Listening to the voice on the other end of the line, MEI pressed her lips together.
"The debt will be paid in full and on time."
"...And who might you be?"
MEI didn't answer. She simply hung up the phone.
Looking at her father, who was still passed out and snoring on the sofa, MEI closed her eyes in faint agony and let out a soft sigh.
A wave of profound pain and exhaustion washed over her, making her expression incredibly complicated.
"Well... at least he's just drinking at home."
In the beginning, MEI used to be furious at her father's degenerate behavior. But now, it had devolved into mere self-consolation. At the very least, getting blackout drunk on his own couch meant he wasn't out starting bar fights and getting thrown into jail, nor was he out gambling and drawing loan sharks to their front door.
Sometimes, MEI couldn't help but marvel at her own adaptability. Though, she knew that in reality, it was just numbness.
She never could have imagined that she would transition from living the comfortable life of a pampered young lady to single-handedly managing all household affairs and keeping her family afloat in less than six months.
To take care of her father and hold this fragile family together, she had learned how to monetize her intellect to pay the bills, how to manage the household chores, and even how to cook...
MEI looked at her father on the sofa, her eyes swimming with a mixture of nostalgia and pain.
How did things end up like this?
MEI had a perfect memory, so she vividly remembered the exact dividing line where her life went from brilliant and colorful to bleak and gray.
It was the day her mother died.
From that day onward, her father—formerly the brightest rising star in the Far East scientific community, the man everyone believed would win the Supreme Science Medal in the Mu Continent before turning forty—completely collapsed in on himself.
In an incredibly short span of time, he morphed into a completely different person. A stranger MEI didn't recognize.
Alcoholism. Brawling... Before then, MEI never would have associated those words with her father.
Until six months ago. Her father had shown up to the laboratory drunk, causing a catastrophic accident that resulted in multiple casualties.
And just like that, the shining hope of the Far East scientific community came crashing down.
MEI originally thought that surviving such a massive, life-ruining scandal might snap him out of it and force him to change his mindset.
Unfortunately, he did change, but in a direction MEI never could have anticipated.
—He developed a gambling addiction.
In a terrifyingly short amount of time, their family's relatively substantial savings were entirely wiped out, and he racked up a massive mountain of external debt.
Looking at her father lying on the sofa under the dim light, looking as if his soul had been entirely hollowed out, MEI couldn't help but fantasize.
"If only this were all just a nightmare..."
MEI sighed soundlessly, then turned and headed toward her own room.
In the Far East, owing debt to the wrong people was a matter of life and death. The string of zeroes Ryoma owed was enough to plunge any normal family into an abyss they could never crawl out of.
Fortunately, in her darkest hour, the vast repository of knowledge in her brain had given her a trump card to flip the table.
Over the past few months, she had taught herself advanced engineering and mechanics. She had identified critical flaws in the current military-grade exoskeletons on the market, redesigned them to be significantly more efficient, and filed a patent for her improvements.
As soon as the patent was approved, she could sell it for a massive sum of money—more than enough to wipe her father's debt clean.
Thinking of this, MEI turned the doorknob and stepped into what used to be her father's study.
She froze.
Scattered all across the floor were pages of handwritten drafts and blueprints.
MEI quickly dropped to her knees and began gathering them up. These were the core materials she needed for the patent application.
But as she quickly reviewed the stack, her heart skipped a beat. A section was missing.
MEI's face instantly darkened.
"Did someone steal them?"
She immediately rejected the thought. If an industrial spy had actually recognized the value of the patent, they would have stolen the entire stack, not just a random handful of pages.
"And the house doesn't look like it's been tossed by a burglar..."
Suddenly, a horrifying suspicion surfaced in her mind.
She practically flew back into the living room and grabbed Ryoma by the shoulders, shaking him violently.
"Father! Where are the drafts I left in the study?!"
Ryoma groaned, blearily opening his bloodshot eyes. "MEI? You're home from school..."
"Father, did you see the drafts in the study?!"
"D-Drafts...?"
"The stack of papers I left right on the middle of the desk!"
Ryoma sluggishly rubbed his face, his alcohol-addled brain slowly turning its gears. Suddenly, realization dawned on him. "Oh... those papers on the desk? I used them to wrap my bento box this morning."
"..."
After frantically digging through the kitchen trash can, MEI finally retrieved the missing pages.
Looking at the grease-stained, crumpled sheets of paper in her hands, she let out a long, shuddering breath of relief.
"Once the patent is approved, I can pay off Father's debt. And then... hopefully, everything will finally get better."
While MEI was looking toward the future with a glimmer of hope, she remained completely unaware that from the moment she walked home from school, a pair of eyes had been watching her from the shadows.
