Naoe, seeking to stand against Kijima, who had founded Advanced Nurturing High School, ordered his subordinate Ayanokoji Atsuomi to launch the White Room project, with the aim of creating an Artificial Genius.
Ayanokoji Atsuomi secretly invited Professor Suzukake back to teach at the White Room. He had been driven out of the education world for violating educational ethics.
Professor Suzukake established ten difficulty levels for the White Room, from 1 to 10, and planned to increase the difficulty by one level with each generation.
When the program reached the Fourth Generation Students, Ayanokoji Atsuomi decided to place his own son, Ayanokouji Kiyotaka, in the White Room and assign him Beta Difficulty.
It was the ultimate difficulty Professor Suzukake had designed as a mere showpiece—the ultimate challenge he believed no human could ever overcome.
"Even if the entire Fourth Generation Students are wiped out, it doesn't matter." Only after hearing Ayanokoji Atsuomi say this did Professor Suzukake feel reassured enough to put this utterly unethical education—his dream education—into practice with the Fourth Generation Students and personally oversee their instruction.
Professor Suzukake had originally thought the Fourth Generation Students would all be eliminated by age five. After all, their coursework had already reached the level of a first-year high school student, while ordinary children at that age had barely begun to form memories.
The last remnants of humanity in Professor Suzukake's heart tormented him, too. Putting children through such a horrifying experiment made him unworthy of being called an educator.
He named the journal in which he recorded his teaching, Incarnation of the Devil.
So when he saw the children, eliminated after suffering so much pressure that they vomited bile, he felt disappointed by the experiment's failure, yet his conscience also made him feel relieved for the children who had been freed.
But even when they were six, four remained: Yuto, Kiyotaka, Shiro, and Yuki.
Yuto and Kiyotaka had originally been neck and neck in their grades.
But starting at age five, Kiyotaka was always outscored by Yuto, settling steadily into second place.
When Yuto and Kiyotaka were six, a major upheaval shook the White Room.
While Ayanokoji Atsuomi was giving a campaign speech on the street, someone shot him twice in the chest with a homemade shotgun from just thirty meters away. He died on the spot.
The suspect was shot dead at the scene. After investigating, the police concluded that he was most likely an enemy of Teacher Naoe, who was allied with Ayanokoji Atsuomi. But assassinating Naoe was too difficult, so he had settled for targeting Ayanokoji Atsuomi instead.
Sadly, Ayanokoji Atsuomi, a formidable figure in his time, had ultimately been no match for a bullet.
And a similar curse descended upon his son, Ayanokouji Kiyotaka.
By age seven, Amasawa Yuto and Ayanokouji Kiyotaka had already surpassed every martial artist the White Room's educators could hire.
Professor Suzukake therefore proposed a graduation test in combat for the two of them. He brought in fifteen delinquents and set them the ultimate challenge: one against fifteen.
The delinquents were naturally unarmed, and the boys were allowed to choose one melee weapon each. Kiyotaka went first, choosing a telescopic baton.
Using his small stature and agility, along with the tremendous leverage of his swinging baton, Kiyotaka knocked all fifteen men to the ground—
That was not how the script played out.
Perhaps because they had lost Ayanokoji Atsuomi, such a meticulous leader, the educators made a rookie mistake and failed to properly vet the delinquents.
They somehow failed to notice that one of them was the cousin of the assassin who had tried to kill Ayanokoji Atsuomi a year earlier and been shot dead at the scene.
And worse still, they neglected the body checks. The man had hidden a folding knife in the sole of his shoe.
The test took place in a sealed room. At the time, Yuto was in another sealed room, choosing his weapon while waiting for Kiyotaka's test to end.
The White Room descended into chaos that day, and Yuto's test was never held.
He had no idea what had happened. He simply never saw Kiyotaka again after that day.
He only learned the details of Ayanokoji Atsuomi's assassination and Ayanokouji Kiyotaka's death after leaving the White Room.
Not long afterward, a series of major events took place in the White Room.
First, the difficulty of the curriculum rose sharply. Yuki and Shiro left the White Room, and in the end, Yuto was the only one left from the Fourth Generation Students.
Then Amasawa Yuto was transferred to a new White Room. There, under Professor Suzukake's guidance, he continued studying alone until he was fifteen, completing two graduation theses.
A proof of the Riemann Hypothesis and a proposed proof addressing the Quantum Gravity problem.
Amasawa Yuto clearly remembered the afternoon Professor Suzukake finished reading his proof papers, which totaled more than three hundred pages, called him in, and announced that he had graduated.
For the first time, he met his parents and younger sister. Reunited with his family, he left the White Room and returned to their villa in Tokyo.
As they parted, tears glimmered in Professor Suzukake's eyes.
At nine that evening, the night Amasawa Yuto graduated, 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 just one sentence: "I have completed the finest work of my life. With my death, I will make it one of a kind."
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