CH 228

228 – Defects

May 24, 2022

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A note:

Sorry for the delay in updating. Real-life has been too busy.

It’s longer than I expected, so here is the first part.

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Rinne Takajou has been defective since birth.

☆☆

Nana and I are best friends.

We are a pair of one and only best friends who have spent more time together than family since we were little.

A gift was bestowed upon us.

Nana was born with an overpowered body, and I with an overdeveloped brain.

We were born with our talents mirrored as if we were standing at opposite ends of a line.

What I cannot do, Nana can do.

What Nana cannot do, I can do.

Thus, we will live our lives compensating for our shortcomings by supporting each other.

That… was my selfish dream.

Because I was born with a fatal defect.

If I try to run, my legs tangle; if I throw a ball, it flies in strange directions.

I was born with something that could be said as a debuff in a video game. The more seriously I tried to exercise, the more I failed. It’s like a curse.

However, this is something that everyone born into a family of Takajou has to live with.

My father, uncle, elder brother, and older cousin.

My elder cousin Ron was born albino and forced to live with a frail body, everyone in this family has some kind of abnormal constitution as the price for their exceptional gift.

For me, the it was the inability to exercise. It is a fatal flaw, but I think that still on the mild side because as long I do not push myself too hard in my daily life, I will be fine.

like the example above, there will always be a price for each gift received by a member of the Takajou family.

But unlike us, Nana has not bestowed such a curse.

Her potential is awesomely high, her body is terrifyingly strong, and her growth limit is yet to be seen.

Nana certainly had what we all wanted so badly.

I entrusted Nana with things that I could not do myself. And I did not doubt that Nana could do things that I could not.

But Nana, never need to entrust me anything.

For example, I was good at studying, but she had never been particularly bad at it. It might be a different story if we ask if she still remembers it or not, but at the very least, when she was a student, she had a good enough brain to be able to understand anything I explained to her.

Even in action games, which I thought I was good at, Nana will be better at most of the things I was good at. She will beat me one-sidedly, relying on her reflexes alone.

Her specs are transcendent, and her concentration is extraordinary. It was more difficult to find something Nana couldn’t do.

Even so, Nana would always rely on me to help her when she needed to. Given time, it’s possible that she could solve her problem on her own. Still, she always comes to me first.

[Because this was something Rin-chan was good at.]

This is Nana’s way of carefully avoiding an intrusion into my domain.

She is not so smart that she does it on purpose, so it must have been an unconscious action at first. I regret it now, but it probably wasn’t a good idea for me to slap her on the cheek after I lost the game that day.

Nana had always been a lonely girl, and this was especially true when she was little. She tried to stay as close to me as possible, and when I held her hand, she always got so happy.

It was probably an unconscious response to [I don’t want Rin-chan to hate me] feeling, which eventually led to this kind of habit.

That part of Nana has not changed even now that we’re an adult.

Of course, there were times when my help was definitely needed, but most of the time, it was because she had decided not to do it, not because she couldn’t do it.

So it was not true that we live to support each other.

The truth is, I have lived my life with Nana supporting me.

That is our true relationship.

But that does not mean that I am inferior to Nana.

We are equal. There is no doubt about that.

Nana instinctively knows this, which is why she leans on me and trusts me more deeply than anyone else.

Just like the right person for the job. I may not be useful in everyday life, but I have my own ridiculous talents even though it’s kind of useless for my daily life.

☆

When I was two years old. I was bored with the world.

My brain was special, and I could memorize anything the moment I saw it.

How good was my ability you ask?

Let me tell you first, that the essence of the talent I was born with is not just perfect memory but also the ability to process those stored information in parallel.

There are many ways to call it, like [multitasking], [parallel thinking], [working at the same time], or [working while doing something at the same time]. But it simply means [an ability to do two or more tasks at the same time].

It is like playing the piano with your left hand while doing calligraphy with your right. It may be physically difficult to actually do this, but it is not a bad metaphor.

Thinking about one thing while also thinking about another.

I have been doing this naturally since I was a baby, and the number of parallel thoughts increased whenever I took in unknown information.

I always tried make sense of everything I see and hear in my own way. At first, it was One. Then Two. And Three. And as the number of unknowns things increased, so did my [Thinking-Self].

The number of parallel thoughts I could use kept increasing, and it was just as if I were casually adding rooms to a building. The number continued to increase endlessly whenever I came into contact with unknown information, and before I knew it, it had exceeded 100.

The turning point probably happens when the [Thinking-Self] number reached around 1,000? I’m not sure. At that time, the part of the room where I had finished examining the [unknown] information became [empty].

The newly gained information was now thrown into the [empty] room and examined until I understand it, and then it becomes an [empty] room again. The cycle continues, and eventually, most of the room has become the [empty] room.

That’s why my ego was complete by the time I was one year old.

A brain that will record all kinds of information.

And talent to process that vast amount of information in parallel and on its own.

These two talents, which are too synergistic, expanded my worldview at once.

My brain developed hundreds or even thousands of times faster than normal people.

I could use tools and understand the meaning of words, the difference in tone between people who spoke to me, also… my current situation.

Even the tiniest differences that a one-year-old child should not easily determine.

I understand. I understand everything.

The unknown quickly turned into the known.

Even so, there was still so much I didn’t know, and at that time, I was still excited about the world.

After some time, I can turn over my body, next, I can crawl. And when I was able to stand up by holding onto something, and at this point, I started spending more and more time alone.

