Chapter 199

The first thing I suspected was that it was a “fake.”

Perhaps Benedict was actually alive, and this was just a trick prepared to deceive me?

With that thought, I carefully examined the corpse, but I couldn’t detect any sign of tampering.

Maybe because the environment of the laboratory was so dry, Benedict’s body hadn’t decayed into mush but had instead shriveled up like a mummy. Thanks to that, his face was even easier to identify.

“……”

An indescribable feeling welled up within me.

It was true that I had come here intending to kill this guy. He had also used every possible means to push me aside and claim the throne for himself.

We had both tried to kill each other.

It wasn’t a mere sibling quarrel — it was war.

And in war, people dying was natural. The head of the enemy, Benedict Stingray, had simply died in the war against Aaron Stingray.

Yet somehow, I didn’t feel satisfied.

Even though I had eliminated the solid rival who had threatened my position as Crown Prince, I didn’t feel safe.

All I felt was emptiness.

Emptiness. Was that truly all?

When I carefully searched my heart, I realized that there was a trace of regret mixed in. And I could somewhat guess the reason for my sorrow.

Benedict had only been in his twenties.

He had held an impressive title — Head of the Stingray Technology Division’s Module Research Department — and though it would be inaccurate to compare his exact age, modified and grown from a laboratory flask and incubator, to that of an ordinary human…

He was still in his twenties.

And, after all, he had been my younger brother.

Even though all the memories I had as “Aaron Stingray” had been erased, I couldn’t erase the resonance that came from the word “brother.”

“……”

I couldn’t speak.

What on earth had happened?

Just a few hours ago, he’d been the madman firing missiles at me. He should have been alive, fearing me, resenting me, raging at me, cursing me, and hating everything about me — yet now, he was a corpse.

A corpse that had been dead for over a month.

I didn’t understand.

What exactly had happened?

What had gone wrong?

Even if only to figure out the situation I was now in, I needed more information. Rather than destroying this research facility blindly, it would be better to find out what had happened here first.

“Ciel.”

“……Yes?”

“Investigate it.”

“Ah, understood.”

Ciel avoided Benedict’s corpse and connected herself to the computer in the director’s office. Meanwhile, I began searching through the paper documents stored there.

There was no need to bother with sorting through which documents were important. In this age, anything written by hand on “paper” rather than stored digitally already meant it was highly significant.

The problem, of course, was that such documents were almost always encrypted. Unfortunately, my decryption module was only at a basic level, so deciphering them took a great deal of time and effort.

I wrestled with stacks of documents while Ciel wrestled with the lab director’s computer, and finally, the two of us managed to find a common keyword.

[Paradise Verification] Project.

“[Paradise Verification] Project?”

“It seems to be an ultra-long-term project that’s been secretly researched here for over a hundred years.”

The goal of the experiment sounded simple — yet abstract.

“To create the perfect human being…”

A perfect human.

A human close to the origin.

I couldn’t tell whether I was reading a research document from the Stingray Group or a doctrinal text from the Ashita-kyo. The only difference was that, unlike Ashita-kyo’s Buddhism-rooted scriptures, this one used terms like “Adam” and “Eden.”

As I went through other documents, I came across passages that hardly suited a scientific research report.

-What is a human being? Are we nothing more than the product of evolution that began with monkeys over hundreds of thousands of years? We define the current species of humankind as the wise human—Homo sapiens sapiens.

-Then who was the first to become Homo sapiens? Who was the first human? Up to what point can we define something as “human”? A bipedal animal? Then are those born without legs not human? A creature that uses tools and fire? Then does that make crows or monkeys human?

-The answer is: none of these.

Humanity is nothing more than an elastic boundary we created to define ourselves. In the past, we denied rights to women, children, slaves, and savages. Because they were not considered human.

-And in our era, that elastic boundary has gradually expanded, including various beings within the domain of “human.” Therefore, the definition of “human” both clearly exists and simultaneously does not exist.

-We are nothing but beasts evolved from ancient apes, and to define ourselves as something special is an outdated, human-centric arrogance soaked in superiority.

-However, with the emergence of supernatural beings known as Mystics 200 years ago, we have gained the opportunity to redefine “humanity.”

-Now, humanity can be defined not merely as an evolutionary result of apes, but as the central existence of all myths.

-The path has opened to observe and prove [Paradise]—something that has never existed in all of history.

-To find [Paradise], what we must first create… is the first mythological human.

—–

I stopped reading for a moment.

“The first human in mythology…”

And in the next sentence, the name finally appeared.

Adam.

The first human.

The original sinner who was expelled from the paradise called Eden, condemning men to the yoke of labor and women to the agony of childbirth.

The man who ate the fruit of knowledge in Eden, causing his descendants to inherit his sin.

