A Chip Suppresses the Mind; From Here On, My Fate Is No Longer Mine

Xiang Shan nodded at the results of his labor and solemnly said to Youji, "Disciple, remember this. ☠🐲  💝🐻 This chip may be what sets you apart from ordinary people... If, and I mean if, you ever become separated from me and someone wants to inspect your driver chip, then you would rather format this chip than let them catch you with it. Understand?"

Youji nodded, seeming to understand only vaguely. "Is it that serious?"

"If they find this, they will immediately think that you might be someone who... voluntarily gave up protection." Xiang Shan patted Youji on the head. "If one day you no longer want to keep following me, I will help you reset the chip as well. It will all be your choice."

Youji asked in confusion, "Master, does this chip hold some great secret?"

"Now is not the time to tell you." Xiang Shan shook his head. "Only when you truly set foot on the path of chivalry with me will I tell you."

—Otherwise, you would have no choice but to live the rest of your life in fear.

While Youji worked on his exercises, Xiang Shan not only completed the rewrite of the terminal system, but also worked overtime to prioritize the construction of a firewall.

To Cyber Inner Power, a "firewall" was what the "Dantian" was to Inner Power in wuxia novels: the origin of all internal force. And a knight's degree of control over computers represented the realm of his Inner Power.

Xiang Shan could not remember what realm his Inner Power had reached in the past, but he knew it had probably not been low.

The only problem was that he currently had no chip capable of unleashing such powerful Inner Power.

"Master, did the mayor tell you anything?" Perhaps bored from sitting around for too long, Youji started a conversation.

Xiang Shan opened his eyes and nodded. "Something might happen in about half a month."

He had to regain at least a little combat capability before then.

"You mean... after the welfare officer arrives?" Youji quickly understood, and he could not help growing nervous. "The mayor doesn't mean that we might really have our protection revoked, does he?"

Xiang Shan shook his head. That was truly hard to say.

The biological parts of Youji's body trembled slightly.

"What would you want to do if that happened?" Xiang Shan asked.

Youji thought for a moment. "Master, you're a knight, right?"

Xiang Shan looked at Youji. "And?"

Because surveillance might be present, he did not answer directly.

"Then we can go into the wilderness... You can take me and Mom with you!" There was a trace of pleading in Youji's voice. "A knight must know how to survive in the wilderness and avoid ordinary bandits!"

Xiang Shan considered it for a moment. "Hmm. That may not be a bad idea. If I can organize the relevant knowledge within these next two weeks, I'll make a copy for you."

"Master?" Youji was somewhat confused.

"If you find it frightening, then hiding really is an option. 😝🍬 ６❾ѕнⓊⓍ.ⓒỖм ✎♩" Xiang Shan nodded. "That would be a very wise decision."

"Then what about you, Master..."

"If I just leave..." Xiang Shan hesitated. "I don't know why, either. I know that leaving might be the safest approach. But my instincts tell me that if I do nothing and simply leave now, then I wouldn't be myself."

Xiang Shan did not remember who he had been, nor did he remember how strong he had once been. Now, all he had left was a brain and the shoddiest prosthetic body. Facing an enemy of unknown strength, running away might have been the right choice.

But...

—Martial arts were created for situations like this...

—This was a technique that could reverse the balance between strength and weakness in an instant, even if only one person remained... even when facing unknown power...

—That was its underlying design. It was a technique created to resist the violence of the strong.

It was a technique meant to protect the weak.

That was what his heart told him.

Before long, Xiang Shan completed the reconstruction of Will's prosthetic driver chip.

He handed the chip to Youji and calmly said, "Youji, help me connect this chip to my biological brain."

Only after installing this chip could he truly become a knight again.

Become his former self once more.

Youji was somewhat nervous.

Very soon, an air that could only be described as "a god descending into one's body" appeared around Xiang Shan.

Xiang Shan had always said that computers were merely tools, that nothing computers could do had ever exceeded the scope of human capability.

But people created tools precisely because an increase in efficiency could itself count as a qualitative change.

What Xiang Shan had described—from the Turing Machine, to things beyond the Turing Machine, to beyond the human brain—was a leap on another level entirely. It could be called the process from human to god.

