"Does this thing have a hidden compartment?" Bai Zhu asked.
"Doesn't look like it." Milluki shook his head, the layers of fat on his face jiggling along with it. "It looks more like some kind of mark, or... a seal."
He grumbled that "anything from that Pariston guy can't be good," but still honestly inserted the memory card into a modified laptop.
Milluki cautiously isolated the files on the card first, then ran a decoding program he had made himself. A pile of code Bai Zhu couldn't understand scrolled across the screen. After about half a minute, the program finally popped up a green "Safe" notification.
There was only one file in the folder, with a simple and crude name.
[D1]
Milluki opened it. Inside was a dense collection of pharmaceutical data.
"A new drug, code name D1... In the early stages, users gradually lose their ability to restrain themselves, become emotionally excited, and grow extremely impulsive..." Milluki read as he went. "It can strengthen the user's belief that they will definitely succeed. In some test subjects, under the drug's effects, their Nen Abilities underwent mutations that surpassed their original limits..."
He paused, then summed it up. "Isn't this just a battle high plus the power of 'I reckon it'll work'? As long as I think I can do it, I really can?"
Bai Zhu didn't respond. His attention had been drawn to several accompanying images in the file. Every experimental report marked as a "successful case" ended with a photograph of the scene. Without exception, every photo contained the same thing—black crystalline fragments scattered across the ground.
He had seen that thing on the walls of the Oasis ruins.
"That's it?" Bai Zhu leaned back in his chair. "Pariston went through all that trouble just to send us a