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Last Embryo Volume 2 Chapter 2 Part 2

Translator: DarkHeartedAlchemist

Editor: Weasalopes

Homura’s father’s funeral was a simple, small and quiet ceremony that very few people attended, and because he didn’t have any relatives both from his mother’s and father’s side, it has been decided that he was going to be adopted into the family of one of the other scientists who participated in his father’s work and research. After so many years Homura couldn’t even recall how that man looked anymore, but if there was one thing that was embedded in his mind about him, it was the fact that he was a youthful person who still had the fire of ambition burning in his eyes. Thinking about it now, the only reason why he took Homura is was probably so that he could get his hands on the data regarding the [Star Particle Bodies] – the nanomachines that Homura’s father spent his entire life researching. At this point in time, it was still unclear whether he was the man who took his father’s thesis on nanomachines research for himself or not, but one thing could be said for certain: for a young kid that Homura was back then, there was no better environment to get to know and learn various things.

Since for most of the time he was totally free to do literally anything that he wanted, Homura took this opportunity to touch, operate, disassemble and reassemble every piece of equipment he happened upon in that man’s residence, which allowed him to gain insightful knowledge of how all those instruments and strange machines operated, what was their internal structure and how he could build them himself for as long as he would have the necessary materials to do so and their blueprints. Thinking back on those days now, that must have been the time when the Gift that Saigo Homura possessed: {Proto Idea} started to fully manifest itself and grow progressively stronger with every piece of machinery that he deconstructed and managed to put back together again.

It was also exactly around that time that the man who adopted Homura started to grow increasingly more distasteful of him, because he concluded that Homura has reached the limit of his usefulness to him when it became apparent that he won’t be able to make any significant progress regarding the research of [Star Particle Bodies], but putting it in such a crudely generalized way would be entirely inaccurate.

Because you see, for all intents and purposes, [Star Particle Bodies] were already a finished, completed invention. When he was still alive, Homura’s father had successfully finished the process of their creation and advanced the development stage to such a point that they could be implemented into practical usage, although it was just a first step on the long and ardous road that was still ahead of them, like he used to say. Therefore, if only Homura’s guardian chose to present the results of the current research to the big shots of the scientific world, he would have probably still earned a great amount of praise and recognition for “his” achievement, but he didn’t choose to do that, most likely because his own pride as a scientist did not allow him to take the credit for something that would be nothing more than plain old plagiarism. But there was also another problem related to the nanomachines.

Out of all the things related to their research and development, the only thing that was not physically recorded anywhere was the solution to the final problem that had to be solved if the Star Particle Bodies were to be incorporated into a large-scale usage: the way to create and reproduce them. But even if the thesis containing the information on how to do it actually existed, it would still be useless to the man who took Homura in, because if he just followed the instructions contained in the thesis, he would really be just an ordinary plagiator who didn’t even try to come up with his own way of improving or surpassing the existing Star Particle Body formula. Whatever he would end up creating, it would be nothing more than a ripoff, a cheap imitation, and that would be like a slap to the face to anyone who dared to call himself an inventor. No, that man wanted results, but not to the point that he would abandon all of his professional pride just for that. Sadly though, it was exactly that professional pride, or whatever was left of it at that point, that became the source of Homura’s soon-to-come ruin. In order to become a part of the team working on Star Particle Bodies, that man abandoned every other project he was working on up until that point, that is how big of an opportunity he must have seen in Homura’s father’s nanomachines.

If they were to be fully completed and then successfully implemented into various fields such as medicine or bioengineering, surely they would have ended up changing the very nature of human being as its roots, maybe even elevating the human civilization onto a higher plane of existence at some point in the future. If he was the one to announce himself as their inventor, then he would undoubtedly pass down to the annals of history as a genius who surpassed the combined achievements of all the other geniuses that came before him, becoming someone who would hold in his hand the wealth surpassing that of the budgets of the entire nations, honor that went above and beyond the ones held by the heads all the super-countries in the world and the power the likes of every other human beings could not even begin to fathom.

Of course, he knew that such a course of action was extremely unlikely to happen, but it nevertheless served as a source of an endless motivation for him, something that would give him the strength to continue pushing forward when everything else failed. And so he continued to work himself to the bone, all the while being continuously driven by the dream of one day becoming the king of the entire world.

Unfortunately for him, all of that vain ambitions of his have been mercilessly and utterly crushed… by a single boy he adopted.

Having possessed {Proto Idea}, young Homura took over and then steadily advanced the research projects that his guardian abandoned in his single-minded pursuit of Star Particle Bodies. One year after he was adopted by him, he managed to successfully complete the other Particle Bodies project that he was engaged in, the one that he abbreviated as B.D.A. That research, which should be used together with the Star Particle Bodies (Officially designated name {Blood Particle Acceleration Device}) could now be used as a means of multiplying them. However…

That research was the main reason why Homura’s guardian was given his own laboratory in the first place. Feeling that his research of that project has reached its limit, he decided to cast it aside in favor of switching to the more promising Star Particle Bodies… and yet, as young as he was back then, Homura managed to succeed where his adoptive parent could not.

The shock and disbelief that overwhelmed him when he learned about that were too great to be described with something as simple as mere words. The look that he had in his eyes when Homura saw him for the last time was something that he could never forget, no matter how many times he tried.

Not long after that, the man simply disappeared, never to be seen again. It was around that time when the results of the research of Star Particle Bodies and B.D.A have been taken from him, even though he was the one who completed them.  For the next several months, Homura, having been abandoned for a second time, has shut himself inside the residence all alone, without meeting or talking to anyone.

(Ugh… okay, that’s enough revisiting the doom and gloom of the days long past. The main question is: what the hell am I supposed to do from now on?)

Finishing his trip down the memory lane, Homura continued to think about the problems he had to deal with here and now as he slowly began to doze off.

During those three days where all they could do was to rest and wait he sifted through the deepest recesses of his mind in search of any suspicious people who might have been interested in stealing his father’s thesis for themselves, but just as he expected, out of all the candidates, his first guardian was the most suspicious one of them all.

(All things considered though, I still can’t believe that someone like him was able to make any kind of progress in the research of Star Particle Bodies at all. No matter how many times I try to think back on it, he was approaching his research from a completely wrong direction.)

Of course, when he was still a child, Homura had no way of knowing that what his guardian was working on were his father’s Star Particle Bodies.