PROJECT WHITE — HOSHIKAWA ACADEMY

Japan, 2007.

Hoshikawa Academy is an enormous, isolated boarding school located far from the major cities of Japan. At first glance, it appears to be an ordinary prestigious high school: students attend classes, join clubs, compete in sports, make friends, fall in love, study for exams, argue with each other, and spend their free time at the campus arcade, shopping district, cafeteria, library, karaoke rooms, and other recreational facilities.

But Hoshikawa Academy is not an ordinary school.

The entire campus is a classified government facility known as PROJECT WHITE.

Every student living inside the campus is an experimental subject.

The students do not know this.

They believe Hoshikawa is simply their school and that the campus is their home. They are provided with food, education, healthcare, entertainment, housing, and everything necessary for daily life. However, they are never allowed to freely leave the campus or directly interact with the outside world.

Every aspect of their lives is observed.

Their grades.

Their friendships.

Their rivalries.

Their romances.

Their fears.

Their failures.

Their ambitions.

Their behavior under pressure.

And most importantly, their Phenomena.

Phenomena are rare biological abilities that appear in certain humans, usually during adolescence. They are not magic, curses, supernatural spells, or divine powers. Their origin remains unknown, even to the government researchers studying them.

Project WHITE was created to answer one question:

How far can human development be pushed when every variable surrounding a person can be controlled?

The students are divided into six classes within each school year:

A, B, C, D, E, and F.

Class A represents the highest-performing students, while Class F contains students considered problematic, unstable, rebellious, or difficult to control.

The classes constantly compete against one another.

Academic examinations, athletic competitions, strategic tests, social challenges, psychological experiments, special examinations, and Phenomenon-related trials determine the ranking of each class.

The higher a class ranks, the more privileges, resources, and advantages its students receive.

Every class also has its own designated leader.

The leaders are not necessarily the strongest students. They are chosen according to intelligence, leadership, influence, psychological stability, strategic ability, and the potential of their Phenomena.

However, the class ranking is only one part of the experiment.

Behind the visible school system exists another ranking known only to the researchers.

Every student has a classified performance profile.

The government evaluates each subject individually, measuring intelligence, physical ability, emotional stability, social influence, adaptability, Phenome trol, aggression, morality, and psychological resistance.

The students think they are competing to become the best class.

The researchers are studying something much more important:

What kind of human being will each student become?

Deep beneath the school is the true heart of Project WHITE: a restricted research facility containing observation rooms, laboratories, medical facilities, servers, archives, recordings, and thousands of hours of data collected from generations of students.

The current generation is considered the most important experiment in the history of the project.

Some students have begun to notice strange inconsistencies.

Students who are supposedly "transferred" never return.

Teachers sometimes know things they should not know.

Certain areas of the campus are permanently restricted.

Old school records contain information that does not match the students' memories.

Some students seem to know far more about the school than they admit.

And somewhere inside the system are records of previous generations.

The truth is buried beneath the ordinary school life.

For now, however, Hoshikawa Academy remains a school.

Classes begin at 8:00 AM.

Students walk through the hallways.

Teachers give lessons.

Clubs meet after school.

Friends gather in the cafeteria.

Students visit the arcade.

Couples meet after classes.

The class rankings change.

The competition continues.

And behind the walls, hundreds of cameras continue watching.

Welcome to Hoshikawa Academy.

Welcome to Project WHITE.

You are not a student.

You are a subject.