I created a foundation

Each instruction is clear, precise, and interconnected.

The dormant foundation was like an awakened steel giant. Every screw and every wire began to work with almost crazy efficiency for the same goal.

ten minutes later.

Foundation headquarters, five thousand meters underground.

This is the lowest level of the entire base, and the air is filled with the smell of cold metal and rock.

A massive, dark silver cube was embedded within the thick rock. Countless robotic arms were still performing the final welding and reinforcement work, their sparks illuminating the tense, focused faces of the surrounding engineers.

A man wearing an orange prison uniform and numbered D-9527 came to the cube under the escort of two heavily armed security personnel.

He was very young, even with a hint of childishness on his face, but his eyes were unusually calm.

He looked up at the metal coffin that was about to become his grave, and then looked at Kasumigaoka Utaha who was holding a data tablet next to him with a complicated expression.

"Need I say something? Like for humanity or something?"

He pulled the corners of his mouth, revealing a smile that was uglier than crying.

Kasumigaoka Utaha remained silent and just bowed deeply to him.

The man shrugged.

The alloy door, as heavy as a bank vault door, slowly opened with a low hydraulic sound.

Inside, there is nothing.

There are only cold metal walls and a one-meter square high-definition display screen in the center.

D-9527 walks inside.

He didn't look back.

"boom--"

The alloy door slammed shut, and twelve thick lock cylinders popped out from all directions, locking the door and the wall tightly.

The buzzer sounded as the airtight system activated, and then everything fell silent.

In the compartment, the man sat cross-legged, staring quietly at the dark screen in front of him, waiting for the face that would bring him death.

at the same time.

The remote mountainous region of Nagano.

The mist in the forest was filled with suppressed sobs.

The sound seemed to penetrate the bone marrow, making everyone who heard it feel sadness and fear from the soul.

Busujima Saeko and Yotsuya Miko hid behind a ridge, and stared through high-powered binoculars at the white figure curled up under a tree in the distance, trembling constantly.

"The photographer is in place."

The team members' voices came from the headset.

Two hundred meters below them, another D-class personnel had already donned specialized light equipment.

His task was much simpler than that of his companions who had to enter the metal coffin.

It’s also much more deadly.

He only needed to carry a high-definition camera specially made by the Foundation, with independent power supply and encrypted transmission capabilities, and rush to the white giant.

Then, point the camera at its face.

Press the capture button.

"action."

Nanami Aoyama's cold voice sounded in everyone's earphones at the same time.

The D-class soldier codenamed "Photographer" took a deep breath and rushed out from behind the cover.

His speed reached the limit, the dead leaves under his feet were crushed to pieces, and his heart was beating wildly in his chest.

The crying was getting closer and clearer.

The fear that came from the instinct of life was like countless cold hands, tightly grasping his heart and almost suffocating him.

But he didn't stop.

One hundred meters.

Fifty meters.

Twenty meters.

He could even see the dirt on the white giant's body from years of curling up, and smell the strange smell of decay and sadness in the air.

It's now!

He stopped abruptly, raised the camera on his chest with trembling hands, and aimed it at the nameless head that had been buried deep between his knees.

He used all his strength to press the red shooting button.

"Click."

A soft sound.

The signal was transmitted through an encrypted channel, across hundreds of kilometers, to the server at the foundation's headquarters within 0.01 seconds.

Almost at the same moment, the sad sobbing in the mountains and forests stopped abruptly.

The expression on the "photographer's" face froze.

The white giant in front of him slowly, slowly raised his head.

He saw a face.

Then, his world, along with the camera in his hand, turned into a splatter of blood and flesh.

Five thousand meters underground.

Inside the cold metal compartment.

The dark screen in front of D-9527 suddenly lit up without warning.

A twisted, elongated face without eyelids, with only two empty eye sockets, but constantly shedding turbid tears, occupied the entire field of vision.

The violent roar from the distant mountains seemed to penetrate five thousand meters of rock and alloy and exploded directly in his ears.

Foundation headquarters, five thousand meters underground.

Cold, dead silence, absolute darkness.

D-9527 sat cross-legged on the hard alloy floor, his eyes closed, regulating his breathing.

He could feel his heart beating steadily and powerfully in his chest, and every beat seemed to be the final countdown to his short life.

As a death row inmate, he was supposed to be executed by lethal injection a week ago.

But the Foundation found him.

They gave him a choice.

A chance to trade certain death for a worry-free rest for his family. A chance to make his death have a tiny bit more meaning than just the end of life.

He agreed.

So here he sat, in this incredibly expensive metal coffin, buried deep underground, waiting for a face that was said to bring instant death.

Very fair deal.

He even felt that he had made a profit.

His only curiosity was: what kind of face would that be? Breathtakingly beautiful, or indescribably ugly? Or would the mere act of being seen be enough to offend some fundamental law of the universe?

As his thoughts raced, the cold display screen in front of him, which took up the entire wall, suddenly lit up without any warning.

The light is not dazzling, but as soft as the light on a cloudy day.

A face appeared on the screen.

D-9527's breathing, at this moment, stopped.

Not as thrilling as expected.

There's nothing weird beyond imagination.

It was a... very ordinary face. Ordinary to the point of being pale, ordinary to the point of being thin, like a patient suffering from long-term malnutrition.

But its eyes, or rather, what used to be its eyes, were now just two bottomless holes.

No eyeballs, no eyelids.

There are two black holes.

But unfortunately, turbid tears with grayish-white flocs kept flowing out from those two black holes.

The face was expressionless, the mouth tightly closed, but the lines of the jaw were distorted and elongated due to some extreme sadness, presenting inhuman proportions.

It's crying.

A silent, eternal cry that seems to carry all the sorrow in the world.

D-9527's heart was gripped by an indescribable sadness.

He seemed to see his forgotten childhood, his mother's tears when his parents divorced, and the desperate eyes of the victim's family after he accidentally injured someone for the first time.

All the regrets, pain and sorrow in my life were brought up by this face at this moment and magnified a thousand times.

He wanted to cry along.

But he didn't.

He just watched quietly, then slowly pulled up the corners of his mouth, revealing a relieved smile.

He got it.

So, that’s how it is…

……

at the same time.

In the dense forests of the Nagano mountains.