On the rooftop of an apartment building directly across from MEI's home, Li Mu stood holding a monocular telescope. Through MEI's open living room window, he had watched the entire domestic drama unfold.
"Yikes... how did Ryoma end up as such a massive loser in this timeline?"
"And why does this whole setup feel so incredibly familiar?"
"A hyper-competent daughter acting as the breadwinner, and a deadbeat, washed-up rock-bottom dad... Is the System trying to feed me some weird, tragic indie band backstory?"
As MEI closed the living room window, cutting off his line of sight, Li Mu casually collapsed the telescope and pocketed it.
As the key character for his next Check-In, Dr. MEI—the parallel equivalent of Raiden Mei—was currently his absolute top priority.
In this era, while MEI's family was well-off before the crash, she wasn't the heiress to a massive corporate conglomerate. Naturally, her father Ryoma wasn't the CEO of MEI Corp.
Unlike his counterpart fifty thousand years in the future, the Ryoma of the Previous Era didn't have a massive family business to inherit. So, he had gone into scientific research. And apparently, he was actually quite talented. Though he was nowhere near the inhuman, logic-defying level of future MEI or Mobius, he had still managed to carve out a solid reputation for himself in the scientific community.
Because of this, the MEI of this era hadn't grown up to be an ordinary, gentle rich girl who loved cooking like Raiden Mei. Instead, heavily influenced by her father's academic environment, she had developed a terrifying obsession with learning, ultimately setting her on the path to becoming a world-ending scientist.
However, the System's Check-In explicitly required "The Heiress of MEI Corp, Raiden Mei."
Because MEI's name literally translated to Mei, she didn't even need to use a fake alias like Kevin did. The only real hurdle for this act of the play was figuring out how to make MEI the "Heiress of MEI Corp."
Li Mu's original plan was brilliantly simple: secretly back Ryoma, help him found a company called MEI Corp, and use it to provide logistical support and props for the upcoming scripts.
After all, he still needed to Check-In at the iconic scene: "Ryoma Gets Arrested for Economic Fraud."
Plus, having a massive corporation like MEI Corp at his disposal would make setting up the rest of the stage—like funding Anti-Entropy's mechs—infinitely easier.
Building MEI Corp from the ground up was a highly strategic move. And Ryoma was supposed to be Li Mu's hand-picked business partner. Li Mu had fully intended to hand the man a golden ticket to the CEO's chair.
But after taking his eyes off him for a few months, the guy had somehow degenerated into this pathetic mess.
The current Ryoma was completely useless. Dragging a dead-weight teammate like him onto the battlefield was the equivalent of hand-delivering a free kill to the enemy.
Clearly, the script needed some heavy revisions.
"Tch."
Li Mu clicked his tongue, a little annoyed, but not entirely stressed. Anyone who had ever written a novel knew that outlines were meant to be thrown in the trash anyway. The same applied to scripts.
"As long as we reach the desired ending, I don't care if the journey gets a little weird."
With that, Li Mu opened his inventory and pulled out the reward he'd earned from completing "Kiana Enrolls in Chiba Academy."
—An A-Rank Stigmata Selector Box.
Initially, Li Mu assumed that the Stigmata from this box would be exactly like the natural Stigmata possessed by the Valkyries fifty thousand years in the future.
But upon closer inspection, he realized they were entirely different. Aside from sharing the name "Stigmata," they were fundamentally two separate concepts.
The natural Stigmata of the future were more like innate genetic talents. Even if a Valkyrie was born with one, they still had to train and develop it to unlock its true power.
But the Stigmata from the Selector Box bypassed all of that. The moment he equipped one, he instantly gained all the corresponding combat skills, instincts, and battle experience associated with it.
Honestly, rather than calling them "Stigmata," Li Mu felt "Character Templates" was a much more accurate term.
The A-Rank Stigmata Selector Box only allowed him to choose from Valkyries officially classified as A-Rank in the Current Era.
Susannah... Alvitr... Lewis... Shigure Kira...
A series of chibi character icons scrolled past his eyes. Very quickly, Li Mu found exactly what he needed.
—Wraith.
An A-Rank Schicksal Valkyrie who had only appeared in the Moon Shadow manga and had virtually zero screen time in the main story.
But her specific ability was exactly what Li Mu needed right now. Her Stigmata power was: Shapeshifting.
The moment the Stigmata activated, Li Mu felt raw power flooding his veins. His strength surged, compounding exponentially. Right now, his physical specs were perfectly equal to a genuine A-Rank Valkyrie.
Li Mu looked back toward MEI's apartment building, a deeply sadistic smirk stretching across his face.
"Ryoma... shitty adults like you need to be corrected!"