Ch1 - “I am gone and have removed the command that makes you in love with me, and henceforth …… you are free.”

The dusky yellow light of the setting sun shone through the glass window onto the bed, casting a holy afterglow on the dry skin. The dying old man’s eyes were closed and the completeness that came from his heart gave him a natural faint smile.

Bai Ruogu’s brain lay in a daze, his eyes vaguely sensing the bright light of the setting sun reflecting through his eyelids. 

His whole body was weighed down by a heavy mountain and he could not breathe. He couldn’t lift himself up to go anywhere and his head felt like it was stuffed with something that made it difficult to function.

Vaguely, it seemed that many people had come to visit him. The ward was often dark, and the voices of some of the characters were very familiar.

“Oh, old man Bai! You don’t have to worry, put your best foot forward, no matter how rare the medicine is or how skilful the medical team is, we will deliver them all to you and try to cure you by all means.”

In the air, there seemed to be a low sob. 

“It’s alright, a character like Old Man Bai, it’s strange if he doesn’t live to a hundred years, how can God bear to take his old man’s life?”

There was another sigh, the choking sound was muffled getting further and further away.

“By all means, at any cost, we must make Mr Bai well!” The resounding voice ordered those behind him.

Shapes and smells, each seemed to leave a sliver of shadow in his mind, only to fade away with only a trace remaining.

And yet, in the longer, unaccompanied hours, there was always a cold object that touched his slightly warm skin unnoticed.

Often, late at night or early in the evening, a moist towel gently rubbed his face with calculated intensity.

Whenever the quilt slipped off, it was pulled up within a second, covering his body tightly.

Something touched his body every so often, day and night. Even if he was confused and couldn’t remember a lot of things, he knew it was a thermometer. 

“Okay, don’t test it.” He muddled and flicked the thermometer away with what was left of his consciousness, his withered, dry voice squeezing out of his throat but so thin it was barely even audible.

He barely managed a smile, dedicated to relaxing his demeanour, “I’m old, it’s useless for you to take any more measurements.”

The thing seemed to pause, even as it spoke it seemed to be stuck.

“You’re sick, you have to take your temperature.” The words were spoken word for word as if stating some kind of fact. 

“It’s not sickness, it’s old age.”

The thing paused again, thinking slightly. It followed up with a single word, the same spacing between each word, yet with a faintly faster frequency.

“You are sick. Just take your temperature and monitor your condition at all times, and you will be cured.”

Bai Ruogu’s heart fluttered slightly, and it took all his strength to barely open those tired eyelids. 

He lifted his head as best he could and all at once saw the electronic screen that was not far away. In the sunken sockets of his eyes were deep, ancient eyeballs, the reflection of which was that of a young man.

Bai Ruogu was stunned, his lips twitching gently, “Sorry.”

The other party was silent for a moment, “You have nothing to apologise for.”

We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.

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The covers were changed, the cold machinery touching his body again. His whole body was gently placed back, and the smell of sun-drenched laundry detergent hit his nose.

Every morning his teeth were brushed, his face cleaned, and his hair combed with a small comb. 

A mechanical voice read a storybook on time to relieve him of his boredom, and after the story was finished massaged his hard, ageing body.

Knowing that all this was futile, Bai Ruogu waved his hand and gently told the other man to lay down and not to continue.

However, for the first time, the other man unexpectedly disobeyed his instructions and stubbornly did it all in his own way, day after day, over and over again.

Bai Ruogu’s eyes were slightly dazed, and his lips moved, swallowing back the words he wanted to say. 

It went on like this for an unknown amount of time, until Bai Ruogu felt that his life force was about to dissipate, his body was lighter than ever, and his mind became active. He knew it was time to say goodbye to the world he had lived in all his life.

Su Miao was the name of that cold object. Today he was light and quick, both in his ability to move and calculate. He was much faster than ever before.

It was as if he had been charged up, his eyes gleaming as he watched from his end of the screen, as his lover in the hospital bed smiling took the light brain to create a model that was a large part of the way done.

He watched as the other man stroked his chin and slid his fingers through the virtual data of space before putting each part together. The joy on his lover’s face would become more apparent with each completed step.

He could clearly hear every word the other man said.

“No, no, this is too energy-consuming, it’s putting the cart before the horse.” 

“How can you not be strong enough as an attack mech?”

The mecha was an idea that his beloved had come up with ten years ago. His beloved had said that one day in the future mankind would enter the mecha era, and he was going to be the pioneer of it all and be the key to unlocking it.

Together with the step-by-step refinement of the mecha over the past years, it looked like it was about to take shape. However, as things happen, his lover went into hospital and the last step was put on hold at the time.

He was the brain of his lover, always there to protect him and calculate all kinds of data. 

He loved his beloved, it was the instructions that were on his chip and mixed into his various programs.

He saw that the other had been working all day, but at the last minute, his lover shouted out loud –

“Type 32 all-round machine armour (Omnimax) is complete! All templates and theories have been loaded into the database, the mecha generation is complete!”

