"I have a not-so-mature idea..."
"I have another not-so-mature idea..."
"I have yet another not-so-mature idea..."
"I always have not-so-mature ideas..."
Who would have thought that even after uploading myself into the network, I still could not escape Qian Qian's curse of "not-so-mature ideas"? Half of this invalid data cleared out of the Database had something to do with Qian Qian: spur-of-the-moment plans, wildly impractical designs, short-term goals that could not possibly be achieved... Because of Qian Qian's status as a high-level node, and because she was connected to the Empire's data network twenty-four hours a day, whenever she came up with one of these ideas and actually intended to put it into action—which, for Qian Qian, was practically a hundred percent of the time—the Empire's data network temporarily stored it as a top-priority directive. But most of that information became invalid within twenty-four hours: some because Qian Qian suddenly lost interest, and some because Older Sister or I talked her out of them with desperate remonstrance.
The result was that every Database self-maintenance cycle produced piles of such fragments. They became Hilling's favorite little collectibles, and Qian Qian and Hilling had formed a subtle supply-and-sales system...
I studied the orange-red cubes drifting down from the sky, but had no time to read them one by one. A few minutes after touching the ground, the cubes began to dissipate. Just as Hilling had said, the colorful falling blossoms of this network world were only a fleeting beauty.
"Those two Databases up there must be specifically responsible for temporarily storing High-Level Node Instructions." I looked up. Without that explanation, it was hard to understand why Qian Qian's mental pollution—I actually had to use that term to describe the Girl's ideas!—was so concentrated in this area, unless her thoughts had already gone