“Hey, kid. You up yet?”
At daybreak, Old Jiang’s voice rang out. Feng Xue, still groggy, sprang up from the bed at once, grabbed the jacket draped over the headboard, and shouted, “I’m up, I’m up!” as he made his way to the door. The moment he looked up, he saw Old Jiang standing in the corridor, calmly squeezing nutrient paste into his mouth.
“You stayed up late, didn’t you? Look at those dark circles. Make any progress?”
Seeing the weariness all over Feng Xue’s face, how could Old Jiang not know what had happened? He asked teasingly, and Feng Xue’s expression immediately stiffened.
Last night, he had cobbled together more than twenty parts and assembled four or five prosthetics, but not a single new entry he wanted had appeared.
Judging by his face, Old Jiang assumed he had suffered an initial setback. Not surprised, he smiled and said,
“It’s like that at the start. Practice more and you’ll get better. Oh, right, take the scrap metal left over and move it over to the furnace…”
“It’s all here.” Feng Xue immediately brought out the scrap left after he had stripped away the useful parts yesterday, then followed him into the old man’s workshop.
“All right. Go tidy yourself up first. This morning’s garbage collection day, and the afternoon will probably be busy…”
Feng Xue heard this and had no reason to doubt him, so he immediately turned and left. Old Jiang, meanwhile, picked up a shovel and tossed the scrap parts into the furnace. As he tossed them in, he grinned.
“Not bad. He actually didn’t aim too high and knew to start practicing from one-star. But this disposal method is a bit rough. One look and you can tell he’s a new— huh? What’s this?!”
Normally, Old Jiang might not have noticed a metal fragment no bigger than a thumb, but he had been young once too, and naturally knew that once young people got their hands on parts, they would be unable to resist tinkering with them.
Part of the reason he was processing this pile of scrap today was to check Feng Xue’s learning progress from those bits and pieces. Who would have thought that this check would turn up such a big find!
Although it was mixed in among a large heap of discarded components, Old Jiang had been a prosthetics doctor for decades. The moment he reached out and weighed it in his hand, he realized the fragment’s weight was off.
As his eyes narrowed slightly, the intricate mechanisms within his precision cybernetic eye began to shift, and the fragment’s general condition appeared in his mind.
“The base material is just ordinary D9 steel. The reason it’s so light is entirely due to its structure?”
All the shop’s junk had been taken in by Old Jiang himself, so of course he knew he had absolutely never accepted anything like this. As strings of code flashed through his field of vision, he could not be bothered to head into the workshop; he directly wrote a hardness-testing code on the spot.
The code loaded into his prosthetic limb, and the moment his index finger and thumb applied a little force, they immediately stopped.
Looking at the data obtained, his expression grew even stranger.
“Less than one-third the weight—with only a fragment and no complete structure, I can’t tell whether there are hollow sections—yet it retains ninety percent of D9 steel’s performance. A structure similar to trabecular bone? But how is this possible? 3D printing? But my shop doesn’t have that kind of equipment!”
Thoughts churned in Old Jiang’s mind, and he immediately began rummaging through the pile of scrap metal. Fortunately, he had long since developed a feel for such things; once a part passed through his hands, he knew its weight. Before long, a pile of debris had appeared in front of him. He gave it a rough sweep with his eyes and nodded.
“Destroyed quite thoroughly. It’s basically impossible to tell what it originally was. In that regard, he did a decent job. Those one-star parts that weren’t completely destroyed were probably a smokescreen? This kid’s pretty sharp. But there’s actually no need to look too closely. There was only this much D9 steel in the whole pile of materials, so he was probably trying to make a prosthetic frame, but didn’t have enough two-star material, right?”
Old Jiang recalled what he had said yesterday about not wasting time on one-star parts. With a young person’s temperament, Feng Xue probably would indeed be unwilling to give up and would definitely want to try making a two-star prosthetic. But after making it, he still destroyed it.
“Is he guarding against me? No need for that. It’s just Source Energy Replication… Oh, right. This kid has amnesia! He must have activated his Source Energy while thinking about how to use that bit of material, then thought he’d awakened some kind of golden finger?”
Old Jiang nodded thoughtfully, feeling that this was very much in line with how an amnesiac young man would think. But just as he placed the scrap parts under professional equipment for inspection, he suddenly realized something was wrong—
“Although it is indeed a trabecular-bone biomimetic structure, there are no unnecessary internal structures like blood vessels or marrow. To make it this clean, one would either have to be a master steeped in this field for many years, or there’s another Source Energy interfering. Even if this kid didn’t have amnesia, at his age, without having undergone prosthetic modification himself, there’s no way he could have accumulated this much experience. So… this kid also has dual Source abilities?”
At that thought, Old Jiang could not help feeling the joy of having picked up a treasure, but then his brows furrowed again.
“I don’t know if he’s aware of it. But judging from how guarded he is, asking him directly probably isn’t a good idea. If he’s only pretending to have amnesia, that’s one thing. But if he really has lost his memory and hasn’t realized his own talent, then I need to make him realize it as soon as possible…”
Thinking this, Old Jiang formed a few ideas in his heart. Acting as though he knew nothing, he threw those D9 steel fragments along with the other metal blocks meant for remelting into the furnace, processing them into uniform metal ingots one after another.
Metal materials below D15 mostly relied purely on the properties of the materials themselves. They were mainly alloys of iron, aluminum, chromium, nickel, and other metals; at most, one had to consider factors like carbon content. As long as the formula was on hand, no special equipment was needed. There was no point hoarding them specifically—just toss them into the furnace to separate and refine them, then mix them as needed.
As for Feng Xue’s wariness, he felt no displeasure at all. Or rather, if Feng Xue truly had no guard up whatsoever, that would be what gave him a real headache.
After all, in a place like the Ge Union, ordinary people without a bit of cunning did not live long.
…
At the same time, Feng Xue, who still did not know that Old Jiang had discovered the fragments of the lightweight prosthetic, was currently tending to the storefront.
He was not merely tidying up. Compared to usual, when he would divide part of his attention to study the knowledge in Old Jiang’s database, today he was particularly interested in the prosthetics.
Whether they were civilian-use prosthetics Old Jiang had made himself or brand-name goods that had yet to be unsealed, he always reached out to touch them, and he did manage to find a few with entries.
However, considering that these were all Old Jiang’s merchandise, he did not directly record them. Instead, he noted down their names, models, functions, and the like one by one, making it easier to obtain them later.
“From what I can see right now, most prosthetics with recordable entries have a certain degree of specialization. For example, this artificial lung made by Dayan—if I’m not mistaken, it should allow me to record an entry along the lines of [Efficient Respiration]…”
Feng Xue muttered inwardly. In a partition of his brain drive, he created a folder specifically to record the various prosthetics that could be catalogued, while also pondering whether he should study their blueprints later and see if the ones he made himself would also possess recordable attributes.