Imprinting

If I remembered correctly, direct current and alternating current could be converted into each other, right?

After thinking it over, Huang Si crossed out the idea of boiling water with gas to make steam for a generator. It would increase the carbon dioxide indoors, and he still had no idea what to do if there was too much carbon dioxide.

In the end, Huang Si decided on a few entries to look up:

Batteries, solar cells, ways to convert direct current to alternating current, and charger circuit design.

Huang Si started searching the house for batteries.

After rummaging around, he dug several half-used AAA batteries out of a few remote controls.

Then he found several dead batteries in a drawer.

Huang Si rubbed his forehead. Why hadn't he thought to buy a few extra batteries to keep at home? He always waited until the remote or wall clock ran out of power before buying batteries at the supermarket. So there weren't any unused batteries in the house.

Still, at least they could serve as references.

Huang Si tried using his microscopic vision on the batteries and found it was useless against something as densely structured as a battery. He could see the molecules in the coating on the surface, but when he tried to look farther inside, something blocked his view.

The battery's outermost layer was tin, followed by plastic wrapping, with paint on top of the plastic.

Huang Si simply peeled off the troublesome plastic, leaving only the shiny tin casing.

But the tin's structure was even more tightly packed. In the microscopic world, Huang Si saw sheets of dark gray tin atoms. There were a few defects, but overall they were arranged in an orderly pattern and held together firmly.

He tested them with his power. He could wrap it around individual tin atoms and copy them with ease. He could even record that arrangement in the Creation Book and then make an identical tin casing.

But his consciousness couldn't pass through the tin and enter the battery.

This power seemed to be capable of creation and nothing else. Huang Si had no choice but to fetch a knife from the kitchen and cut the battery open lengthwise.

Inside the battery were a lot of black powder and a black rod. What was this stuff?

Huang Si tried to recall his middle school physics lessons. The rod was probably graphite, but what was the difference between the powder and the rod? And he had no idea how batteries supplied power, either.

Huang Si wrote all of this down in his notes. After finishing his experiment notes, he took apart an alkaline battery as well, but it still didn't make any sense to him.

Well, time to use the laptop!

Huang Si quickly powered it up and opened the database without hesitation. He searched for battery-related entries as fast as he could, then immediately jotted down some key information.

Only then did he realize he'd been completely wrong. The dark gray atoms in the battery casing were probably zinc, while the positive terminal was copper. The black rod inside was a graphite rod, and the black powder was a mixture of manganese dioxide, carbon powder, and ammonium chloride.

While he was at it, he looked up the key information on alkaline batteries and solar cells, then wrote down the most important points.

Before shutting down, Huang Si glanced at the bottom-right corner. Eighty-nine percent battery. Not bad.

After sleeping and recovering some of his power, Huang Si ate some fried dough slices the next morning and resumed studying batteries. Unfortunately, his phone's battery wasn't designed to be taken apart, and he only had one. Otherwise, he would have liked to dismantle it and take a look.

After tinkering all day, Huang Si finally made a real carbon-zinc battery by evening.

He referred to the differences between dead and half-charged batteries. After several failed attempts and many retries, he finally produced a fully charged battery.

The Creation Book also recorded the structures of zinc, carbon powder, graphite, copper, manganese dioxide, ammonium chloride, and carbon-zinc batteries.

The carbon-zinc battery was divided into three versions: dead, half-charged, and fully charged.

Huang Si had chosen what to record himself. In theory, he could record countless versions if he wanted to, but there was no need.

Next, Huang Si took apart a phone charger. He had several of them, anyway. He wanted to see how the charger's circuit was structured.

Over the next few days, Huang Si cooked first thing each day, then tinkered with batteries, read while waiting for his power to recover, and exercised to keep fit.

In fact, by the third day, he had already made both alkaline and carbon-zinc batteries by following the diagrams. The house already had both types, so copying them wasn't difficult.

But looking at the pile of crooked, ruined batteries, Huang Si wondered what he should do with all the trash. His creative power couldn't break things down and reuse them.

After thinking it over, he simply opened the window and threw all the junk batteries out.

In a place like this, where there was nothing but empty space, there was no need to worry about public decency. There was no public here, only private.

Next came the construction of an inverter circuit. He wanted to convert direct current to alternating current and try charging his phone.

By then, his phone had long since run out of power. Huang Si first analyzed the structure of various kinds of wires and recorded each one. Then he analyzed the charger's structure, before using up some of his precious laptop time to look up inverter circuit designs.

Fortunately, Huang Si had graduated with a degree in computer science and knew his way around circuits. He spent a day designing and building a battery-powered circuit, then another day making a very crude voltage conversion device.

