I Won't Freeze in Place Out of Fear of Risk
Where there's smoke, there's fire. In the end, every event has a cause and effect.
If something happens, there is always a proper reason for it — even if you never manage to figure out what that reason was.
And yet, the Earth still turns. Galileo Galilei's famous line. Though there's no actual evidence he ever said it.
Anyway.
With that kind of thinking always in the back of my mind, this one-sided black scissors blade — the weapon I'd lately taken to calling the Scissors Blade — couldn't help but feel like something with secrets buried inside it.
It sat there, perfectly intact no matter how long I left it outside, as if declaring that the law of finite time — the limit no object could escape — simply didn't apply to it. Thinking this Scissors Blade was just some ordinary thing with nothing special about it would have been the work of a complete idiot.
So I'd spent my free moments running experiment after experiment, trying to dig up whatever secret it held. And at last, I found something.
Resonance.
Kiiing—
I gripped the handle hard and focused on the sensation of connecting with the Scissors Blade. As if answering that will, the sharp edge of the blade began to glow with a faint light.
Attunement… Deploy.
Feeling my consciousness link with the Scissors Blade, I added the image of pouring some kind of energy from inside my body into the weapon. Something seemed to drain out of me, and a brilliant radiance gradually bloomed across the blade.
"Haaaaah!"
Discharge.
I swung the light-blazing Scissors Blade without hesitation at the scrap-metal heap in front of me.
The result was nothing short of astonishing.
The Scissors Blade, swung with everything I had, erased an entire mountain of scrap as if it weighed nothing at all.
That was it. One of the secrets this black, obsidian-like Scissors Blade had been holding. It could take a certain energy from inside my body as fuel and deliver a devastating strike — powerful enough to cleave a threatening beast in a single blow, or wipe a towering scrap pile clean off the map.
"Hoo… That should clear a path. Heave… ho!"
But I couldn't afford to get excited about the spectacular result. I was right in the middle of serious work.
"Urgh… Maybe I should've made wheels. No, no. Better to save even a little CP…!"
Sssk. Sssssk.
I grabbed the tail of a crocodile-shaped Virtual Beast and heaved it onto my shoulder, then forced myself forward one step, then two. The overwhelming weight — easily hundreds of kilos — made my arms ache on their own, and sweat rolled down my cheeks to drip onto the ground.
Still, I could endure this much hard labor. My body wasn't the fragile thing it had been when I'd first become Nia. And when I thought about the high-quality data this beast carried inside it… my mouth watered like I was staring at a delicious meal, and my motivation refused to drop. Hardship was bearable when you knew a clear reward was waiting at the end.
"Hyaaaah!"
That said, just because I felt that way didn't mean the fatigue building up in my body disappeared. Hard was hard, and there was no need to put on a tough act when nobody was watching. Still — maybe just a little more. I locked my eyes on the shelter already visible ahead and drove my feet forward.
"Noise. Can you process this for me?"
"Yeah. Leave it to me."
Having dragged the beast's corpse all the way to the shelter, I immediately asked Noise to sort through the data. High-quality data with almost no loss was great, but right now that data was still locked inside the beast's bones and flesh. To use it, it needed at least one round of decryption — processing, in simple terms. And Noise was far better at that than I was.
Before she got a body, she used to pick data out of dead beasts and live off it, didn't she?
I'd learned the decryption method from her, so I could manage it clumsily myself — but my success rate and yield weren't great. Better to leave the hard jobs to the expert. If I botched it and ruined the data for good, I'd be kicking myself.
Then I'll… take a short break.
While Noise handled the cleanup, I had nothing immediate to do, so I decided to catch my breath in the chair I'd set up inside the shelter. The Scissors Blade could erase beasts and scrap heaps in a single swing — but it left a matching toll on body and mind.
If a little physical tiredness is all it costs to take down a monster, I'd do it as many times as I needed to.
I muttered that to myself and studied the Scissors Blade leaning against the wall. Ever since I'd accidentally bisected that refrigerator mimic, I'd known this mysterious blade was valuable. Its existence — a weapon that could protect me from outside threats — was one of the reasons I'd been able to claim territory in this Data Trash Heap. The wounded monsters that wandered into the area were well within what the Scissors Blade could handle. And when I took them down, I got to swallow high-quality data whole. Kill two birds with one stone. Catch a crayfish while digging a ditch. Pure double profit.
Of course, the Abyss Berka I met at that subway station — and the monster that was chewing on it — are out of the question. Swinging the Scissors Blade won't win those fights anytime soon.
