The man fell into thought. He was now considering a very important question.
In this world... who exactly held the power to issue currency?
Yulia was determined to save money to buy Youji an adult cybernetic body, which showed that currency still existed in this era.
But after learning about the "Gene Tax," he found it deeply strange.
The Gene Tax was a levy the lords imposed on residents. Every year, they took a certain number of people from a settlement to replenish the Human Gene Bank and preserve humanity's genetic diversity. One of Youji's brothers had been taken away this way.
Other than that, the residents did not need to pay any additional taxes.
In other words, the "government"—whatever form of government it might be—did not need currency to carry out public construction or meet society's public needs.
So who issued currency in this era? What role did currency even play?
And what was the basis for the existence of this "Gene Bank"? Why had the lords created such a thing?
No one had ever answered those questions. Yulia worked all day and only stopped by Youji's little shack for a short while late at night. The last time she had come back was because she had heard that Youji had picked someone up. The man was embarrassed to disturb the hardworking woman's rest. As for everyone else, most of them just treated his questions as a joke and responded with baffled laughter.
Now, he could only discuss the matter with Youji when they went out scavenging.
"This is so hard, Yawg..." The boy leaned against a chair back covered in lead-green mold. He had just dragged the chair out of a garbage heap. During the Sublimation War, it might even have belonged to some high-ranking staff officer. "What could be above the lords... It really feels like nobody has ever brought up anything like that..."
"There must be ranks above the lords. Otherwise, they would have no reason to obey something called the 'Dyson Principles.'" The man pondered. "What exactly are the Dyson Principles? Who came up with them? Someone named Dyson?"
What did that person have to do with the true owner of the name 'Yawg'?
Youji shrugged. "I really don't know. It seems like the Dyson Principles just forbid us from killing people... that's all?"
"Primitive." The man, who had no lungs, used his vocalizer to imitate a sigh. In his memories, the name "Dyson" was more closely associated with an engineering concept called a "Dyson Sphere." At the very least, it should have had something to do with physics.
"Why not talk about the Paralympics instead?" Youji shook his head. "Yawg, have you remembered anything? You were an athlete, right?"
The Paralympics were the highest-level competition in this world. As the man understood it, they should have been called the "Disabled Olympic Games," with a corresponding event called the Olympic Games. But in his memories, the Paralympics had been far more advanced than the Olympic Games. The Olympic Games had extremely rigid rules. For one thing, they did not allow genetically engineered super racehorses in equestrian events, nor did they allow horses to use performance-enhancing drugs. In short, the competitive level was fairly ordinary.
After artificial Cybernetic Body Technology emerged, the Paralympics became a battlefield of gods. It could even be said that the Paralympics were the stage where nations and corporations displayed their technological prowess.
An Olympic Games athlete competing against a Paralympics athlete was like table tennis players from the rest of the world taking the stage against table tennis players from some table tennis empire.
And the day Paralympics records surpassed Olympic Games records was considered a turning point in human history.
For some reason, recalling all this gave the man a faint sense of pride.
Could I have been... the first disabled athlete in the world to surpass an able-bodied world record?
Youji, meanwhile, swore that he had never heard of any Olympic Games. There were only the Paralympics in this world—the Paralympic Games. It was the world's greatest competitive festival, where martial artists from dozens or even hundreds of different schools competed on the same stage.
And just as its name implied, the competition temporarily caused every defeated participant to lose some bodily function.
[Paralympics: a blend of "paralyze" and "Olympic."]
The subject had come up when the man asked Youji about "martial arts." According to Youji, all martial artists and athletes now made their names through the Paralympics, rising above ordinary people.
At least that news gave the man some comfort. It seemed he had been reborn with his stats reset, rather than transported to another world. This was, at least, the future of his own world rather than a parallel world.
Youji truly hoped the man had been an athlete. But the man always felt that he was not that sort of person. A voice in his mind was shouting, No—that's absolutely not real martial arts.
According to Youji's description, the Paralympics displayed only "Outer School martial arts." External martial arts could indeed be trained to an invincible level, but...
Practice martial arts without practicing Inner Power, and all your efforts will come to nothing.
That sentence drifted through the man's consciousness for no apparent reason.
Whenever he thought of it, he felt like laughing for some reason. One part of his mind told him that so-called "Inner Power" was a fictional concept from fantasy novels. But another part told him that someone had truly created "Inner Power." It was different from the Inner Power in literary works, but... but...
