Why does FFVII Rebirth freeze at 92% loading with the AK500?

Every time I entered a new chapter, the progress bar would freeze at 92%, sometimes crashing to desktop, which made me incredibly anxious. I first tried updating all hardware drivers, but the loading time actually increased by 4 seconds, a futile effort that only added to my stress. I used the GamePP Resource Scheduler to set the game process priority to High and restricted background resource usage. Loading time dropped from 40s to 25s, and CPU temperatures remained stable at 68-74℃ per AIDA64, while voltage stayed at 1.1V-1.3V per HWiNFO64.