[As the elevator car rose with an extremely faint, steady sensation of weightlessness, the numerical indicator above your head ticked upward rhythmically.]
[Until you actually stepped through those metal doors, you kept considering how this Star Plasma Vessel Protection Incident differed from the countless death simulations before it.]
[That completely unfamiliar, unknown cursed residue, whose analysis progress was "starting from zero," was like a steel needle caught in the gears, giving you an unsettling sense that things had slipped beyond your control.]
[After extremely meticulous logical deduction, you finally pinpointed three key factors at the heart of this butterfly effect: the death of the woman with stitches across her forehead, the "Million-Demon Night Parade" incident that had swept across the country a few days earlier, and the enormous black-market bounty you had just instructed Shiu Kong to post, which came with a considerable delay.]
[Especially that last point-the delay in posting the bounty.]
[In those established simulated timelines of the past, because the higher-ups or the Time Vessel Association had leaked the news or posted a bounty early on, you would often encounter a troublesome male curse user who possessed the "Inversion Cursed Technique" while riding this elevator upstairs, leading to a fight inside the cramped elevator car.]
[But today, the elevator was empty except for you.]
[So you had essentially ruled out the direct effects of "changes to the bounty's posting time and amount."]
[This bizarre variable that had appeared out of nowhere made you all the more certain that its root cause lay more with the first two factors: the complete death of that thousand-year-old woman pulling strings behind the scenes, and the intense upheaval and chain reactions that an unprecedented disaster like the "Million-Demon Night Parade" had caused throughout Japan's hidden world over the past several days,