Hearing the voice coming from the phone, Mei pressed her lips together.
"I will repay the debt on time."
"...Who are you?"
Mei didn't answer and directly hung up the phone.
Looking at her father still lying on the sofa fast asleep, Mei closed her eyes with slight pain and let out a soft sigh.
Pain and exhaustion surged up at once, making her expression extremely complex.
"Lying at home drinking... that's fine."
In the very beginning, Mei would feel angry about her father's degenerate behavior, but by now only self-consolation remained.
At least drunk at home, he wouldn't get sent to the police station for drunken brawling, nor would he have people come to the door because of gambling debts.
Sometimes Mei couldn't help but marvel at her own adaptability.
But she also knew this was essentially a kind of numbness.
She had never imagined that adapting from a life resembling that of a young lady to managing household affairs and maintaining the family's operation alone would take less than half a year.
To take care of her father and maintain this fragile family, she had learned to use her knowledge to earn a living, learned to manage housework, and even learned to cook...
Mei glanced at her father lying on the sofa, her eyes revealing nostalgia and pain.
How did things become like this?
Mei had a good memory, so she clearly remembered the dividing line in her life between brilliance and darkness.
It was the day her mother died.
From that day on, her father—originally a rising star in the Far East's scientific community, considered most likely to travel to the Mu Continent before age forty to receive the highest scientific medal—completely sank into depression.
In an extremely short time, her father seemed to have completely changed into a different person, becoming so unfamiliar to Mei.
Alcoholism, brawling... Before that, Mei had never imagined these words would appear associated with her father.
Until half a year ago, when her father caused a major accident in the laboratory due to drunkenness, resulting in multiple casualties.
Thus, this rising star originally viewed as the hope of the Far East's scientific community fell.
Mei had thought that after experiencing such great ups and downs, her father's mindset would change somewhat.
But unfortunately, her father did change, just in a direction Mei had never imagined.
—He became addicted to gambling.
In a short time, the family's originally substantial savings were emptied, and they even owed a large debt.
Looking at her father lying on the sofa under dim lighting, seemingly drained of all vitality, Mei would sometimes fantasize.
"If only all this were just a dream..."
Mei sighed silently, then turned toward her own room.
In the Far East, debt was a deadly matter.
The string of numbers Ryoma owed could doom an ordinary family to eternal damnation.
But fortunately, in this most difficult time, the knowledge in her brain gave her trump cards for a comeback.
During this period, she had self-studied engineering and mechanics, improved upon existing defects in individual combat armor, and then applied for a patent.
As long as the patent application could pass, selling the patent would yield a large sum of money—enough to repay her father's debts.
Thinking this, Mei twisted the handle and entered what had been her father's study.
Then she saw manuscripts scattered all over the floor.
Mei froze for a moment and quickly gathered them up. These were materials she prepared for applying for the patent.
But after checking, she found that some were actually missing.
Mei's expression turned ugly.
"Were they stolen?"
But this thought had barely arisen before she rejected it.
If someone really had their eye on this patent, they wouldn't have taken only a small portion.
"The house doesn't look like it was visited by a thief either..."
Suddenly, a conjecture surged into Mei's mind.
She turned and returned to the living room, shaking Ryoma's body to wake him.
"Father, where are the manuscripts I put in the study?"
Ryoma drunkenly opened his eyes and said groggily, "Mei? You're back from school..."
"Father, did you see those manuscripts in the study?"
"Manu...scripts?"
"The stack of documents on the desk in the study."
Ryoma recalled groggily for a while, then suddenly had an epiphany. "You mean those things on the desk? I used them to wrap lunch this morning."
"..."
After rummaging through the trash can, Mei retrieved those missing manuscripts.
Looking at the paper documents stained with grease in her hands, Mei breathed a sigh of relief.
"Once the patent application comes through, I can pay off Father's debts. Then... I hope everything will get better."
While Mei was full of hope for the future, she didn't notice that since she returned home from school, a figure had been secretly watching her from the shadows.
