Ed opened his eyes and took a look at the phone on the bedside table. It was 8:50 in the morning. Although he didn't go to bed until after five o'clock in the morning last night, it didn't prevent him from being refreshed early in the morning. Since he had made an appointment with Ayanami Rei in advance, he informed Momoka that he was going out this morning at dinner last night, so now he has to get up no matter how much he wants to be with An Qi for a while longer.
"Well, you woke up so early?" An Qi dazedly propped up a slit between her upper and lower eyelids, and said in a loud voice, "Ed, do you want to have a good morning—"
"No, you sleep a little longer." Ed gently moved the octopus around him, kissed An Qi's lips gently, and rolled over to get out of bed.
The Wheel of Angels has entered the final stage. Recently, he has been working overtime on the construction site. It was only yesterday that he completed all the tasks at hand and was able to go home for vacation. Little Biesheng's newly-married Miss Friday was forced to stop last night until her body spasmed. Ed estimated from experience that she would have to sleep at least until the afternoon.
Recalling the beauty of last night, Ed sighed again unconsciously. Seven years later, although Lux and the others did not dislike or even tolerate his physical defects, whenever he was making out with his lover, he would be forced to think that he had been deprived of one of the most important symbols of being a man. The inner torment is increasing day by day - the function of his sage time has been deleted.
"You can't use it yourself anyway. Does it make sense to work on these technical details?"
After washing up, Ed went down to the first floor, Taoxiang was cleaning as expected, and seeing him sweetly called "Good morning, master". CC is also lazy and probably won't wake up until noon if she doesn't sleep. Alice should have been working hard in the laboratory by now, and only Lux is beating on the laptop in the living room.
"Morning." Ed walked behind Lux and glanced at it, only to see the dense words on the screen, "What is this doing?"
"Ed?!" Lux closed the screen in a conditioned reflex, and a blush flashed across her face, "It's nothing, I have nothing to do and write something for fun."
Seeing her reluctance to speak, Ed didn't ask any further questions. In order to live a mentally healthy life in such a complex environment as the Lingos family, it was necessary for everyone to maintain a certain degree of absolute privacy. He glanced around at random and found someone's dress and stockings scattered on the sofa: "Minerva got up too?"
"Waking up, she said that Hathaway came back today and got up early because of an appointment to pick up the boat with Pru at noon. There is no other reason." Lux said Nunuzui in the direction of the bathroom.
As soon as Lux's voice fell, Minerva's wet head poked out of the bathroom, with a small half-naked shoulder. The girl's face was reddened by the heat, adding an air of fascination, and the water droplets on her shoulders slowly slipped out of the field of vision along the collarbone, making people unable to help but imagine.
"Uncle Ed, are you up?" Minerva said cheerfully, "My nightgown is wet, can you help me go back to my room and get another one? I remember it was on the bed."
Ed calmly lowered his head and started reading this morning's news: "Peach, go and help Minerva get some clean clothes."
After a while, Minerva, who had dried her body and changed her clothes, stood in front of Ed, involuntarily shoving the hairdryer into his hand, her eyes full of dissatisfaction: "Ed. Uncle, you haven't dried my hair for a long time."
When he mentioned this, Ed couldn't help but soften his heart. He has been too busy with work in recent years, and he has to allocate his limited leisure time to CC and them as much as possible. The time to spend with Minerva has indeed decreased. It's not unreasonable that the girl is too attached to him, maybe it's a mixture of a sense of spiritual loss and the excess desire formed by the reaction? It can be seen that as long as she spends more time with her in the future, she will gradually get better.
With this in mind, Ed called Minerva to sit down, while he stood behind her and began to dry the girl's hair with ease. All that was left in the living room was the whirring of the hairdryer and the clack of the keyboard, as if it were ten years ago.
Eddard stroked Minerva's long, smooth hair skillfully, and his downward gaze naturally slid over the girl's show neck and into her overly wide neckline. What he could see was a pair of delicate collarbones. The snow-white hills below held up the silk nightdress as thin as cicada wings. The crystal embellishments on it rubbed gently rhythmically with the movements of his hands. velvet…
"Peach fragrance." Ed turned around decisively and handed the hair dryer to the little maid who heard the sound. "I'm running out of time soon, so help Minerva dry her hair."
"Oh." Taoxiang nodded and took it obediently, "Good master."
