Chapter 196 Which is more important?

◎Day 12 of the Highway Survival Game◎

Could the poison they're talking about be the Silver Bullet? The same drug that caused Shiho and Shinichi Kudo to become childish? If the Silver Bullet refers to this drug, and it's openly sold as a drug that makes people young again, it's indeed hard to refuse.

Especially for the elderly, whose physical functions are declining but who still wield considerable power and wealth, anyone with a brain should know that such a drug should never be sold on a large scale in society.

Consider the effects Vermouth used. According to FBI intelligence and what he and his colleagues investigated, Vermouth became a Hollywood star 20 years ago under the guise of Sharon Vineyard, while secretly carrying out various organizational missions.

Twenty years later, her nominal daughter, Chris Vineyard, had the same fingerprints and the same face as her. That face was not a disguise; it was her true appearance, confirming that Sharon was indeed her.

The effect of maintaining the same appearance for 20 years is exactly the same as the effect of childish transformation of Conan and Shiho. Moreover, I secretly investigated Conan and Ai Haibara's physical examination reports at school and confirmed that their height and weight have not changed since the childish transformation.

Therefore, it can be inferred that in addition to making people look younger, APTX4869 may also have an absolute age-freezing effect. Does this age-freezing only freeze a person's appearance, or does it also freeze their original lifespan? If it freezes their original lifespan, then...

Just imagining a world where, after the drug is sold, the elderly become like children, or that the final version of the Silver Bullet will make the elderly as young as Vermouth's age, is chilling—a world where no one dies, where everyone has a young appearance but is an old person inside…

What a terrifying and despairing world! No wonder the silver bullets of the future have serious side effects. It's not just a scientific error, but also the world's punishment for humanity's trespassing into forbidden zones, a warning to mankind issued by hundreds of millions of people!

And the drug's name, according to what I overheard, isn't it called APTX4869? However, that's the name the organization gave it; the one sold in the future will likely be the name Shiho chose herself…

Based on the information currently available, Shuichi Akai could only draw this conclusion. At the same time, he understood in his heart why Bourbon had such a strong desire to kill her. Given his position and personality, knowing such a future, whether it was his duty as a member of the Japanese Public Security Bureau or his own mental will, he would not hesitate to kill her.

There's no way they'd let the creator of that future silver bullet live. Even if it were me, if it weren't my cousin, if it weren't the person Akemi entrusted to him, I'd lean towards Bourbon's decision...

But why? Based on my understanding of Shiho, neither Sherry in the organization nor Ai Haibara after her defection were purely evil people. Even though she was brainwashed by the organization from a young age, perhaps influenced by Akemi, she was not completely corrupted by the organization's darkness.

During her time with the organization, Sherry always tried her best to avoid doing anything bad for the organization. She was a pure researcher for the organization, and basically, unless there were special places around the world where scientists were needed to assist in completing tasks, Sherry never left the academic areas or research institutes arranged by the organization.

After her defection, free from coercion and intimidation by the organization, she gradually reverted to her true nature. She had friends she liked, idols she admired, and she was interested in gossip about other people's romantic relationships, making sarcastic remarks. She would proactively lend a helping hand when others needed it, and she would choose to sacrifice herself to protect her friends...

.

How could someone like her possibly research and perfect a drug like the Silver Bullet in the future? Even if she continues her research on APTX4869 now, based on what she overheard, she only wants to create an antidote that can completely restore her and Shinichi Kudo's bodies.

When she encountered a bottleneck in her research, she would mutter to herself when she was alone, saying that she couldn't understand her parents and didn't understand why they were researching a drug that humans should never touch.

Even at this point, she knew that APTX4869 was a forbidden drug that humans should never touch, and that the research was only to create an antidote. So why did she, in the future, complete more than just the research on that drug? This completely contradicts her current psychological understanding. Why?

Wait, there's another possibility: she was forced to conduct this research, just like when she was in the organization. But is that possible? Based on what I overheard, those people were transmitting future information to Gin.

It has been mentioned more than once that the silver bullet was produced and sold by pharmaceutical companies officially recommended by the US and Japan. Even the sterile chambers that caused the side effects were developed and produced by these two companies, which seemed to have official endorsements.

It is clear that the pharmaceutical research companies that will support Shiho's research in the future are obviously related to the official forces of both countries. However, these companies, which are equivalent to state-owned enterprises, will use means to force her to conduct this taboo research.

Yet they are the ones who sell this drug, which any discerning person should know is absolutely forbidden for humans. If they dare to sell this drug openly, legally and legitimately, then it seems logical that they would do other disgusting things as well.