For example, an ordinary iron shovel was only slightly more efficient than human hands at digging. But when that increase in efficiency acted upon civilization, it almost divided civilizations into distinct tiers—the widespread use of iron farming tools had been a momentous milestone in every civilization.

Not to mention that transferring the damage that human palms should have suffered onto metal tools that were not part of one's own body was itself a form of liberation for humanity.

Computers were the same. They merely replaced humans using pen and paper for calculations, but humanity shifted the burden of calculation from the human brain onto energy—from the chemical energy of the body, to sunlight stored by plants hundreds of millions of years ago, to the force of water driven by planetary gravity, to the power released by stellar fusion.

A calculation a computer completed in one second might take a human using pen and paper a day, a month, or even a year.

After Will's driver chip was implanted, Xiang Shan's work efficiency finally improved.

He could construct more detailed blueprints in his mind and store them directly in the chip. He could consume electricity and call upon computing resources to calculate more precise parameters.

Over the following days, Xiang Shan explained the meaning behind his recent actions to his disciple while reconstructing his prosthetic body.

Time was tight. He had to finish his new prosthetic body before the welfare officer made the announcement.

On the third day, he instructed Youji to deliver a set of parameters to the mayor.

Then, on the fifth day, the mayor sent some things over.

Among them was an external armor shell. Its outer casing closely resembled the natural shape of a human torso. It was over an inch thick and weighed more than a hundred pounds. There was also a layer of support frame. These braces could hold up the external armor so it would not hinder his movements.

This sort of external armor was not the type martial artists commonly used. It greatly restricted the torso's movement. But Xiang Shan still had no movable spine, and his torso could not move anyway. The power components salvaged from the canine prosthetic body were enough to support such external armor. That was why he chose this design.

Also delivered were two brand-new alloy leg bones.

What needed to be reconstructed next was the topology of the artificial muscles.

Naturally, these artificial muscles did not resemble muscle groups in their natural state. Body structures produced by natural evolution contained far too many irrational flaws that merely amounted to "good enough." For example, the extremely haphazard neural networks of Cambrian Period organisms were often radially symmetrical or even asymmetrical, utterly unlike the obedient bilateral neural networks of modern animals that had been battered into shape by natural selection.

From the early stages of biological evolution onward, this greatly limited the intellectual development of most species.

The ancestors of vertebrates had once, due to competition for ecological niches, lost the nervous system inherited from even older ancestors of the Cambrian Explosion, leaving behind only one great nerve in the tail. Yet when environmental changes later forced these creatures with only one main nerve to occupy other ecological niches, that single main nerve evolved into a brand-new nervous system capable of adapting to axial symmetry.

That was the "spine."

But stories of "destroying the old before establishing the new" were exceedingly rare in evolutionary history. Most of the time, biological evolution followed the trend that once something had degenerated, it would not evolve again.

Of course, a species would not easily lose any function. If a trait did not affect an individual's ability to survive until "the age when it could have children," then that trait would not be eliminated—in simple terms, evolution could never help humanity overcome diseases of old age, because old-age diseases did not affect reproduction. In natural conditions, organisms could barely survive into old age anyway.

Thus, vast numbers of "evolutionary remnants," or "historical problems," that were actually useless but did no harm during youth accumulated within living bodies.

Perhaps, when the environment changed again, they could serve as biological evolution's margin for error and become useful once more.

Under the premise of "not knowing what the future might bring," this was also a relatively reasonable strategy.

But artificial prosthetic bodies were not designed to deal with "an unknown future." They were designed for "a clear purpose."

From the standpoint of efficiency, having artificial prosthetic bodies completely imitate natural bodies full of redundant structures was exceedingly foolish.

The muscles of this canine prosthetic body could exert force more easily than natural muscles, and they were more compatible with the new variations of the Bionic Fist Technique.

But this was not the martial art Xiang Shan knew.

He needed to make use of these existing muscle fibers, connect them to discharge units and the new leg bones, design the connections between the muscle fibers, and create a prosthetic body suited to himself.

