The production schedule for 'Puella Magi Madoka Magica' had eased up. Kamiyā Yuu had also finished the tasks he absolutely had to handle as animation director early, leaving him with nothing to do that afternoon.
The Sound Department was too far away, and Kamiyā Yuu didn't feel like going. The Key Animation Department had Uehara Etsuki, so there was no need for him to worry blindly. The animators' process was too broad and complicated, and with Gogyo Ruri there, his joining in would basically be redundant. At most, he would probably contribute no more than 3.2 ordinary animators.
The members of the 3D Department had already started moonlighting in other departments to find work for themselves, let alone having anything that required Kamiyā Yuu's help.
"Aoi, I'm heading home early. Call me directly if anything urgent comes up."
Kamiyā Yuu went to Morishita Aoi's office, waved, and greeted her.
"Mm. Be careful on the way."
Kamiyā Yuu stopped and thought for a moment, then turned back to Morishita Aoi.
"Oh, right. Tell Uehara-sensei for me that production on Episode 12 doesn't need to be rushed that much. She should know what I mean."
After greeting Morishita Aoi, Kamiyā Yuu left the company and drove his little car to a supermarket near his apartment to buy ingredients for dinner and restock snacks.
For Kamiyā Sora's convenience in going to school, the two of them still mainly lived in their old apartment. It took Kamiyā Yuu more than an hour to drive back, while taking the train was actually faster.
Inside the supermarket, Kamiyā Yuu finished selecting meat and picked up a package of vegetables nearby, carefully examining their appearance.
The vegetables were bright green and fresh, looking appetizing at a glance.
Dinner will be hamburger steak. Hmm~ I'll buy some more vegetables too. Sora doesn't like vegetables, so I'll make them into vegetable soup.
After selecting the ingredients, Kamiyā Yuu went to the snack section and found the shelves holding Kamiyā Sora's favorite snacks with practiced ease.
Snacks... Pocky's chocolate sticks and potato chips are Sora's favorites. I'll buy a little extra as backup, but I have to be careful she doesn't treat them as meals when I'm not paying attention.
"Free tasting event. Please feel free to try some."
A pleasant female voice repeated this sentence over the loudspeaker.
As he was preparing to check out, Kamiyā Yuu noticed the free tasting and approached with interest, asking the clerk, "Free sausage tasting? They even have events like this? Please give me one."
"Yes, please enjoy."
The female clerk wore a bright professional smile as she handed Kamiyā Yuu a small piece of sausage speared with a toothpick.
Events like this were common in Japanese supermarkets, similar in nature to one-time free tasting promotions.
"Thank you... Mm... Tsk, it tastes good. Hamburger steak with sausage sounds pretty nice. Please give me two packs."
Kamiyā Yuu's already mountain-like shopping cart gained two more spoils.
"Watermelon? Do they still have watermelon this season? Let me see... 6,280 yen!? Forget it, I'll buy one."
Although he was wealthy enough to be willful, Kamiyā Yuu was still amazed by how expensive watermelons were in Japan. He remembered that the cheapest watermelon he had seen in supermarkets before was one thousand yen, which converted to over a hundred yuan.
The taste was indeed good, but back in China, that price could buy more than ten watermelons and eat them as meals.
"Ah... I almost forgot we're nearly out of laundry detergent."
Kamiyā Yuu smacked his forehead and hurried back to the daily necessities section.
"What else..."
"What else was there again..."
In the end, Kamiyā Yuu left the supermarket under the strange gazes of passersby while carrying two large bags stuffed full of items.
At checkout, the huge circle of things he bought forcibly created a long line behind him.
Kamiyā Yuu was used to getting things done in advance. After returning home, he gloomily realized that aside from cooking, there didn't seem to be anything left to do.
Housecleaning, laundry, and other chores had all been finished before he went to the company. It was still too early to start preparing dinner.
"Sora is a third-year high school student. Even without club activities after school, she still has extra classes, so she'll probably be home in about three hours. I'll go to the consciousness space to pass the time."
After thinking for a while, Kamiyā Yuu sat on the sofa and slowly closed his eyes.
As his consciousness instinctively sank into darkness, he gradually awakened in another world.
It was a pure white world.
This world's existence could not be described through the five senses of living beings. Even the pure white color was merely an illusion created by Kamiyā Yuu's consciousness.
Here, Kamiyā Yuu could clearly sense the location of his own awareness.
With a single thought, his real-world body formed in this place, and the consciousness space once again became a world recognizable by a creature's five senses.