Mother was busy, and so were my two older brothers. I was relatively quiet because I was physically weak, so they seemed to think it was okay to leave me alone for the time being.

And finally, my parents learned about the rapid development of my brain.

Even though my body was not yet developed and could not speak, I could still have a conversation using a smartphone.

I still remember the expression reflected in my mother’s eyes when we first talked using the phone. It was a mixture of surprise, fear, and resignation.

My only playground was the tablet device my mother gave me as a young child. Some bodyguards took care of me, but they were not my playmates.

Anyway, I remember that I was so excited at the time to have this magic item that could connect me to all kinds of information.

But that, was also the quickest route to boredom.

I immersed myself in the world of the Internet as much and as long as I could, and to understand all of the new wonders I found, the first thing I did was study.

I finished my compulsory education in a month, another for higher education, then using half a month working on the past exams of one of the most difficult universities, and I stopped studying after I got that far.

Not because I can’t.

But because I have already learned it all. So I stopped.

Knowing too much will make you lose the joy of discovering.

I realized that in those two and a half months after using my talent to carelessly devour the unknown and turn the world into something so boring.

And after I tossed my tablet, my boredom accelerated.

It sounds silly, but at the time, I really thought I was going to get bored with the whole world if I didn’t do at least that.

The joy of curiosity and the despair of losing it.

After thinking about it with all my useless parallel thoughts, there were times when there was nothing left for me to do but sleep feeling betrayed, and at that moment, something rare happened, my father came home.

“Rinne, I’ve prepared the perfect playground for you. follow me.”

The place he took me to was neither an amusement park nor a zoo but the headquarters of the Takajou Group. It may be weird but not wrong to call this place the group’s headquarters, but no description fits this place better than that.

I was taken to a large room with countless monitors and computers. It was an wicked space where all kinds of confidential information were gathered by the company’s spies worldwide.

My father showed me the dark side of the largest company in the world for the first time.

Then he said.

“I will lend you 100 million yen. Use the information here freely and increase it. It will surely be a good way to pass the time.”

My father said this to a child that was not even reached two years old and left.

Everyone there was shocked, and I was too. My father loved me dearly, but he had never once talked about his work in front of me.

From that day on, my pleasure changed to making more money.

If you ask me if I enjoyed it, I don’t think so.

All I was doing was looking at data, and even if I lost my money, there was no risk to me.

But it was certainly more distracting to read about the ever-changing situation than to just accumulate knowledge and feel like the all-knowing.

After the age of two, I was able to hold a controller. And for the first time, I got into competitive online gaming.

I enjoyed competing against opponents that I couldn’t beat with just my knowledge, and I learned the joy of working hard and honing my skills. This was the first time I learned about a sense of satisfaction that I could not get from studying.

Then, when I turned 3 years old, I met her. I met Nana for the first time.

☆☆☆

Over the years, many things happened, and she saved my life from a rabid dog.

She went from being a henchman who followed behind me all the time to an equal friend.

The more I learned about Nana, the more interesting the world became.

Everything was fun with Nana.

For better or worse, physically, Nana was already the strongest person in the world at the age of four, but mentally she was an ordinary child.

She would show interest in things she saw for the first time and ask, [What is this?] When I told her what it was, she smiled happily.

The brain, which I thought was just a thing to make the world boring, the knowledge that I had accumulated for nothing, became an indispensable tool to entertain that child.

At first, all was fine.

But as Nana’s knowledge accumulated, it became harder and harder to do so.

I’m not talking about imparting knowledge. What I mean is that it became more and more difficult to find something new for Nana.

And that was natural. The more you know about things, the less fresh the world becomes. It happened to Nana, too. It just happened too early for me.

But that doesn’t mean she was unhappy about it.

Unlike me, who felt betrayed when the world became boring, she was truly happy just to be with [Rin-chan] from the bottom of her heart, and that was the same with me.

However, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel sad that Nana was relying on me less and less.

And in contrast, the older I got, the more I relied on Nana. The price I had to pay for being born with this burden was that much heavier than what I expected.

Ten years had passed since we first met.

After we both turned 13 years old, the number of my parallel thoughts had easily exceeded 10,000.

But that is just a rough estimate. As for myself, it only means that I could process information 10,000 times that of an ordinary person. I only become more efficient.

Should I be forced to use a simple metaphor, I would say that I had a supercomputer in my head.

I may sound like I’m bragging, but at the time, I was awesome.

The Takajou group collected dark information that ordinary people couldn’t, and the information flowed from all corners of the world. Using this information, I predicted the fluctuation of stock prices in a hundred different ways and built up a huge asset base.

This is fundamentally different from a computer that only efficiently processes data built with 1s and 0s.

Everything was calculated in my prediction, including human emotion, the inner situation of the company, or even the world’s affairs.

That’s the reason why I was able to predict everything. The accuracy of my money game had improved to the point where it was more difficult to fail.

Some may envy that, and they have every right to do so.

But, as someone who actually had it, I never need this kind of talent.

I had never told Nana about it, but at that time, I was slowly falling prey to my own defects.

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Rinne is a rather uptight person.

Incidentally, Rinne is not the so-called creative type. She’s just efficient in information processing. For example, she cannot make groundbreaking inventions or bring revolutionary ideas to difficult mathematical problems.

Be it fortune or misfortune, Rinne’s talent only makes her brain computer-like, and she can only calculate emotions and other uncertainties to some extent.

TL notes:

So… Nah, nevermind, I will let you guys experienced it yourself.