Classroom of the Elite, I Have a Life Simulator 22

[Chapter 1 Clearance Goal: Find Ichinose Honami's life turning point and correct it.]

"Simulation... start."

[Simulation started]

[Day 1: The date is July 9th. Tokyo is in the grip of a sweltering heatwave. You stand at a street intersection, following the navigation on your phone to find the location of your home. The long-lost city scenery feels somewhat novel to you. During summer vacation, you can see many high school students dating in pairs along the streets. Large screens mounted on the walls of surrounding buildings are scrolling through advertisements. The white cat on your shoulder taps your cheek with its paw, signaling that the light has turned green and it is safe to cross.]

[This cat, named Hotaru, is a stray you picked up last year. Because its pupils are a brilliant firefly color, you named it Hotaru.]

[Living in the countryside, you received a text message two days ago from your friend Matsuo Eiichiro. He is a friend you met two years ago, and you have been under his care ever since. Upon hearing that you had lost your past memories, he actively helped you inquire about relevant clues. Hard work pays off; he finally found your real name and address over the last two days and sent the collected information to you.]

[Kitagawa Ryo, that is your name. The address is an apartment building four stories high in the Nakano Ward of Tokyo. Furthermore, there is a savings card registered under your identity at the bank, containing a neat five million yen. This might be a gift left by the past you for the present you.]

["Recently, the Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing High School held a press conference to respond to a series of issues, including allegations of occupying excessive public resources. Chairman Sakayanagi spoke on the relevant matters."]

[The news playing on the screen outside the building by the road catches your attention.

"Sakayanagi?"

You inexplicably feel that this surname is somewhat familiar. Sealed memories feel like the entrance to a cellar being pried open by a crack.]

[You shake your head, casting the messy and aimless thoughts to the back of your mind. The most important thing you should do now is to find that apartment quickly. If the neighbors still remember you, perhaps you can learn about your past from them.]

["Phew, is this the place?" After another two hours of traveling, you finally arrive in front of this small-looking apartment building.]

["I remember the specific address Eiichiro sent me was on the fourth floor." Just as you are about to tap your phone to confirm the specific location, you suddenly sense the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.]

[At this moment, you are blocking the stairwell between the third and fourth floors with large bags of luggage. Realizing someone is coming up, you quickly move all your luggage to the fourth-floor hallway. Just as you pass the stairwell again while carrying the last small bag, you see a girl who looks to be about fifteen or sixteen, presumably your age.]

[The first thing that catches your eye is undoubtedly her golden-pink hair reaching her waist. Beneath light bangs is a pair of azure blue pupils currently revealing surprise and disbelief. Even though her summer clothes are loose, her chest is still held high, showing an impressive scale. Her waist is cinched tight, contrasting with her chest to give an exceptionally slender impression. The hem of her pitch-black skirt falls just past her knees. A faint, lingering scent of green tangerine drifts to the tip of your nose.]

[Noticing that she seems to be staring intently at your face, you tilt your head in confusion. Hotaru on your shoulder also tilts its head:]

["Um, hello?"]

[Unlocked Story CG: Meeting Again After All These Years]

[Meeting Again After All These Years: To meet again means both farewell and reunion. So, long time no see.]

[Do you want to read this story CG? (This may be helpful for your subsequent game progress)]

Chapter 24: Meeting Again After All These Years

Ichinose Honami started learning to write letters when she was ten years old. At an age when her elementary school peers were still fretting over writing compositions based on pictures, she could already write several pages of text on snow-white stationery.

Whenever Ichinose Honami wrote a letter, her mother would pull up a chair and sit beside her. A dim, greenish lightbulb hung above their heads, casting two shadows—one large and one small—against the wall, stretching halfway across the room.

At first, Ichinose Honami didn't even know the proper format for a letter. She could only imitate the vague content she found in her limited reading, just like the beginning of the letter nine-year-old Vanka wrote to his grandfather:

"Dear Grandfather, Konstantin Makarich! I am writing to you. Wishing you a Merry Christmas, and may God bless you with everything you wish for."

Ten-year-old Ichinose Honami followed suit:

"Dear Brother, Kitagawa Ryo! This is Ichinose Honami. It has been two weekends since you moved away. Because I am very unhappy right now, I don't want you to be happy when you see this letter. If you were happy, you wouldn't know about my unhappiness."

