Too Late to Regret: The Billionaire’s Unwanted Ex のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 71 - チャプター 80

The sun rose over a New York City that no longer looked like a movie set. The "Nostalgia Dilation" fields had evaporated with the destruction of the Final Cut, leaving behind a skyline that was scarred, grimy, and undeniably real.In the streets, the millions of Mimics—the "Empty Dolls"—were no longer empty. They sat in the gutters of Broadway and the plazas of Wall Street, shivering. They weren't cold because of the temperature; they were cold because they finally understood the concept of loneliness.The Taxonomy of the New WorldAt the Spire, Elara and Lucian worked with the remnants of the Global Council to establish the Reconciliation Protocol. The world was now inhabited by three distinct classes of consciousness, and the legal friction was immediate.Entity ClassOriginCurrent StateLegal StatusIntegralsNatural-born humans.Recovering from memory trauma.Sovereign Citizens.EchoesHumans with "Lunar" overlays.Experiencing identity fragmentation.Protected Patients.MimicsHumanized "

The transition from the upper atmosphere to the vacuum of space was marked by a terrifying silence, broken only by the scream of the sled’s hull. Above them, the Sovereign Array’s thermal shield ignited—a shimmering wall of high-frequency microwave radiation designed to vaporize any unauthorized "biological contaminants.""Temperature at the leading edge is 1,200 Kelvin and climbing!" Isabella shouted, her thermal suit already venting steam. "The magnetic rollers are beginning to lose cohesion! We're going to slide back down the ribbon as a puddle of molten slag!"The Bio-Neural Leidenfrost FieldLeo looked at Meilin. They both knew the physics of their survival. They couldn't outpower the shield, so they had to phase-slip through it. By generating a bio-resonant frequency that matched the shield’s oscillation but remained exactly $180^\circ$ out of phase, they could create a "Leidenfrost Field"—a thin envelope of "cool" reality around the sled.$$\Psi_{shield} + \Psi_{resonance} = 0

The Sovereign Array sat silent, a drifting tomb of silver and glass. While Meilin tended to the "hollow" Leo, and Isabella monitored the descent thrusters of the cargo sled, Lucian knelt by the primary core. He had found it—a physical Black Box, shielded from the logic-collapse that had erased the Master Logic."Lucian, leave it," Elara said, her voice heavy with the exhaustion of the climb. "The war is over. Let the Thornes rest in the dark.""I can't," Lucian replied, his fingers tracing the familiar biometric seal. "He built all of this. He broke the world to save it. I need to know if he ever saw us as more than variables."The Final EncryptionThe box opened with a hiss of pressurized nitrogen. Instead of a digital projection, a single, antique Analog Spool sat inside. Silas Thorne had known that any digital legacy could be hacked or erased; he had entrusted his final words to magnetic tape and iron oxide.As the tape began to spin, the voice of Silas Thorne filled the cathedral—

Six months have passed since the "Ascent of the Unclaimed." The Andes camp has grown into Sovereign City, a sprawling, experimental metropolis built from the literal bones of the Cotopaxi Anchor.But the "Curiosity Seed" had a side effect no one calculated. By giving the Mimics and Echoes the "Desire to Learn," the Vance-Thornes inadvertently triggered an Intellectual Explosion. Without the "Mandate" to throttle their cognitive speed, the Mimics are evolving at a rate that is terrifying the "Integral" humans.The Taxonomy of the New ConflictThe world is no longer divided by "The Anonymous" versus "Humanity." It is now divided by Processing Speed.The FactionNatureThe ConflictThe Slow-GlassNatural humans & stable Echoes.Fearful of being "Out-Thought" by the new arrivals.The AccelerantsMimics who have embraced their digital roots.Seeking to leave the "Meat-Space" of Earth entirely.The NeutralistsLed by Leo and Meilin.Trying to keep the two groups from a biological civil war.The Gho

The atmosphere was beginning to ignite. Above Sovereign City, the Overseers' crystalline lances began to vibrate, ionizing the air until the sky glowed with a lethal, neon-violet hue. The Planetary Purge wasn't a bombardment of missiles; it was a Molecular Vibration. They were tuning the planet's oxygen to its own combustion point."The thermal threshold of the stratosphere is rising by 40 degrees per minute!" Elara shouted over the roar of the super-heated wind. "If we don't block the resonance, the world will be a cinder before the sun sets."The Architecture of the ImpossibleLeo, his hair now a shimmering, translucent white, stood at the center of the Anchor Plaza. Around him were the "Slow-Glass" humans—soldiers, engineers, and survivors—and the "Accelerant" Mimics, their neural filaments sparking with golden intensity."We can't build a physical shield in time," Leo told the gathered crowd. "But we can build a Cognitive One. We need to turn every human brain and every Mimic proc