"It's not good at all!" Minerva jumped up from the chair and stared at Ed with aggrieved face, "You won't even give me this time? It's too much! It's too much! "
Ed looked at Lux for help, but the latter continued to code without raising his head, turning a blind eye to everything that was happening in front of him, so he could only bite the bullet and try to control the situation: "I made an appointment with Li for a meeting at noon. —”
"Don't change the subject! Who cares what you are discussing in the meeting? I only need half an hour for you to give me. In your heart, isn't your daughter worth wasting even half an hour?" Minerva's big watery eyes It was covered in mist, "You haven't bathed me since you were fourteen, you haven't slept with me since you were fifteen, and you refused to even hold me and watch TV since you were sixteen, and now you even blow your hair. Is the right to be taken away from me too? In your heart, what am I? Is it a burden to get married and everything will be fine?"
Ed is very self-consciously convinced that his own emotional intelligence cannot appease Minerva. What he has to do now is to delay the outbreak and find a reliable family ethics consultant before that, so now he chooses the third Sixteen Strategies: "You know that you are very important to me. Let's have a good talk tonight. But now that I really have to go out, it's the same for Taoxiang to help you dry your hair."
"It's completely different!" Minerva pointed at Taoxiang angrily, "She's just a mere maid, how can she be the same!"
"Minerva!" Ed's expression suddenly became serious, "Apologize to Taoxiang, immediately."
"Apologize?" Minerva laughed in a low self-deprecating laugh, tears streaming down her face, "So in your mind, even a maid has a higher status than me?"
"You know it's not for this." Ed said sharply, "Taoxiang took care of you when you were young, right? How could you just talk to her like that? What is a mere maid? Who taught you such uneducated words?"
"The high-sounding rhetoric is a set, do you think I don't know the reason?" Minerva's eyes were red and distressed, "Of course it's because you have slept with her, and the woman who can sleep will marry sooner or later. My daughter, who is more important is self-evident, right?"
This time it was Ed's turn to be stunned: "How do you—"
"How did you find out when you asked me? Do you still need to find out, which other woman in this room has you never been to?" Minerva shouted hysterically, tears dripping down desperately as if he didn't want money. " You haven't been home much in the past few years. When you came back, it was dark with them. At night, you could hear the sound of calling the bed through the wall. What do you think of me as a daughter? I can grow up healthy and normal. Damn it! Uncle Ed, let me tell you the truth, it's all your responsibility that I become what I am now!"
Every word of the girl slammed into Ed's heart like a heavy hammer, so shocked that he couldn't utter a word.
Minerva silently walked to the wall to open the drawer, rummaged through it and took out a uniquely shaped knife, and silently walked back to Ed. Then the girl grabbed her long orange hair with her left hand, and flashed the blade of her right hand against the middle of her hair.
"You think I'm in trouble now, don't you? You don't want to blow my hair for me, do you?" The girl pulled her right wrist down, and her long hair was cut into two pieces with a knife, "Why do you have no point in keeping my hair? Do you? Throw away what no one wants!"
After speaking, the girl threw away the knife and turned to go upstairs, leaving only broken hair all over the floor.
Ed was completely stunned, as if his brain didn't understand what had just happened.
It was only then that Lux slowly lifted her eyes from the screen: "Did you think that Minerva just now seemed to be a different person? Do you think that the cute image of the little girl was hit by reality? Shattered? Do you feel that the sense of distance between you and her has been completely lost all of a sudden?"
Ed nodded dumbly.
"Blue is better than blue." Lux murmured, "I can't do better."
"What did you say?"
"I said that's great, it's time for you to stop deceiving yourself and face the reality, Minerva's education is obviously wrong." Lux walked over and picked up the knife, "Hey, this is not what I brought from Dakar. Is it back? Where did she find it?"
"Taoxiang, please clean it up." Ed walked to the entrance in despair, "I'm going to a meeting."
…
"So... Ed? Ed? Ed?" Ayanami's voice woke him from the daze he didn't know for the first time, "So I want to take three days off at the beginning of next month."
"Give you half a month." Ed replied absentmindedly, "After all, Shinji-kun is married."
The air was instantly quiet, and the scene was once embarrassing.
A few seconds later, Ayanami sighed softly, her tense facial lines softened, her frozen shoulders relaxed naturally, and her buttocks twisted imperceptibly to bring a slight angle to her originally upright sitting posture. However, these changes that were almost imperceptible to the naked eye turned her temperament upside down.
"How should I put it, there is a sense of relief, a sense of relief that I don't have to act anymore." Ayanami chuckled, "Tell me, when did you see it?"
"You asked for leave at the graduation ceremony of Shinji-kun's high school, and you have been suspicious since then." Ed also told the truth, "You asked for leave again when he graduated from college. At that moment, I was finally convinced, Li, your memory. recovered."
