Solving the Mystery

But this time, as soon as Huang Si woke up, he saw the notes he had left on the table.

After reading them, recalling what had happened, opening the book to look at his imprint, and thinking it over, Huang Si quickly reached a conclusion:

He had lost his memory several times.

This was the third time since he had started keeping records, though in reality, he had no idea how many times it had happened.

He might be losing his memory repeatedly, which would explain why more than eight hours had vanished without a trace.

Huang Si felt a little frightened, but the situation also felt strangely familiar. It was so much like the famous movie Memento. The male lead in the film also suffered from short-term memory loss and couldn't remember recent events, leaving his sense of time in fragments.

But on closer thought, Huang Si felt that wasn't what was happening.

He wasn't ill, and he hadn't suddenly lost his memory. On the contrary, there had to be a pattern to these memory lapses. The answer lay in the notes he had made the second time.

"Find a way to create a second self in reality." The record stopped there.

The memory loss had to be connected to this.

Huang Si sensed the power inside him. Compared with when he had just finished eating at around one o'clock, it had increased by about thirty. Yes, it hadn't been used up at all. It had actually grown.

Wasn't that strange?

He had lost his memory, which meant his attempt to create a second self in reality had succeeded. But logically, such an act should have consumed a tremendous amount of power. Yet his power hadn't been depleted.

Then there was the fact that making a new imprint of himself didn't consume power, while recording any other object cost a significant amount.

Therefore, only two things didn't consume power: imprinting himself and creating himself.

That meant it had worked.

So why hadn't a second self appeared in reality, and why had he lost his memory?

Huang Si thought hard and eventually came up with a frightening possibility.

As the owner of the Creation Book, he might be unique, and its special privileges might be unique as well.

That would explain why he could make unlimited "backups" of himself without using any power, and restore himself at any time without using any power.

In other words, he could restore his entire self to the state he had been in when he made the backup at one o'clock.

Since he had restored a backup, just like restoring a saved file on a computer, everything he had experienced in the interim—and all the memories of it—would disappear without a trace.

But this theory needed to be tested.

Huang Si gritted his teeth and decided to take a risk.

First, he wrote down a complete and detailed explanation and record on paper. Then he went to the kitchen, took a small knife, and heated it over the gas stove to disinfect it. After gathering his courage, he cut his hand.

Blood ran from the wound.

Huang Si didn't staunch the bleeding. Instead, he connected his consciousness directly to the Creation Book and began creating himself in reality.

Several minutes later.

After reading all the notes he had left for himself, Huang Si was shocked—and his eyes shone with excitement.

He looked at his wrist. The skin there was smooth. There wasn't a single cut.

He wouldn't deceive himself. He was the only person in the room. More importantly, there was still a streak of blood on the blade in the kitchen.

The experiment had succeeded! He really could "rewind" himself!

Before he could celebrate, Huang Si thought of another question.

"But why has my power increased? If I was perfectly backed up and restored using my own power, then the version of me restored after nine o'clock should have had only as much power as I did at one, right?"

Huang Si found that, strangely enough, his power had recovered normally over time.

A little after one, he had just used up his power, so he'd had only about one or two points left.

Now, his power was around thirty-eight.

His power had indeed recovered at the normal rate. In other words, the power inside him was independent of his body's physical attributes.

After thinking for a moment, Huang Si decided to give this power inside him a good name.

"I'll call it Creation Power."

The Creation Book couldn't object, so Huang Si could call it whatever he wanted.

Actually, Huang Si thought that "creative power" or "productivity" might be better names, but he decided against them to avoid ambiguity in his records.

One thing was clear: Creation Power didn't follow the state of his body. His body had indeed been "rewound" to how it was around one o'clock. But since Creation Power's natural recovery was completely independent of his body, it had to be unrelated to his physical condition.

"Is Creation Power connected to the soul, or consciousness, or something like that?" Huang Si had his suspicions, but he wasn't familiar with souls and had no way to verify them.

However, this did prove that memory followed the body, not the soul.

So damage to the brain caused memory loss. Huang Si suddenly felt that all the novels about souls traveling to other worlds that he'd read before were so fake.

Huang Si closed the Creation Book and put it away.

Since rewinding came with the drawback of memory loss, he couldn't use it lightly.

Otherwise, every rewind would mean that all the time in between had been wasted. That was terrifying.

And setting that aside, the fact that his own ability had inexplicably tricked him out of nine hours was just too embarrassing.

Huang Si thought back over all the web novels he'd read. Seriously, he'd never seen an ability user as embarrassing as himself.

Afterward, Huang Si even checked his notebook to confirm that it had really been nine hours, from one to ten, and not something like nine o'clock the next morning.