But that wasn't enough. He also needed a voltmeter to keep the voltage steady at the household standard of 220 volts.

A voltmeter was difficult to make, mainly because he had no comparable device on hand to use as a reference.

He took apart the entire circuit in the distribution box by his front door and examined it very carefully.

Then he searched the house for a long time, looking for a few special metal atoms.

During all this, something happened that Huang Si had never expected.

That day, he had just used up all his power and finished eating. For the moment, he didn't feel like exercising or reading, so he held the Creation Book and curled up on the sofa.

Huang Si could truly feel how much he loved the book from the bottom of his heart. He had felt that way even before he found it.

Thinking back, no one had called out to him on his way home from work that day. They hadn't even called his name. He had simply sensed the book calling to him.

Huang Si held the book in his arms. It was big, larger and thicker than an encyclopedia, but it didn't feel heavy to hold.

After so many days of practice, the Creation Book and the creative power it had given Huang Si felt like parts of him.

Using the book and his power came naturally now. He didn't even need to concentrate. He could do it with a mere thought.

Huang Si looked at his book, and a thought suddenly occurred to him.

He had never examined the structure of the book itself.

Should he take a look?

Acting as soon as he had an idea had always been one of Huang Si's strengths. He held the book close, focused his consciousness on it, and tried to enter the microscopic view.

The world rushed backward around him. Huang Si's vision blurred, and then his perspective changed.

He saw two arms in front of him. Beyond them was the room, but the book was missing from the scene, and the view seemed to be the reverse of what he'd just been seeing.

What was going on???

Huang Si jolted in alarm. Only then did he realize that he was no longer himself. He had become the book. The book was his body, and he was being held in his own arms, looking out through the eyes of the book in his embrace.

Could he go back?

The instant the thought crossed his mind, his perspective changed. Still shaken, Huang Si looked around and saw that he was back in his own body.

That was terrifying.

A disembodied soul experience?

No, had he switched bodies?

Huang Si thought, Good thing the book isn't conscious. If we'd really swapped souls and couldn't switch back, it wouldn't be anything like a funny comedy movie. This is about whether I can keep being human!

Though the book seemed supernatural, Huang Si didn't want to be a book. He still wanted to be human.

Suddenly, Huang Si felt something new inside the book. He quickly flipped it open.

To Huang Si, the book didn't just feel close to him. It felt like a part of himself. Recording things and sensing changes in it both came as naturally as feeling his own hands and feet.

The Creation Book opened to the second page. Nothing had changed; it still contained the same things as before.

He turned to the third page, and then he was completely stunned.

The third page was densely covered in countless diagrams and symbols. Even more amazingly, though they looked harder to understand than any esoteric text, Huang Si understood them at a glance.

He quickly flipped forward another page.

He turned pages two, three, four... all the way to page 104 before he reached the end of the diagrams.

He didn't close the book. Instead, he looked through all the pages covered in diagrams and symbols again.

Huang Si understood that this imprint was himself—his own structure.

Its complexity far exceeded that of anything he could make.

It seemed that when his consciousness had accidentally transferred to the book just now, his own structure had been "imprinted" onto its pages.

Ordinarily, recording such a complex pattern would consume a terrifying amount of power.

But Huang Si checked inside himself and found that he hadn't used up any power at all.

This definitely wasn't ordinary recording.

Huang Si tried placing other objects on the Creation Book, from potatoes to ham to batteries. None of them were automatically imprinted on the pages.

It seemed only his own imprint was special.

Could this be a privilege granted to the book's owner?

Huang Si didn't know, but a possibility suddenly occurred to him. If he could be recorded in the Creation Book, did that mean he could create another version of himself?

At the thought, Huang Si shook his head and dismissed the idea.

Never mind how creepy it would feel to make a second version of himself. The power it would consume would probably be so enormous that he couldn't afford it anyway.

Huang Si had long since realized that the size of the patterns recorded in the Creation Book usually depended on the complexity of the material, and the power needed to create it was proportional to that complexity.

For instance, creating a whole bucket of water took one unit of power, a bucket of flour took three, and a bucket of batteries took twenty-five.

The ratio between the patterns for batteries and water molecules in the book was also around one to twenty.

Given how complex the structure of a battery was, a little extra was only natural. Huang Si thought that he might be wasting power when making overly complex things. If he learned to control his power more precisely, he might be able to improve.

But after recording more than twenty different materials over the past few days, he hadn't even filled a single page of the Creation Book.

Yet he alone had taken up more than a hundred pages...

It was hard for Huang Si to believe.

So creating a second version of himself was out of the question. He'd never be able to do it in this lifetime.