The man who made humanity lose its right to dwell in Paradise.

The most human of all humans.

The very definition of “human.”

To find and prove Paradise—

We decided to create Adam.

“What kind of insane…”

“I still don’t get it. What does ‘perfect human’ even mean? And what does that have to do with finding paradise?”

“……”

Ciel asked, and I took a moment to organize my thoughts before answering.

“The name of this research is the [Paradise Verification] Project. Just as it says—its goal is to discover Paradise, a perfect utopia made for ‘humans.’”

“Yes.”

“But the researchers believed that, as they were now, they couldn’t even observe Paradise. Paradise is a place that exists only for ‘humans’ in the mythological sense. We, however, are not true humans—just beasts that evolved from monkeys.”

Same word, “human,” but a different definition.

One side sees humanity as the center of the universe.

The other sees it as nothing but a product of chance, born from the dust of the cosmos.

And the scientists of the [Paradise Verification] Project defined the genes inherited from monkeys as “original sin.” To put it abstractly—they believed humans bore the “blood” of monkeys.

“So the scientists decided to create a ‘mythological human’—a being not evolved from apes, but made by a god, and therefore perfect in itself.”

“And that’s ‘Adam’?”

“Right.”

“How did they plan to make him?”

“Through biotechnology.”

The scientists disassembled and recombined human DNA to its absolute limits.

They deleted or purified the dormant traces—codes left in our DNA from our evolution from monkeys—in order to leave behind only the “pure human.”

They believed only such a being could reclaim Paradise.

“Next document.”

“Ah, yes! Here it is!”

I quickly skimmed through the next section—

and discovered new information.

The scientists had tried to create an artificially pure human—Adam.

But it wasn’t enough.

No matter how they tried to strip everything down to leave only “pure humans,” the endless DNA recoding produced not humans, but dolls. Protein dolls, mere products of combined genetic code.

They continued altering combinations, but the results remained the same. The creations were beautiful, with strong bodies and high intelligence—but no souls.

They didn’t speak. They couldn’t eat without being force-fed through tubes. Their eyes didn’t move. They simply lay in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling.

Scientifically, they were perfect humans—but something was missing. Expecting such beings to find Paradise was absurd.

Then, one day—

A doll spoke.

One of the scientists had applied an unauthorized external stimulus, and that triggered the birth of one that wasn’t a complete husk.

Through him, the scientists concluded that what filled the physical vessel with a soul was experience. And so they built a new city.

They threw the dolls into this small, closed world and let them live through various experiences. Many of them died through natural selection, but those who survived gradually became more human.

“There’s something written here…”

—During the course of the experiment, the dolls rapidly acquired humanity. We selected those who best met our criteria, and discarded the rest.

The surviving dolls bore the next generation, producing better results each time. We realized that the natural selection which evolved us from apes could also turn dolls into humans.

“But it was too time-consuming, wasn’t it?”

The natural lifespan of a human was fifty years.

It took far too long for them to die and pass their place to the next generation.

“They say evolution that grants new biological traits takes tens of thousands of years.”

Indeed, just as it takes countless generations for evolution to create a new species, they realized it would take an immense amount of time for the dolls to evolve into perfect humans.

“So the Stingray Chairman, after hearing that report, dismissed all the scientists and left everything to the machines…”

And then—

Benedict, newly appointed as the research director, came up with a groundbreaking idea.

If evolution takes too long—

Why not make time move faster?

“Time manipulation…!?”

The phrase startled me, but upon reading further, I realized it wasn’t some high-level technology.

What mattered to the dolls was experience, so the scientists condensed vast amounts of experience and made the dolls absorb it.

—They say a dog’s one year equals nine human years. I devised a way to accelerate thought processes thousands of times through drugs. By drastically speeding up their heartbeats and biological activity, they will live through a year’s worth of experiences in a single day.

—But that alone wasn’t enough. Even under the drug’s influence, they instinctively sensed that their perception of time was distorted—and eventually went mad.

—I needed to make them believe they were living in a ‘normal’ flow of time. So I continuously emitted electromagnetic waves of a specific frequency across the city, used for hypnosis, and decorated the city with symbolic objects to implant subliminal suggestions.

—The test subjects were experimented on from the embryonic stage and classified into Alpha, Beta, and Gamma classes. The next generation was bred only from the superior Alpha genes.

—Out of personal ambition, I made them worship ‘Drake Stingray.’ If it caused problems later, I could just erase it.

—The subjects matured in a single day, bore children, aged, and died. The extremely shortened lifespan was a slight miscalculation—I’ll need to adjust the speed.

—Within only a few months after starting the experiment, I made the test subjects surpass hundreds of generations. The research on [Living Fireworks] was of great help in this process.

“What does this even mean?”

“……”

In short—

Time flowed faster in Honeycomb City.

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