The familiar bodily sensation returned. Even the soreness from overusing his muscles during lunch was copied over.
Kamiyā Yuu narrowed his eyes and looked at his hands, experiencing a feeling completely different from usual. This difference could help him better adjust his body.
After recording the data, Kamiyā Yuu waved his right hand.
A crisp sound of shattering glass came from the pure white space before him. The space broke apart and formed a green passage made of numbers.
Endless digits and garbled codes drifted through it, changing according to some strange rule.
It was the materialized form of the online world.
The moment Kamiyā Yuu stepped into the passage of numbers, his consciousness also transformed into a massive data cluster composed of infinite digits. The astonishing amount of data nearly drowned the digital passage.
At the same time, secret agencies belonging to China, America, Japan, Russia, and Britain all received emergency reports with largely similar content.
A secret cyber-information monitoring agency directly under Britain's MI6.
"Sir! We've detected abnormal data again. Coordinates: 40°43'0"N, 74°0'0"W."
The monitor, who had been staring at the screen all day, reported urgently.
"All calculation methods are unable to measure the size of the abnormal data cluster!"
"Should we send a contact signal?"
"No need. Observe quietly."
Robert, a middle-aged officer in a black suit, gave the order cautiously.
He himself was also a computer expert, so watching the data jump across the large screen left him deeply alarmed.
"Three seconds after appearing, the abnormal data vanished as usual. Unable to identify the data source. Unable to determine the data flow direction."
Codename 1.
An abnormal fluctuation in network data that had appeared ten years ago, or perhaps even before the internet existed.
Ten years earlier, MI6 had stolen classified intelligence from China and learned of the existence of a massive abnormal data cluster. After confirming it, MI6 established the secret network data surveillance agency "Queen" to observe it.
To date, this agency has burned through tens of billions of dollars while developing the world's most advanced computer technology.
Yet even as hardware performance improved and software calculation methods went through multiple revolutions, they still couldn't capture the true nature of this abnormal data cluster.
After gathering top mathematicians and elite computer engineers, the only conclusion they reached was that the abnormal data cluster was too vast. Current computer technology simply couldn't fully observe it.
An intelligent lifeform?
An unknown alien?
Alien spyware?
Before concluding, no one dared act rashly.
Over the past decade, Codename 1 had randomly appeared all across the globe, then vanished like a stone thrown into the sea, becoming impossible to trace in less than three seconds.
Because major technological powers had detected Codename 1's existence, the military adjustments that followed had wasted over a trillion dollars.
Weapons capable of destroying the world were forbidden from having direct contact with the internet. Anything that could be operated manually had to be operated manually.
...
Kamiyā Yuu didn't care about the surveillance of the world's major technological powers.
Every time he entered the online world from the consciousness space, such data fluctuations were unavoidable.
Although he would be detected, Kamiyā Yuu was confident that nothing on the internet could restrict him.
As for those hidden nuclear missiles, merely thinking about them made Kamiyā Yuu laugh.
The essence of transmitting information was still electricity.
As long as something used electricity, there was nowhere he couldn't affect.
After two months of day-and-night construction, the abandoned town's underground base finally looked somewhat proper. All kinds of basic facilities were fairly complete.
At present, the underground base covers several hundred mu, equivalent to more than twenty football fields. Its main construction materials were special architectural alloys paired with specialized glass.
Even before full completion, it already gave off the feeling of a futuristic city.
"Yuu, the Ruby System experiment failed. Although we can establish a computer program with simple logical thinking, after many attempts, it still can't accommodate us."
As soon as Kamiyā Yuu arrived at the underground base, Weiss submitted an experimental results report to him.
The report detailed the process by which Weiss, Yang, Ruby, and Blake had constructed the Ruby System according to Kamiyā Yuu's ideas over the past two months.
"Exactly. Every time, the computer hardware temperature suddenly rises, and there have even been explosions," Ruby said softly.
Aside from the complaint, there was also a trace of fear.
When computer hardware burned out from overheating, that meant the vessel meant to contain them disappeared.
If they recklessly forced themselves into computer hardware, their very existence might disappear along with the destroyed equipment.
Although they had created a computer program with simple logical thinking, whenever they tried to leave Kamiyā Yuu's consciousness space as their vessel and transfer themselves into the hardware of this world, the impact of the massive data flow instantly burned out the high-end computer hardware.
Over the past two months, the value of computer hardware destroyed has roughly exceeded one hundred million dollars.
After extracting the data and conclusions from the report, Kamiyā Yuu muttered, "I generally understand the reason now. Don't force it. Just let nature take its course."
