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Life—death.

That\'s the fundamental rule of all living things. In the beginning, one hides such an assumption under the guise of tangibility. Our achievements are only as real as they are because we have a limited amount of time. One may also believe that our inevitable deaths are the reason for us having any motivation at all.

However, those are simply the assumptions made by those who are too afraid to confront the real truth of the matter.

For all intents and purposes, I have reached the pinnacle of humanity. The Kanako Conglomerate has a net worth of over fifty billion dollars. I myself own eighty per cent of it in full. When I was younger, I was filled with aspiration. I would become rich. I would become powerful—those thoughts were what motivated me.

However, the stronger I became, the more despair I felt.

What was I doing?

In the end, it just became numbers on a sheet of paper. I had no specific need for all of my wealth. I had no reason to keep pushing. But I continued anyways because I was insane.

Insane, not in the conventional way. I was not addicted to watching numbers on a screen grow, after all. I was insane in my fear of the end. Eventually, I could no longer distract myself from this ever-growing fear.

!#$*&%$*#

It all came to a head when my wife passed away.

!#$(*&%^$#

That was when I first truly understood the sanctity of life.

No matter how strong I was, no matter how wealthy I was, in the end, I wasn\'t able to accomplish anything. I couldn\'t even protect the person most precious to me. After her mother\'s death, Hanae was terrified of boys, even to the point where I had to transfer her to an all-girls school.

Now, my mind was completely broken. I needed something... anything else to distract me from the cold, honest truth.

"Kanako, do you want do want to see something interesting?" asked a man of similar age to me. Unlike me, however, he was brimming with life, filled with motivation, and devoid of fear.

Tachibana Kohei, please, show me something interesting.

• ───────────────── •

It was the second year of the Ideal Human Project. I came here every day just to observe all of the children. After watching them for so long, I began growing more attached to one in particular. Not in any loving way but in a more parasitic way.

As the days went on, I worried about the success of the project. The thing that attracted me in the first place was Tachibana Kohei\'s insanity. If anyone was going to make something like this work, it was going to be him. There was a period of time when my trust began to wane, a period of time when my despair came back to haunt me.

However, there was one girl who reinvigorated my hope.

Hasegawa Mio.

She was strong, intelligent, witty and elegant. As one of Tachibana Kohei\'s two real subjects, I had no doubt that she was going to become someone beyond human comprehension. At her young age, she was already destroying adults at chess, judo, athletics and nearly every other activity that she was being given.

It was honestly amazing watching all of her feats.

Like a flower growing by the side of a mountain, she was incredibly resilient. To this day, I have yet to see her truly defeated. The only exception would be that time during the name tag activity when she was attacked by one of the boys. Still, I couldn\'t understand the full situation, so she might have just been going easy on them; she had a tendency to do that.

Tachibana Kohei also had another subject. Someone named... Mizu... Mizuhara Ayato. I didn\'t really take much notice of him since he seemed mostly unremarkable. I guess Kohei\'s vision of potential wasn\'t perfect. Still, Mio was enough to prove that Kohei definitely had grounds for his success.

Like always, Mio was the first to finish the test. Nonchalantly walking up to the teacher, she handed in her perfectly-completed sheet of paper. I watched as she sat back down in her seat, staring off into the distance.

For so long, I\'ve wanted to bring Hanae.

I begged Tachibana Kohei to let Hanae interact with Mio.

However, like the petty man he is, he\'s been holding a grudge ever since I rejected his offer to let Hanae become part of the project. I\'ve tried threatening him, but Kohei knows that I wouldn\'t discontinue funding for the project—because of my unstable mental state, he knows that I would never discontinue funding.

It\'s fine. There\'ll come a time in the future when I\'ll be able to let Hanae meet her. Kohei\'s plan was not to keep all the children in here forever after all. He did have plans to let them out eventually.

Until then, I\'ll just watch Hasegawa Mio grow. That\'s enough for me.

"Kanako, apparently, there are some people in Australia who\'ve started a similar project to ours. It\'s called the Genomic Human Perfection Program. Do you want more details?" one of the scientists said to me.

"No, I\'m not interested."

As long as Tachibana Kohei was leading this experiment. As long as Hasegawa Mio continued to develop as she was. There was no one who could surpass us.

I took a seat in the cafeteria of the facility.

The children were all undergoing their usual lessons for the day. I had no reason to stare at them during these relatively mundane activities. In exchange for my funding, Kohei has given me access to some of the private documents.

I could see that Mio was developing at her usual fast rate. Looking through some of the documents on the \'rats\', I saw that they were also developing. There might even come a day when one of these \'rats\' get promoted to a subject.

Still, I couldn\'t understand one child.

Mizuhara Ayato—why was Tachibana Kohei putting so much faith in you?