"Actually, what makes me even more unhappy is that when I am unhappy, I cannot go directly to your house to tell you that I am unhappy, but instead have to write a letter to tell you at this time. By the time you receive the letter, I might have already forgotten about this matter, and by the time you write back, I might have new things I want to tell you."

"I really don't like writing letters. I want to look at your face, look into your eyes, and tell you these things."

Ichinose's mother wouldn't speak, nor would she make a sound. She just waited quietly for Ichinose Honami to finish the letter, then answered her anxious daughter:

"He will receive it. If there is a reply, I will bring it to you."

"Ryo will definitely write back. He promised."

After finishing the letter, Ichinose Honami would return to her normal self. Even though she had been frowning and pouting while writing just moments ago, she would forget these little moods as soon as she handed the letter to her mother.

"Oh, he promised."

Ichinose's mother repeated her daughter's words calmly. She could see a thousand such children's promises in front of the elementary school gate every day—promises to play together forever, promises not to tell secrets, promises to give away things from home. Did she believe them?

Of course she believed them. What reason did she have not to?

In her view, if any woman had never believed a man's promise, she could be called prematurely aged. Discovering that the things one deeply believed in were slowly decaying was a necessary part of growing up; she had no need to stop it.

What's more, she actually held a little fantasy in her heart. Watching her daughter, who frequently asked if there was a reply after the letter was sent, the mother actually felt a bit of expectation herself, as if to make up for the regrets of her past.

But unlike her daughter, as an adult, she knew exactly what had happened to the Kitagawa family next door. After the whole family suffered a horrific car accident, only the little boy who often played with her daughter had survived. Subsequent rumors were only fragments, saying he had been adopted by other relatives of the Kitagawa family, with the location being the United States.

Therefore, unlike her daughter's confident posture, the mother already felt half-desperate when she mailed the letter to that address. In the past, she had also contacted someone with fervent feelings; she even had two children by that man at the time. But that man was nothing more than a kite held in her hand. All she could grasp was that thin string; when the wind blew, he snapped away, and she couldn't hold onto him at all.

What if the address he gave was fake?

What if this address didn't exist at all?

What if he didn't take that promise seriously at all?

The mother was even more nervous than her daughter. She waited with both fear and anticipation until she truly received a reply half a month later.

"See, I told you he promised."

In that instant, the mother even ignored Ichinose Honami's somewhat awkward phrasing. When she took the letter from the mailbox, she was almost surrounded by a sense of immense peace and stability. She handed the letter to Ichinose Honami and said in a tone of joy she hadn't even noticed herself:

"Go take a look."

The correspondence between Ichinose Honami and Kitagawa Ryo lasted for a total of four years.

It was during the first year that Ichinose Honami stepped into middle school that her letters could no longer reach that old address. In truth, there had been omens; in the final months of their correspondence, Ichinose Honami had already suggested they exchange contact information—or rather, use modern communication tools. Whether it was a mobile phone or a computer, an email address or a phone number, he had always remained vague.

He had disappeared without a sound, like a moon sinking to the bottom of a lake. Ichinose Honami reached out, desperate to fish him back up, but in the end, all that landed in her palms were the shadows of distant clouds, the moonlight, and letters that had been returned to sender.

Ichinose Honami refused to believe this reality. She remembered how they had held each other and wept when they parted. Children cannot cry that much at every moment, and as one grows older, one is even less willing to sob until the body convulses for the sake of another person. She did not believe he could have laughed so many times and shed so many tears with other friends; could it be that he wept for every girl he met?

Impossible.

And so, Ichinose Honami struggled on, continuing to write to him as if she were detached from the norms of modern society. Her mother no longer wished to see her write these letters, nor would she help her mail them, but it did not matter. Ichinose Honami had learned to go to the post office herself. She would affix the stamps and clearly recite that address to the clerk; it was only after studying geography that she understood it was on the far side of the vast ocean.

In the first year that Ichinose Honami received no replies, she wrote the most letters—a long letter every single week. Ichinose Honami's knowledge was growing, and she became increasingly adept at using various flourishes to express her feelings. She could also clearly and logically list the interesting things that happened at school one by one. Her command of writing improved, and as a result, her letters grew longer and longer.

