Chapter 169 The Butterfly Effect

Day 12 of the Highway Survival Game!

"The most important thing?" Bourbon asked, as if he had just realized something. "Could it be related to the 'major changes in the future' that Gin mentioned on the phone when you came back last year?"

"As expected of you, your reaction is still so quick." Matsuda looked at Hagiwara: "Regarding this matter, Hagiwara... the first person Granwitt met, Kaze-chan, knows the most details. Let him tell you!"

Upon hearing this, Bourbon's gaze immediately shifted to Hagiwara.

Hagiwara felt a little strange being called a weird nickname by his childhood friend. Then, when he heard what Kojinpei said, he realized that Fuuya had to be so close to him when talking to everyone so that Fuuya could hear him.

Looking at his handsome baby face, the petty and love-struck man didn't want to see Feng Jiang's heart stolen by his friend before he could even win her over.

So he readily accepted the task of explaining and began to speak to Furuya: "This matter needs to be explained from the beginning. It's easier to understand from my perspective, so I'll start with what happened during that explosion!"

My superiors ordered me not to defuse the bomb until all the residents of the apartment building had been evacuated, so as not to implicate the people if things went wrong. I finally managed to wait until all the residents had been evacuated.

Kojinpei finished his work on the other side and confirmed that the bombs there were fakes. Just as he was telling me this, the bomb timer, which had stopped, suddenly lit up again, with only a short 7-second countdown. I was like, "

Hagiwara briefly recounted to Bourbon how he was saved by the Wind Star Guardian a few seconds before he was blown up, how he entered the racetrack through the dungeon exit, how he returned to the survival road after the race, how he learned that the game had begun and that people were being forcibly recruited to participate, and how he confirmed that the Wind Star Guardian and he were from the same planet...

"Tsk! My situation is similar to his. I was also facing a desperate situation. In order to ensure that the police could find the correct location of the other large-scale bomb device, I could only survive by having Feng-chan take me through the dungeon exit before the explosion occurred."

Other things and experiences are too complicated, and we only have an hour today, so let's talk about those experiences another time! Matsuda, who was standing next to Hagiwara, skipped over his own experiences.

He was quite considerate and didn't reveal that his entry into the game was actually a misunderstanding caused by the Wind Star Guardian's lack of understanding of the bomb's structure and his own skills, instead explaining that it was all a last resort to save her.

Morofushi Kagemitsu had heard about the situation during casual conversations with them over the past two days, but given that the gentle and considerate Scotsman was certain that the Wind Star Guardian had no malicious intent and that it was truly a misunderstanding, how could he possibly expose Matsuda's well-intentioned lie?

To embarrass Feng Xing Shou in public! So, to save face, he didn't reveal the truth of the matter, but continued: "The most important thing right now is to convey to you from the past that the road survival game will arrive on April 1, 2025."

We also hope that you can pass this intelligence on to countries around the world, at least those with advanced technology. With 10 years, or even longer, there may be more time to prevent this from happening.

Alternatively, by improving the public's driving skills, physical fitness, and ability to cope with various crises, etc., the survival rate of people after being captured by the game could be increased. Of course, this is assuming that the game cannot be prevented from happening in the first place.

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"...This is unbelievable!" After hearing his friends' words, Bourbon, if he didn't know their personalities, would never play a prank on such a serious matter. He almost suspected that they were joking with his long-lost friends.

Even if he's certain they weren't joking and that these things are true, it will take him some time to process this and react appropriately.

At this moment, he rarely brushed aside the stray hairs on his forehead and smiled wryly: "I feel like my brain is boiling water right now, it's all churning up, and I can't come to a conclusion. This matter raises too many questions."

What is the background of the game organizers? Why choose Earthlings to participate in a survival game? Is creating a survival highway based on Earth's historical timeline really a technological feat? What benefits would such a game bring to the organizers...?

"You're not the only one with these questions. After experiencing various instances, we have countless more questions than you do." Matsuda joked with a wry smile, "Accept reality! These questions can only be answered little by little in the future."

"Then let me ask you the most practical question first: how did Feng Sang manage to rescue you from the brink of death and bring you back to the Survival Highway? Is it an ability given to survivors by the game?" Although Bourbon asked this question, he had already judged in his heart that it was not.

Ever since he learned that they were involved in time travel, he had been keeping a close eye on intelligence from all over the world, searching for any traces of other people traveling through time, but the result was—nothing.

