Galaxy Martial Temple - Reincarnation (6)
I toddled over to Siwoo, who had just finished cleaning. She turned to me with her usual graceful poise.
“I want a computer.”
Siwoo blinked. “You want a computer…? How do you even know about computers?”
I pointed at the wall-mounted television.
“Ah, you saw one in a documentary? Hmm… but would you really understand what it was?”
Siwoo stared at me with a mixture of surprise and confusion. Of course she would. What one-year-old could watch documentaries, comprehend them, and then demand a computer? But it was too late to play dumb and act like a normal baby now.
Besides, Siwoo had already started teaching me footwork techniques under the guise of “stretching” the moment I began walking. There was no point in pretending to be an ordinary infant anymore. I couldn’t live like that anyway. It would drive me insane. So I decided to be shameless.
Siwoo hesitated, clearly troubled. “Hmm… I’m afraid a computer might still be too early for you, young master.”
“No it’s not!”
“It is not too early? While computers are certainly convenient, they also come with many harmful aspects. Exposing a child to the internet at such a young age is concerning. I will provide one when you are older.”
She turned me down. Aaah, if she had just bought me one, I wouldn’t have to resort to this.
My forbidden dark art! Tantrum Technique, activate!
I threw myself onto the floor and began flailing. Siwoo looked genuinely flustered. After all, I had been unusually well-behaved and obedient until now.
“P-please calm down, young master. Even if you had a computer, you cannot read yet, so it would be useless.”
“Computer! Computer!”
I don’t care! I want a computer! This was my house now. My parents were gone, so it was mine. I was rich! Buying one computer wouldn’t hurt! I wasn’t asking for anything crazy. Just something decent enough to browse the internet smoothly would be perfect.
Siwoo watched me thrash about like a child begging for a toy, looking completely lost. After a moment of internal struggle, she finally spoke.
“Really?”
“Yes, truly. However, there is a condition.”
“Condition?”
Siwoo laid out her terms. “First, you must learn to read. Without knowing letters, owning a computer would be meaningless, wouldn’t it?”
I pushed myself up from my dramatic sprawl across the floor and nodded vigorously.
Siwoo let out a sigh of relief. She probably thought it would take me a long time to learn to read and that my interest in computers would fade by then.
But thanks to the universal skill Translation I had received from the Tower, or perhaps because of the Multidimensional Avatar ability itself, I could already understand the language perfectly. Learning to read would be trivial.
“Right now? In that case, I will purchase children’s character workbooks and vocabulary books immediately.”
“No, just teach me. We have paper and pens, right?”
Siwoo looked startled for a moment, then quickly fetched paper and a pen. She sat me on her lap and began writing out the characters.
The writing system of the Galaxy Murim used letters derived from English as the common script, but she explained that mastering martial arts also required learning Chinese characters. Siwoo read each one aloud, teaching me the pronunciation while I nodded along absentmindedly.
After all, the language was already fully loaded in my head. I just needed to pretend to study for a while, then claim I had mastered it.
After pretending to pay close attention for about an hour, I finally declared:
“…Pardon?”
“I said I know it now.”
I slid off Siwoo’s lap, waddled over to the bookshelf, and pulled out a children’s picture book. My pronunciation was still clumsy, but I read the text aloud. Siwoo’s eyes widened in disbelief.
“Not a genius.”
I denied it because I didn’t want her getting overly excited and becoming a nuisance, but Siwoo didn’t believe me at all. Well, how much could a one-year-old possibly know about themselves? Genius or ordinary—those were labels others gave you, not something you decided for yourself. Still, pretending to be a normal baby forever would have suffocated me, so this was unavoidable.
Siwoo nodded with a helpless expression. “There is a computer that belonged to your parents. However, it does not have the Kids Lock installed yet, so please wait just a moment.”
No! I don’t need a Kids Lock! I tried to protest, but Siwoo had already gone upstairs. She returned carrying the computer down to the living room.
Its appearance wasn’t all that different from the ones in my original world—a tower PC without a monitor attached.
“This was the computer used by your mother, Lady Seo Kyung-ae.”
A computer bigger than my current one-year-old body. I had expected something like an invisible nano-biochip by the 50th century, but apparently that wasn’t the case. I later learned that bio-implanted nano-computers had been discontinued two thousand years ago because cosmic radiation could cause fatal errors when traveling through space. There were tiny external computers, but they were so small that people kept losing them, so they never became popular.
Made sense. If people lost wireless earbuds all the time, something even smaller would be a nightmare. Everything had its ideal convenient size. Smartphones had grown from three or four inches to six because smaller ones were too awkward to use.
