Automatic Scribe

"What... did you say?"

Stiyl looked at Zhang Qi, his voice carrying an uncontrollable tremor.

Touma Kamijou was stunned as well, his mind a complete mess.

"Let's go. This isn't the place to talk."

Zhang Qi offered no further explanation. He glanced toward the mouth of the alley, then turned and headed down the street toward his apartment. "Follow me. I'll prove it to you."

More than ten minutes later, in Zhang Qi's apartment living room.

Index was already fast asleep on the sofa, breathing steadily.

Kaori Kanzaki and Stiyl stood rigidly in the middle of the living room like two statues.

Ignoring their taut nerves, Zhang Qi carried a thick stack of printed A4 papers out from the study and placed them on the coffee table.

The headers bore titles in various languages, along with complex charts and diagrams.

"These are some cutting-edge papers on the mechanisms of human memory storage, information-processing capacity, and cognitive neuroscience."

Zhang Qi picked up the top document and began explaining.

"Simply put, the human brain can be roughly divided into long-term memory and short-term memory.

"Short-term memory, or working memory, does indeed have limited capacity.

"But long-term memory—especially semantic memory, meaning memory of facts, concepts, and knowledge—has an extraordinarily vast theoretical storage capacity, far beyond what we usually imagine.

"Even for someone with perfect recall, memorizing the contents of 103,000 books may sound unbelievable, but from a neurological perspective, that knowledge would not 'fill up' or 'crowd' the brain's memory space the way episodic memories of personal experiences would."

As he spoke, he flipped through the papers and pointed at several diagrams of brain structures and data models.

"Simply put, storing knowledge is more like forming new neural connections than writing files onto a hard drive.

"As long as the brain is