Unfortunately, Jarvis's words had come true. Before nightfall, Pepper had dragged Stark in by the neck.
Pepper looked remarkably healthy—in fact, a little too healthy. Schiller looked her over and found that she seemed ten years younger, with thick hair and a rosy complexion. Stark, on the other hand, stood beside her with two dark circles under his eyes, looking as though he had spent the night burglarizing houses.
Without the slightest concern for the fact that this was the Psychiatry Department of Presbyterian Hospital rather than Schiller's little clinic, Pepper began telling her story as usual.
There was not much to explain. Ever since discovering that Pepper was ill, Stark had reached the point where even if a cockroach by the roadside twitched a leg, he would have someone inspect the quality of the floor three times. Put simply, he was exploding with anxiety.
Ordinarily, Stark, who had already seen every kind of hardship and spectacle, would not have fallen ill over something like this. But after Earth's technology entered its explosive growth phase, he had not had a moment's rest. Working for hundreds of consecutive hours with a magic core plugged in had become routine.
If he had merely buried himself in the lab as he once did, it would have been nothing to him. But everyone knew that once an operation grew large enough, all kinds of bullshit came with it. The most draining part of research was not the research itself, but resolving every problem so he could focus on research.
Stark had fallen into exactly that state. He desperately tried to solve every external problem so he could return to the lab, but his current position meant those problems would never end.
Today, one country fought another over patent rights. Tomorrow, one country's satellite blocked