"Really? I feel like I can beat even stronger monsters now!" Saitama's tone became excited as he ran to the edge of the tall building, looking around to try and pick a lucky monster to verify his idea.

The daily exercise finally paid off.

So this is what it means to become stronger?

"Mr. Mado, how about you let me punch you?" Unable to find any trace of the monster, Saitama decided to target Yomi. He had witnessed Yomi Mado fighting the monster before, and she seemed to be an extremely powerful martial artist. Thinking about it that way, punching her shouldn't be a problem.

Huang Quan's gentle smile almost crumbled.

What does it mean to throw a punch?

Has this man who exercises every day turned his brain into muscle? Huang Quan didn't want to ruin this rare good time because of such a nonsensical thing, so she naturally rejected him. Saitama, unaware of his own lack of romantic understanding, habitually scratched his head.

Perhaps he didn't control his strength well, because with that grab, a large clump of hair came off his head!

Huang Quan happened to witness this scene.

"Saitama-kun, if you keep grabbing like this, you might have trouble getting premature ejaculation later."

"It's so noisy! I'm only in my twenties, how could I possibly be prematurely balding?!"

Chapter Sixteen Earth Mother

"Help me! Someone please help me!!"

A piercing wail echoed far and wide through the deserted city, receiving no response other than the echo of its own voice. The elderly scavenger, staggering and fleeing, looked utterly terrified; he was completely scared out of his wits!

He saw a nightmarish scene!

Driven by unbearable hunger, the aging scavenger, who had been wandering the city, ventured into this eerie ghost town. It was a desolate area that everyone avoided, a place no one would ever visit, so there should be many valuable things left behind.

As he gets older, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to compete with other scavengers.

It can only be described as taking a risk and trying one's luck by entering the dead city.

At first, he was quite lucky, and in a state of high anxiety, he found a lot of valuable items that would allow him to have meals for several days in the city where prices were soaring.

but……

What about a few days later? What about a few days after that? The old scavenger's son died at the hands of the monster, and his wife also died in the battle between the monster and the superpowered. In this terrible era, human life is very, very cheap. He may join his family one day.

'I hope that before I die, I will no longer suffer from hunger and cold.'

With such a luxurious thought in mind, the old scavenger gritted his teeth and walked deeper into the dead city.

It turns out that luck is an equivalent thing.