If Flowers Bloom Even Among Scrap Heaps, They Might Be Quite Beautiful
Clank.
I carefully set my foot down on the scrap heap, and from somewhere beneath it came the sound of metal grinding against metal.
The good news, at least, was that the scrap seemed to be tangled together in a dense, interlocking mess — solid enough that my weight alone wasn't going to send the whole pile cascading down.
I'd been half-afraid that the moment I stepped on it, everything would collapse in a roaring landslide. That grim little fantasy mercifully stayed a fantasy.
Alright then. Let's take a look around.
Having confirmed the ground wouldn't kill me, I pulled the flashlight from where I'd clipped it at my waist. Hardly any light reached this place, so everything around me was nothing but dim, murky shadow.
"Whoa… it's a mountain of scrap. Is this, like… a junkyard?"
That was the impression the flashlight gave me once I started sweeping it around. An irregular mountain of scrap metal, rising and falling in chaotic piles. No particularly foul smell, but the whole scene naturally called a scrapyard to mind. Whether there was anything worth finding here was something I'd only learn by walking around and looking for myself.
"And one more thing I was curious about…"
I turned my gaze the other way, back along the path I'd come from. What immediately caught my eye was the unstable styrofoam-board slide and, at its far end, a single faint glow of light. I'd left the door to my studio open, so that light was just the indoor lamp spilling out — but what I actually wanted to see wasn't up there. It was far, far below.
I really wanted to know what the space underneath my room looked like. From above, no amount of waving a flashlight around had revealed anything. But from down here, after dropping so far, maybe I could at least make out a silhouette?
"Whoa. You can't even see the bottom under the house. The flashlight doesn't reach at all. Falling from there would be bad news."
The answer to that question was not a good one. No matter how hard I pointed the beam downward, all I got was darkness — no floor, no nothing. Meaning if I'd carelessly opened the front door and stepped straight out, I'd have been freefalling from a height of at least several dozen meters.
Ugh. Just imagining it was enough to make me want to wet myself.
…So that's why the outside felt so terrifying at first. Instinctively sensing danger? No… it felt like something a little different from that…
Hmm. I crossed my arms, closed my eyes, and turned the question over in my head, but nobody was around to hand me an answer. So I filed the problem away for later. It wasn't urgent, and maybe the answer would come with time.
"Hup."
I secured the long rope I'd already tied off at the top end to a nearby point. Climbing back up on nothing but that styrofoam board still felt sketchy, so I figured I'd need the rope's help.
With that taken care of, I turned back to face forward.
For today, let's just go as far as I can. Treat it like filling in a map.
I drew a deep breath in, then slowly let it out, the tension still tight around my throat. As long as I didn't completely let my guard down, nothing too catastrophic should happen. And if something did go wrong… well, I could just dump every last CP I'd been saving for streaming.
With a hundred thousand CP, I should be able to create something good enough to get me out of a crisis.
Having run through that little mental checklist, I set my face into a serious expression and carefully began descending the scrap heap. The spot I'd been standing on was, for all practical purposes, a high, narrow peak. If I wanted to survey the surroundings, I first had to get down.
"Ugh… th-these shoes are a little awkward."
One inconvenience made itself known as I picked my way down the scrap. Nia's default outfit didn't come with practical sneakers — it came with pretty heeled dress shoes. Fine for walking on flat ground. Not so fine for scrambling down treacherous terrain.
But what was I supposed to do? Looking closely, I could see sharp-edged scrap metal nestled in the gaps everywhere. Going barefoot was not an option. So I gritted my teeth through the discomfort and, bit by bit, fretted my way down to the lowest, flattest point I could find.
"Ugh… I either need to get used to these shoes fast, or make a new outfit that includes sneakers."
One of Nia's alternate costumes was a casual look. For this kind of activity, that would probably be more comfortable than the default uniform. Of course, I didn't know the casual outfit in nearly as much detail, so it'd cost a ton of CP to create…
Sigh. So it always came back to CP, huh. Something to think about after I'd done some streaming.
"Alright. Made it! Finally, I can walk around properly!"
Thud!
I carefully picked my way down a slope that was nearly a cliff, then jumped from a reasonable height and landed on the ground below. Maybe it was this body's raw performance, but even though the impact was solid, I didn't feel any strain at all.
"Anyway… whoa. So this is what it looks like down here."
Looking around from the bottom, I could tell the flat ground beneath everything was a completely different material from the scrap piled on top of it. Not dirt… marble? Ceramic? From the look of it, the scrap had simply been dumped in a chaotic heap onto this hard surface that was already here.
But is this really scrap metal? …It doesn't have the smell or the feel of it.
I lifted the flashlight from my shoulder and held it in my hand as the thought continued. No distinctive metallic smell, and mixed in among the piles were things that crumbled easily when I touched them. Maybe this place held some kind of secret that a simple junkyard label couldn't cover.
"Nice. Secret-hunting. Feels like an adventure. I like it."
Looks like my first outing was going to start with combing this place from top to bottom.
I'd already been searching the scrapyard for close to two hours.