At that time, writing letters became the most important task of Ichinose Honami's week. It was as if her daytime self—whether at school or at home—was a fabrication, and only at night, when she hunched over her desk to write to him, did she truly come alive. If the moonlight was beautiful that night, she would think that they should be bathing in the same moonlight together. If her younger sister was noisy that night, she would write about her sister in the letter. Of course, it couldn't take up too much space; after all, Ichinose Honami would not allow other girls to appear too often in the letters she gave him, not even her own sister.

Ichinose Honami was far calmer than her mother imagined. She truly did not mind that letter after letter was returned, yet she continued to send them to that ethereal address, and with increasing frequency, until eventually, she could no longer control it herself.

Finally, a year later, Ichinose's mother forcefully put an end to Ichinose Honami's practice of sending letters.

As for whether Ichinose Honami was still writing letters to this day, her mother felt she no longer had the right to manage it.

Seeing her daughter repeat her own mistakes, she felt a pang of heartache that her daughter had been deceived at fifteen or sixteen, while simultaneously feeling a sense of relief that her daughter had already been deceived at fifteen or sixteen. She suddenly felt a strange sense of shared hardship with her daughter.

Her mother felt that after this incident, Ichinose Honami would grow up, and she was comforted by that.

Yet, in her heart, there remained a faint, lingering regret. She had indeed once hoped for certain things, but in the end, it had been a pipe dream.

"Um, hello?"

Kitagawa Ryo, of course, did not know what this girl standing a few steps below him on the stairs was thinking. He even wondered if he was blocking her path, so he shifted his body to the side. However, he suddenly remembered the purpose of his visit and asked with some hesitation:

"Could it be that you know me?"

Kitagawa Ryo suddenly grew excited. Because he had lost his past memories, even though he had been working hard to learn the skills of social interaction over the past two years, his emotional expression in certain aspects remained as simple as a child's. He thumped down the stairs to Ichinose Honami's side and reached out to place Hotaru on the ground, seemingly wanting to let the other person see him more clearly. He leaned in a little and said:

"Big sister, do you know me?"

In his two years of life in the countryside, Kitagawa Ryo had grown accustomed to various affectionate forms of address. He had survived solely by the grace of the village elders, and in his mind, aside from "Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle, and Auntie," the only term available to address someone of his own age seemed to be "Big sister."

Of course, this might also have been related to the fact that he had absolutely no female friends his own age. Although that guy Eiichiro always boasted about having a childhood sweetheart, Kitagawa Ryo had never seen her in person, only two photographs of the young girl.

His gaze drifted involuntarily toward the girl's chest. In Kitagawa Ryo's worldview, there had been no girl better-looking than Eiichiro's childhood sweetheart, but the girl he had met today, who seemed to know him, felt even more beautiful.

"...You."

"Me?"

"My name is Kitagawa Ryo, though that is a name I only learned recently."

Kitagawa Ryo looked at Hotaru, who was tugging at his pant leg to express her dissatisfaction, and had no choice but to pick her up again, waving her paws at the girl:

"This is my cat, her name is Hotaru. I'm the one who gave her that name."

After he finished speaking, he and Hotaru stared with wide eyes, seemingly waiting for Ichinose Honami's self-introduction. Ichinose Honami gazed into his eyes; they were still a pair of clean, beautiful black pupils that reminded her of the purest obsidian, just like the cat in his arms—vibrant, yet revealing a hint of confusion.

"Wait a moment."

As Ichinose Honami said this, she began to search for something in the compartments of her shoulder bag. Even during this process, her eyes remained fixed on Kitagawa Ryo, as if afraid he would run away the next second.

Kitagawa Ryo just stood there obediently, holding Hotaru. Now that they were closer, the faint, lingering scent of green citrus became even more apparent.

"Here."

Ichinose Honami handed over a photograph. Her slender fingers brushed lightly against the photo, briefly touching the tips of his fingers.

Two small children were holding hands, and behind them was a massive stone signpost. It seemed to be a photo taken at the main entrance of a park, because on the right side of their bodies, one could see the characters for "Park" carved in bright red paint. The two of them were offering their best smiles toward the lens.

On the back of the photo, written in black permanent marker, were the words "Kitagawa Ryo & Ichinose Honami," the handwriting elegant and flowing.

