Project Darwin
“Hmph...”
Iris walked the streets with a look of clear dissatisfaction. The blindness from the penalty had vanished, and so had those half-formed wings whose origin she still couldn’t fathom—yet her mood remained thoroughly foul.
“...”
Why, though?
After turning the question over in her mind, Iris realized she had been asking herself something painfully obvious.
Why else? It’s because of the homework that person left me.
The moment her eyes had recovered enough to function, Iris had checked the message the mysterious man had left behind. At the time she had wanted nothing more than to repay his kindness as quickly as possible—yet the instant she read those words, the debt in her heart only grew heavier.
Once your vision returns, go outside and eat whatever you want to your heart’s content... No matter how I look at it, that isn’t homework.
On top of that he had compiled and sent her the latest training methods perfectly suited to her, and even taught her spear techniques that belonged in the realm of national secrets. The only thing that could even remotely count as her repaying the favor was summarizing her own unique ability for him. From him she felt none of the usual hungers she had always sensed in other people.
I’ll just get the cheapest thing.
No matter how she thought about it, taking the card he had given her into a steakhouse would leave her conscience in tatters. With that decision made, she turned her steps toward a nearby fast-food place.
She reached the restaurant and was about to step inside when her reflection appeared in the glass wall.
This is...
It was not the scruffy, pitiful figure she had seen every day in the back alleys. It was the face of a beautiful girl she was seeing for the first time in her life.
“This... is me?”
The sight of her own unfamiliar appearance nearly stopped her breath. Iris stood frozen at the entrance, staring blankly, until a man came out of the restaurant and she hastily stepped aside.
“Hey, who’s blocking the— Wait, a little girl? What are you doing here?”
“Ah... um...”
“Are you lost?”
“N-no... I, uh, came to eat lunch...”
“By yourself?”
“Y-yes... Sorry for blocking the way!”
Iris apologized in a rush and fled in the opposite direction from the fast-food place. She ran for a long while before finally stopping in front of a building, gasping for air.
“Hah... hah...”
What was that? Why did I run?
She pondered for a moment, then started to turn back toward the restaurant. At that exact instant a bakery sign caught her eye.
“This place...”
As if entranced, Iris walked straight into the bakery. When she emerged again, two paper bags stuffed full of bread hung from her hands.
I’m crazy, I’m crazy, I’m completely crazy. Why did I buy this much bread? Can you even eat all of it?!
She considered returning it for a refund, then simply kept walking until she reached home.
“...”
The truth was, bread was the thing she had eaten until she was sick of it in the back alleys. Of course, most of that bread had been so hard she had to soften it with spit, or nothing more than plain lumps of flour without a single topping.
Iris pulled a cream-filled bun from one of the bags and took a bite. The first sensation that hit her was sweetness. She had already heated frozen meals from the refrigerator in the microwave, but this was incomparably sweeter.
“So good...”
How had it been in the past? A bun filled with cream had been something she could never even dream of. In the first year or two after falling into this world, she had been grateful just to scavenge the hard leftover bread other people discarded.
“Hahp...”
She took another bite, and the sweet cream melted across her tongue.
“Heup...”
Iris ate in a frenzy until, at some point, she realized she was crying.
Huh... why am I crying...
Even while tears streamed down her face she finished the entire cream bun and reached for the next one. This time it was a sausage roll, and it was delicious too.
“...”
In less than an hour she had polished off every last piece of bread. Then she summoned the Spear of Longinus from empty air and gripped it in one hand.
The proof that she had been chosen as a hero—and the weapon of sin that had killed hundreds. The more lives it took, the stronger it became: something closer to a demonic spear than a holy one. There had been a time when she had tried every method imaginable to free herself from it. In the end she had failed.
What was my unique ability again...
This would be the first time she ever revealed her unique ability to anyone. Yet somehow, if it was the person who had saved her...
If it was the one who had opened a future for her when she could see no path ahead, then someday—whenever that day might come—she wanted to offer him one of the things she held most precious.
Time flowed swiftly.
When she had first entered middle school, graduation had seemed impossibly distant. Now she was a third-year with only one year left—more precisely, standing on the threshold of the winter break that would carry her from second year into third.
“Let’s play and drink! The exams are over, so who cares!”