Across from Ryoma's floor, Lucius held up a monocular telescope. Through the window Mei had opened, he saw what happened in the living room.
"Tsk... How did Ryoma end up looking so pathetic?"
"And this plot—why does it feel so familiar?"
"A daughter supporting the family, a down-and-out dad—they're not going to throw some Bocchi the Rock plot at me, are they?"
As Mei closed the living room window, blocking the interior scene from view, Lucius casually put away the monocular telescope.
As the key character for the next check-in, Raiden Mei's counterpart Mei had been his focus of attention recently.
In this era, although Mei also came from a well-off family, she wasn't the daughter of some large corporation. Naturally, her father Ryoma wasn't the president of ME Corp either.
Unlike fifty thousand years later, in this era Ryoma had no family business to inherit, so he chose the path of scientific research, and he seemed to have considerable talent.
Although not comparable to inhuman beings like the future Mei and Mobius, he had still made quite a name for himself in the scientific community.
And the Mei of this era hadn't become an ordinary young lady who loved cooking like Raiden Mei fifty thousand years later. Instead, due to her father's influence, she picked up the good habit of studying and ultimately walked the path of a scientist.
The system's check-in mission required ME Corp's young miss Raiden Mei.
Since Mei's name already meant the same as Mei, she didn't even need to change her name like Kevin. Therefore, the key point of this performance was how to make Mei become ME Corp's young miss.
The initial plan Lucius had settled on was to directly assist Ryoma in establishing an ME Corp to provide prop support for future scripts.
After all, there was still the famous scene of 'Ryoma being imprisoned for economic fraud' to check in later.
Moreover, ME Corp's resources could be used to complete the arrangement of other storylines, such as developing plots related to Anti-Entropy.
Therefore, building up ME Corp would be very useful.
Ryoma was Lucius's initially selected partner. He had originally wanted to give him a great opportunity and let him live the good life of being promoted to CEO.
Who would have thought that after not paying attention for a while, he'd become this pathetic.
The current Ryoma was obviously finished. Pulling such a pig teammate onto the war chariot would be equivalent to feeding the enemy kills.
Clearly, the script had problems again.
"Tsk!"
Although somewhat annoyed, Lucius wasn't particularly troubled.
After all, anyone who had written stories knew that outlines were meant to be torn up—scripts were the same.
"As long as the result can be achieved, a more convoluted process is fine."
So Lucius found the reward he'd recently obtained from 'achieving Kiana's enrollment at Chiba Academy.'
—A-rank Stigmata Selection Box.
Lucius had initially thought that the stigmata obtained from this so-called Stigmata Selection Box would be like the natural stigmata possessed by Valkyries fifty thousand years later.
But after careful understanding, he found this wasn't the case. Besides both being called stigmata, these two things were basically different.
The natural stigmata fifty thousand years later were more like the manifestation of certain talents. After all, even possessing natural stigmata required post-natal development to become powerful.
But the stigmata given in the Stigmata Selection Box weren't like that. Once the drawn stigmata were loaded, one could obtain all corresponding combat techniques and application insights.
Rather than so-called stigmata, Lucius felt it was more appropriate to call them 'character templates.'
The so-called A-rank Stigmata Selection Box could only select stigmata held by Valkyries whose strength was determined as A-rank in the later civilization.
Susannah, Alvitr, Lewis, Shigure Kira... Chibi avatars passed before his eyes one by one. Soon, Lucius found the one he needed.
—Wraith.
A Schicksal A-rank Valkyrie who only appeared in the Moon Shadow arc and had little screen time in the main storyline.
But her ability was precisely what Lucius needed. The power of her stigmata was—ever-changing transformation.
As the stigmata's power loaded, Lucius felt his strength surge wildly, explosively, vigorously.
At this moment, he was equivalent to an A-rank Valkyrie.
So Lucius looked toward Mei's home, the corners of his mouth revealing a cruel smile.
"Ryoma, an adult like you—I will correct you!"