I'd worked up a light sweat, but physically and stamina-wise I was fine — ready to sprint a hundred meters right now if I had to.
…So what had I been doing this whole time? Well, luckily, it hadn't been a total bust. I'd managed to uncover two facts about this place.
The first was simple: it was way bigger than I'd expected.
I walked in a straight line from where I started for a full hour and still couldn't see the end. I wasn't getting tired, so my pace never dropped — felt like I'd covered about five kilometers…
An average adult man walking for an hour covers roughly five kilometers. I was in a woman's body now, but my stamina casually crushed that of an average adult man. If the distance I'd covered was about the same, and I still couldn't see an edge — that should give a rough sense of how vast this scrapyard was.
And the second fact I'd uncovered along the way…
"This stuff wasn't just trash."
The scrap piled everywhere in this place wasn't ordinary garbage. So what were all those chunks lying around, then? Well… something like this.
"This one looks pretty good. …Oh! Wait, is this a Blu-ray disc?!"
I plucked a slightly dented CD case from a gap in the scrap. Carefully opening it, I confirmed the blue disc inside was intact, then set the backpack I'd been carrying down on the ground. When I unzipped it wide, everything I'd been diligently collecting spilled into view.
Tucked in one corner was a DVD on yoga methods. Next to it, blueprints for home exercise equipment. Below that, a Cuban sandwich recipe. And right beside it, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructional BD.
That was it. This place was a kind of Data Trash Heap — a dumping ground where discarded data had piled up in mountains. And for someone like me right now, it was a treasure island buried under a fortune of potentially priceless finds.
"Of course… about ninety percent of what's here is completely corrupted junk data. But still better than nothing."
And one more thing was certain. Almost everything I'd found here was information I could never have gotten from the internet outside. So what did that mean? Anyone with half a brain would figure it out immediately.
"I can use this on stream!"
A virtual idol who claimed to be a broadcaster of the old civilization, boldly revealing data nobody else had ever seen? That was a concept that couldn't fail even if it tried — especially in a world that held such deep romantic nostalgia for the old civilization.
"Gather data here, turn it into stream content, earn CP from streaming, use that CP to make gear, then come back and gather more data… wait. Is this a perpetual motion machine?!"
I couldn't help being moved. This was a genuine eureka moment. With this alone, a Virtual Lifeform could advance to the next stage.
Of course, I was currently the only Virtual Lifeform in existence… but you never know. Somewhere out there, maybe there were other Virtual Lifeforms too shy to show themselves — and I could be a role model for them. Naturally, I'd take all the credit for pioneering this. The latecomers could sit there sucking their thumbs! Heheheh!
"…Still, I should call it a day here. If I get too excited and wander around until I get lost, that'll be a problem."
I shoved the still-unidentified Blu-ray disc into my bag as I muttered that. Physically I still had plenty of energy left, but picking my way through the dark with nothing but a single flashlight was surprisingly draining on the mind. It felt like playing a first-person horror game in real time. I'd gotten less scared once I started getting absorbed in collecting data… but the idea of going full throttle only for the flashlight to die and leave me stranded was something I didn't even want to imagine. Terrifying.
"Next time I'll bring a bigger bag and draw a map while I… huh?"
I was mulling over how to use today's haul and planning the next search when something I couldn't look away from suddenly caught my eye.
"What… is that?"
It was a scissor blade. A massive scissor blade jutting out from between the scrap heaps, asserting its presence with a sharp, clean silhouette. I couldn't help but wonder — in a scrapyard full of twisted, dented, mangled objects that had all looked the part, had I ever seen anything this sharply defined?
"Hmm… doesn't seem like a trap or anything. But seriously, what is it? That presence feels dangerous."
I glanced left and right twice, the way you do before crossing a street, then carefully approached the blade. The single remaining half of a giant pair of scissors was nearly as tall as I was. Made of some black, hard material like obsidian, it was flawlessly clean from tip to base — not a single scratch. And even though you could tell at a glance it was a scissor blade, something about it also felt like a sword with a curved edge.
I stared at it blankly… and then, as if entranced, my hand naturally closed around the grip.
"Oh. It came free. Not as heavy as I expected."
The blade slid upward the moment I gripped the handle and gave a light pull. The weight… maybe thirty or forty kilos? Objectively on the heavy side, but nothing my arm strength couldn't handle.
…Should I take it? I couldn't properly gauge its value, but a gut feeling flooded my head that I'd regret leaving it behind. And my hands still had room. One more thing wouldn't hurt.
"…I'm taking it!"
My mind was made up. If there was no reason not to take it, there was no reason to leave it. I wedged the self-defense staff I'd made earlier into a gap in my bag and took the giant scissor blade in one hand.
Yeah. Holding it felt a bit like gripping an umbrella as if it were a sword, and my heart gave a little flutter.
Alright — time to really head home. For a first day out, the haul had been pretty good. Including this scissor blade, that is.
"Hope it's a rare item~"
I tossed out that casually silly line and started walking back the way I'd come. My steps, free of any particular worry, were livelier than they'd been all day.