Change! Change! Change!

Mo Fei's target was those streams of light. The spot he'd been in just now had too few passing through, and he didn't want to keep waiting. He swung his arms, intercepting them, but the streams were too fast—his paddling couldn't keep up. After missing several times, he started observing.

Wherever the streams were densest, he went. Then he adjusted his position up, down, left, and right, getting ahead of them to block their paths. These streams never changed direction; they slammed straight into him, and Mo Fei absorbed a flood of information.

"A table?" The first stream he intercepted this time was a form, still in English, but Mo Fei understood it completely. It was a quarterly financial report for an import-export company, listing imported and exported items, prices, margins—everything in painstaking detail.

Though puzzled, Mo Fei didn't care about the report's specifics. He hurriedly grew himself a pair of legs. This time, it worked in one go—both legs sprouted at once?

"Huh? One stream did it all. So they're different after all. What do I need next?" Mo Fei used his bizarre hands to feel his body, trying to look down. "No head?"

Mo Fei startled again, but quickly calmed down. He knew his current state was strange—no sensation, no mouth, and now no head, let alone a nose or ears. He had no choice but to keep catching streams.

"This time, I hope you can support my Senate campaign. I need funds, and the returns will be generous if I win!" Mo Fei had no interest in the deal. He focused on growing a head, and sure enough, his body changed, his vision shifted. But if he had no head, how could he still see the streams?

Mo Fei had some guesses about his situation, but the priority was to make himself human-shaped—or at least look like a 'person.' It was an instinctive stubbornness. After all, he definitely wasn't human now. No sensation, none at all. But he had emotions and thoughts. That was the best news so far—emotions and thoughts at least proved he still had 'human' traits. Now, he'd make himself whole, then figure out where he was and what kind of 'thing' he'd become.

Intercepting streams was now smooth. With legs, Mo Fei was stunned to find his speed incredible—'fast' didn't even cover it. One step took him wherever he wanted, almost like teleportation. He got excited, but then realized his body wasn't human. His legs and feet were angular, and after growing a head, it seemed to have no mouth.

He had to keep intercepting, imagining each facial feature, then checking his whole body. Everything was basically there, but below was empty. He thought about it and decided not to grow a 'third leg.' "In my current state, I probably won't need it." He sighed at the absurdity, then started organizing his thoughts.

"First, something definitely happened to me. My last memory is typing, too focused. Then what?" Mo Fei tried hard to recall—his first real effort since waking up, wanting to know what happened. Then something astonishing occurred: a panel appeared in his mind, or his thoughts, covered in dense folders. Mo Fei froze.

He opened one. "This is when I was born—a hospital delivery room?" The moment he opened the first folder, he saw the scene of his own birth. How did he know it was his birth? Because he saw his mother's younger face, exhausted but smiling, reaching out to him.

A wave of grief hit him. Mo Fei wanted to cry, but found he couldn't—only the emotion, with no body to express it.

He quickly closed the first folder, then opened the others one by one. Each folder held a year of his memories—thirty years total. His final death was clear too. The folders after that contained every book, movie, and TV show he'd ever seen, neatly categorized. His earlier memories had those too, but these were fully sorted.

"What have I become? Am I a set of computer data?" Mo Fei looked around again. "Are these streams data too? Can I use them to strengthen myself?" He knew how he died, and given his bizarre situation, he had a guess. "Like in novels—I've entered a virtual world, and I can grow with other data?"

The thought made him a little excited. "Am I an artificial intelligence system now?" It was unbelievable. He wrote novels himself, and the most common genre now was transmigration—endless varieties.

Time travel, space travel, gender-bending, turning into cats and dogs—countless. Mo Fei didn't know if he'd transmigrated, but he was almost sure he was a set of data. Whether he'd transmigrated or become an AI was still unclear.

"Let me try again—can I make this body look more human?" He wanted to test his abilities, so he kept absorbing streams. The only thing he was sure of was that absorbing them strengthened him.

After absorbing a dozen streams, Mo Fei raised his left hand, extended his middle finger, and stared at it. He imagined a normal human middle finger. The tip was square at first, then started rounding. Mo Fei shouted in surprise, but no sound came out. Then, his left middle finger suddenly collapsed into sparkling dots and vanished. Mo Fei froze, quickly imagined the finger back, and it grew again—square as before.

This time, he focused hard, not daring to slip. The middle finger began to round, then collapsed again. "Is it not what I thought? Am I not an intelligent system? Or... wait, no! If I were an intelligent system, what I know wouldn't match up. In this virtual world, I'm like a newborn baby. A system needs tons of data—especially an intelligent one, not just logic programs but vast knowledge. Is my knowledge base too shallow?"

He reached this conclusion from the finger's collapse. If he were a set of data or a system, and his finger collapsed, that had to be a system crash, right?