Whenever the man thought this far, he felt as though his artificial eyeballs had developed some sort of bug.
For no reason at all.
Yet that feeling also made the man suspect something.
Could the so-called "creator of Inner Power" have something to do with him?
Who exactly was I in the past?
The man could only sigh inwardly. Could he possibly have been the descendant of some great figure?
However, according to Youji, there was another kind of person in this world besides athletes who had mastered "martial arts."
They were called Vagrants, thugs who wielded force. They worshiped an evil god called Mozi, took an ancient thug named Aaron Swartz as their spiritual guide, disrupted peace, destroyed order, and were enemies of human civilization.
This is bad, the man thought. Going by the usual amnesia plot, it seems like... I might very well be this kind of dangerous person?
"Alright, we're rested." Youji drank most of the last bottle of Copper Sugar, then picked up the man's head, found a small hole in his upper jawbone, and poured the remaining little bit of Copper Sugar into it. Youji's body was less than fifty percent mechanized, mainly in his hands and feet, so he could still absorb and transport metal sugar through biological tissue. But the man could only eat this way now.
"Let's keep looking for parts! We'll try to make you a pair of feet this month!" Youji shouted cheerfully. His feelings toward the man were rather complicated. At first, he really had wanted a father. But for some reason, as they spent time together, he developed a faint sense of seeing the man as a pet.
The man nodded and followed after him. Secretly, he resolved to make himself a pair of feet as soon as possible, then leave Yulia and her son.
It was not because he was ungrateful, nor because he feared that fool Enoch. He had merely suddenly realized that his mysterious background might bring danger to Yulia and Youji.
He might very well be a Vagrant, and since Vagrants were called "enemies of human civilization," they presumably did not have a very good reputation with the authorities.
Still, no matter how urgent he was, collecting parts depended on luck.
More than ten days passed, and the man and Youji had only barely gathered a component for a control motherboard and two transmission bearings from large machinery. [These could be used to make the "leg bones" for the thighs.]
Fortunately, a person with a skill could survive anywhere. Before long, many people in town had seen the man replace parts on himself. Once word spread, people occasionally commissioned him to carry out simple repairs.
For some reason, the man's repair skills were truly excellent. Aside from the rare machines with damaged control chips, or machines that required more precision than his old cybernetic hands could provide, there was basically nothing he could not fix.
That earned him some money.
A month later, he had finally saved a little.
Yulia had once suggested saving that money. In her view, it should all go toward preparing Youji's adult cybernetic body. The man had been picked up by Youji from a garbage heap, so the money he earned naturally belonged to Youji. But Youji did not agree. He had already received payment while scavenging, so the money the man earned should belong to the man. He had nearly gotten into an argument with his mother over it.
Arguments with large engineering machinery usually ended disastrously—the speaker volume was truly loud, and it consumed power. The man stopped their quarrel and promised Yulia that once he had built his body, he would earn even more money to repay the debt of saving his life.
A few days later, the man was finally able to stand.
Youji had only one evaluation of the body: "So ugly."
The man now had a head, with a short section of cervical vertebrae beneath it, supported by a metal bracket. Below the silver bracket was a straight crossbeam. At either end of the crossbeam were cybernetic hands with sleek, graceful shells. Below the crossbeam was another vertical steel pillar, ending in two ball joints. Beneath those ball joints were thighs made from cut transmission shafts.
Simply put, the man's head looked like it belonged in a comedic cartoon, his hands looked like an elegant sketch, and the rest of his skeleton looked like a stick figure—with a realistically rendered battery hanging from it.
The mayor's assessment was, "Not practical." In his view, choosing solid steel pillars as material for the thighs was an enormous waste. It would consume vast amounts of energy while moving. And at the Achilles tendon area of the lower legs, the man had installed an inexplicable bracket as a structure for "supporting heavy objects." That was truly unqualified.
The man merely laughed. Or rather, he simulated a polite laugh.
The mayor did not understand this sort of "etiquette" and only found it strange. He patted the man on the shoulder and said, "Still, having hands and feet is good. The big shots collecting the Gene Tax will be here soon. If you had no hands or feet and looked all strange, you might attract their unnecessary interest. That wouldn't be good."
To the townspeople, those "big shots" held the power of life and death.