It seemed as if no one else in the world could do this, which led him to believe that Feng Xingshou, as the organization's heir, had taken sole control of the organization's most advanced technology. Now that he knew the truth...

He had a different guess, believing that this might be a unique ability of hers, or even if it was given to her by the game, it might be a skill that is extremely rare, like those in game-related anime and novels, and can only be obtained by a hidden profession that only exists in the entire game.

However, this possibility was negated the moment Hagiwara revealed the truth, because when Hagiwara was rescued, the game had only been going on for two days. In those two days, it was impossible for Fuu-san, who was participating in a road survival game but couldn't drive, to have activated such an amazing and rare ability.

Furthermore, since Hagiwara and the others have confirmed that they were at least alive in the five-person group of the Sakura Class at the police academy around the time of Gin's incident, then as long as they are alive, they will be captured and brought into this game in the future.

I will definitely try my best to pass on this information to the real world. If I also had Feng Sang's ability, I would have passed it on to the past long ago. The longer the time of knowledge, the longer the countries will have to prepare and respond.

In reality, there's absolutely no indication of this, which clearly means that either I didn't live to see 2025, or I wasn't chosen by this game, or I was chosen but didn't activate this skill...

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In fact, Bourbon himself believed that he was unlikely to live to 2025. The reason he had this thought was due to his experiences in the past year. He had learned from several friends that the Silver Bullet could make people regain their youth.

The fact that it keeps people's physical appearance at its peak is what makes it so sought after in the future. Most people have used it, which is why it causes such terrible side effects and leads to those bleak futures for the world.

Besides that, he didn't know much, but for the past year or so, he had been assigned by the organization to investigate Kogoro Mouri in Beika Town. Thanks to this mission, he noticed a strange child around Kogoro Mouri.

His eyes, reactions, thinking, and actions are all unlike those of a 6 or 7-year-old child, and he's involved in so many things—all sorts of cases, organizational matters, Phantom Thief Kid's affairs…

Kogoro Mouri himself unwittingly became known as a famous detective who solved those cases, but according to his investigation, the whole thing was related to this child.

They tried to find out what was going on with the child, but couldn't find anything. They found nothing about his parents, his registered residence, etc. However, they accidentally saw him without his glasses.

He suddenly realized that the other person looked familiar, as if he had seen him somewhere before. He couldn't remember where he had seen him until he went back to deal with the police work that night and, out of habit, looked at the group photo with his friends from the same period.

He suddenly remembered that he had seen that face when he and his classmates solved a drug trafficking case during his time at the police academy, and he remembered the name of that face. After recalling it, he thought that the Silver Bullet would have the effect of restoring youth in the future.

While investigating Conan, it was noticed that the children of the same age who lived at Professor Agasa's house, who made those handy gadgets for him, were also like Conan. It was Professor Agasa who provided them with the necessary documents and procedures for school enrollment as distant relatives.

Conan's extremely high level of involvement and concern regarding cases related to or suspected of being related to the organization, his tense expression even when he hears something that seems to be related, and the rumors he's heard within the organization about the Japanese Sherlock Holmes—high school detective Shinichi Kudo—being poisoned by Gin using the latest poison developed by the organization's scientist Sherry...

Under these circumstances, he couldn't help but come up with an extremely surprising, but logically plausible, deduction: what Gin fed to Shinichi Kudo was not a simple poison, but most likely a byproduct of Sherry's research on silver bullets.

Because there are no survivors in the human experiments conducted by the organization, and no other phenomena occur, only the effect of repeated heart attacks is what allows the organization to use it as a convenient, traceless criminal poison.

In reality, this drug has a very small chance of producing a childish effect, which is why Shinichi Kudo survived the organization's clutches and went undercover as Conan at the Mouri Detective Agency to investigate the organization.

This poison may be the precursor to the massive deaths and long-term effects that will cause immense suffering to humanity worldwide in the future. Research institutions supported by the US and Japan may eventually develop a stable, youth-restoring effect from this poison…

After making this deduction, he took the opportunity of Poirot going on a trip to bring back souvenirs for his landlord Kogoro Mouri to test Ran Mouri and Conan, who were present during the drug dealer case during their police academy days.

Sure enough, they both quickly recalled some word puzzles related to the case from the labels they had deliberately put on the souvenirs, and he also confirmed that Conan was indeed Shinichi Kudo.