## Chapter 213 – The Process of a Girl Becoming a Monster
***
A young girl, consumed by unbearable despair and disgust, abandoned her name,
vowing to trample those who had once caused her pain with power and strength.
The girl began to ponder, “Why are humans destined to be weak?”
It didn’t take long for that contemplation to form a hypothesis.
Her father and sister, who had collapsed rapidly after her mother’s assassination,
and the incompetent citizens who always relied on heroes and complained.
Watching them constantly cling to past memories and personal emotions, ruining their work and wasting their lives,
she eventually concluded that emotions and memories were what made humans weak.
She even hypothesized that if the concepts of emotion and memory were completely removed,
humans could become much closer to the word “perfect” than before.
However, there was another hypothesis that conflicted with that one,
namely, that the manifestation of superpowers was related to humans’ extreme emotions or desires.
This hypothesis was an unproven story that had been circulating among some researchers for some time,
and Jia had heard about it before.
Since Jia had loved reading and studying since she was a child,
her father often allowed her to visit the research lab under the Hero Alliance.
Therefore, after combining and compromising the two hypotheses, Jia devised a method
to acquire superpowers and then remove emotions and memories.
Of course, proving that method definitively was too distant a goal for Jia at the time.
As just a young girl without superpowers, what she could do was extremely limited,
and joining a small, insignificant villain organization was the best she could do.
Amidst the ugly crowd of humans, full of greed and only thinking of filling their bellies,
all she could do was humiliatingly run their errands.
Living among these trash-like people, she gradually became worn down,
and began to spend time foolishly hoping that she might develop superpowers someday.
‘Well… an opportunity will come someday…’
After all, superpowers were said to manifest through humans’ extreme emotions or desires.
And so, a chance encounter came to Jia, who had been wasting months
in an organization that was no different from a collection of human garbage.
“Huh…?!”
At the time, Jia’s job was to assist the boss’s secretary,
and she happened to witness the scene of the boss being murdered while passing by his room.
What’s more, the culprit who murdered the boss was Jia’s superior, the boss’s secretary.
The boss was usually a piece of trash who committed violent actions and words against his subordinates,
but in fact, he was the only superpower user in the organization, so no member could resist.
Then, the boss’s secretary, who could no longer tolerate the tyranny, took courage and drew a knife,
and took advantage of the boss’s carelessness while he was enjoying his leisurely time and killed him.
‘Could it be that the secretary… killed the boss…?’
Jia, who witnessed the shocking situation, was greatly surprised and unknowingly leaned against the wall to hide,
but out of some curiosity, she slightly raised her head and carefully examined the murder scene.
The secretary, who killed the boss, looked back and forth between the knife covered in blood and his own hands,
seeming to be happy, but on the other hand, trembling with fear.
Along with the sense of liberation from tyranny by killing the boss,
there was also a complex mix of guilt for having committed murder.
As much as the secretary’s face, which revealed complex and subtle emotions, one object stood out,
which was a large jewel placed on the boss’s desk.
To be exact, it was the dark red smoke that began to swirl around the jewel, which always emitted a pure white and beautiful light.
The dark red smoke seemed to emanate from the secretary who killed the boss,
and soon completely stained the pure and beautiful jewel.
Surprisingly, as soon as the color of the jewel completely changed, the secretary suddenly lost consciousness and collapsed.
‘What… what is going on…?’
While bewildered by the bizarre situation that was difficult to describe,
Jia stretched her neck and stared blankly at the jewel with its dark red color.
‘It’s like… it’s tempting me to touch it…?’
The jewel began to emit an intense light as if trying to seduce her,
and Jia unknowingly got up from her seat and slowly approached the place where the jewel was.
And she reached out her hand and grabbed the tempting dark red jewel.
– Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeㅡ
“Kyaaaaaaaat?!!!”
Then, the jewel emitted an intense roar that momentarily burst her eardrums,
and when the roar disappeared, it shattered into pieces, leaving only a few fragments in her hand.
“Something… I feel like some strange energy is swirling around my body….”
Even the few fragments in her hand soon crumbled like sand and the jewel completely disappeared,
but the strange energy left by the jewel continued to linger around Jia’s body.
It wasn’t long before she realized that the identity of that strange energy was the superpower residing in the jewel.
When she gained the powerful ability to transform a part of her body into the form of a weapon,
Jia used that power to seize the capital and power of the organization from which the boss and secretary had disappeared.
‘Transparent jewel… death… the eruption of extreme emotions…’
She was naturally not satisfied with becoming the ruler of a worthless villain organization,
and began an experiment using capital and power to recreate the situation she had seen.
After preparing a transparent and clean crystal that had been on the desk of the dead boss,
she repeatedly killed the organization members or kidnapped citizens next to the place where the jewel was placed.
However, the situation she had seen was not reproduced even after killing several people,
and the jewel did not even change color, let alone gain superpowers.
‘What on earth is the problem…?’
She didn’t feel any guilt about the subordinates or citizens she had killed,
and she was dying to know which guy she had to kill for the jewel to gain superpowers.
She continued to change the position of the jewel or change the conditions of the experimental subjects in various ways,
and did not stop the cruel human experiments, giving a dog the dignity of life.
“This… this is…?!”
While more than thirty people had been dying like that for several months,
she finally witnessed the color of the jewel changing and at the same time reconfirmed the conditions and found out the principle.
At the moment when the explosion of emotions or the whirlpool of desires that are too intense to handle are accompanied by the death of a superpower user,
a pure form of vessel is needed to contain it, like a transparent jewel.
“This is what I wanted… Kihihihit…!!!”
Jia, excited by the success of the experiment, explosively increased the number of people used in the experiment,
and succeeded in creating another jewel with superpowers.
Jia did not simply create jewels containing superpowers,
but focused on creating a ‘superpower that can freely control and dominate humans’.
Through that superpower, she planned to control the emotions and memories of the humans she dominated,
thereby creating the ‘perfected human by excluding emotions and memories’ that she had so desired.
It was possible to find out the ability contained in the jewel by looking at the created jewel and feeling its energy,
but it was quite difficult to create the superpower she wanted accurately.
Even if the conditions were met, the probability of a superpower residing in the jewel itself was extremely low,
and even if a superpower resided, there were very rare cases where the superpower could not be obtained from the jewel.
‘I need… I need more experimental subjects.’
Taking human lives as wealth, from a random box with an extremely low probability,
it’s like choosing what you want from a wide variety of winning prizes.
Jia continued to use the superpowers that were gradually increasing as her weapons,
and began to merge several villain organizations of a certain size and co-opt some capitalists.
With the gradually accumulating capital, she expanded the manufacturing facilities for creating jewels with superpowers,
and hundreds and thousands of innocent people who were dragged in by all sorts of dirty methods were sacrificed.
Only screams echoed in the manufacturing facility due to the madness-filled obsession,
and the corpses reeking of blood piled up to form a mountain in the adjacent storage warehouse.
Among the dozens of superpower jewels created in this way, there were some with the superpower she wanted,
but for some reason, there were also several failures that could not obtain superpowers.
Jia later placed some of the unusable failures as decorations in her command office,
one of which was the jewel containing the ‘Corruption System’, the superpower currently possessed by Si-yoon.