From that day on, Huang Si began keeping a diary and making records.

He had a vague feeling that someday in the future, he might need to use this rewind function.

A few more days passed, and Huang Si finally completed a simple charging circuit.

First, he connected ten alkaline batteries in series. Then he hooked them up to an inverter circuit and connected a voltmeter he had made himself. Next, he stripped the wires from an outlet and connected them to the circuit. Done.

Whenever the alkaline batteries ran out, Huang Si could simply create ten more to replace them. Since the batteries were small, they didn't take much power to make.

Huang Si adjusted the circuit until the voltage stabilized at 220 volts. Then he found a desk lamp and plugged it into the outlet.

The lamp lit up, yellow light pouring from its shade. It was nowhere near as bright as the Creation Book, but the sudden glow moved Huang Si.

He had made electricity. Electricity was the firelight of modern civilization!

Next, Huang Si took a working phone charger and carefully plugged in his phone.

The phone stayed quiet for a while. Then, a tiny charging icon appeared on its black screen.

It worked!

Huang Si waited anxiously, his excitement mixed with nervousness. When the battery reached ten percent, he couldn't wait any longer and turned the phone on.

Seeing the familiar app icons made him incredibly happy, even though there was still no signal.

What could be more delightful than finally charging a phone after it had been dead for ages?

Clutching his phone, Huang Si felt as if he had come back to life. He was completely at ease.

He couldn't get online, but a charged phone was still a modern person's hope.

After charging his phone, Huang Si charged his laptop too. It still had thirty-five percent battery. He had planned to use it sparingly, but now he had managed to get ahead of schedule.

Throughout the entire charging process, Huang Si had to keep making batteries with Creation Power to replace the ones that ran out.

After a busy day, he finally finished charging both his phone and laptop late at night.

Then he lay on his bed and happily opened a movie on his laptop, enjoying his first dose of entertainment since arriving in this godforsaken place.

Over the next few days, life became much more varied now that he had electricity.

Huang Si made a detailed plan for his daily routine. This place had no medical system, saw no sunlight for most of the year, and offered no way to go outside, so it would be easy to develop physical or mental health problems.

For safety, he had the Creation Book light up promptly at six every morning and turn off at nine every night.

He also scheduled an hour of exercise each day. His routine included various bodyweight workouts in addition to the elliptical machine. He found the instructions in files he had saved on his computer.

There wasn't much he could do about eating healthily for now, but he found a bottle of multivitamins at home. He crushed the pills into powder, dissolved it in liquid, and spent several days working at it until he finally learned how to make them.

Huang Si wrote in his diary:

"August 3, 2019. I finished making multivitamin pills today, so I can finally supplement my nutrition. But I'm sick of pancakes, dough drops, and pasta. I still can't make potatoes or ham. The structure of living things is far too complicated. A single cell is as complex as a large machine. However, my Creation Power limit increased again today. It should be 197 points now."

Early on, Huang Si had realized that he could slowly raise his Creation Power limit by using it repeatedly.

And it wasn't only his Creation Power limit that had increased. He had become more adept at using his power, with greater precision, and making complex objects cost him less power.

His consciousness also seemed to have grown stronger. For example, he could now switch between the microscopic and macroscopic states faster, and his ability to analyze and memorize the structures of objects had improved.

By now, he had analyzed everything in the house that he could and made backups of some everyday items.

Toilet paper, for example. That was important. If he ran out, he wouldn't be able to use the toilet.

There was also soap, seasonings, paper, pens, and other simple items. Huang Si had analyzed and recorded them all, so he could make replacements whenever he needed them.

Halfway through writing his diary, Huang Si glanced down at his phone charging beside him and noticed that the charging indicator wasn't lit.

When he looked up, sure enough, the LED on the charging circuit had gone out too. The batteries must have run out.

Huang Si sighed. Charging with batteries was such a hassle. He got up and went over to the battery pack, removed the batteries one by one, and waved his hand. Two new batteries appeared in the empty slots, fitting snugly into place.

"Controlling the positions of two things at once is no problem anymore. Let's try three," Huang Si muttered. His consciousness locked onto three battery slots at once. He split his Creation Power into three modest streams, then concentrated them simultaneously.

"Click." "Pop."

Three new batteries appeared at the same time, but two were slightly out of position. Luckily, the springs in the battery compartment were elastic, and immediately pushed them back into place.

"I can still improve my precision," Huang Si thought. He gathered his power again and made three more batteries.

This time, they were a little better. Only one battery was out of place.

He made two more, and all ten batteries were back in position. Huang Si switched on the circuit, and a ding came from the phone as it began charging again.