"You, you are obviously very slow, but you are very sensitive in such a strange place... After graduating from Shinji University, didn't you watch my jokes for more than a year, Ed?" Rei Ayanami shook her head, "Are you still calling me Rei? ?"
"Yeah, can't you?" Ed asked rhetorically, "From the time I met you in the petri dish until now, every conversation between us belongs only to Adrian Lingus and Ayanbury. There is no character named Yui Ikari in the overlapping life trajectories. If you want me to change my words, of course I will cooperate, but to me you are just Ayanami Rei and no one else."
Ling Baoli closed her eyes and pondered for a while, and when she opened her eyes, a faint smile climbed up the corner of her mouth again: "It's better to keep it simple, I like the current atmosphere, so let's not change it. "
"So Miss Li." Ed coughed solemnly, "In order to celebrate our relationship returning to normal from the brink of shattering, can you grant me a small wish? To tell you the truth, I have been holding back for several years. endure until now."
"Okay." Ayanbury smiled and nodded, "As long as I can do it."
"In order to prevent people from eavesdropping, let's talk like this." Ed's voice sounded directly in her head, "I can't understand, how did you make Alice an obedient baby?"
"It's very simple." Ayanami replied indifferently, "I deliberately let her see Nuonuo's plan by accident, and when she eavesdropped on me, she said to herself, 'The old model AI is really not subjective enough, In this way, Ed can only rely on Nuonuo', and she has been very cooperative with my experiments since then."
"...Let's get down to business."
"Then you look at this first." Ling Baoli took out three stacks of documents and put them in front of Ed, "I have finished processing the stack on the left, you just need to sign; the stack in the middle I can't make a decision, but the point is You can understand at a glance if the suggestions and suggestions are marked; the key is the information on the right, there is something wrong with your plan to cut the earth."
"Impossible." Ed blurted out subconsciously, "How could I—"
"That may be my mistake." Ayanami immediately took back the information on the right, "Although Ed, you gave me the decision-making power, I hope I can exist as your error correction module, but I feel that I am still It's too immature. Why don't you let me go back to being a simple student first, and I'll be able to help you when I'm more mature, and then you-"
"I'm sorry, Li, I was wrong." Ed quickly pulled the information out of her hand. "I have the iron evidence in my hands. If I lose you, I will kill myself in minutes."
"It doesn't have the majesty of academic hegemony at all. That's not good, Ed, Doctor, he is much more stubborn than you." Ayanami smiled and looked at the way he frowned while reading the materials, "But you are more cute."
It turns out that he was wrong. You must know that the earth is essentially a liquid sphere. Simply cutting it can only destroy the crust. The core and mantle will still remain the same due to their gravitational attraction and the physical properties of the liquid, so how can they be cut? Earth is a chore, not to mention how to guide the flight path of the sliced pieces of the earth.
Ed's lack of consideration for a borderline situation makes him completely unable to control the development of events once the borderline situation is actually approached if his plan is implemented. Fortunately, he also has a super-strong error correction module always by his side.
"Ayanami is really useful." Ed sighed inwardly for the countless times.
Next, Ed put all his heart and soul into the calculation model, and the happy scientific research made him temporarily forget Minerva's troubles. Rei Ayanami will occasionally put forward her own opinions, and by the way, will bring him tea and water, and arrange tools.
By the time Ed updated his plan and said goodbye to Ayanari and returned home, it was already completely dark. As soon as he entered the door, he saw the whole family sitting neatly in the living room, and everyone looked strange.
Except for Minerva's absence, there is nowhere to be found in perception.
"Master, you are finally back!" Taoxiang hurriedly greeted you, "Everyone can't find you anywhere, I don't know what to do."
"I'm in a meeting with Li, and the phone is off." Ed handed her the jacket. "What's wrong? Did something happen? What about Minerva?"
"Take out your phone." CC said lazily, "Just open any portal and get the headlines on the front page."
Ed took out his mobile phone without knowing it, and clicked on a website, Minerva's large photo took up the entire screen impressively. An ominous premonition rose, he swallowed, tremblingly clicked on the video below the photo.
"Hello everyone in the world, I'm Minerva Law Zabi. Not Audrey Lingos, that's the pseudonym that man gave me after he adopted me, my real name is Secret. Neva Law Zabi.
"I have the courage to stand here today because of reason, because of conscience, for freedom, for justice, and to expose a horrific and shocking conspiracy to innocent people around the world who have been kept in the dark. But before that, I A difficult decision must be made first—
"I announce that I will sever all ties with Adrian Lingus!"