Arisu Sakayanagi…
When you looked at yourself in the mirror, you realized you had transmigrated into her. You didn't even know how you died—one moment you simply poofed, and the next, you became the little princess, the daughter of the chairman of the Advanced Nurturing Academy.
That elite institution, backed by the government, massive corporations, royalty, and the intricate machinations of the nation's power brokers, promised one thing above all else: one hundred percent employment to every graduate who walked its halls.
But that promise meant nothing to the little princess. She was born with a golden spoon in her mouth, unmatched genius flowing through her veins, a background so elevated that the masses—those muggles scurrying through the school's corridors—could never hope to compete. The so-called guarantee of employment was never a temptation; she had been secured since birth.
The Arisu Sakayanagi of the original world existed purely for chaos, for the sheer pleasure of breaking geniuses and treating the entire academy as her personal little garden.
But you were different.
Even as your memories, identity, and soul merged with hers, you found yourself utterly uninterested in playing games with people you perceived as intellectually beneath you.
Why waste precious time on such trivial pursuits?
And then there was that edgy prick who constantly quoted Darwin and spouted nihilistic garbage—Ayanokōji Kiyotaka. You found nothing impressive about him.
He was a walking plot device, a crutch designed to artificially reduce the intelligence and wisdom of every opponent and heroine who crossed his path.
He wasn't a true genius—not on the level of the figures you truly admired, like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Augustus Octavian.
When you had already read about and witnessed legends in your previous life, and then compared Ayanokōji to them, you saw there was simply no comparison at all.
It was like comparing a fart to the moon.
Even Lelouch vi Britannia could easily crush ten thousand Ayanokōjis combined in raw intellectual scale.
And honestly, you didn't even need Lelouch—Light Yagami would be more than enough to make Ayanokōji look like a toddler in comparison.
So you simply didn't understand where Arisu's obsession with this nobody came from.
You deleted her fixation entirely from your mind, reducing him to something small and inferior compared to the titans you'd studied in your past life.
It worked.
The genius gene inside Arisu no longer felt admiration—only cold, clinical disdain for the White Room's supposed "masterpiece." The boy had shown no achievement that proved he was the smartest man in any room.
Beating Ryūen, Horikita, and the others? That was nothing impressive.
His starting point, his development, his foundation—everything was already superior to theirs from the very beginning.
Dominating lesser men, crushing those with less intellect than yourself… that wasn't an achievement. It was a waste of time. It was bullying. There was nothing to be proud of.
A bunch of brainless Ayanokōji fanboys reading this would probably be having strokes right about now.
They'd be preparing lengthy, passionate arguments to prove why their hero was better, greater, more deserving of admiration. You didn't ask for their opinions, and frankly, you didn't care about them anyway.
Now, as you gazed at your beautiful reflection in the mirror, your mind still raging with satisfaction from completely degrading Ayanokōji, you couldn't help but feel a deep, profound contentment settle into your bones.
Arisu wasn't merely cute. She was alluring in a way that hit differently—the kind of captivating beauty that could effortlessly stir desire and trigger that primal, instinctive need to protect in both men and women alike.
There was something about her that made people want to protect her, claim her, keep her close.
You understood it now, looking at yourself.
The red blazer hugged your slender frame perfectly, accentuating the gentle swell of your small but shapely breasts.
The short pleated skirt barely covered the tops of your thighs, teasing just enough skin to stir hunger without revealing everything.
Long white stockings clung smoothly to your legs, disappearing under the hem in a way that screamed innocent yet provocative.
Every small shift of your weight, every subtle tilt of your hips, made the outfit move with you — drawing the eye, holding it, making the viewer imagine what lay beneath.
No wonder she had so many devoted fans in your previous life. Looking at yourself now, you could feel that same pull.
You were falling in love with the girl in the mirror.
Your gaze traced every exquisite detail — the soft pink lips, the sharp yet delicate features, the smooth pale skin, the way her lilac hair framed her face like silk.
She was perfect.
Crafted to ensnare hearts and bodies alike.
Perhaps someday you would build an android yourself, custom-design it from the ground up, and make it look exactly like Arisu Sakayanagi.
It would be a way to satisfy that twisted, narcissistic hunger growing inside you—the desire to be loved by yourself, to hold a mirror that could love you back.
You knew, on some rational level, that it was nothing but self-deception, a hollow echo of genuine connection.
