Chapter 2 Copper Candy and Dyson Principle

The man who was temporarily using the name "Yog" propped up his head with both hands, gazing down at the world beneath the mountain of trash and sighed once again.

"I always feel like the world shouldn't look like this."

"Yog" felt that between himself and this world, one must have gone mad.

To his east, there was a large "farm," covered in silver-black over a vast expanse of land. It was a type of small tree, not even two meters high, with silver-black leaves and pure blue sap. Each tree had a mechanical device attached, and every day there were people designated to collect the sap through these devices.

This sap is what they call "Copper Candy."

It is said that the Town Mayor's greatest wish is to lay a set of pipelines to automate the Copper Candy collection and keep all of the town's Copper Candy firmly in his grip. But supposedly, such pipelines are quite expensive—the mere laying of pipes is not difficult; the challenge is how to prevent townsfolk from stealing and the excessively high maintenance costs.

Copper Candy is the main food for the residents of this era.

Although "Yog" also consumed Copper Candy—mainly through a broken soft tube in his upper jaw—he still found it insane.

He once saved a little bit of Copper Candy and brought some combustible materials together to heat the Copper Candy for experimentation.

He found, undoubtedly, that the Copper Candy contained copper elements. Under certain heating conditions, it even produced anhydrous copper sulfate.

This was strange.

But apart from him, it seemed like no one else thought, "Biological beings shouldn't ingest so much copper."

The black plants were also strange. "Yog" sincerely believed that plants should be green. But Yuki and Yulia, mother and son, swore to him that green plants simply did not exist in this world.

Really strange.

All this was extremely, extremely, extremely unreasonable.

But what's even weirder is that a part of him felt that the current world was logical. It seemed after a long period of change, the world he knew had turned into this. He even felt like he had lived through this process.

Unfortunately, it appeared that all of these memories had been burned away. Only a few components remained from the electronic part of his brain, possibly not even a complete chip, and his biological brain might have also been damaged—of course, it was also possible that it starved to damage.

"What on earth has happened to this world..."

He muttered.

"Hey!" Yuki ran up the trash mountain: "Yog, why are you still admiring the view! Come and help me! We might be able to gather materials for your new body!"

"Oh." The man was thus carried down the mountain made of scrap metal by Yuki. Tumbling along, they arrived at a place they had never been before.

At this time, apart from his head, "Yog" already had a skullcap [though it's modified from a fuel cap and does not fit well with his head], and two arms [seems like they were previously used by Yulia and possibly even by Yuki's grandmother; they were too old, could only be sold for scrap metal money, so Yulia kept them, advocating "to use them in case of emergency when the arms break"].

Fortunately, his spine was broken, but "the central nervous system's metal-based content is quite high" [said by the Town Mayor, Yuki did not quite understand what it meant], and that tiny bit of the spine worked as a "universal interface." Otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to use these two arms at all.

The Town Mayor, in a rare gesture of kindness, helped "Yog" attach the two arms.

The man had no shoulders, and his two arms were directly connected to the cervical spine. He walked on the ground with his two hands, resembling a domestic fowl.

What even surprised the man himself was that he seemed to possess a knack for engineering and that there genuinely might be hope to assemble a functioning body from spare parts.

.................................

One month later, "Yog" finally installed a "shoulder" for himself. Although this was just affixing a shaft below the neck and then attaching both arms to the shaft.

But at least, "Yog" could now nod or shake his head.

This was a major leap forward. Body language really did make communication much more efficient.

Latter on, Yuki found a storage battery for "Yog," which was hung on the bracket. The man felt having a storage battery was like owning a "heart" from the old times. With this battery, he was finally able to be active for a bit longer.

That afternoon, the man stayed beside the solar photovoltaic panel, connecting the storage battery with the communal charging port, then opened the shell of his left arm and used an electromagnetic screwdriver for fine adjustments.

Upon realizing that he had an enemy called "Yog," the man had fallen into a kind of crisis. He didn't know where this sense of crisis came from. It seemed as though the entire world was related to this sense of unease.

He vaguely felt that he needed a complete prosthetic body.

This screwdriver was also found by Yuki a few years ago. Tools from the era of the Sublimation Wars weren't particularly expensive, but they were extremely practical. Yuki had decided to keep it. The head of the electromagnetic screwdriver could be fine-tuned according to the target. If detailed parameters were input, it could even serve as a universal key.

Of course, in this age, finding a mechanical lock was a difficult task.

The man was replacing old, worn parts in his arm with relatively newer ones. Changing some transmission parts would slightly increase the output power of this arm. It was something he had been continuously doing. For him at his current stage, his hands were all he had; if they were to fail, he would be left with nothing but his head.

