After nearly three more hours of nonstop work, they finally stopped.
By now, the sky was already beginning to brighten. The students, who had not slept all night, were exhausted to the point of dizziness, yet so excited they could barely contain themselves.
The reason was the twenty-five blood-test collection tubes laid out on a tray.
They were not filled with blood, but with a milky-white liquid.
It was this stuff that had returned a little girl to normal. Even now she was still fine, alert, and full of energy.
Even the cut on her hand—about four centimeters long—was gone. It had healed completely, as if nobody would ever guess she'd been injured just hours ago.
Then, without any discussion at all, someone picked up the first dose and used it. No politeness, no consultation—just took it and drank it.
No one objected.
Because the person who took it was Kain.
He didn't hesitate. He swallowed the first tube at once, letting it slide down into his stomach.
No—before it even felt like it reached his stomach, the thick, milky-white liquid seemed to seep and disperse into his real body.
Because, strictly speaking, the throat is not "inside" the body in the same way.
Almost immediately, he sensed something off with the wound in his chest and, even more, with his severed arm.
It itched.
Especially the stump. It felt like something was trying to push its way out of the wound—like it was almost there, but lacked just a little momentum.
Kain, who had already removed his metal gauntlet, did not hesitate. He cut the stump open again, carving it into a clean, complete wound.
Now the regrowth became visible to the naked eye—flesh was forming.
But it still wasn't enough.
He grabbed another tube and downed it.
Still not enough.
He downed another.
The people watching nearby all started staring wide-eyed, practically drooling with envy.
In the end, he used five tubes before finally exhaling in relief. Only then did it seem like there would be enough left for everyone.
But what happened next was even more shocking.
"I-It's regenerating!"
"Even bone can grow back!"
"This drug is completely insane!"
Some people couldn't help blurting it out.
And Shizuka—someone training for a medical career—understood better than anyone just how absurd this level of regeneration was.
Soon, some people couldn't bear to look anymore. The process of growing back tissue was, in a way, grotesque and bloody.
Shizuka's face also beaded with sweat, because the sensation could only be described as savage growth. The pain it produced would be unprecedented.
So if anyone ever used this to regrow a severed limb, the best approach would be to have them in a coma or under anesthesia.
Otherwise, it was not impossible for someone to be driven mad by pain—or even die from it. Not hypothetically. It could actually happen.
Ten minutes later, an arm had been restored, with almost no sense of mismatch.
The only difference was that the new arm looked unusually pale and delicate—so smooth and tender it might have been softer than even Shizuka's hand.
"Use the rest yourselves."
With Kain's announcement, everyone erupted with excitement.
"Quiet. Line up. One at a time!"
Saya barked immediately, forcing the overexcited crowd—who had been on the verge of rushing in a swarm—to stop and form a line.
Originally, there were seventeen people here including Kain. Adding the father and daughter who had come in made nineteen.
However, Alice had already used the very first dose earlier. That one was not counted among the twenty-five tubes now on the tray.
So logically, eighteen people should each get one dose, leaving seven extra.
But Kain alone had used five. That meant he had taken four more than "his share."
After everyone else received one dose each, that left three extra tubes, which would be kept by Shizuka.
"Um… do we drink it now?"
"Or do we wait until we're bitten, until we're infected, and then drink it?"
"Ms. Marikawa, what do you think?"
Some people were uncertain. If they drank it now and later got bitten, wouldn't that mean they'd already used it up?
Saya, on the other hand, didn't hesitate at all. The moment she got hers, she drank it immediately.
She believed what the documentation said—that it would grant lifelong immunity from diseases that plagued humanity 15,000 years prior.
Even if that was exaggerated, it wouldn't be exaggerated down to "a few days or months." In any case, it meant she wouldn't need to worry about the Dead virus in the short term.
With the frantic work finally more or less done, Saya could at last think properly about the staggering information hidden inside the Earth Elixir documentation.
First, she had noticed the advertising copy.
That company even listed sales outlets—places where ordinary civilians could buy Earth Elixir.
And those sales outlets were written as star systems and planets.
That was a big deal.
Some of the star systems, Saya had never heard of. But one in particular stood out—Proxima Centauri, the closest star system to the Solar System, about 4.25 light-years away.
That meant that in the era this hard drive came from, humanity had already entered an age of interstellar travel.
And their range absolutely exceeded 4.25 light-years.
As for the word "Terra," it was, as the name implied, another way of referring to Earth.
And "15K" was a year marker—roughly the year 15,000 AD, which was about 13,000 years in the future from now.
"Terra in the 2K era" meant Earth in this era.
But the manual explicitly referred to "diseases from 15K prior," and it even implied that there were more advanced medicines capable of treating even more troublesome diseases from later eras.
This suggested the man who brought the hard drive came from a time beyond 13,000 years into the future.
That was so far beyond the future of the T-800's era in Terminator that it was hard to even process.
And if Earth Elixir could do this, she couldn't imagine what the more advanced medicine—Panacea—would be capable of.
Maybe this was because the "hard drive" hardware itself belonged to a different company.
A company that wasn't a pharmaceutical corporation.
Like modern computer manufacturers: they build the machines, then supply them to pharmaceutical companies, and their hardware includes their own advertising programs.
Yes. The program that tested her was likely an advertising program—also a talent-scouting program.
If you passed its evaluation, it wouldn't just unlock the contents. You'd also receive an invitation from that company and be offered further training and development opportunities.
What a shame.
In this era, that "threat" meant nothing. There was no law enforcement from the future to come arrest her.
So what—was a 2K-era high school girl actually considered a genius even by 15K-era standards?
Not exactly.
Their evaluation was based on the cultural and educational level of the planet you were on, and then it generated a targeted test.
No internet connection needed.
It could read local information by interfacing with nearby devices and scanning the surrounding environment—apparently even determining a "five-tier technology level."
And the reason Saya knew it was testing her against 15K-era standards was because the test framework clearly belonged to that era.
But without internet access, it could only integrate knowledge from the environment it was currently in to build its evaluation.
In other words, it was improvising with local data.
Speaking of which, if this was a product, it should have a production date.
If they could find that, they could pin down the hard drive's manufacturing era—meaning the man's era should be roughly around the same time.
But the hard drive had already been reclaimed by that guy, so she couldn't check.
And the internal program still hadn't displayed any timestamp information.
Wait.
That custom search function might be able to probe the approximate era.
But for now, the priority was letting everyone who had worked all night get some rest.
At noon, they would leave this place immediately.
In the 15K era… what level had humanity reached?
And what had happened that forced someone to return to the 2K era to alter this catastrophe?
Such a change would cause an unimaginably massive divergence in the future.
After all, this was crossing at least 13,000 years of time.
The future would be unrecognizable.
Then what about the original timeline—the timeline where he existed?
Would it vanish because of the alteration?
That led straight to the classic problem.
The grandfather paradox.
(End of Chapter)
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