But there's one thing I don't understand. Logically, as long as I'm alive, I can't let my cousin, who has finally regained her freedom, be forced into prison by other forces again.

Furthermore, during their conversation, they mentioned that the strange name of the drug, Silver Bullet, was personally given by Shiho. It's remarkable that a developer would publicly acknowledge his parents and himself as the developers of the drug and even name it.

In the ruthless world of capital, before this side effect appeared, the power representing immense honor, which also equated to huge profits, was in Shiho's hands. This meant that she had considerable authority over the Silver Bullet, so it was possible that she wasn't forced into it. So why? Why did she change in the future?

Upon hearing that Bourbon intended to poison Sherry with poisonous smoke, Shuichi Akai, based on the information he possessed and his deductive reasoning ability, had these thoughts flash through his mind almost instantly, immediately plunging him into a dilemma.

From the perspective of kinship and Akemi's request, he should have immediately tried to alleviate the crisis facing the sisters, given that Bourbon clearly showed murderous intent and that Gin and Vermouth clearly had no intention of letting Sherry off the hook.

However, when he learned that the horrific future was caused by his cousin Shiho, he was caught in a dilemma. On one hand, there was his important family member, and on the other hand, there were the lives of hundreds of millions of people and the unknown number of patients suffering from the severe aftereffects of the silver bullet.

Which is more important? If he saves Shiho today and wastes the opportunity created by Gin and his sister to change the past, allowing the Silver Bullet to be successfully sold again in the future, he will definitely feel guilty about the large number of people who will sacrifice themselves in the future.

But knowing that his two cousins ​​were in danger, and for the sake of a future he had only heard about from others, including Gin's accomplices who were pure villains, he allowed Bourbon and his gang to kill his own family in order to change that future. He felt guilty about it.

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Moreover, in another memory, he experienced the guilt and self-blame he felt after Akemi's death, when he came to Japan to investigate what the organization had done to her and discovered that she was actually his cousin.

In that memory, he originally felt nothing about using members of the organization to infiltrate the organization, even if it was through emotional deception, even after he later discovered that she, who was using the identity of Yami to establish herself in Japan and the organization, was not a real bad person or criminal.

She was forced by the organization to do some wrong things out of necessity. Knowing her identity, her boyfriend always kept his distance from her. What did such intimacy mean if they weren't really lovers? Even after deducing her identity, he still kept it a secret for her.

He felt only sympathy for Yami at the time, for her being forced into the organization's darkness. But according to the FBI's principle that a criminal is a criminal, even if he felt sympathy and pity for her, these could not overcome the hurdle in his heart and make him moved.

He could not and would not fall in love with the accomplice who murdered his father, even if she was too young to have been involved in the events leading up to his father's death, even if she was completely unaware of the events. Just the fact that she was an accomplice was enough.

So when he agreed to risk exposing his identity to help his colleagues capture Gin, knowing that she might be implicated because of him, and because he deduced that with her sister Sherry around, she was definitely not in mortal danger, he did not take any protective measures for her.

Before planning and directing the 1 billion yen robbery, she texted herself, asking if she could become his real girlfriend after leaving the organization, to which he directly replied that he refused.

To reiterate, he could never fall in love with the accomplice of his father's killer. Even if he left the organization, wouldn't his former accomplices still be considered accomplices? Besides, her question seemed meaningless to Shuichi Akai at the time.

Even if she did leave the organization, the things she did to help other members complete their tasks during her time there would likely result in her being imprisoned for a long time if she were to face legal consequences.

However, these thoughts, these perceptions, and the decision he thought he would never regret at the time caused him to feel unprecedented regret when he learned that the other party was actually his own cousin.

If he had known that she was his own cousin, he would never have used her to infiltrate the organization. If he had known that she was his own cousin, even if he was prepared to take action against Gin at the risk of being exposed, he would have arranged an escape route for her.

If he had known it was his own cousin, and upon seeing that text message and guessing what she might be up to, he would have tried to dissuade her, urging her to prioritize the safety of both sisters...

Unfortunately, it's just a hypothetical. There's no going back in life. No matter how much you regret it, you can't change what has already happened. He doesn't want to experience that feeling a second time, but now it seems he's heading down a dead end again.

Regardless of which is more important, choosing one side will lead him to the same regret in the future. He even knows very well that even if he stops them this time, given Bourbon's persistence and Gin's ruthlessness, they will plan a second and a third time.

If he continues to protect the 'princess,' he will appear to countless people in the future as an accomplice to evil, protecting the creator of a future tragedy...