Youji sat rather stiffly in front of Xiang Shan. For some reason, he felt that the "Yawg" before him seemed different.
Humans were born knowing how to convey their feelings through means other than declarative language. It was like a natural compiler. People could transform their emotions into a cipher conveyed through body language, expressions, demeanor, and tone, while the means to decipher that cipher also existed within the human brain.
And from all sorts of details about "Yawg," Youji had deciphered precisely that message—he was different.
Youji himself did not realize he had gone through this decoding process. He merely felt uneasy. His room looked as though it had been swept by a storm, a complete mess. Various parts had been roughly pulled out, and the dog lay on his only table, its chest and the back of its head opened up.
"Sorry, kid." Xiang Shan scratched his head. "I lost control of my emotions a little just now... I made quite a mess here."
He currently had a kettle lid on top of his head. Cyborg heads did not need additional structures such as airways or esophagi, so the Biological Brain sat lower than that of a natural human, leaving room in the skull for electronic components. But Xiang Shan had lost all his electronic equipment. Aside from the Biological Brain, his cranial cavity was empty, and the brain-machine interface was directly exposed.
He was rather afraid that static electricity would cause dust to get in.
Looking at the head topped with a kettle lid, Youji simply could not stay serious.
"Did you remember something, Yawg?" Youji asked.
Xiang Shan nodded.
He hesitated. Youji was a cyborg, which meant that his memories might not belong solely to him—Xiang Shan did not know what augmentation surgery was like in this era, or whether it left surveillance backdoors in the brain.
He also did not know what position his enemy held in this world, or whether speaking his own name might bring danger.
After a long while, he finally said, "Youji, I'm going to tell you some things. You absolutely cannot tell anyone else about them, or they may very well bring danger to you and your mother. Do you understand? Of course, you can choose not to listen. I won't force you..."
A nervous expression appeared on Youji's face. But it was quickly overwhelmed by excitement. "You remembered, right? You used to be an important person, right? And you have really formidable enemies..."
Xiang Shan sighed and pressed a hand on Youji's head. After spending several months together, he had learned that this boy had always possessed far too much curiosity. His expression turned serious. "If you really want to hear it, then you have to swear that you won't tell anyone what I'm about to tell you. Can you do that?"
"I can!" Youji nodded excitedly.
Xiang Shan sighed. At this point, he had no one else he could trust. If he wanted information, he could only start with this boy.
Xiang Shan said, "Youji, have you ever heard the name 'Xiang Shan'?"
"'Xiang Shan'... So your name is 'Shan'?" The boy was thrilled. "'Xiang Shan' sounds so imposing!"
Xiang Shan was a little dumbfounded. His grandfather had given him that name, and it held no particularly special meaning. But in his era, that name should have made everyone gasp in awe...
My name has vanished?
That enormous historical event has now disappeared from humanity's awareness? The event that changed the entire course of Earth's evolutionary history...
How long was I asleep?
Xiang Shan gripped Youji's shoulders. "You really can't remember anything? About this name? Or names with similar pronunciations—do you know anything related to this name? Titles like 'Xiang Shan Nan Yue' or 'Mountain-Shaking Blade'?"
Youji shook his head.
Xiang Shan collapsed onto Youji's bed. For some reason, Youji felt that Xiang Shan had suddenly become terribly dejected.
"Xiang Shan, were you really famous before?" Youji asked curiously. "Not hearing of you was that big a blow?"
Xiang Shan nodded. "I really was quite famous before... Maybe everyone in the world knew my name?"
"Hah, boasting about 'the whole world'?" Youji laughed without much sympathy. "It's not like you were a Paralympics champion! Why don't you tell me what great things you did before?"
Xiang Shan held his head. "I still can't remember."
Although he had recalled his own name and some other things, he still could not remember the things he had actually experienced.
Xiang Shan roughly knew why. In pursuit of the pinnacle of martial arts... in pursuit of the limits of Biological Brain performance, he had transferred all declarative memories that could be losslessly converted into machine language into external information storage devices. Only non-declarative memories that could not be precisely converted, along with pure knowledge, remained in his brain.
He had lost too much.
Even if the memories in his Biological Brain could still be reawakened, the physically vanished information storage devices could never be recovered.
Now, all he could remember were his own name, his enemy's name, and every other sort of technical information.
Xiang Shan looked somewhat lost. "Hey, Youji, if none of you remember 'Xiang Shan' anymore... then what about the name 'Yogmov Voigt'?"
Youji drove his memory hard drive at full speed, searching for the term, but still found nothing. He shook his head and looked at Xiang Shan with concern.
"How strange. No one remembers my name anymore, but as the 'victor,' it's impossible that everyone forgot him too, right?" Xiang Shan looked bewildered. "Could it be that I wasn't asleep for decades, but for thousands of years?"
Youji burst out laughing. "Xiang Shan, are you stupid? Even a fully augmented brain can't have its brain cells hibernate for decades without nutrients. You were thrown in there at most five or six years ago!"
At that, the little boy stopped laughing. "Then your relatives and friends might still be alive! Now that you've recovered your memories, maybe you can..."
