"By the way…"
Fang Li narrowed his eyes slightly and looked at Misaka Mikoto, who was currently locked in a glare-off with Index. He didn't miss a beat before asking:
"The last time you were in front of my dorm, I meant to ask, how did you know I lived here?"
It was a perfectly reasonable question, yet it caused Misaka Mikoto's body to stiffen slightly.
She quickly averted her gaze and, sounding a touch too casual, mumbled, "I... I asked around. Yes, I asked around."
But Fang Li highly suspected this overly free-spirited Onee-sama had probably taken a few less-than-conventional measures to get his address.
Like, for instance, hacking into Academy City's library.
Here, "Academy City's library" wasn't just a simple collection of books, it was the centralized server that held nearly all of the city's information, containing data on almost every resident, facility, and entry ID, effectively functioning as a national database.
Due to the "Absolute Ability Evolution Project," some of Fang Li's personal information, such as his school enrollment, had inevitably leaked to those who truly intersected with Misaka Mikoto's world.
So, if Misaka Mikoto used her power to hack into the library and search the student roster of a certain high school, finding Fang Li's name and address would have been child's play.
"You've actually got the nerve to have a junior serving as a Judgment member?" Fang Li said, irritatingly smug. "If that girl, who's always going on about 'Onee-sama this, Onee-sama that,' finds out you hacked the city database, you'll be in deep trouble."
Trouble like being threatened to do things she couldn't speak of, over and over.
"You… you're seriously annoying!" Misaka Mikoto, remembering the horrifying implications, shivered slightly as she snapped at Fang Li. "Forget all that! I came here today for something important!"
"I figured as much," Fang Li replied, a smirk playing on his lips. "Otherwise, I wouldn't understand why you'd suddenly muster up the courage to enter the boys' dorm."
"I already said you're annoying!" Misaka Mikoto finally flushed a deep red, shouting in exasperation. "Anyway, that project hasn't been canceled yet, what are we supposed to do?"
Indeed, the Little Sisters project was only paused, not permanently terminated.
It wasn't that the experiment had been deemed a failure; Scorpius had simply seized all the hidden operational territories, leaving no secure location for the research to continue. Helplessly, the project was put on hold, but not scrapped.
"And if it continues and they end up needing to conduct experiments outside Academy City, what then?" Misaka Mikoto asked, her worry evident. "At that point, we really won't have any options left."
Hearing this, Fang Li didn't answer right away. Instead, he turned to gaze intently at Misaka Mikoto.
"W-what are you doing?" Misaka Mikoto asked, instantly uneasy under his scrutiny. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Nothing," Fang Li said, spreading his hands with a half-smile. "I just didn't expect that Onee-sama, who quietly endured all that pain alone before, even going so far as to destroy the research facilities to avoid implicating anyone, would come to me to discuss this matter."
Hearing Fang Li's words, Misaka Mikoto froze.
That was right.
Wasn't she originally planning to bear everything alone, without involving a single soul?
So why, upon learning that the experiment hadn't been terminated, did she immediately come to consult Fang Li?
Could it be… that she had unknowingly started relying on him?
Relying on this stranger who, not long ago, she had never spoken to and who had only ever expressed complaints?
In truth, enduring something so immense alone is agonizing.
Misaka Mikoto's previous mental state had made that abundantly clear.
But ever since Fang Li intervened in his own strange, effective way, she had unwittingly begun to see him as a reliable partner in action.
As a result, even Misaka Mikoto didn't notice that, in this roundabout way, some of the pain caused by the Little Sisters' tragic fate had been eased, and the tremendous emotional stress on Misaka had dropped sharply.
Now, Misaka found herself instinctively turning to Fang Li.
It was a subconscious behavior brought on by seeing Fang Li as an effective, albeit annoying, ally.
Up until now, the two of them had only maintained a strange, one-sided relationship: one always fleeing, the other always chasing, without ever exchanging a proper conversation.
Just as Misaka was still reeling from this realization, her cell phone suddenly rang.
It was the specific ringtone for an incoming SMS.
Startled awake, Misaka fumbled for her phone and opened the message.
Inside was a string of odd, cryptic code from an unfamiliar number with no identifying name.
The sender of the SMS was Fang Li.
As Misaka stared, momentarily frozen, Fang Li closed his own phone and addressed her directly:
"You know what the 'Tree Diagram' is, don't you?"
Of course, Misaka did.
It was the supercomputer carried by one of Academy City's artificial satellites.
This machine was developed using the city's most cutting-edge technology, a supercomputer boasting the strongest parallel computing ability in the world. Its performance not only far outstripped that of the outside world, but its developers even claimed it would be impossible for anyone to surpass its capabilities for the next twenty-five years.
To prevent foreign parties from targeting it, Academy City's leadership installed that supercomputer on an artificial satellite orbiting Earth, ensuring nobody could easily get to it.
This supercomputer could accurately model every air molecule on the planet, its "weather forecasting" capabilities approached weather precognition. With a reliability of 1.0, it never made a mistake and could provide extremely precise forecasts down to the second.
That machine was the Tree Diagram.
With the Tree Diagram's immense power, it only needed to run once per month to compute the weather for the coming month.
So, besides weather forecasting, what did the Tree Diagram spend the rest of the month doing?
The answer was simple.
It was used to run predictive simulations for every research project conducted in Academy City.
Drug reactions, physiological responses, electronic behavior, even projected research outcomes, everything was fed into the Tree Diagram.
That included the "Absolute Ability Evolution Project."
In other words, the conclusion that killing twenty thousand Little Sisters would allow the city's top esper to ascend to an Absolute Ability user was a result calculated by the Tree Diagram.
Put differently, the real, mechanical culprit behind all of this was that supercomputer.
Fang Li's reason for bringing it up now was equally simple.
"The message I just sent you is the Tree Diagram's entry ID," he said.
"You can use it to hack into the Tree Diagram, start its computation, and tamper with the results of the Absolute Ability Evolution Project, overwrite them and completely remove the plan."
(End Of This Chapter)
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