But once that feeling took root in your heart, it was impossible to stop.
The desire grew, coiling tighter and tighter: the need for someone who was your mirror, your equal, your companion, your pet—someone whose entire existence was devoted solely to serving you, pleasing you, belonging to you.
Such technology could be built. It was highly possible, even inevitable with the resources at your disposal.
And as for your current body—the frailty, the weakness, the crippled legs that chained you to this flawed vessel—you already had plans forming in your mind. This liability would be erased.
You would not be bound by the limitations of flesh when you could reshape existence itself to fit your desires.
Yeah, to make your body healthy again, you needed to invest heavily in AI to cure your heart disease—which, ironically, this world had no foreseeable breakthrough for yet.
Not because AI was great. No, it wasn't. It had never been. The technology was overhyped and overspent, a black hole disguised as innovation. The profits gained from the expense were always in the negative. You'd seen the reports, the balance sheets bleeding red, the way executives would spin quarterly losses into "strategic positioning" while their shareholders quietly panicked behind closed doors.
Moreover, the systems lacked true accuracy and authenticity. They were perpetually prone to hallucination without human guidance keeping them tethered to reality. You'd watched them fabricate legal cases, invent scientific studies, confidently assert falsehoods with the same polished certainty they used to state basic facts. And the humans overseeing them? They were often deceived by those sophisticated, confident answers. They trusted the machine, and that trust led to catastrophic misjudgments. A lawyer citing phantom precedents. A doctor following hallucinated treatment plans. A banker approving loans based on fabricated financial projections.
All of it real. All of it documented. All of it ignored in the stampede toward the golden calf.
So why was AI valuable?
Because it was a narrative—a seductive fantasy for the elites who dreamed of eternal rule, of separating themselves from the population entirely. They envisioned replacing every profession with AI, hoarding all resources for themselves, and facing no consequences. Why wouldn't they? In their delusion, they didn't need humans anymore. No workers to pay. No wages to negotiate. No unions to fight. No messy, inconvenient people with their messy, inconvenient demands.
They could sit atop their towers, alone and clean, and watch the automated world spin beneath them.
That fantasy was what attracted the money. The endless rounds of investment poured in despite the technology offering no short-term benefit. It bankrupted companies, drained nations, and still the capital flowed. Because profit was never what they were chasing. They were chasing the future usefulness—that glittering promise whispered by the tech moguls behind the curtain, a tomorrow where they would no longer be bound by the messy, inconvenient reality of needing other people.
Even nations couldn't afford to lose the AI war, despite its overhyped, overspent nature. Even knowing the returns would never match the spend. Because losing meant looking weak, and perception, in the halls of power, was often more valuable than reality. You understood that calculus intimately. Appearances were armor. Weakness was death.
What you needed to do was feed their delusion. Stoke their greed. Let them believe you were one of them—another true believer throwing money into the fire. Because you understood the ugly truth better than any of them: the AI results they worshipped were just fancy packaging with little delivery of the promised results.
Yes, AI helped humanity in research, medicine, audit, and coding. Those were real benefits—for users, for consumers, for the people who interfaced with the shiny front-end. The coders who debugged faster. The researchers who processed data. The everyday workers who suddenly had tools that made their jobs easier.
But for the owners? The investors who burned billions? The capitalists who fantasized about ruling a future where the population was obsolete? They were the ones eating the loss. Every dollar they poured in was a dollar lighting itself on fire. And the great irony—the cosmic joke that would have been hilarious if it weren't so grotesque—was that the people they wanted to replace were the ones benefiting most from the very tools designed to erase them.
Investors and capitalists burned billions and saw no profit. They suffered massive losses—not to serve the people, but to replace the masses entirely. Yet the AI didn't deliver the promised result. And before your death—before whatever cosmic joke dumped you into this crippled little body with its failing heart—you had already seen the cracks forming. You watched them stuff ads into every corner of the foreseeable future, monetizing the very thing they despised, just to cover the burning cost of their own delusion.
They wanted to rule without humanity. Instead, they became slaves to the fantasy they built to justify their greed.
And yet.
If the dream could be turned to your purpose… if you could take their delusion and weaponize it, siphon even a fraction of that burning capital into research that might actually cure you…
Then maybe, just maybe, you could survive long enough to watch them all choke on their own invention.