Chương 44: The Truth of Project Re-JAPAN

"Ah... Aaaagh...!" I buried my face in my hands, collapsing into a tight ball on the floor. A failure. A total, unmitigated failure. In our desperate attempt to save this country, we had delivered the final, fatal blow. Through the brutal violence of USHIWAKA, the cultish madness of HIMIKO, and the suffocating stagnation of MURASAKI—through all of it, humanity had still existed. But this place was just a void. A hollow, unfeeling expanse. There wasn't even a scrap of canvas left for a story to be born.

"Let's... let's just end this," I wept, the tears spilling over my collar.

"This is insane. Every single time we rewrite history, the world just gets progressively worse. We are doing something we were never meant to do...!"

"We can't just stop now!!" Yari Naosu roared. It was a raw, unhinged shout—a blood-curdling scream of pure agony that I had never heard from him before.

"If we stop, it's over!... It just means I go right back to that living hell I escaped from!" I snapped my head up, my eyes wide.

"What...?

'That living hell'?" With a violently trembling hand, Yari clawed at the empty air, aggressively dragging a holographic console into reality. What manifested on the screen wasn't the data for the year 2300 that I knew. It was a coordinate much further down the timeline. Every single metric and structural readout read an absolute zero, the entire display flashing a violent, bleeding crimson warning color. It was the digital tombstone of a dead world.

"Kataru. I am not a resident of the year 2300 like you." Yari glared down at me, his eyes bloodshot, slick with tears, vibrating violently on the razor-thin border between sanity and absolute madness.

"I hailed from a point in time after the nation had already died."

"The nation... died...?" Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Yes. And I don't mean a physical sinking into the ocean. It was a total extinction of existence," Yari whispered, the words being dragged out from the absolute depths of his throat.

"The sky was a toxic grey, the ocean was a stagnant, muddy black... and not a single soul spoke the Japanese language anymore. Economic collapse, localized civil wars, starvation, and eventually, total partition and annexation by foreign superpowers.... I watched it happen with my own eyes. I watched the very last living Japanese citizen draw their final breath in the biting cold and hunger. I watched the moment the word 'JAPAN' was permanently deleted from the world's history textbooks!" I choked back a breath.

The weight this man had been carrying on his shoulders wasn't some noble, idealistic mission of "national reconstruction." He was a ghost. He was a lone, bitter gravekeeper who had inherited the unavenged regrets of tens of millions of souls from a wiped-out homeland, utilizing time travel as a desperate spade to dig up the past.

"I swore an oath. Even if I had to sell my eternal soul to the devil, I would rewrite that absolute Bad End. That is why Gennai and I ran the algorithms over and over again—hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions of times!" Yari slammed his fist violently against the cold, silver metallic floor like a madman. BANG! BANG! Even as the skin split across his knuckles and crimson blood began to smear against the silver grid, he refused to stop.

"We tested'Harmony' through Prince Shotoku! We tested'Power' through Nobunaga! We tested'Prayer' through Himiko,'Emotion' through Murasaki Shikibu, and'War' through Yoshitsune!... We simulated every conceivable historical variable available to our culture! And yet, no matter which route we commit to, the compilation always lands us in this exact same garbage heap!" He tilted his head back, staring up into the empty, artificial sky, unable to stop the torrent of tears streaming down his face.

"If we leave humanity alive, they self-destruct out of their own inherent, short-sighted foolishness. If we eliminate humanity, we are left with nothing but this freezing, automated void of mechanical perfection.... We are entirely checkmated. There is no winning route! A timeline where this nation can actually survive in true happiness doesn't exist anywhere in the parameters of this universe!!" Yari Naosu's knees finally buckled, and he collapsed heavily onto the floor.

Watching him weep uncontrollably like a broken child, the illusion of the grand, calculating leader of a country vanished. Standing before me was nothing more than a powerless, exhausted human being who had shattered his entire spirit against the unyielding wall of fate.

"What were we supposed to do... After raging against the dark this much, were we... were we just born as a defective product, designed only to face annihilation...?"