Nearly three years had passed since the ZAGE Foundation began operating.
It had been established in 1998, shortly after Zaboru met a young leukemia patient named Aldrich Kirk. At that time, Aldrich was still a frightened child trapped between painful treatments, exhausted parents, and a future nobody could promise him. Meeting him had affected Zaboru far more deeply than he expected. He had already possessed money, influence, companies, and technology, yet none of those things could immediately erase the suffering in front of him.
That helplessness remained inside him. It shows how fragile human life is.
Not long afterward, Zaboru created the ZAGE Foundation.
Most of its early funding came directly from ZAGE and Zaboru himself. The Japanese government also contributed after recognizing the seriousness of the program, but from the beginning, Zaboru refused to let the foundation become a decorative charity used only for publicity. He did not want beautiful advertisements showing smiling children while families continued drowning in medical bills behind the scenes just like most of it in his previous life.
He wanted the foundation to find people before they were forced to beg.
Because of that, the ZAGE Foundation did not simply wait for applications. Its staff actively searched hospitals, rural clinics, crowded city wards, and even private homes where sick patients had stopped receiving treatment because their families could no longer afford it. Social workers, nurses, and regional coordinators visited families directly, especially when hospitals reported that a child had missed appointments or when parents suddenly requested early discharge despite the patient still needing care.
Many of those cases involved cancer.
Some parents had sold furniture, land, vehicles, or family heirlooms to pay for treatment. Others had borrowed money from relatives and dangerous lenders. A few had quietly accepted that their children might die because they believed there was no other choice.
The foundation intervened before that despair became final.
It helped pay for examinations, hospital stays, chemotherapy, surgery, medication, transportation, accommodation near major hospitals, and food for families who had been forced to leave work while caring for a sick child. When necessary, the foundation even arranged temporary housing so parents from distant rural areas could remain close to their children during months of treatment.
For pediatric patients, the support went even further.
The ZAGE Foundation created specialized children's wards in several partner hospitals. These wards were not cold white rooms filled only with machines and fear. They had colorful walls, small libraries, toys, game systems, drawing tables, music corners, and quiet rooms where children could watch cartoons or play with their families. ZAGE regularly donated games and consoles, though the medical staff carefully limited playtime when treatment required proper rest.
Some ZAGE developers also visited the hospitals personally.
They did not arrive as celebrities surrounded by cameras. Most visits were private.
Stories like that spread quickly. The public began seeing the ZAGE Foundation not as another corporate charity, but as an organization that genuinely entered people's lives and remained there through the ugliest periods. Families who received help often continued communicating with foundation staff even after treatment ended. Some former patients later returned as volunteers, translators, nurses, counselors, or donors.
Akechi played an enormous role behind the scenes.
He rarely appeared in public foundation events, and most people outside ZAGE did not understand how involved he truly was. But he made certain that the money reached the patients and researchers it was meant to support.
Every major contract was reviewed.
Every hospital partner was investigated.
Every regional leader was monitored.
Anyone attempting to inflate costs, redirect medicine, steal donations, or use sick children as a method of personal enrichment found themselves removed very quickly.
Sometimes they were dismissed through official procedures.
Sometimes they simply received a quiet visit from people connected to Aoshidan and suddenly discovered a powerful desire to confess everything.
Zaboru never asked for unnecessary details.
He only told Akechi, "Please make sure nobody steals from sick children."
Akechi had replied expressionlessly with a grin.
That had been the end of the discussion.
Fortunately, most of the foundation's senior staff were genuinely good people. Many had entered medicine, charity work, or social services because they wanted to help others, and the scale of ZAGE's resources finally gave them the ability to do more than offer sympathy. They could arrange real treatment, hire specialists, fund equipment, and support families for months or even years.
By 2001, thousands of cancer patients had received some form of assistance through the foundation's programs. A large portion of them were children, though adults with severe financial difficulties were also supported. Not every story ended happily. Some patients still died despite receiving the best treatment available. The foundation never hid that truth.
Instead, it also created grief-support programs for families.
Counselors helped parents who had lost children. Memorial rooms were built in several hospitals, allowing families to leave photographs, letters, drawings, or small belongings. Zaboru insisted that the foundation should not disappear from a family's life the moment treatment failed.
"Helping someone doesn't only mean saving them," he had once said during an internal meeting. "Sometimes it means making sure they are not alone when saving them is no longer possible."
