Chapter 15

Chapter 15. Galactic Martial God Chronicle - Reincarnation (6)

I waddled over to Si-woo after she finished cleaning.

“What is it, young master?”

“I wan’ a compuwter.”

“You want a computer? ...How do you know what a computer is?”

At Si-woo’s question, I pointed at the television built into the wall.

“Ah, did you see one in the documentary? Mm... no, even then, can you understand that?”

Si-woo looked at me with somewhat flustered eyes.

Well, of course. Where in the world would there be a baby who watched documentaries and understood their contents at an age when he should barely be crawling around and managing to say “Mama” and “Dada”?

But it was already too late to pretend I knew nothing and act like a baby.

In the first place, Si-woo had started teaching me a footwork method under the excuse of stretching as soon as I began walking, so it wasn’t as if I needed to act like a baby either.

I couldn’t live like that. It was too frustrating.

So I decided to be shameless.

“Compuwter! I’d like it if I had a compuwter!”

At my words, Si-woo fell into thought.

“Hmm... Even so, I think a computer is still too early for you, young master.”

“No. Not too eawwy.”

“No, it isn’t too early? A computer may look convenient, but there are many bad things on it as well. I’m concerned about exposing you to the internet from too young an age, so I’ll give you one when you’re a little older.”

Si-woo refused my request.

Ah, if only she had just bought me one, I wouldn’t have had to use this demonic art.

My forbidden demonic art!

I activated a tantrum!

“No! No! Compuwter! Compuwter! Buy me a compuwter!”

When I suddenly lay down on the floor and threw a tantrum, Si-woo panicked.

Of course she did. I had been quiet and obedient all this time, so my tantrum was unexpected.

“P-Please calm down, young master. Even if you have a computer, it won’t be of any use if you can’t read.”

“Compuwter! Compuwter!”

I don’t care! I want a computer!

My house. No, since I lost both my parents, it isn’t our house. It’s my house.

I’m rich, aren’t I?! I can buy one computer, can’t I?!

I’m not even asking for anything amazing!

I’ll be satisfied as long as the specs are good enough for quick internet searches!

Si-woo was at a loss over the sight of me throwing a tantrum as if I were demanding that she buy me a doll. After thinking for a moment, she said,

“Understood, young master. I’ll give you a computer.”

“Weally?”

“Really. However, there is a condition.”

“What is it?”

Si-woo placed a condition in exchange for buying me a computer.

“First, I’ll buy one for you once you learn to read. No matter what it is, if you don’t know how to read, there’s no point in buying it, is there?”

I had been lying spread-eagled on the floor, but I got up and nodded.

“Okay!”

Si-woo let out a relieved sigh.

She seemed to be hoping that it would take me a long time to learn letters, and that my interest in computers would fade in the meantime.

However, whether it was thanks to the common skill “Translation” given by the Tower, or thanks to the power of “Multidimensional Avatar,” I understood language without any trouble.

“Let’s do it now!”

“Right now? Then I’ll purchase a children’s letter-learning book and vocabulary book immediately.”

“No, just teach me. We have papew and a pen.”

“You want me to just teach you? Because we have paper and a pen?”

Si-woo looked flustered, but soon brought paper and a pen, sat me on her lap, and wrote down letters.

The characters used in Galactic Murim were a common language derived from English, but she told me that one also had to learn Chinese characters separately in order to learn martial arts.

Si-woo read them one by one and taught me their pronunciation, while I more or less nodded along.

The language was already inside my head anyway.

I just had to pretend to take the lesson, then claim I had learned it all.

In that way, I spent one hour pretending to listen diligently to Si-woo’s lesson, then said,

“I got it.”

“...Pardon?”

“The letters. I know them all.”

I climbed off Si-woo’s lap, waddled over to one side of the living room, pulled out a children’s fairy tale book from the shelf, and read it.

My pronunciation was a mess, but when I truly read the letters, Si-woo could not hide her surprise.

“Young master, you were a genius!”

“Not a genwus.”

I denied it because any needless expectations would become bothersome, but Si-woo did not believe me at all.

Well, of course. How much could a one-year-old know about himself?

Whether one was a genius or an ordinary person was something other people evaluated, not something one judged for oneself.

That said, if I spent my life only pretending to be a child, I felt like I would die of frustration before my time, so there was nothing I could do about it.

“Now buy me a compuwter.”

At my insistence, Si-woo nodded as if she had no choice.

“If it’s a computer, there is one your parents used, young master. However, a kids lock has not been installed on it yet, so please wait just a moment.”

Ah, no! I don’t need anything like a kids lock!

I was about to shout in panic, but Si-woo had already gone up to the second floor and brought the computer down to the living room.

The computer’s appearance did not look very different from the world I had lived in. It was a tower-type PC with no monitor connected.

“This is the computer used by your mother, Seo Gyeong-ae.”

A computer bigger than my one-year-old body. I thought that by around the 50th century, computers would be invisible things in the form of ultra-small nano biochips.

I found out later that implantable nano computers had been discontinued two thousand years ago because if they malfunctioned due to cosmic radiation when one went into space, they could cause fatal consequences.

Instead, ultra-small external computers that were not implanted in the body did exist, but they were too small, so people often lost them, and they were not a very popular form.

Well, even wireless earphones got lost all the time, so computers smaller than earphones would be even easier to lose.

Everything had a convenient size.

Smartphones had once been only around three or four inches, but hadn’t they grown to six inches because they were too small and inconvenient?