"There's nothing difficult about it," Xiang Shan told himself. "It's just a problem in topological geometry, that's all."

All right, he had to admit that this was actually the hardest part.

It involved the positions and layout of millions of artificial muscle fibers, discharge units, and circuits.

And after the calculations were complete, he still faced other challenges.

Lacking professional repair equipment, he and his disciple could only assemble everything by hand.

The only fortunate thing was that the artificial muscle fibers themselves were replaceable parts. Under intense movement, these artificial muscle fibers could overheat, age, and break. These artificial creations had no ability to repair themselves. They had to be replaced.

All the muscle fibers came in only three standardized sizes.

As long as the ends of those muscle fibers were brought close to the discharge units, the units could release electromagnetic force and connect the ends of the fibers to the correct circuits.

It truly was an excellent design.

At the very least, Xiang Shan felt that such convenient designs had not been so common in the era he knew.

Very soon, the two legs gradually took shape.

During this process, Xiang Shan also rebuilt the framework of his body. He still had no spine to serve as a central axis, so he needed to spend more space laying down control circuits. In addition, he had to consider the body's heat dissipation.

But no matter what, he installed both the heat engine and battery removed from Will into his own chest.

At the same time, Xiang Shan did not waste the remaining parts from Will's body. He gradually replaced the aged components in his prosthetic hands and further optimized them.

—That said, the upper limit of these hands' precision was simply too low.

These hands were truly old relics. They probably had not even been new when Youji's grandmother used them.

No amount of patching and repair could turn these things into prosthetic limbs suitable for combat.

—I need to find a better pair of prosthetic hands somehow.

Xiang Shan added this to his plan. While Xiang Shan worked day and night to build himself a new prosthetic body, Scrapheap Town did not remain idle either.

On the third day after the mayor spoke with Xiang Shan, Enoch returned with one wheel limping along. Since he had nowhere to replace the blown tire, he had practically inched his way back.

Naturally, this caused a huge uproar.

According to Enoch, unknown bandits had approached him and questioned him about "Shan" and a "martial artist prosthetic body." During that encounter, Vili had also been killed by the bandits.

"It was that prosthetic body!" Enoch insisted. "It's because he didn't sell that prosthetic body... We may have been targeted!"

"What kind of nonsense is that, Enoch?" The mayor merely rebuked him. "If not for Shan, we might not even have been able to pay a single tax!"

"If he hadn't meddled, maybe there wouldn't have been trouble in the first place," someone in the crowd said timidly.

"Nonsense!" The mayor pulled out his inherited automatic rifle and fired a shot into the sky. "Is now the time to be saying that?"

Most humans did not deliberately pursue high modification rates. Cyberized people with low modification rates would still suffer severe injuries when hit by firearms, and could even bleed to death. Heavy machinery like Enoch could likewise be killed if its biological brain was hit directly.

However, many martial artists had experience confronting firearms head-on—among Outer-School Martial Arts, there was also the Gunfire Way, which specifically emphasized wielding thermal weapons. Martial artists had to consider situations where they would clash directly with firearms.

That was why the mayor had not intended to fight Will Grand Dog himself back then. The reaction speed and survivability granted by cybernetic prosthetics could contend with conventional firearms.

—No, first came cyber martial arts for fighting thermal weapons, and only afterward came cyber martial arts for using thermal weapons.

"Now is not the time to say such things!" the mayor shouted. "We have to find a way to save ourselves!"

Although lords were obligated to kill bandits who harmed protected people, they had great discretion regarding when to kill them.

Therefore, when a lord believed that the cost of killing a bandit far outweighed the benefits, he would cease pursuing that bandit.

The same applied to bounty hunters.

And it also applied to the bandits themselves.

If a settlement whose protection had temporarily been revoked possessed sufficient defensive strength, the bandits might not attack it.

Now, they had to organize a self-defense force.

"They only came for a martial artist prosthetic body. They can't be a very powerful bandit organization!" the mayor shouted. "Large bandit organizations have many powerful martial artists too! One prosthetic body is not enough to draw them here, so as long as we unite, we have a chance to weather this crisis!"