Uchiha Sasuke’s Collapse Chapter 009

In the end, Sasuke didn’t choose such a cruel method. He was never one to needlessly kill, except during the period when he was manipulated by Obito.

Although his time with the girl named Raiden Mei was short, her kindness and resolve still earned Sasuke’s slight approval.

Unless absolutely necessary, Sasuke didn’t want to use the method of “sacrificing one person to save millions.”

Since that was the case, there was only one way to obtain information.

ME Corporation Headquarters!

The ME Building was deserted late at night, with only the noise of various machines maintaining their operations.

The base of the building, where it met the ground, was encircled by a 50-meter wide dark gold alloy protective band. Its surface was densely covered with honeycomb-shaped heat dissipation holes, from which fluorescent blue Honkai energy condensation mist seeped out. The outer side of the protective band was inlaid with an Anti-Entropy snake emblem relief, the purple-black crystals embedded in the snake’s eyes already corroded with spiderweb-like cracks.

Above the gate hung a 360-degree circular scanner.

Although Sasuke had never seen such high-tech equipment, his natural intuition from countless life-or-death battles, combined with his years of living in Orochimaru’s laboratory where he had seen similar, albeit cruder, products, allowed him to roughly understand that this scanner was likely for identity detection.

There were no people passing by, so the plan of using his Sharingan to hypnotize an ME Corporation employee to open the door was scrapped. Forcibly opening it with ninjutsu would likely cause too much commotion.

Then, there was only one way.

Beneath the bangs on his forehead, his black pupils suddenly transformed into light purple ripples, with six tomoe arranged within the ripples.

This was his Rinnegan dojutsu, Amenotejikara!

Then, his figure flickered, exchanging places with a document folder in an office on the first floor. This office used transparent floor-to-ceiling windows, and Amenotejikara coincidentally allowed Sasuke to swap places with any object or living being within his line of sight.

The first floor was empty.

After a rough chakra perception, Sasuke confidently focused his attention on the office in front of him.

The fastest way to obtain information was to read the files before him.

Sasuke casually pulled out a document from a nearby filing cabinet. The title was “Proposal for Improving Inter-departmental Collaboration Efficiency,” and at the bottom, it was marked “ME-YH- 2013- 089,” seemingly a document number.

He casually flipped it open and glanced at it. The content was about internal departmental cooperation issues.

Midday “Cross-Departmental Meeting”: Every Wednesday from 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM, the Energy Department and the Bioengineering Department must jointly discuss “The Application of Clean Energy in the Medical Field.”

Establish “Employee Mental Health Assessment System”: Anonymous psychological evaluations secretly include screening for Honkai energy resistance.

(Question 23 of the questionnaire: “Have you ever seen a purple starry sky in your dreams?” — Positive responders are marked as X-level experimental candidates).

Were they conducting human experiments?

Having followed Orochimaru for many years, Sasuke was accustomed to such things. This document didn’t contain much useful information, it only confirmed for Sasuke that ME Corporation was not just an ordinary company as it appeared to the public.

Looking back at the filing cabinet, Sasuke pulled out several more documents, but they all seemed, from their titles, unlikely to be related to confidential information, such as “Q 2 Team Building Activity Proposal,” “Annual Charity Foundation Audit Report,” “General Notice Regarding Cafeteria Menu Adjustment,” and so on.

The only truly useful piece of information was probably a passage in the appendix of the “Summer High-Temperature Operations Safety Regulations”: “All personnel entering floors B 30 and above must wear a heart rate monitoring wristband (data synchronized to the Titan Mech Defense System, personnel with abnormal heart rates will be ‘preventatively terminated’).”

At least he now had a new piece of information: there were guardians named Titans stationed on floors B 30 and above.

As for the remaining documents, there was no meaningful information, but Sasuke didn’t mind. After all, this was the first floor and it had transparent floor-to-ceiling windows, so it was clear that ME Corporation wouldn’t store major company-related files here.

Hmm? What’s this…

As he moved through the corridor between the workstations, Sasuke inadvertently caught sight of two sticky notes.

The first read: “Electricity bill for B 50 floor this year increased by 3400% compared to last year, but the audit report shows laboratory utilization decreased by 82%. How strange.”

The second read: “Confirm Ms. Cocolia has controlled 73% of board seats. President Ryoma’s ‘New Energy’ proposal is merely a cover. Voluntary resignation agreement signees have a 100% disappearance rate.”

It seemed the system hadn’t lied.

If the sticky note content was true, then this building was indeed controlled by Cocolia. Did this mean she herself was inside?

Sasuke hesitated, temporarily abandoning the plan to hypnotize the woman and order the suspension of the Third Great Honkai.

He didn’t have enough information yet to determine if Cocolia was the overt instigator.

In this world, of which he knew nothing, Sasuke decided to be cautious. His every action could affect millions of lives. If Cocolia’s situation was similar to Pain’s back then, where Obito was the true manipulator behind the scenes, then even if he defeated or controlled Pain like Naruto did, he wouldn’t be able to stop the Akatsuki’s plan.

In fact, Sasuke’s caution had inadvertently led him to the right conclusion.

The Anti-Entropy controlled by Cocolia had indeed been infiltrated like a sieve by another force.

Placing the sticky notes back in their original positions, Sasuke continued forward. He carefully used Shunshin Jutsu or Amenotejikara to traverse through the blind spots of cameras, eventually reaching the elevator entrance.

“As expected, identity verification is needed.”

Should he go up through the elevator shaft?

His chakra perception detected miniature cameras also installed within the elevator shaft. Clearly, the builders of the ME Building had anticipated someone attempting to infiltrate the company through the shaft.

“Looks like I’ll have to go back the way I came.”

Sasuke’s mind stirred, and he returned to the previous office. Then, using Amenotejikara, he swapped places with the documents outside. After that, he leaped, flipping upwards, landing on three transparent pipes, each over 10 meters in diameter, wrapped around the middle of the building. Fluorescent blue fluid surged continuously within the pipes.

The fluid seemed to sense Sasuke’s arrival and rushed towards him with such speed that the pipes quickly became covered in spiderweb-like cracks.

Sasuke was startled and quickly leaped backward. Only after pulling back nearly fifty meters did the fluids return to normal.

What were those things?

The system’s voice chimed in at the right moment, saying lazily, “Tsk, I remember I warned you, Sasuke. As the only Otsutsuki on this planet… no, in this multiverse, your existence is as dazzling as a firefly in the dark.”