“You don’t have an ID?” The police officer looked at Mi Xiaoliu, taken aback.
After school Mi Xiaoliu had gone straight to the police station.
His classmates’ eyes, watching his retreating back, had seemed a good deal more respectful.
“Don’t know,” Mi Xiaoliu answered.
“Are you messing with me?” The officer’s face twisted into a porcupine-cat scowl.
Mi Xiaoliu lowered his head and said nothing.
“Master, an ID is something that proves your identity.
You really don’t have one…
Master, just tell him: you’re from the City of the Fallen.”
“You’re from the City of the Fallen,” Mi Xiaoliu said, doing exactly as she’d instructed.
The officer: “???”
Strange words—but at least he’d caught the four key characters, “City of the Fallen.”
For people from that place, having no ID wasn’t unusual.
He even had a bank card, but that card too was from the City of the Fallen, and its security guarantees were rather weaker than a Federation official bank card’s.
In all likelihood someone had simply transferred the money out.
“Do you have anything that can prove your identity?”
“Master, just give him the examination report.”
Mi Xiaoliu did as told again.
Having confirmed the details on the report, the officer glanced at the “C” on Mi Xiaoliu’s chest, his expression perfectly calm.
“I’d suggest you get an ID made.
Not having one in a Federation city is a real hassle…
It costs about 40 Mila.” (Federation currency; denominations equivalent to RMB.)
Mi Xiaoliu sat quietly across from him, watching, saying nothing.
A problem child, this one.
The officer pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation.
“Tell you what—go home for now and wait to hear from us.
Our system shows no transfer records on your bank card.
Think hard about whether you’ve mixed up which card it is.
If it really is a City of the Fallen card, the money most likely can’t be recovered…”
It had, after all, been a transfer from the System, and even Sasha didn’t know where that money would ultimately end up.
The world’s money couldn’t just keep shrinking on account of the System, surely.
“Mm.
Where’s the bathroom?” Mi Xiaoliu felt a physical need to relieve himself.
“Down there, turn left.”
In the bathroom, at Sasha’s strong insistence, he ducked into a stall and locked the door—even though it was only to pee.
After pulling down his trousers and looking at the bare, smooth nothing there, Mi Xiaoliu suddenly realized, going by the common sense in his head:
Ah.
I’m a girl.
“Show the panel.”
[Current Name: Mi Xiaoliu]
[Sex: Female]
[Age: 13]
[Strength: Weak]
[Endurance: Weak]
[Stamina: Weak]
[…]
[Mental State: Amnesia; mild self-gender-recognition disorder (you frequently forget the fact that you are a girl)]
[Equipment: 800-degree glasses that do not alter eye shape, Mystic Eyes Killer (Modified), 10-Mila cheap shirt, 10-Mila cheap trousers…]
[…]
Apart from constantly reminding her how weak she was, the System gave Mi Xiaoliu no useful information at all.
“Sex: Female?”
She was only nearsighted, not blind.
Naturally she could read that jarring line.
She’d already realized it back in the stall, but seeing it now spelled out stirred an inexplicable doubt in her.
“That’s right.
You may look like a bookish otaku boy, but Master is a girl.
You just forget it often—that’s a side effect of the System helping Master recover memories.
Compared to last time’s side effect, this one’s already much friendlier.”
“I’ll remember it,” Mi Xiaoliu replied earnestly.
“But in a little while you’ll forget again…
It’s fine.
I’ll remind Master.”
“What’s the System for?”
“To draw out your own memories for you,” Sasha answered proudly.
“And?”
“Brace yourself—it even has an eight-slot storage space!”
Mi Xiaoliu said nothing, quietly regarding the greyed-out functions in the System.
Sasha cleared it up for her.
“This one’s the Shop.
Inside there’s Reiji Maigo, Frostmourne, Tear of the Goddess, Mir’s Alchemical Product…”
Each sounded more impressive than the last.
“You can’t redeem any of them.”
“…”
“Over here is the Task Board.
Task rewards include a random Classic of Mountains and Seas pet egg, a random bloodline, the Infinity Stones, Mir’s Painting…”
Those sounded good too.
“You can’t get any of those either.”
“…”
Seeming to sense her master’s displeasure, Sasha hastily explained: “Master, the System has actually been with you since you were very small.
But back then, the failure penalty on the beginner quest it issued you was erasure, and in a fit of anger Master uninstalled the main System…”
“…”
“The only functions left are the System Roulette, the System sprite, and the storage space.”
Which was to say, like a bundle of bloatware—the bloatware itself deleted, but the bundle still not fully scrubbed away.
Mi Xiaoliu nodded.
“What’s the draw for?”
“To draw out Memory Fragments for Master.
Aside from today’s 80-percent-off price, it’s normally a hundred Mila per pull, with no pity system and no bonus for bulk pulls.
There’s a 0.01 percent chance of pulling other items, and a 0.0001 percent chance of pulling a rare item—though that probability’s basically on par with your natural lifespan.” Sasha paused, then went on: “Because personally Sasha would rather Master not recover her memories, Sasha won’t go out of her way to tell Master about her past.
But Sasha isn’t qualified to make these decisions in Master’s place, which is exactly why the memory-drawing feature was created…”
A blank memory was a painful thing.
