Prologue: Tea Immortal

I sat in Shimaki's car as we drove from the remote countryside toward the bustling city. The high-rises around us grew denser, the streets more crowded. Clouds hid the moonlight once again, and the bright lights of the modern city took its place. Did I find this comforting or repellent…?

It was a long drive, giving me plenty of time to think. Most of the time I would rather let my mind go blank, but my brain never seems able to stay idle. Clues and fragments piece themselves together in my head, sorting themselves out until everything forms a complete, flawless whole. Even without deliberately thinking about it, I can grasp things that others must painstakingly study to understand.

Perhaps this is what talent is, something people dream of possessing. To me, though, it feels more like a curse I was born with.

From the time I was old enough to understand, I knew I was different from the other princes. Clearly, my father had once doubted my parentage, and my mother suffered his neglect because of it.

Later, when I was about six, the question of my parentage was finally settled. The medical test was not particularly complicated, but with royalty involved, it became a sensitive political issue and was delayed again and again.

The final test results showed that my blue hair was not the result of my mother's infidelity, but a genetic mutation. I was what people called a mutant.

At the time, I felt that my father received the news with mixed feelings. Although I was not yet seven, what I observed suggests I was right.

My mother had never fit in with the other imperial consorts or the empress. She had no powerful family behind her; before I was born, she had not even had a single blood relative in the world. A woman of common birth, alone and without support in the palace, she endured suffering only she knew. She had thought that giving birth to a son would earn her more of my father's attention and a measure of respect from others. Instead, it marked the beginning of another nightmare. Through those years of constant suspicion and slander, my mother might have chosen death if it had not been for me.

In my father's place, I might have preferred bad news. If I had not been his biological son, he could have put both my mother and me to death with full justification, settling many problems once and for all.

Once my parentage was confirmed, however, my father was left in a difficult position. He had wronged my mother, and he felt guilty. More than that, my talent made it very likely that I would surpass his other sons, my brothers.

For a prince with no political capital whatsoever, branded a bastard from birth, talent was a threat to his own safety.

I do not know exactly what my mother was thinking, but shortly after my parentage was confirmed, she took poison and killed herself. Perhaps she loved my father and knew her death could ease that man's worries—the only thing she could do for him. Or perhaps she believed I was safe now, that no one would dare speak ill of me anymore or harm a prince whose birth was beyond question.

It did not take me very long to emerge from my grief. Perhaps that “cleverness” of mine helped me understand how to manage my emotions effectively.

While the other princes were reluctantly beginning their elementary lessons, I studied every subject I could, day and night, and explored my superpower. I devoted all my energy and attention to those two pursuits to help me forget the pain of losing my mother.

At twelve, I left the palace and joined HL, shocking the entire court. But my father supported me wholeheartedly. He understood that even if I stayed in Tiandu, there was no place for me there. Only by going far away could someone like me keep my brothers from feeling threatened. That was best for everyone.

At first, I had only wanted to find somewhere to put my talents to use. What happened afterward went beyond anything I had expected.

There are many villains in this world, but few of them are clever. Cases that seemed intricate to others were clear to me at a glance. Gradually, I gained a measure of standing in HL. People stopped seeing me as a prince dabbling in the organization who needed his colleagues to protect him. The higher-ups began to take my opinions seriously and entrust me with important tasks, moving me from a nominal post to one where I did real work.

Perhaps this feeling of “being needed” was what I had been looking for when I left Tiandu.

More than ten years have passed in the blink of an eye. Time has been especially kind to me. I age more slowly than ordinary people, and even now I still look like a student who has just started high school. By my own rough estimate, if I live out my natural lifespan, I may be over two hundred and forty when I die. I wonder what the world will be like then. The friends who know me well no longer call me His Highness Krause Wittstock. They all call me Tea Immortal, the codename for an operation I once took part in. At some point they started using it for me, perhaps also because tea is the only hobby I have ever let others see.

If there is anything in this world that still rankles, it is that I have yet to arrest Tian Yi. I have never even met him face to face.

My first encounter with one of his crimes was five years ago. That was the first time I experienced true horror. It was not fear of anything tangible. Tangible things are nothing to fear; at most, they can destroy your body. In the eyes of ordinary police officers, the aftermath of his crimes amounted to no more than that. But if they could see as much as I did, if they could see the horrifying course of events revealed when those clues were pieced together, they would surely feel the same admiration and revulsion that I did…

Before I knew it, we were almost at our destination. That survivor… the high school student Ikeda had actually survived Tian Yi's game. From what I know of Tian Yi, Ikeda's survival certainly cannot have been the result of mercy or an oversight. There is more than a ninety percent chance that he deliberately left a survivor… Taken together with that earlier phone call, it all means this is the beginning of a new game, a contest between him and me.