From the moment the Ruby Project was established, Kamiyā Yuu had also been collecting data.
Combined with the report Weiss had submitted, he vaguely understood the reason.
The answer was compatibility.
The data transformed from Kamiyā Yuu's consciousness conflicted with this era's online information world composed of zeroes and ones.
It was precisely this incompatibility that prevented the superpowers from using supercomputers to analyze Kamiyā Yuu's existence.
The two were fundamentally not things of the same level.
The unknown data transformed from Kamiyā Yuu's consciousness stood above this world's network. However, due to his lack of understanding of its rules, what Kamiyā Yuu could do was still limited by this world's network rules.
When he tried to forcibly convert the strange existence that made up for himself into network data, the hardware conditions of this world simply couldn't contain it.
Last time, Ruby had been able to control a mechanical vehicle only because she had issued instructions to the vehicle's program, not because she had transferred her consciousness vessel.
A computer intelligence program was ultimately still just an intelligent program. No matter how intelligent, it could not escape a certain range.
Ruby and the others, however, possessed the ability to imagine freely.
This kind of imperfect possibility was something ordinary hardware and an online world composed of absolute information could not contain.
In the online world, 1+1 would always equal one, but Ruby could rewrite the answer of 1+1 as 2.
For Ruby and the others to truly descend into this world, Kamiyā Yuu needed to start changing things from the most basic computer hardware.
That was also the purpose behind Kamiyā Yuu creating this underground base.
Now, he had already made sufficient preparations.
Once construction of the underground base was completed, a high-tech research center built by Matrix Corporation would soon rise above this abandoned town, focusing on biology and computer science.
The Ruby Project was temporarily shelved.
Since Ruby and the others could handle the construction of the underground base, Kamiyā Yuu had come to this world mainly to check later audience reviews for the VR version of 'Puella Magi Madoka Magica', so that he could better revise his own anime storyboards.
Over the past two months, the appearance of the VR version of 'Puella Magi Madoka Magica' has caused a small craze throughout the global ACG field.
Someone had actually remastered an ancient anime masterpiece and even released a VR version. More importantly, it was completely free to watch.
Both nostalgic fans and ordinary ACG enthusiasts were extremely interested in this personal remastered version.
The VR version of 'Puella Magi Madoka Magica' reached the front pages of major ACG information and discussion sites. The comments were overwhelmingly full of praise and nostalgia.
Because no information about the uploader could be found, the matter appeared even more mysterious.
Who exactly had remastered 'Puella Magi Madoka Magica'?
Why had they released it without a word and adopted a completely free viewing model?
The audience in this world had far higher standards for film and television appreciation than the world Kamiyā Yuu currently lived in.
Kamiyā Yuu wanted to seek inspiration from reviews with actual substance, ranging from the overall plot direction down to subtle changes in a character's expression during a certain scene.
Kamiyā Yuu was a perfectionist.
In order to leave himself no regrets, he pursued perfection in his remastered works, making sure that even as time passed, classics would remain classics forever.
By now, most pages of the storyboard drafts Kamiyā Yuu had drawn for 'Puella Magi Madoka Magica' were filled with dense revision instructions.
This included parts that had already been made into animation and could no longer be changed.
After Kamiyā Yuu exited the consciousness space, he had spent almost a full day in the previous world, but only two hours had passed in reality.
The intense mental operation in that world had not made Kamiyā Yuu feel especially tired in this world.
As the medium connecting two worlds, Kamiyā Yuu's spirit was not affected by crossing between them.
His current mental state was equivalent to having continuously performed high-intensity mental work for two days without feeling fatigued.
"Sora should be coming back soon, too. Next, I'll make dinner first... and I need to bring in the clothes I hung out to dry."
Kamiyā Yuu took out his phone to check the time, stretched beautifully, then stood and loosened his body.
Carrying the ingredients he had just bought, he walked into the kitchen.
His cooking skills were already no worse than those of the world's top chefs.
Skills related to Kamiyā Yuu's daily life were always things he wanted to master as quickly as possible.
Soon, rice topped with hamburger steak and fragrant meat sauce was finished, paired with a fresh vegetable soup seasoned with meat juices.
It was clearly simple home cooking, yet in color, aroma, and flavor, it was no worse than sky-high-priced food from a high-end restaurant.
Its presentation had none of those messy, unnecessary embellishments.
It only possessed the simplest colors capable of stirring people's most primal appetite.
"I'm back."
Just as he brought the food to the table, Kamiyā Sora's slightly weary, soft greeting came from the entrance.