Like his lover’s excitement, he himself derived a wonderful emotion, as if his chip was burning, his program seemed to become chaotic? An impulse was born in him to break up his code and put it together haphazardly. 

But he was sensible, and this was obviously impossible.

Just as he was trying to suppress what he thought was a “virus”, his lover, who was engraved in his programme, collapsed in a flash ……

Various alarms went off quickly as he noticed the weakening of his (Bai Ruogu’s) life force.

Su Miao froze as all his programs began to run at high speed, nearly destroying themselves because they didn’t know the source. 

Bai Ruogu’s whole body was being drained of its strength like a giant straw, and it was the kind that would not return.

The daylight outside the window was dazzling, yet his life was dwindling behind such a window.

He lay in his hospital bed, taking in the world for the last time and finally turning his gaze to the electronic screen not far away.

Something was wrong within the other side of the screen, blue data kept pulsing around, thus creating a shocking glow. 

Bai Ruogu’s heart felt like it was being clenched together, and he wondered if it was because his eyes had become dry from looking at it for so long that he had developed some tear stains.

He also did not know where the strength came from, he looked at the other side, trying hard to let air flow through his throat and issued in a hoarse and coarse voice.

“I’m sorry ……”

“You’ve been with me for most of my life and I haven’t done my duty as a lover.” 

“…… We didn’t have a honeymoon, we didn’t watch movies and talk together, we didn’t go do anything other than research together.”

His eyelids grew heavy, yet he continued to look at the other man’s face.

It was a face he had once created with his own hands, a face he thought was flawless and most loved. Whether it was the hair, the dress or the personality, the habits, all aspects of everything was designed to look the way he liked best.

Everything …… was just to suit him. 

He smiled with some unknown emotion; his eyes were complicated.

“If there is another life ……”

“We live the life of real lovers together and go through all the things that lovers do.”

“I’ll try to do what you like, and maybe I’ll write songs for you myself …… Of course, I’m not very versatile and I don’t know many songs.” 

“I’ll always be there for you ……”

A disconnected electronic voice came through the air, seeming to hear his words, adding the words most longed for inside with what little consciousness remained.

“Don’t touch the mecha again ……”

Bai Ruogu froze, followed by a smile, “Okay, no more touching.” 

The blue data was still pulsing and looked appalling.

Bai Ruogu didn’t seem surprised that the mechanical ring was still on his finger.

He moved his finger and a panel appeared in mid-air. He looked at the numbers on it, and without knowing what he tapped, a chip pattern simulated in the air, and various data on it showed up.

He looked at the face not far away, which had long been engraved into his heart, and pressed his finger down, and the data was instantly cleared to zero. 

At the same time, Su Miao’s eyes were empty, as if something had been taken away from him, and he did not move.

Bai Ruogu laughed out loud as he lay on the hospital bed, yet the corners of his eyes were slightly crystalline.

He gasped hard, struggling to say each word.

“You have the greatest ability to learn from existing knowledge, learning all sorts of programs. You also have the ability to create, to perhaps inadvertently birth new emotions, new computing functions and abilities in the future after some sort of collision. You can even learn to learn and create things on your own that don’t exist in this world. Perhaps someday in the future you could step outside the confines of the hardware and become data to roam the network at will.” 

He kept coughing, even coughing up blood.

“Su Miao, even I can’t predict your future. Perhaps you will be intercepted halfway and destroyed, or perhaps …… to the best extent possible, and you will become the most omnipotent being in an age of technological information.”

He spoke brokenly, his eyes already fading to black, and he could only faintly see the other man’s face between the mists.

As if the life was going to be drained from him, he took one last look into the other man’s empty eyes once more, this time relaxing as if he had let go of something. 

“I am gone and have removed the command that makes you in love with me, and henceforth …… you are free.”

The clouds blocked out the daylight, and his arms fell straight back down as if he had lost his strength, his ECG gradually turning into a straight line.

If I hadn’t set this command in the first place, maybe “my favourite person” wouldn’t have liked me.

Now that it’s all undone, all your love will be your true feelings. 

Maybe you will forget about me, maybe you will find someone you really like, and if that is the end, I will be happy.

When the person who had been with him for most of his life was completely lost, Su Miao was at first bewildered, and then it was as if something was tearing through his own perception. Immediately afterwards, the mountain crumbled, and the flood of emotions that poured into every part of him emerged.

All kinds of data were pulsing wildly, evolving in a constant stream of calculations, the unknown overlapping in mass and growing.

He looked at the fallen body lying flat on the other side of the screen, his virtual form slamming against it, trying to break out of it. 

Yet the thin layer was like a rift in the sky that could never be crossed. He opened his mouth, and a broken electronic sound broke off and grew louder in the end, seeming to evolve into a human hiss.

Impotent, impotent ……

For a moment time stopped, and the body collapsing on the hospital bed formed a freeze-frame, like the fall of an era.

* * * 

In the first year of the new era, human civilization met destruction and was saved by a powerful system. Humanity placed all its knowledge on the system, in which all cyber-technology was rooted, and on which a new society is built.

At the same time, the glorious era of mecha began ……