The White Room Becomes History

To counter Kijima, who founded Advanced Nurturing High School, Naoe had his subordinate Ayanokoji Atsuomi launch the White Room Project in an attempt to create an artificial genius.

Ayanokoji Atsuomi secretly brought back Professor Suzukake to teach at the White Room, a man who had been expelled from the education world for violating educational ethics.

Professor Suzukake established ten difficulty levels, 1 through 10, for the White Room, planning to increase the difficulty by one level with each generation of students.

When the Fourth Generation Students were underway, Ayanokoji Atsuomi decided to throw his own child, Ayanokouji Kiyotaka, into the White Room, and to use Beta Difficulty.

That was the ultimate difficulty Professor Suzukake had designed as a mere formality, the ultimate challenge he believed humans could never possibly achieve.

"Even if the Fourth Generation Students are all wiped out, that's fine." With Ayanokoji Atsuomi's words, Professor Suzukake felt reassured enough to pour this absolutely unethical education—the dream of his own making—into the Fourth Generation Students, personally instructing them.

Professor Suzukake originally believed the Fourth Generation Students would be completely wiped out by age five, since by then their coursework had already reached the level of first-year high school, an age when normal children haven't even started forming lasting memories.

The part of Professor Suzukake's humanity that hadn't yet been extinguished tormented him; throwing children into such a terrifying experiment was unworthy of being called an educator.

He named his educational record log "Incarnation of the Devil."

So when he saw the children who were eliminated, vomiting bile from the overwhelming stress, he felt both disappointment at the experiment's failure and, driven by his conscience, relief for those liberated children.

But by age six, four still remained: Yuto, Kiyotaka, Shiro, and Yuki.

Yuto and Kiyotaka's grades had originally been neck and neck.

But starting from age five, Kiyotaka's grades were consistently surpassed by Yuto, settling into second place.

When Yuto and Kiyotaka were six years old, a huge upheaval occurred in the White Room.

While giving a campaign speech on a street corner, Ayanokoji Atsuomi was shot twice in the chest at close range—thirty meters away—with a homemade shotgun. Both shots hit, killing him on the spot.

The suspect was shot dead at the scene. According to the subsequent investigation, the police concluded that the individual was highly likely to have harbored a grudge against Naoe, the teacher Ayanokoji Atsuomi was aligned with. But assassinating Naoe was too difficult, so he settled for Ayanokoji Atsuomi as a second choice.

A pity—Ayanokoji Atsuomi, a man of his era, ultimately couldn't outrun a bullet.

And a curse similar to his befell his son, Ayanokouji Kiyotaka.

At age seven, Amasawa Yuto and Ayanokouji Kiyotaka's combat skills had already surpassed any fighter the White Room's educators could hire.

So Professor Suzukake proposed a combat graduation test for the two: find fifteen thugs and have them face a 1 vs. 15 ultimate challenge.

The thugs were, of course, unarmed. The two were allowed to choose one melee weapon each. Kiyotaka went first; he chose an expandable baton.

Relying on his small stature's agility and the baton's massive leverage from its swing, Kiyotaka knocked all fifteen to the ground—

But that's not how the script played out.

Perhaps with the loss of Ayanokoji Atsuomi as the meticulous leader, the educators made a low-level mistake in quality control when selecting the thugs.

They failed to notice that one of them was the cousin of the assassin who had been shot dead on the spot a year earlier while trying to kill Ayanokoji Atsuomi.

And an even bigger mistake was that they neglected the body search; this man had a folding knife hidden in the sole of his shoe.

The test was held in a sealed room. At the time, Yuto was in another sealed room, choosing his own weapon while waiting for Kiyotaka's test to end.

That day, the White Room was in chaos, and Yuto's test never took place.

He didn't know exactly what happened; he just never saw Kiyotaka again from that day on.

Even the details of Ayanokoji Atsuomi's assassination and Ayanokouji Kiyotaka's death only came to light after he left the White Room.

Not long after, a series of major events occurred in the White Room.

First, the course difficulty suddenly skyrocketed. Yuki and Shiro left the White Room, leaving Yuto as the only remaining Fourth Generation Student.

Then, Amasawa Yuto's White Room location was relocated. In the new White Room, Amasawa Yuto studied alone under Professor Suzukake's guidance until he was fifteen, completing two graduation theses.

A proof of the Riemann Hypothesis and a conjectural proof for the Quantum Gravity problem.

Amasawa Yuto clearly remembered that afternoon when Professor Suzukake, after reviewing his combined total of over three hundred pages of proof papers, called him in to announce his graduation.

For the first time, he met his parents and younger sister, reunited with his family, left the White Room, and returned to the villa in Tokyo.

As they parted, tears glistened in Professor Suzukake's eyes.

At nine o'clock on the night of Amasawa Yuto's graduation, Professor Suzukake left a suicide note and poisoned himself in the empty White Room, in the observation room where the educators usually sat.

The note contained only one sentence: "I have completed my life's most perfect work. With my death, I make it one of a kind."