Project Arahabaki

Project Arahabaki was a top secret Japanese military research project that revolved around the creation of artificial Abilities. Spearheaded by N, it was conceived sometime towards the end of the Great War, specifically years after a French researcher named Pan created the Ability-derived life-form Black No. 12.

The project was successful, with the researchers able to create a gravity-manipulating Ability Singularity Arahabaki (荒覇吐,), which they hosted in Chūya Nakahara.

Description
The objective of the project was to create an Ability Singularity through the use of a persona model and a cloned body, which was the same method Pan used in creating Black No. 12. As a national secret, the project was primarily held in a well-guarded, covert military facility near the Yokohama Settlement.

Background
It has been known that special Abilities possessed output ceilings, beyond which the military wanted to know more about. Researchers soon discovered that this could be achieved through Ability Singularities, particularly the self-contradicting Singularity that was first discovered by a German researcher. However, the occurrence of self-contradicting Singularities posed great risk and danger that they were considered unsuitable to be used as weapons despite how they could provide near-unlimited supplies of energy.

However, during the war, the French researcher Pan figured out and wrote about how to weaponize such Singularities by using the human heart. Believing that only a human soul could use the energy of an Ability, he combined a persona model with a cloned body to make the Ability think it was human who possessed a soul. A few years later, Japan acquired Pan's research and tried to create an Ability Singularity using the same method, thereby launching Project Arahabaki.

After possibly several attempts to achieve results, N and his fellow researchers were successfully able to create Arahabaki, codenamed Prototype A2-5-8 (試作品・二五八番,), with Chūya as its host. N claimed the boy's existence to be miraculous, as they were unable to repeat the same phenomenon as they did with him.

Subsequently, France caught wind of the project and sent two spies, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine (who was actually Black No. 12), to steal the high-energy life-form that was being researched by Japan. Though initially successful, the two operatives soon had an internal strife over Chūya's fate, with the attempted theft ending in a massive explosion that razed the military facility and everything within a mile.