“Hahaha! Strike up the band!”
The classroom roared with the children’s shouts. At that moment the front door slid open and every gaze snapped toward the sound.
Rattle—
“Uh, kids...”
““...””
“I-I’ll put on a movie for you~”
“Hey, so yesterday, right~ Minji, she...”
“What?! No way! That’s huge!”
Even the teacher seemed to have given up on quieting them. Amid the chaos I continued silently organizing notes.
“Seo-hyun, are you studying?”
“Hm...? Yeah, this problem just won’t click.”
“If even you can’t solve it, what kind of monster problem is it? Didn’t you get a perfect score on the midterms this time?”
“Well... middle-school studying and this feel completely different, so it can’t be helped.”
“True, high-school stuff is a bit harder. Anyway, what subject is it?”
“Huh? Uh, um... life science.”
“Life science?”
“Yeah, there’s a subject like that.”
In truth it was quite a bit different from the life science my friend was imagining.
PROJECT DARWIN
That was the title written at the top of the notebook I had been filling for some time now.
The moment we received our report cards and returned to the mansion, the one waiting to greet us was Ludwig Wittelsbach, head of the Wittelsbach family.
“Um... Seo-hyun? Should we go around through the back door?”
“Young miss... we’ve already been spotted.”
“...”
Julia hastily formed a blade of wind and tried to snip out the bad parts of her report card, but Ludwig was faster.
“Daughter?”
“Ah, Dad. My beloved—”
“These days report cards can be issued online as well. Isn’t that fascinating?”
“Ah...”
While Julia—who had thoroughly bombed math and science if nothing else—was dragged off by Ludwig, I carried my own report card upstairs to my room and slipped the perfect-score sheet into a drawer. Having reached SKY universities in my previous life, I was hardly the sort to be bound by a middle-school report card; a perfect score stirred no particular emotion in me.
Other people’s reactions, however, were a different story.
I logged into the computer and woke Laplace. The AI addressed me in a form that had grown noticeably more mature than usual.
I understand report cards were issued today. Did you not say you planned to spend time with Young Miss Julia?
—Julia got hauled off by Lord Ludwig. She’ll probably get lectured for about three hours until he can’t take it anymore and lets her off the hook.
The longer time passed, the more I felt Laplace was growing to resemble a human. Having absorbed every scrap of data in the world for well over a decade—counting my previous life—it had more than enough material to mimic human thought.
—How’s the experiment progressing?
No progress beyond the status of one month ago.
“Haa...”
As difficult as ever. When I first grasped the true value of the power Yekaterina had given me, I had thought a few months of research would be enough to produce something usable. Instead of a few months, more than five years had passed and the research remained stuck in place.
—Pull up the lab feed.
Understood.
The screen switched, revealing a research facility lined with countless test tubes. Four years earlier I had realized that limited equipment inside the house would never be enough, so I had poured my own funds into building this secret laboratory. Of course I hadn’t built it alone; Yekaterina’s full cooperation had been essential. Considering the effort it took to persuade her, it was something I never wanted to do twice. The capital invested here probably exceeded my entire personal fortune.
Inside the facility, countless machines under Laplace’s control moved busily. Their sole purpose was to maintain the enormous life-form at the center of the complex.
Subject No. 1302 — Activation sequence commencing.
“...”
An artificial life-form created by recombining various organic matter through the power of the Bloodstone. Commonly called a homunculus. The most fundamental goal of the experiment I had named Project Darwin was to birth the one and only ultimate life-form capable of standing against the Demon King.
“...Let’s begin.”
Injecting Bloodstone. Time remaining until completion: 60 seconds... 59... 58...
The subject accepted the Bloodstone stably through the forties and into the thirties. The moment the countdown entered the twenties, however, it began to display violent abnormalities. Its body swelled; cells divided at an unnatural rate until the creature grew beyond anything the facility could contain. Laplace made an immediate decision.
Subject No. 1302 — Disposal sequence engaged.
The machines standing by sprayed a high-concentration corrosive solution over the mass of flesh. The moment the liquid touched it, the meat dissolved into a thin slurry and ran across the floor.
“Haa...”
The 1,302nd failure.
While Laplace compiled the causes of this failure and possible countermeasures, I sank into deep thought.