His pupils continuously dilated and contracted, adjusting the focus. The other day, the man was surprised to discover that his eyes seemed to be quite valuable assets. They were directly connected to his nerves and could zoom freely, allowing him to see things clearly from thousands of kilometers away. The man didn't know the specific parameters of his eyes, but whenever he set his visual capability to a higher setting, the cheap chip in his brain would overheat and warn him, sometimes even causing his vision to experience frame loss.

He now understood why "metal eyelids" were a thing. These eyes were indeed high-end and deserved specialized protection.

"Alrighty..." The man quickly finished the repair and was ready to reattach his arm.

"Beep beep!" A horn blared for an extended time. A swirl of dust came rolling towards him. Startled, the man immediately closed the shell of his left arm, pressed it down with his head, and then smacked the ground with his right hand as fast as possible, covering the screws that secured the shell.

Then, the sandstorm howled past. He nearly thought he had been caught in a sandstorm.

In this era, plants seemed to be a rare sight. At least in the town, "Yog" had only seen a shrub that produced Copper Candy. Besides that, he hadn't seen any other plant – not even a blade of grass.

After the storm passed, the man's first action was to check the screws on the ground. If any were missing now, he'd really be in trouble.

A thunderous noise approached him. A huge truck had deliberately reversed toward him. The cab and the bed uncoupled, advancing towards the man, positioning its camera from a lofty angle: "Yo, Yog, it's you! Sorry about that! I really didn't see you there, especially now that you're... haha, really small! None of the screws are missing, right?"

This voice sounded rough, like that of an old man who had been tarnished by nicotine and alcohol for thirty years. Clearly, this fellow was more willing to spend money than Yulia, willing to get a voiceprint package for himself.

"Are you out of your mind?" Yog was somewhat annoyed. "Enoch, if you like Yulia so much, go find Yulia. What's the meaning of causing trouble in front of me?"

Enoch was also a piece of engineering machinery in the village. It seemed that when he was about ten years old, he was infected by the Silver Disease Bacteria and had to give up his flesh and blood, selling his spine to exchange for engineering machinery. This guy had worked as engineering machinery in Recycling Station Town for over a decade, earning a considerable income. But mostly due to his lavish spending, he hardly had any savings.

He had a fondness for Yulia, the only female engineering machinery in the village.

Yulia didn't exactly have a strong repulsion towards him. However, the concept of 'family' had long vanished from her mind. 'Family' was sacred; it was a marker of human lineage and genes. Every person had the duty to label their genes with 'family' and 'name' to ensure that Lords could better consider genetic diversity when establishing the Human Gene Bank. But both of them only had their brains left, so there was really no need to form a family.

Rather, Enoch's sporadic scraping and nudging behavior was what truly annoyed Yulia. Both were heavy machinery, and one wrong move could damage themselves. Every time Enoch shamelessly drew close, Yulia tensed with apprehension. Even if Enoch was skilled, the anti-rust paint scraped off Yulia still cost money to replace.

And now, "Yog" was living in the house of Yulia's son. This made Enoch very displeased.

Yog felt bewildered by the situation. He really didn't understand how a romantic feeling could develop between pieces of engineering machinery—by the looks of it, it wasn't Yulia's "interesting soul" that attracted Enoch.

Enoch's wheels were almost brushing against Yog's face, the engine roaring: "You listen to me, you freak. I pity you because you're useless right now, and that's why I'm giving you a chance. You've been staying at Yulia's son's place for quite some days, right? And now you even have prosthetic limbs... It's time you left, right?"

The man almost believed that the tire would roll over his body. At that moment, an uncontrollable thought burst forth in his mind.

— Just let my body fall forward, inside the wheel...

— He won't have time to turn...

— Grab the drive shaft...

— Use Vibration Force to loosen the screws...

Lots of mechanical schematics...

More strategies and combinations...

Moves...

The man's head emitted a "buzzing" sound. The newly installed ventilation fan had already kicked in. The cheap civilian chip couldn't support such extensive calculations. The man nearly shivered with the strain.

— What's wrong with me? What is this...

Noticing that the man gave no response, just trembling arms, Enoch thought he had scared him silly, and disdainfully emitted a puff of black exhaust from his tailpipe. After all, he wouldn't dare actually run over Yog. The second rule of the "Dyson Principle" was "Do not kill humans." No matter the reason, anyone who killed a human and destroyed another's biological brain would lose all the protection that civilization offered.

Enoch's wheels wobbled a bit: "I'm warning you, you better move out of Yulia's son's house soon. You have at most three months... no, two months left! Got it? Before the next Gene Tax is due! Otherwise, I have a thousand ways to make your life miserable!"