Chapter 229: is not enough!!
Chapter 229: is not enough!!
Two chapter is not enough!!
So I extends it.
There are about two or three more episodes.
===*
Today was the day I turned 13 years old after entering middle school.
I woke up on my birthday and was filled with terrible anxiety.
(…headache?)
The first discomfort I felt was such a trivial thing.
My body is not built as sturdy as Nana’s. Actually, scratch that, my constitution is so poor that it is laughable to compare it to that of an ordinary person.
It was not unusual for me to collapse with a fever, and I had experienced more kinds of illnesses than most people.
In addition to that, I’ve been up late every night recently because I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time considering the optimal chart for the Kurokuro RTA.
So there is a great possibility that the headache is caused by a lack of sleep.
But I still felt strange because the headache had come in the form of a pain I had never experienced before. It was a sharp, cutting pain.
The headache I felt when I woke up made me feel dizzy, but I felt the warmth of human skin in my back, supporting me.
It was Nana.
“What’s wrong?”
Nana gently supported my back and said anxiously.
How long has she been awake?
Sorry, that was stupid thought, of course she had been awake for a long time.
She hardly needs to sleep at all.
I felt the gentle heat of Nana’s arm around my back. That was the only thing that made the headache go away.
“I have a slight headache. It’s gone now. I’m fine.”
“No good, go back to sleep. You have been pulling all-nighter lately.”
She pulled me down and forced me to go back to sleep.
I was honest when I said the pain had subsided, but Nana would not allow it.
She is puffing her cheeks, pretending to be angry with me. And she won’t yield no matter what I said. But yeah, it was my fault for showing weakness.
“I can’t help it… Let’s take it easy today.”
“un.”
Recently I kind of neglected her. Still, I couldn’t help but stroke Nana’s head when I saw her happy smile.
In the end, I dismissed that headache as a sign of a cold since it was gone the next day after I had slept so much.
Unaware that was the beginning of the countdown that had started.
☆
After that, the peculiar headaches came and went on a whim.
When I was 13, it would come at least once a month.
Gradually, the intervals became narrower, and by the time I turned 14, it will happen once a week.
And after I turned 15, the headaches became so frequent that I didn’t know when they would strike, and they had become so bad that I felt great stress just by being alive.
Sister Ron forced me to go to the hospital for a checkup when I was bedridden at the age of 13 with a headache for the third time to confirm my condition.
I wasn’t that wary of it, but I still remember Ron’s worried face.
“The most common cause of headaches is overuse of the brain. It becomes overworked because it keeps concentrating for a long time. And in Rinne’s case, it’s because the software inside your brain is special. The burden on your brain as hardware is tens of thousands of times greater than that of a normal person. Your one second of concentrated thought equals the same amount of fatigue that a normal person would experience after three hours of concentrating.”
While scratching her head in frustration, Ron told me the cause of his headache.
“Even if you don’t do anything, your specs will continue to improve endlessly until you have enough information-processing power to make supercomputers look foolish. But your body is not strong enough to withstand it. There will come a time when your nerves will burn out someday, just like a dam bursting under too much pressure.”
“I see. So, I don’t have much time.”
“They expect the limit will be reached when you are twenty, that, if you delay is as long as you can. The earliest is probably two or three years from now. “
Ron said that with an expression as if she was forced to swallow a bitter bug, and I felt something heavy dropped in my chest as I listened to her words.
“Thank you Ron-nee… You know this not just from checkup, but also from our family research, didn’t you?”
This is thanks to Takajou’s family records. Its very root could be traced back to the Heian period. As the name suggests, [Taka][Jou] means a [falcon][craftmen], it was said that the first generation family head could talk with a falcon.
Thus, this family was given a name that suits its uniqueness, and countless sacrifices and research were made for this family to continue to prosper for more than 1,000 years, we had persist through many struggles and despairs, until the present time.
From what Ron said, there must be a precedent. Someone with a similar brain to mine must have been born in this family. It’s all thanks to their existence that we have been able to weave our history without falling apart when we were facing the trials of time.
If there had been supercomputers in the Edo period, it would have been quite a joke of power, wouldn’t it?
Even if there is no network, the ability to record and operate a vast amount of information is of great value in this country. Simply by using vast amount recorded in the imperial library.
They must have been active in their own right and then lost their talent at a young age. When I think about it, I am deeply moved.