I was well aware this was still a high-risk game. No matter how good the Scissors Blade was, as long as things like Predator Species existed in the Abyss, a crisis could arrive at any moment. But I had no intention of freezing in place out of fear of that eventual danger. If anything, I wanted to get even a little stronger — strong enough to protect myself and Noise. Living in the Abyss meant a collision with those things was inevitable.
So… first priority is earning a lot of CP. Even before the goal of reviving Nia's stream, it's something I absolutely need to survive in this world.
Someone might wonder here: what does CP — which only affects Creation — have to do with getting stronger? To explain that, I needed to look at the status window I'd made before.
"Status."
I straightened my posture, put on a very serious face, and muttered toward empty air. Blue text rose across my pale forearm — as if my skin itself had become a screen. Not that it surprised me. This was just another program I'd created by spending CP not long ago.
Going all the way back up to the room every time I wanted to check my CP balance was a pain.
The idea of using skin as a display. But nothing about my body had actually changed. The forearm the text floated on was still soft, as if insisting it belonged to a girl's body. Being a Virtual Lifeform at the root, I was different from an ordinary person in all sorts of ways.
…Anyway, enough of that. What mattered right now wasn't how the text appeared on my skin — it was what it said.
> Accessing user data...
The information floating on my forearm looked like that. The only things that had changed since I'd first created the status window were the numbers. And once I'd figured out what LP, EP, and CP actually meant, I could tell this was a pretty satisfying improvement.
LP isn't just stamina — it's a comprehensive numerical index of physical ability. The higher it is, the stronger my body has become. Safe to read it that way.
The baseline had been 100 LP when I'd first created the status window. So 213 LP now meant I was roughly 113% stronger than back then. Not an exact comparison, but that was the general idea.
Below that, EP functioned as a kind of energy that powered objects in this Abyss environment where Creation didn't work. A single use of the Scissors Blade, for example, cost around 1,000 EP. And the conversion rate from CP to EP was one-tenth. Put those two facts together, and one swing of the Scissors Blade cost about 10,000 CP.
Expensive and cheap at the same time. Lately, one stream earns me around 120,000 CP on average. So one stream buys me about twelve Scissors Blade swings.
Ten thousand CP. Not enough to make me hesitate every time — but not enough to swing freely either. I'd have to save it for the moments that really needed it. Right now, while I was still expanding my territory, there were too many places that needed CP. Light bulbs for the expansion. Traps to lay. Maintenance. It felt like getting paid and watching the money vanish straight into credit card debt and insurance. Knowing it was necessary didn't make it less painful.
The real silver lining was that my personal stream — which had risen on a wave of buzz — had settled into a fairly stable place lately. The early flood of trolls and aggro had dropped off a lot, new viewers kept coming in, and interest in the content was still running hot.
But settling for this much would be a waste. Looking long-term, there's still plenty of room to grow…
Every metric was smiling at me. The numbers were trending up, the content had personality, and there wasn't much that could go wrong. But like I said — my current environment was far too precarious to sit back and get comfortable. To face the Predator Species I would eventually run into, I needed to pull this growth forward even a little faster.
For all I know, a Predator Species could show up tomorrow. I don't have the luxury of taking it slow and long.
Plenty of methods floated through my head. Among them, a way to grow the stream's scale in a really striking way was…
"…Not that there isn't one."
"Hm?"
"Ah, Noise. Nothing. Just talking to myself. Keep going."
"Okay."
Had I let a mutter slip out without meaning to? Noise, who'd been tinkering away with a beast bone in her hands, turned her head toward me. Oops — I'd interrupted her. I hurriedly waved my arms to signal it was nothing. Noise tilted her head for a second, then nodded as if she understood and went back to work.
Sorry for interrupting after putting her to work. Noise throws herself into everything — it's honestly nice to watch.
Having peeled off her heavy work suit, Noise was diligently restoring data in a pair of cute overalls. Watching her with a fond look, a good idea suddenly flickered through my mind.
…What if I shot a vlog?
Cute, pretty people are fun just to watch. And right now, I was the cutest person in the world. If viewers got to see me like this, they'd definitely love it.
Plus, some people still think I'm streaming under a Virtual Lifeform concept. This would be a good chance to clear that up too.
Two birds, one stone — perfect for clearing up the misunderstanding. No cleaner answer than that.
Title: A Virtual Lifeform's Rough Tour of the Cyber World.
This might just be the kind of material that could grab people's attention to an absurd degree.