When she connected the computer to the living room television and turned it on, an odd crocodile character began waving its hand, as if the kids lock had already been installed in that brief span.

-Hello~! I’m Elli!

“This is Elli, an AI for assisting infant users. You may use the keyboard and mouse, or if you give commands verbally, Elli will carry them out, but....”

My hands were small, and my pronunciation was poor.

“If that is inconvenient, you may use this brainwave controller.”

Si-woo handed me a thin headband.

A brainwave controller. That’s incredibly sci-fi.

I later learned that it had been developed as a controller for people with physical disabilities, but since it was more convenient than existing controllers for controlling IoT (Internet of Things), it had spread to the general public.

The headband form was the most common, but there were also patch types attached to the temples, glasses types, and helmet types used as professional controllers.

I put on the headband and examined the screen.

Something that looked like a mouse pointer moved according to my gaze and thoughts.

“Wow! Amazing!”

In terms of the basic feel, was it more like Mac than Windows?

What exactly was the OS?

Naturally, since this was a different world, things like Linux and Android wouldn’t exist.

They probably didn’t use things like JavaScript or C either.

Of course, all the ports would be incompatible as well, so even if I took this high-performance computer with me, I wouldn’t be able to use it in my home world.

Even if it was just a personal computer, after three thousand years, its performance would be as different as a stone axe and a rifle. If I brought this back, I could call it an OOPArt.

I focused on the computer and spent time searching for information.

Though it took longer than I expected just to get used to the future computer itself.

---

Enough time passed that I had gone beyond taking my first steps and could now toddle around without much trouble. After cultivation method and footwork method, Si-woo began teaching me fist arts and kicking arts.

The martial art was named Bluewood Combat Art. It was a martial art in which one stood in place without moving, deflected an opponent’s attacks, and countered.

Since it was based on Chinese fist arts, the stability of the legs was most important, but my body was not even two years old yet, so I was only imitating the forms of the techniques.

The dedicated room for learning martial arts was surrounded by mirrors on all sides so that I could check my own movements, but seeing myself flail my arms made it look like I was watching a child do tricks.

“Is this right?”

After practicing my pronunciation, I still wasn’t exact, but I could pronounce words more or less properly now.

At my question, Si-woo smiled gently.

“You are doing well. It is simply that you still lack pure muscle strength and cannot use internal energy yet. Once you develop muscle and become able to use internal energy, the form will come alive.”

After Bluewood Combat practice ended, I trained in Bluewood Step, and after Bluewood Step ended, I cultivated Bluewood Art.

Since I was still a child, there were many breaks in between, but I felt as if the training time was gradually increasing.

Because I obediently followed Si-woo’s guidance, she seemed to be increasing the training time to match my progress, but if I had been an ordinary child, it would not have been strange for this kind of training to get someone arrested for child abuse.

Well, the reason I had come to this world was to learn martial arts, so it wasn’t bad for me.

“Now then, today’s practice ends here. It is not good to overwork your body at a young age.”

When all training ended, Si-woo kneaded my body and performed Meridian-Acupoint Circulation on me.

When I searched it up, it said that performing Meridian-Acupoint Circulation even once would exhaust even an expert of the Transformation Realm, but Si-woo showed no sign of that at all.

Was it because her body was mechanical, so she didn’t know fatigue?

Si-woo did sometimes cultivate, but she recharged the internal energy spent while performing Meridian-Acupoint Circulation by separating her external qi center and plugging it into a charger.

Shockingly, an android’s qi center was not integrated, but detachable and replaceable!

No wonder it was called an “external” qi center. To think it could be swapped out like a battery.

External qi centers were items used not only by androids, but also by cyborgs.

Unlike androids, which were created as machines from the beginning, cyborgs were beings created by modifying humans with machines, and legally, unlike “androids using singularity technology,” which were quasi-humans, they were treated as humans.

That was because the scope of cyborgs was extremely broad, ranging from people who used prosthetic fingers to replace severed ones to people who had modified their entire bodies into machines except for their brains, making it ambiguous to divide some as humans and others as quasi-humans.

However, the standard that divided cyborgs from androids was the “brain.”

Even if someone had been born human, copied their memories, and placed them into a mechanical body, legally, if they did not have an actual brain, they were classified as an android.

The reason androids were legally classified as quasi-humans was also because of people who copied their memories from cyborgs and transferred into android bodies, or those who copied their memories into androids for eternal life right before death.

Of course, there was the philosophical question of whether an android with copied memories should be seen as that person.

For the time being, galactic international law regarded androids with copied memories as the people in question.

However, since that person was considered to have died once, their property was distributed to their bereaved family according to inheritance law, while the android with copied memories was treated as a kind of zero-degree bereaved family member and received a portion of the property.

Naturally, since it was inheritance, inheritance tax also had to be paid according to the laws of the corresponding region.

It might seem unreasonable, but in order to copy memories completely, one had to use an android chip based on singularity technology, so to people who could buy such a thing, money was hardly a major issue.

For reference, it was said that roughly one-third of androids using singularity technology were memory-copy androids.

It could be said that memory-copy androids contributed greatly to the improvement of android rights.

After all, judging from appearance alone, it was impossible to distinguish a memory-copy android from an ordinary android.

After Meridian-Acupoint Circulation ended, I lay down and let out a sigh.

Recently, I had been unable to return to my main body and had continued living in the body of my clone.