The next night.
Inside the bedroom, the ten-million-yen crystal chandelier had been dimmed to its lowest setting, casting only a circle of suggestive amber light.
The air was thick with the mingled scent of red wine, a young woman's sweat, and humiliation.
Yukino Yukinoshita knelt on the carpet.
The carpet was soft, but to her it felt like kneeling on spike-covered ice.
She still wore that shameful maid uniform.
After hours of torment the night before, the long legs sheathed in pure white stockings had gone numb, but her upper body remained stubbornly upright.
Spread open before her was a hardcover edition of Pride and Prejudice.
Seiji Fujiwara reclined lazily against the headboard, wearing only a loose silk robe. He toyed with a Zippo Lighter in one hand, flipping it open and snapping it shut over and over, the click-clack ringing crisply through the room.
That sound was like an invisible stopwatch, hammering on Yukino's nerves at the point of snapping.
He was no longer torturing her with the pure toying he had used the night before.
That style of play was entertaining, but its efficiency was too low.
And the joint statement from ASML and the others had cost him a measure of his patience for "playing slowly." He needed a more powerful weapon of state.
The "key" to unlocking that reward was kneeling right in front of him, like a lamb awaiting sacrifice.
"Continue."
Seiji's voice was flat, two cold words.
Yukino's body trembled almost imperceptibly. She drew a deep breath and forced her gaze onto the page.
She knew a fresh round of torment had begun.
"Chapter the First. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife..."
Yukino began slowly. Her voice was still cool and proper, like the chanting of a sacred verse.
But she had no idea that her laughable little stratagem had already been seen through completely by Seiji Fujiwara.
Watching her stubborn pretense of composure, the smile at the corner of his mouth turned crueler and more amused.
The instant Yukino finished the first paragraph and tried to immerse herself in the world of the book.
Seiji spoke up, in a cold, brooking-no-question tone of command:
"Read. Don't stop."
Before the words had faded, he shot out a hand, seized Yukino's slender arm, and dragged her whole body off the carpet and in front of him.
Then, as terror flickered across her face, he entered her body in a direct, savage way.
"Ah!"
A scream tore out of Yukino's throat.
Her mind went blank.
She instinctively tried to struggle.
But Seiji's cold voice, threaded with a teasing laugh, sounded clearly beside her ear.
"I said, don't stop."
"Keep reading."
"If you make another unseemly sound like that, or get even one word wrong," his voice paused, the pause loaded with malicious implication, "you'll have to take the punishment given to bad children."
At that, Yukino froze in place.
She thought of her family in its dire straits, of her sister's despairing sobs, of her mission.
She bit down hard on her lower lip, forcing her scattered consciousness back onto the book in front of her.
"However, little known the feelings or views of such a man may be, on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth, mm, is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of... someone or other of their daughters..."
Her voice trembled violently, beyond her control.
The smooth, fluid London accent was now full of heart-rending creases and broken tremors.
And yet she had to coolly parse those complex sentence structures, had to maintain an intonation that had already gone off-key.
That sense of being torn apart, mind and body, made Yukino feel she might lose her sanity at any second.
"The business of her life was to get her daughters married, its solace, its solace was... visiting and news..."
"Mm... ah..."
A simple word came out with the smallest slip.
Almost at the same time.
"Wrong," Seiji's voice came slowly above her head. "It seems you still aren't focused enough. As your punishment, let's switch up the rhythm of your reading. All right?"
The "punishment" continued.
Yukino's self-control was already crumbling.
She gripped that book with all her strength, knuckles whitening from the force.
She felt an unprecedented, bone-deep hatred for this game that forcibly bound "intellect" together with pleasure!
She hated Seiji Fujiwara to death!
Hated him for not being plainly brutish like a beast, for instead choosing this method to flay her spirit alive!
"Continue."
The devil's voice rang out coldly again.
Yukino's eyes brimmed with humiliated tears, her vision blurring. She could only rely on what fragments of memory and instinct remained, continuing to read in a voice now thick with sobs and heavy panting.
"Mr. Bennet was... so odd a mixture... of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and, and caprice... that the experience of three-and-twenty years... had been insufficient... to make his wife understand his character... ahhhh!"
Another simple word was cut off mid-syllable by a more violent thrust.
She could no longer hold on to any reason.
Her mental defenses, beneath the extremity of shame, hatred, and that endless tsunami of sensation, were utterly washed away and ground to dust.
Yukino's eyes lost all focus.
The book slipped from her limp fingers.
In the moment Yukino's consciousness was about to sink fully into the dark abyss, the cold system chime sounded in Seiji Fujiwara's mind, right on schedule.
[Ding!]
[Congratulations, Host, on further conquering target Yukino Yukinoshita...]
[Host receives the Stage Two reward!]
[Reward dispensing...]
[Congratulations, Host, on receiving: the EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) Light Source Full Core Technology Package, including: 1. LPP light source core target material (high-purity tin droplets) full purification and mass-production processes; 2. High-power CO2 laser array full design schematics and manufacturing processes; 3. Core reflector assembly (multilayer Bragg mirror) full coating technology and material formulations!]
A torrent of scientific information, even more vast and precise than the FinFET Architecture, instantly flooded into Seiji's brain.
It was as if he had become an observer of the universe, watching with his own eyes how a powerful CO2 laser struck, with surgical precision, each supersonically ejected tin droplet only twenty micrometers across, exciting it to release extreme ultraviolet light at a wavelength of just 13.5 nanometers.
He "saw" how the reflector assembly, alternately coated with hundreds of layers of molybdenum and silicon only a few atoms thick, smoother by orders of magnitude than the smoothest mirrors in the known universe, reflected and focused that faint light again and again, finally forming the "blade of god" capable of carving hundreds of billions of complex circuits onto a silicon wafer the size of a fingernail.
So that's it... the bottleneck of the LPP light source was right there.
The corner of Seiji's mouth curled into a smile of certain victory.
He knew that with this technology, like a revelation from heaven, the so-called "ASML Alliance" had become an international joke in his eyes.
Their global monopoly on lithography machines was no longer an unbridgeable chasm to him, but a pile of obsolete industry he could replicate any time he pleased.
This was the real thing, something that could overturn the world's order!
As the inflow of information in his mind came to an end, in the real world, the act of possession over Yukino Yukinoshita came to a close with a satisfied low growl.
Yukino slumped onto the soft carpet, mind gone.
The proud Elizabeth in the book and the abject self she was now formed a brutal irony.
Just then, his encrypted phone rang sharply.
On the other end was the panicked voice of his First Chair secretary.
"Boss! ASML has joined every one of its allies and held a global press conference! They... they've officially announced a comprehensive equipment embargo against us!"
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