Meeting Attendees

After the first New American representative entered and took a seat, eleven seats in the conference room remained empty.

Mingzhi's gaze swept across those vacant seats as he silently calculated.

Apart from the two central seats reserved for Arakawa Sesen and Rosalind Myers, the remaining nine seats should, by the principle of equal representation, be divided into five for Arasaka and four for Militech.

Five Arasaka seats.

Mingzhi thought for a moment and roughly guessed who would be coming.

First would undoubtedly be the three members of the Arasaka Family: Haruko, Hanako Arasaka, and Arakawa Michiko. Of the remaining two seats, one would unquestionably belong to Kenichi Shiro, Vice President. As for the last seat...

Mingzhi's memories flashed back to a meeting at Arasaka Tower a year ago.

At the time, Kenichi Shiro had taken advantage of a gap in communications to introduce him to an old man in a white suit, calling him a cunning "old dog" without the slightest attempt to hide his contempt.

He had seemed like an old-fashioned figure who had merely climbed the ranks through seniority, yet he had steadily worked his way into the upper echelons amid the fierce factional struggles within Arasaka Corporation.

Even now, Mingzhi could clearly recall the elderly man named Sanada—his cloudy yet shrewd eyes, the seasoned cunning that seeped through his words. Whenever he seemed most innocent and least informed, he would precisely set a deadly stumbling block in his colleagues' paths.

The downfall of the previous vice president had been the result of this seemingly honest and harmless old man, who appeared to have attained his position solely through "putting in the years," pulling strings behind the scenes.

Sanada's rank in Arasaka's global hierarchy was indeed not enough to place him among the top five.

But within the