To Live Again, For the First Time!

"Stop dilly-dallying and get the ones who just failed to my office right this moment."

The young man's eyes widened from the unexpected order.

The professor had always simply disposed of the failed products, never giving them a second glance unless his goal was to dissect them, not that there was much to dissect, and even then, it would be at the basement rather than his office.

Not to mention that if it were indeed for dissection and preservation, it was done mostly by another person other than the professor himself.

But after only a moment of hesitation, he nodded his head saying "I'll do it immediately" before going on his way.

The young boy turned around right after he finished talking and so he just barely missed the professor's sinister smirk, the old man's whole body exuding a dark aura as he left for his own office in a great mood.

***

The young man, who went by F8, having no other name, entered the glass room adjacent to the room where he had been talking to the professor.

But even his so-called name was barely used, so rare that even he himself went on to forget it as time went on.

Yet at other times, even if he wanted to forget it, he was not able to do as he wished. This name haunted him as much as it identified him.

F stood for failure.

His name was quite straightforward, it wasn't as if the professors here could bother with actual names, they were simply easier to identify in such away.

In fact, it wasn't really a name, it was much more like a tag of sorts.

F8 was his identification tag.

He was the 8th person to fail to pass the second trial after having passed the first.

As for the people who couldn't pass the first trial, the dead people who numbered in the thousands, no one would have known their names.

[Chapter 32 for reference]

The professors working on this case had wanted at least 100 successful trials moving from the 1st phase to testing for the second, but that had proved to be much more challenging than what had been initially anticipated.

What had originally been around 1 successful subject passing the first phase for every 50 people, who had ultimately died, had soon come to become 1 in 100 and then 1 in 120 and then 1 in 140 and not long after, 1 in 150.

The success ratio only decreased, dwindling like sand from there on out.

And nothing could have been done about it. They didn't know why either.

But the truth of the matter was that they originally asked the higher-ups for extra 1000 participants, saying that that was just around what they needed.

And yet that number had somehow multiplied with the results being only a fraction of what had originally been anticipated.

And there was also an exponential increase in the difficultly as they moved forward in the experiments, which could be seen clearly from the fact that there were only so many people who passed the 1st phase, represented by the number of people who had failed in the second.

As for the number of people who were able to pass the second phase, they could be counted with just one hand.

This was already quite good considering that there hadn't been that many attempts as of yet.

Currently, the ratio of the people who had passed the second trial way surpassed the ratio of success to the failure of the first trial.

But considering what little data they had, all of this was circumstantial.

The glass room was see-through from both sides with a mechanism that could make it a one-way mirror if necessary, but that mechanism had been turned off after the experiments for that day had ended.

On the floor, next to the glass, 4 young children laid.

If F8 didn't know any better, he would have thought them all to have been dead, not a single one of them moving a muscle, with their breaths so faint that it was barely audible even though the room was otherwise silent.

"I wish they would just wake up accordingly," F8 sighed.

"And without the fuss either," he continued to complain to himself, but rather than annoyed, he sounded much more helpless, unlike someone else, who would have looked at these pale kids with disgust.

Not because of their thin and pale countenance, which made them seem more like corpses and ghastly than human, but simply because they were failures, or so the professor said.

And of course, all failures had to be disposed of.

These children were only around 6-9 years old.

F8 reached out for the first child, the one closest to the entrance.

He immediately went for one of the child's vital points as if about to attack him, a killing move.

The first child F72, who had been lying in a defensive pose despite having been knocked out, completely unconscious, suddenly swung his arms from below and stood up like a ragged doll controlled by strings, avoiding F8's attack.

His eyes were now wide open, displaying in full view his red pupils which were made especially prominent under the dim lighting and behind his messy dark hair.

Those very pair of eyes slowly lightened as the murkiness from within dissipated, showing how his consciousness slowly returned to him, which only made him even more on alert.

The boy F72 swallowed some dry saliva, trying to assess his own situation, which didn't look pretty. Rage burning in his pupils as he thought of the events prior to his fainting.

He didn't know whether he had failed or not, but he knew that he hadn't passed, that much was for sure.

And not passing meant danger, more dangerous than anything the trials could ever put them through.

F8 didn't seem surprised by his actions at all, having expected such a reaction from the boy.

"You know that you can't resist, so calm yourself down and settle that anger of yours. You should know clearly by now that it won't help increase your survivability," F8 sincerely said.

Despite having said such words dozens of times, they never lost their sincerity. But that was the extent to which F8 could help the kid, the rest would be up to him.

A similar scene occurred 4 more times until F8 reached the final corner of the room, the one furthest away from the entrance.

He had already woken up F72 through F76, with 3 of them being boys and the other 2 being female.

And finally, the last one, S3, the child who passed, a young girl, likely around 6 of age.

Though there weren't major indicators of age to go off by, F8 made his assessments through height, even if it wasn't the most accurate seeing as just months prior, these children were greatly malnourished.

Though that wasn't the case now.

Now there were all well-fed, able to eat till their heart's content, yet not one of them had a better countenance than when they had first arrived, in fact, one could very well argue that it was levels worse. 

"And you should wake up now too," F8 directed his voice at the last girl, one of dark brown hair and yellow eyes tinted with a shade of green that could only be seen after she 'woke up' as F8 had told her to.

"I have to say, I thought that even if one passed, it wouldn't have been you," F8 directed his words at the female who slowly stood up.

He sounded as if he were talking nonchalantly, making small talk, but he was in fact observing the girl closely.

F8 had met both of this girl's predecessors and found the need to make some observations on her as soon as possible.

The 6-year-old girl, despite her seemingly slow movements, didn't leave a single opening for F8, at least none that F8 could catch on to, despite being more than double her age.

Her movements were also natural as if it was engraved into her cells to not let her guard down, making every move subconsciously.

'Those two were the same,' F8 thought.

"Not in a million years did I think it would have been you. No offense or anything, but the last two people who passed phase 2 were both much older than you."

F8's words were worth nearly nothing, after all, there were only 2 data points, not nearly enough to make such a conclusion.

In F8 were to truly be a person who could believe that age mattered in this matter with only 2 previous cases, then he wouldn't have survived until this point.

At least not with such a presumptuous attitude, and his lack of ability didn't help either.

What F8 truly wanted to do, was to probe this little girl.

S3 looked at F8 with calmness, the maturity in her eyes were not ones that could usually be found in a child of her age, but no one in that room would have realized this, after all, they were all the same.

Not a single child here could claim to be able to act their age in the outside world, the world outside of the cage that they were entrapped in.

The young girl nodded her head absentmindedly, ignoring F8's comment about her age and her achievement as if none of it mattered, none of it bothered her at all.

'I guess they really can be different,' F8 thought. 

This child was different from the other two.

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