“The longest is seven years, and the shortest is two years. Somehow my motivation sprung up when you gave me a time limit.”
“…I knew you would say that. Otherwise, it’s not the Rinne I know.”
I muttered happily while my sister Ron laughed in frustration.
I have a lot of things that I want to do, and I have a clear idea of what I want to achieve.
All that remained was to see how hard I could work before my talent ran out. As simple as that.
☆
My headache got worse day by day.
There were many days when I could not bear the pain and went to bed.
I stopped working and playing the money game by the time I was 13 years old; it was when I realized that this headache was something that could not be cured, and now I had to do what my heart was set to.
No, to be precise, I got tired of the money game long before this headache came, so to say I stopped playing because was not true. And because I had created a system that could make money on its own. The only thing I did with it was maintained it.
My work became less as a result, and that was a good time to quit because I started to affect the family poorly as a whole, especially with my mother.
The money I earned simply had become too much. It was the right decision to the left at this point because my existence had become too big, which caused various inconveniences to the balance of power inside the organization.
Takajou group was a place where my father and brother Ran ruled. It’s not where I want to belong.
Whenever I had free time, I would spend more and more of it with Nana.
And I noticed that only when Nana was beside me did my headache go away.
Thanks to this, I was able to keep Nana unaware of this symptom until the end of my stay. And I was thankful for that because if I showed even the slightest sign that I was not feeling well, she would worry about me.
I don’t know why I didn’t feel any pain. Maybe I got relaxed when I was with her, or maybe it was just the drugs in my brain that made the pain go away.
I still don’t know the reason, but the only thing that matters is that I was able to spend more time with Nana, and we were both happy.
My time with Nana was filled with happiness, and I cherished the time we had left, sometimes with the occasional visit to the Touka’s house.
Even so, it’s no time for me to be idling. I don’t have such leisure.
Until now, I had only played games, taken naps, gone out, and played around depending on my mood, but now… I didn’t have much time left.
And within this limited time, I wanted to accomplish something that would be called a mark, something that would be etched in the gaming history.
There were two targets.
The first was to set an ideal time by reducing it to the absolute minimum in a 100% RTA in Kurokuro, which was about to come to fruition after years of studying the charts.
The other is winning the WGCS, which is the pinnacle for anyone in a pro gamer career.
There are many things I need to do to compete in the WGCS, and that including the completion of Kurokuro RTA. I knew that the frequency of my headaches was gradually increasing and that there would eventually come a time when I couldn’t control them, even with Nana’s help.
The perfect RTA would take more than three full days, no matter how I calculated it. At the very least, it was clear that it would be physically demanding with this headache.
After much consideration, I decided to prioritize a 100% RTA of the Kurokuro and completed it at least before I turned 15.
Now is the time to run the strategy chart that I was developing over a period of years.
With Nana watching over me for three days and three nights, I shortened the time as much as possible by eating meals and ‘watering the flower’ during a non-skippable cutscene.
I was half-conscious by the time I had passed the 60-hour mark, but I managed to accomplish it before I ran out of steam.
This was my first live stream as a gamer. I broke the previous record by nearly 20 hours.
It was the fastest time in the world, which still shines brilliantly to this day.
Although this RTA was harsh, the result was very rewarding because I was able to shorten my qualification to WGCS by a year, thanks to the worldwide uproar that this stream generated.
The only goal left was to win the WGCS.
However, there is not much time left.
Five years is the maximum. And at worst, I don’t even know if I have one year left.
With only that much time left, how much of a result will I be able to achieve in the world of professional gamers, a world full of monsters?
Granted, all individual professional gamers are all different, but all the gamers that could qualify in the WGCS are basically a monster. Standing at the top of the world is not something easy.
I had to sort out what I could do in the limited time I had and what I should give in return.
But I’m okay with that because I have someone who supports me.
As long as Nana was by my side, I could do anything.
I really believed that at that time.
I truly believed, forever with Nana, I could do anything.
But.
This world is cruel.
‘Forever’ was not something we meant to be.
On that snowy Christmas.
Nana’s parents died.
===*
A being like Rinne is born every 100 to 200 years in the Takajou family. At that time, the ability to remember everything was especially valued and treated as if they were the child of God.
But unlike Rinne, since they were not exposed to vast amounts of information at once, nor did they have to concentrate on anything, they were generally stable and unbroken until they were about 40 years old.
Tl note:
I cried.