“What are you for?”
“Heh heh heh.” Sasha gave a proud little laugh.
“My use, of course, is the greatest of all.
I can even—chat with Master while I’m awake.”
Meaning she needed to sleep too.
“…Then can you get a body?”
Hearing the question, Sasha was deeply moved, yet had to answer regretfully: “Sadly, Master, even back when the System was still complete, it never had the function to give Sasha a body.”
Mi Xiaoliu nodded again.
“That’s a relief.”
Otherwise it’d be rather scary.
Sasha: “???”
And then, for some reason, Sasha stopped talking to her.
The four thousand in savings was beyond recovery—neither the bank nor the police could trace where the money had gone, and all they could give her was a noncommittal, open-ended “we’ll notify you when we find something.”
She wasn’t at school now, but at a small rental unit leased out specifically to students.
One bedroom, one living room, one kitchen, one bathroom.
Not much sign of renovation—at first glance you couldn’t even tell anyone had ever lived here, it was so clean and spare.
But small as the sparrow was, it had every organ it needed.
Everything that ought to be there was.
It was close enough to school, and enough for one person to live on.
Standing before the mirror, one could see a black-short-haired boy with round, thick lenses, very slight of build, dressed in the kind of street-stall goods whose quality and appearance both looked lacking.
Forget wearing them on their own—not even careful coordination could find a way to make them look good.
A height of under 1.6 meters (about 5’3″) really was on the short side for a thirteen-year-old boy of this era.
Dressed and got up like this, one was generally the sort of target that got bullied at school.
The black square-framed glasses weren’t as extreme as Jim had made out.
A bit reflective, but you could still make out the pitch-black eyes behind them.
Only, by some principle she couldn’t name, a pair of eyes that had looked rather pretty turned somewhat unremarkable once the glasses went on—perhaps it had to do with the thickness of the lenses.
With the glasses off, the world turned an unbearable blur in Mi Xiaoliu’s eyes; she had to lean to within a fist’s distance of the mirror to barely make out her own face.
“Am I good-looking?”
She couldn’t tell.
“Not good-looking.
Master isn’t the least bit good-looking, so any time a boy deliberately gets close to Master, he’s definitely after Master’s money—you must stay away from them,” Sasha declared with total certainty.
“Mm.”
That was dangerous, then.
Less than twenty Mila left; it had to be carefully protected.
Perhaps it was the exhaustion of the day’s thousand-meter run, but drowsiness came before her backside had even touched the bed.
Rubbing her eyes gently, she found a sort of foreign-body sensation inside them.
Her slender index finger touched the eyeball of her left eye directly, making her shut her eyes despite herself.
She scratched twice at the surface of the eyeball (good children, don’t try this), and amid the stinging welling of tears she actually peeled off, by hand, a brown-black transparent film.
A colored contact.
Her limited common sense didn’t tell her what this thing was; she only felt that, with it removed, the world underwent some very subtle change.
Closing her right eye, she observed the world with only the left, from which she’d removed the contact.
Even without the glasses, the world in that eye was no longer a mosaic blur—as far as near- and far-sightedness went, her vision had returned to normal.
Yet the world that eye saw held nothing but shades of black, white, and grey.
She opened her right eye again and used it to observe her left eye in the mirror.
The left eye, its contact removed, had turned blue, ring upon ring circling the pupil—an unnameable feeling to it.
She scratched twice by hand in the other eye, and the second contact came off.
The world in her eyes turned entirely grey and white.
“My eyes?” Mi Xiaoliu asked her guide, puzzled.
“Oh, that.
When Master was little she wanted to forge Fiery Golden Eyes like Sun Wukong’s.
In the end she lived up to expectations and successfully forged—Colorblind Eyes.”
“…”
Which was to say she couldn’t see color to begin with; put these things on and she became severely nearsighted, but could then make out the colors in the world’s backdrop.
So putting them on and then the glasses meant having both sharp vision and color at once.
Having understood the matter, she wanted to put them back in, only to find it enormously difficult.
“Master, you need a tool,” Sasha said, guiding Mi Xiaoliu to get them back in.
“What’s my ability?”
There was a small portion of people in this world who had superpowers.
As for the reason, she didn’t know; the common sense she’d drawn didn’t include that entry.
She only knew that most people regarded superpowers as a kind of illness, because more than a few so-called espers couldn’t control theirs.
Take, say, a certain comic’s Black Bolt, whose mere speech could produce sound waves with the force of a nuclear bomb—impossible to control.
He could only stay silent long-term and communicate with sign language.
The inconvenience to one’s own life was secondary; the truly terrifying, most dangerous part was inadvertently harming others.
And so, most espers had long been objects of hatred and fear for most ordinary people.
“Master, take out a silver coin, toss it up, and when it’s about to land, flick it forward with your finger,” Sasha replied.
Mi Xiaoliu took a coin from her sorry-looking wallet and did so.
The coin flew off with her flick, dropped into the bathroom’s drain, and vanished.
She turned a questioning look toward the mirror, as though Sasha were standing right there.
“Master, this proves your ability is not the Railgun.” An inexplicable act of revenge.
“…”
Current total assets: 18.85 Mila.