That sentence later became one of the foundation's guiding principles.
However, the ZAGE Foundation did not only pay for treatment.
It also invested heavily in cancer research.
Zaboru understood that charity could help the patients of today, but research could change the fate of patients who had not even been born yet. Because of that, a growing portion of the foundation's budget was directed toward laboratories, universities, hospitals, pharmaceutical research teams, and international data-sharing programs.
The foundation funded better leukemia classification, faster blood-analysis equipment, improved bone-marrow matching systems, safer chemotherapy-delivery methods, and research into reducing long-term treatment damage in children. It also paid for experimental work involving targeted medicines designed to attack certain cancer cells while causing less harm to healthy tissue.
Not every project succeeded.
Some produced nothing useful.
Others failed after years of investment.
Zaboru accepted that.
Research, unlike game development, could not always promise a finished product after enough overtime. Sometimes the answer simply refused to appear. But the projects that did succeed created meaningful progress.
Several hospitals reported better survival outcomes for specific childhood leukemia cases after adopting new treatment combinations developed through foundation-funded cooperation. Researchers improved methods for monitoring whether cancer cells remained after treatment, allowing doctors to adjust therapy earlier instead of waiting for a visible relapse. New infection-control systems reduced the number of vulnerable patients dying from complications while their immune systems were weakened.
A foundation-supported laboratory in Japan created a faster genetic-screening process for certain blood cancers. The method was still expensive and not available everywhere, but it allowed doctors to categorize several patients more accurately and select treatment based on the specific behavior of the disease rather than using the same approach for everyone.
Another international research partnership improved bone-marrow donor matching across Japan, Korea, the United States, and England. Shared databases allowed doctors to search for compatible donors far more efficiently. Patients who might once have waited too long now had a better chance of finding a match across national borders.
The foundation also financed compact diagnostic machines for regional hospitals. These were not miracle devices, but they reduced the time needed to perform several important tests. In rural areas, faster detection often meant the difference between beginning treatment early and discovering the illness only after it had progressed dangerously.
Doctors and researchers were careful not to exaggerate the results. Cancer had not been defeated. There was no universal cure, and many forms of the disease remained devastating.
But the situation was improving.
Survival rates for several childhood cancers rose steadily in hospitals participating in ZAGE-funded programs. Treatment became more precise. Side effects became easier to manage. International research moved faster because institutions shared information instead of guarding every discovery for national prestige or commercial advantage.
The effect was large enough that even medical organizations unrelated to ZAGE began adjusting their own research structures.
The foundation's central policy was simple: if a project used ZAGE money and produced information that could save lives, that information should not remain trapped inside one institution unnecessarily.
Zaboru hated the idea of two hospitals repeating the same failed experiment because one refused to share its results with the other.
Because of that, the ZAGE Foundation created an international cancer-research network where approved medical teams could exchange data, treatment outcomes, side-effect reports, and failed trial information. The failed results were especially valuable because they prevented other researchers from wasting years following the same dead ends.
At first, several institutions resisted.
Some feared losing prestige.
Others feared losing patents or future profits.
Zaboru responded by offering larger grants to teams willing to cooperate and refusing long-term funding to organizations that accepted foundation money while hiding essential patient-safety data.
The policy was controversial.
It was also effective.
Research accelerated by margins that surprised even the doctors involved. Progress that might have taken many isolated institutions years could happen far faster when they worked from shared information.
The ZAGE Foundation eventually expanded beyond Japan.
Its first major international offices appeared in Korea and China, followed by the United States and England. Later, it reached parts of South America, beginning with Brazil and Argentina. These countries already had ZAGE offices or business partners, but the foundation remained legally and administratively separate from the company's commercial branches.
Zaboru insisted on that separation.
The foundation could receive help from ZAGE employees, infrastructure, and technology, but its medical decisions were not supposed to become marketing decisions. A child's access to treatment could never depend on whether their family owned a ZEPS console or liked ZAGE games.
Governments generally welcomed the foundation's arrival, especially after seeing the results in Japan. Some offered land, tax exemptions, hospital partnerships, and research access. Others provided matching funds, allowing every dollar from ZAGE to support even larger programs.
The expansion was not always easy.
Different countries had different laws, medical systems, corruption problems, regional politics, and cultural expectations. In some places, officials attempted to delay approvals until they received personal benefits. In others, local businessmen tried to control construction contracts or medicine procurement.
The foundation refused.