"Is this me when I was a child?"

It was the first time Kitagawa Ryo had seen a photograph of his own past. Although several years had passed, the boy in the photo indeed bore his own features, yet his mind remained a blurred blank.

"Then you are..."

Turning to the back of the photo, alongside his own name, was the girl from the picture. Kitagawa Ryo raised his eyes and murmured:

"Ichinose Honami."

The name seemed to possess a magical power, lingering at the tip of his heart. He stared into her azure-blue pupils, seeing his own reflection within them. In the dim stairwell, Ichinose Honami leaned toward Kitagawa Ryo as if trying to confirm something. She was waiting for an answer, or perhaps bracing herself for some kind of judgment.

"Have you remembered?"

By the time Kitagawa Ryo regained his senses, he had been backed into a corner by the girl in front of him. Kitagawa Ryo turned his head away, feeling flustered and wanting to avoid her.

"Ichinose Honami, do you remember?"

Her eyelashes and the tip of her nose were now lightly brushing against Kitagawa Ryo's jaw. The subtle, lingering contact of their skin and the angle allowed Kitagawa Ryo to see the girl's stunning curves the moment he looked down. Before that flash of white, supple fullness could occupy his vision, Kitagawa Ryo decisively closed his eyes.

But he quickly realized the mistake in his action, because Kitagawa Ryo clearly had never learned a certain theory—

When a person closes their eyes, the brain, having lost its primary source of information, naturally heightens the sensitivity of other senses to help gather information about the surroundings, much like how people intentionally close their eyes when focusing on listening to music.

Kitagawa Ryo felt his right hand pressed against the wall, the back of his hand receiving the faint, icy chill of the wall, but his palm was quickly filled with softness. Her fingers forcefully squeezed between his, and her other hand rested on Kitagawa Ryo's chest, as if trying to listen to his heartbeat. Her head leaned in closer as well.

Hotaru had been shooed aside and could only jump onto the stair railing.

"Ichinose Honami."

"Is it my older sister, or perhaps my younger sister?"

Kitagawa Ryo felt that such an intimate embrace should be reserved for family members, so he asked tentatively.

"That's not it."

"It's a girlfriend you haven't seen in a long time."

Ichinose Honami stood on her tiptoes and whispered into his ear. Her lips brushed against Kitagawa Ryo's earlobe, sending a jolt of electricity that raced from the tip of his ear straight into his heart.

[Plot CG: Years Have Passed Since We Last Met, read complete.]

Chapter 25: Zhimeng

[Year 7, Day 199: When you wake up in bed, a thick sense of unease envelops you. The bedroom looks unfamiliar, and the wallpaper on the walls features patterns you have never seen before. You do not know where you are, or even how you arrived at this place.]

[This place is not the home you remember. Even though your mind holds no impressions of the past, you still make this judgment.]

[Is this some kind of hotel?]

[A woman's voice catches your attention. You bend your arms to lift your body up, only then realizing it is coming from an LCD television mounted on the wall. The woman's voice you just heard was merely a host on a news channel broadcasting the morning news.]

[You rub your eyes. For the past sixteen years, you have always maintained a high level of confidence in your eyesight. Every time the other children lined up for an eye exam, struggling and stammering as they tried to guess the distorted E's, you would always calmly say to the uncles conducting the check-up:]

["Just point to the bottom row."]

[Your eyes gradually adapt to the environment, and they do not betray your trust; you can still see things just as clearly. The first thing that catches your eye is a large wardrobe on the right. Hanging from the wardrobe's handle is a men's bathrobe. The pitch-black robe looks both lightweight and stylish. You touch it with your right hand and find the material is excellent, though judging by the size, it must belong to an adult man.]

[On the nightstand to your left sits a neatly stacked pile of books. You pull out two to take a look; they are textbooks related to preschool education. A small desk lamp is mounted in the center of the headboard, and you guess that the owner of the books must have been lying back reading at night.]

[You open the title page of the first book, and a name you have absolutely no memory of appears:]

[Ichinose Honami.]

[You look at the rumpled quilt on your right, where a trace of warmth still lingers. Someone must have been lying there not long ago. You deduce that it was likely the owner of this book: Ichinose Honami. It sounds like a girl's name.]