"I can't remember what they looked like at all..." Xiang Shan shook his head, looking lost. "I don't even remember who they were."
He sank into confusion once more.
"Hey, Youji, what year is it?"
"What year... You mean that thing..." Youji thought for a moment. "The year 209?"
"209 AD?" Xiang Shan froze. "AD?"
"What's AD?" Youji shook his head. "The things you say are all so strange."
"Youji, do you know what major historical event happened in Year 1—or rather, Year 001?"
The boy shook his head. "I only remember that in Year 03, there was a historical event called the Sublimation War..."
"Sublimation... War..."
He had absolutely no impression of the term.
Humanity had completely forgotten the AD calendar and adopted an entirely new system of dating. Had he been asleep for 209 years? No, that was far too absurd. His brain cells could never have lasted 209 years without taking in any matter at all.
Or was the first year of this "new era" actually within his own time period, with later generations redefining the era based on a historical event he knew?
For example, perhaps people now called "World War II" the "Sublimation War"...
Hah... How could that be possible...
Xiang Shan laughed at his own thought.
That feeling of having a bug in his prosthetic eyes returned.
Really, judging by the landfill that Scrapheap Town depended on for survival, the Sublimation War had to have happened at least in the Information Age.
Xiang Shan had been asleep far longer than he had imagined.
Why had he come back to life?
His rebirth seemed utterly meaningless. His own name had already been buried beneath the dust of history, and his enemy appeared to have met the same fate. No one remembered either of them anymore. Yet under such circumstances, he still called out his enemy's name and awakened from a landfill.
Why?
No, that's not right.
Xiang Shan said to himself.
"Yawg and I used the same batch... the same batch of what... Damn it, I can't remember. Our biological components used the same technology. If I can still be alive, then he has even less reason to be dead."
"And this twisted world... The Earth becoming what it is now absolutely has everything to do with that so-called 'historical event that changed evolutionary history' in my memories!"
Xiang Shan unconsciously clenched his fists.
"Even if all that remains is one head... I need to know who I really am, and what exactly happened while I was asleep. I have to... I have to..."
"Xiang Shan..." Yawg shook Xiang Shan's hand.
"Hm? What? Sorry, I was distracted."
"Sorry..." Youji lowered his head. "I'm too ignorant. If I knew about your past, you wouldn't be this sad, right?"
"No, it's my fault." Xiang Shan shook his head and smiled. "Who told me not to be famous enough?"
"Were you just thinking about your old family and friends?"
"No..." Xiang Shan shook his head. After thinking for a moment, he said, "I'm going to tell you a secret next. A real, enormous secret. If you find it frightening, I'll leave right away..."
Youji became nervous again. "What is it?"
"Besides my name, I also remembered my identity." Xiang Shan looked at the dog lying on the table. "I'm sorry, kid, but I'm not the athlete you admired. I'm a Vagrant—a very formidable Vagrant."
"So you're... what?" Youji's face froze. "A Vagrant?"
He stared at Xiang Shan. "A Vagrant?"
Xiang Shan nodded, his tone solemn. "A very formidable Vagrant."
As the festive atmosphere gradually faded—or, to put it another way, as the sounds of street brawls gradually died down—the doorbell of Mr. Dresden Schultz, the mayor's nephew, rang.
Mr. Schultz was heavily augmented. His entire face had been replaced with metal: flat eyes and an abstractly stern expression fixed onto his head as decoration—supposedly modeled after an ancient mechanical hero.
When Xiang Shan saw someone open the door with Iron Man's face, he was completely dumbfounded.
Fortunately, Youji did not know about things like "Iron Man." He jumped up and shouted, "Doctor, Doctor, Xiang... I mean, 'Shan' needs some parts. He heard you have them here, so he came. He wants to make himself a..."
"Hold on, kid, you're too excited." Xiang Shan reached out and pressed down on Youji's shoulder. "Dr. Schultz, correct? I may need to make a more convenient prosthetic body for myself, but I am indeed lacking quite a few parts. I heard that you have the most complete collection of parts in town."
Dr. Schultz nodded. "I understand. Please come in."
He unfastened the door chain and let Xiang Shan and Youji into his house. Youji immediately darted inside. After taking a few steps, he even turned back to glance at the doctor, his eyes filled with both the urge to show off and frustration at being unable to do so.
Dr. Schultz scratched his head. "This is the first time I've seen that kid look so excited..."
"Maybe he's just overly excited." Xiang Shan explained, "I remembered some... things from the past. I just told him that, as repayment for saving my life, if he could help me out in the days ahead, I'd be willing to teach him some skills."
Dr. Schultz became somewhat wary. "Repairs?"
He knew that this man understood a little about repairs.
This town only needed one doctor. The Schultz family had three children and planned to have another. If the next child did not enter the Human Gene Bank, the doctor wanted to cultivate all four children into upper-class talents. But a town only needed one doctor. He did not even have enough work to divide among his own children—how could he let outsiders get involved?
"Perhaps some simple repairs, perhaps other skills." Xiang Shan patted the doctor on the shoulder. "Of course, my little bit of skill can't compare to yours!"