That stubbornness created conflict, but Zaboru preferred delay over allowing charity money to become someone else's luxury car.
Akechi's people quietly investigated the worst cases, while local legal teams and honest government officials handled the formal response. Over time, the foundation gained a reputation for generosity combined with an almost frightening intolerance for corruption.
Beyond cancer support, the foundation also established several other programs.
One of the most successful in Japan was called Talent Finder.
The concept focused on locating children and teenagers with exceptional potential in sports, technology, art, music, mathematics, writing, and other fields. Many talented children never developed their abilities because their families lacked money, facilities, connections, or even awareness of what the child could become.
Talent Finder worked with schools, local governments, sports clubs, community centers, and teachers to identify those children. If accepted, they could receive training, equipment, travel support, education, nutrition, medical care, and mentoring without being required to repay the foundation.
The Japanese government strongly supported the program, particularly its sports division.
Football, basketball, baseball, athletics, swimming, gymnastics, martial arts, boxing, wrestling, judo, and many other sports received dedicated programs. Training facilities were built with high-quality equipment, professional coaches, medical staff, and educational support so children did not need to sacrifice school entirely for sport.
Zaboru especially hated systems that treated young athletes like disposable machines.
Because of that, Talent Finder required medical oversight, rest standards, injury monitoring, and continued education. A talented child who suffered an injury was not immediately abandoned simply because they could no longer become a professional athlete. The program helped them redirect their future toward coaching, sports science, education, management, or other fields.
In Brazil and Argentina, the ZAGE Foundation also created ZAGE Schools.
These were normal schools placed primarily in rural or less fortunate areas where children had limited access to education. They taught ordinary academic subjects, but they also offered technology rooms, sports facilities, music programs, art classes, and talent-development support.
The goal was not to turn every student into a ZAGE employee.
The goal was to give them choices.
A child could learn programming.
Another could discover football.
Another could become interested in medicine.
Another might simply receive a stable education and escape a cycle of poverty.
Establishing the first schools had been difficult. Even in a world less corrupt than Zaboru's previous one, corruption still existed. Some regional officials delayed permits, demanded control over hiring, or attempted to redirect construction budgets.
Strangely, several infamous South American criminal groups helped pressure those officials into cooperating.
The situation was morally complicated.
These groups were criminals, but many of their leaders had grown up in the same neglected communities where the schools were being built. They wanted their children and grandchildren to receive opportunities they had never possessed. Some openly warned local corrupt officials not to interfere with school construction.
Zaboru did not approve of their crimes.
He also could not deny that, in several locations, their involvement prevented officials from stealing land or blocking education projects.
The world was rarely simple.
Sometimes good people failed to act.
Sometimes bad people protect something good for reasons of their own.
The foundation handled the situation carefully, refusing direct criminal money whenever its source could not be verified, while still accepting community cooperation that kept students and workers safe.
By the middle of 2001, the ZAGE Foundation had become one of the most respected charitable organizations connected to any corporation in the world.
It costs ZAGE an enormous amount of money every year.
Zaboru did not care.
Whenever Sayuri showed him the foundation's expenses, he never felt regret. He saw the numbers as treatment sessions, hospital rooms, research equipment, schools, laboratories, meals, transportation, and years of life that families might otherwise lose but Sayuri is never mad for this she actually really respects Zaboru's decisions.
For once, losing money made him happy.
ZAGE had become famous not only as a video-game company, but as a company that genuinely tried to make the world better. That reputation naturally helped ZAGE commercially, though Zaboru never wanted public benefit to become the foundation's main reason for existing.
Donations also began arriving from outside patrons.
Some came from wealthy fans.
Some came from athletes, actors, business owners, game developers, and families of former patients.
Others arrived anonymously.
Several unknown donors contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. On a few occasions, anonymous donations reached millions. The foundation investigated the funds carefully before accepting them, ensuring they were not connected to obvious criminal laundering or political manipulation.
Akechi suspected that at least some of the mysterious donations came from people who preferred not to have their names associated with charity.
Zaboru did not mind.
As long as the money was clean and helped patients, the donor could remain a ghost.
And now, on 25 June 2001, Zaboru was about to meet the child who had unknowingly started all of this.
Aldrich Kirk.
The frightened leukemia patient Zaboru had met almost three years earlier was no longer trapped inside the same endless cycle of worsening reports.
Aldrich had beaten leukemia and now he will visit him.
To be continued.
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