When I connected the computer to the living room television and turned it on, a strange alligator character appeared, waving its hands. The Kids Lock must have been installed while I waited.
“This is Elly, a toddler-user assistant AI. You may use the keyboard and mouse, or give verbal commands. Elly will carry them out, however…”
My hands were tiny and my pronunciation was still terrible.
“If it is inconvenient, you may use this brainwave controller.”
Siwoo handed me a thin headband. A brainwave controller? Very sci-fi. I later learned it had originally been developed for people with physical disabilities but became widely popular because it was more convenient than traditional controllers for operating Internet of Things devices. The headband style was most common, but there were also patch versions that stuck to the temple, glasses styles, and even professional helmet models.
I put on the headband and looked at the screen. The mouse pointer moved according to my gaze and thoughts.
The basic feel was closer to macOS than Windows. I had no idea what the actual operating system was called. Since this was an entirely different world, there was probably no Linux or Android here. JavaScript and C probably didn’t exist either. The ports would all be incompatible, so even if I took this high-performance machine back to my home world, I wouldn’t be able to use it. Even a personal computer from three thousand years in the future would be like comparing a stone axe to a rifle. This thing would definitely qualify as an out-of-place artifact.
I spent the next several hours completely absorbed in exploring the computer and getting used to its futuristic interface.
Time passed. Once I could walk steadily without much trouble, Siwoo began teaching me fist techniques and kicking methods in addition to the cultivation method and footwork.
The martial art was called Cheongmok Tubop, or Clear Wood Combat Method. It focused on remaining stationary, redirecting the opponent’s attacks, and countering. Its foundation was in Chinese fist techniques, so stability in the lower body was crucial. Since my body was still less than two years old, I could only mimic the forms.
The training room had mirrors on all four walls so I could check my own movements. Watching my little arms flail around made me look like a toddler doing a silly dance.
My pronunciation had improved with practice, though it was still a bit off. Siwoo smiled gently at my question.
After practicing Cheongmok Tubop, we moved on to Cheongmokbo, and after that, Blue Wood Cultivation. Because I was still a young child, we took frequent breaks, but the training sessions gradually grew longer. Since I followed Siwoo’s instructions obediently, she adjusted the duration to match my progress. For a normal child, this level of training would have been considered child abuse. But since I had come to this world specifically to learn martial arts, it was exactly what I wanted.
Once training was over, Siwoo would massage me and perform Chugunggwahyeol, the Blood and Qi Circulation Therapy. From what I had read online, even a Transformed Realm expert would be exhausted after performing it once, yet Siwoo showed no signs of fatigue. Was it because her body was mechanical?
She sometimes cultivated as well, but when her qi was depleted from the therapy, she would detach her External Dantian and plug it into a charger to replenish her energy. Shockingly, an android’s dantian wasn’t a single integrated unit—it was detachable and replaceable! No wonder it was called an “external” dantian. It really was just like a battery.
The External Dantian was used not only by androids but also by cyborgs. Unlike androids, which were created as machines from the start, cyborgs were humans who had been converted into machines. Legally, they were treated as human beings, unlike “androids that have reached the technological singularity,” which were classified as quasi-humans.
The range of what counted as a cyborg was extremely broad—from people who used prosthetic fingers to replace lost digits, all the way to those whose entire bodies except for the brain had been mechanized. It was difficult to draw a clear line between human and quasi-human. The deciding factor was the brain. No matter how much of a person’s memories were copied into a mechanical body, if there was no actual biological brain, they were legally classified as an android.
The reason androids were categorized as quasi-humans had to do with people who copied their memories into android bodies to transfer their consciousness, or those who did so right before death in pursuit of immortality. Of course, there were philosophical debates about whether a copied-memory android should truly be considered the same person.
According to galactic international law, they were treated as the same individual. However, the original person was considered to have died once, so their assets were distributed to their heirs according to inheritance law. The memory-copied android was treated as a sort of zero-degree relative and received a share of the inheritance. Naturally, inheritance tax still had to be paid according to local laws.
It might seem unreasonable, but copying memories completely required using android chips with singularity technology. For those who could afford such things, money was hardly an issue. Roughly one-third of all singularity androids were memory-copy models. These memory-copy androids had contributed greatly to improving android rights. After all, it was impossible to tell from appearance alone whether an android was a memory copy or not.
After the Chugunggwahyeol session ended, I lay on the floor and let out a long sigh.
Lately, I had been unable to return to my main body. I was stuck living in this avatar’s form.
(To be continued in the next chapter)