The clothes had already turned to dust and vanished during the surgical pod’s debridement.
If I had to say anything, I could only say I had never thought of that problem myself.
If I had known the clothes would disappear, that to the surgical pod they were unnecessary in the first place, then… I should at least have kept them for myself… that would have been better, ah.
In a ruin that had already been abandoned for who knew how many years, even if some of the facilities could still work normally, where was I supposed to find clothes?
Even knowing that besides Alice and me there should be no one left here, asking me to fly through the sky bare from the waist up… this… ah… QAQ??
As I approached, the medical-room door opened with a whoom—.
Outside was still the bright corridor.
I knew there was no one, yet I still looked left and right, then beat the wings at my back and lifted off the floor.
From the map, turning one corner would take me out of the corridor.
When the door at the end of the corridor opened, outside was a stretch of pitch-dark gloom, as if night had arrived in an instant.
The various shapes and marks drawn on the map told me this was an industrial sector.
Both sides of two broad roads were lined with warehouses, transport centers, and other functional buildings I could not understand.
The dim light came from a road not far away that cut across the entire area.
It was raised high in midair.
From a distance it looked like a band of light floating in the dark.
Beneath the road and on both sides, all the buildings stood there in neat horizontals and verticals.
It was hard to imagine such magnificent architecture existed under the desert.
As my eyes gradually adapted to the dark, the red lights flickering on the tops of different buildings sketched the outlines of whole stretches of structures.
Just looking at a scene like this made it easy to imagine how busy and lively this place had once been.
Only now they simply stood there, quiet and at ease, as if the yellow sand outside and the time outside no longer had anything to do with them.
The broad road, coming and going together, had 32 lanes in all.
I followed a walkway down the wall that soared until it vanished into darkness and came onto the road—
I had never seen a road this wide.
The steel cables on both sides looked so far from me standing in the middle of the road.
Directly opposite the road was another high wall.
The towering gate opened in its face, as majestic as a canyon in the mountains, made me wonder what had once passed through it.
In the dim light it looked like the work of giants.
The DKN-045 I was looking for was on the other side of the gate.
On the map I had already felt it was large, its size occupying almost half the screen.
But when I passed through the enormous gate and came inside, I only felt it was boundless.
The factory was different from the factories in my impression, the ones full of machines, lathes, conveyor belts, and equipment of that kind.
It had nothing.
It was only an empty lot.
Pale-blue light extended across the floor as I walked, illuminating what lay in front of me.
Aside from that, the empty metal floor only made me wonder whether this really was a factory.
The blue light stretched to a rectangular platform rising from the ground, and then pale-blue lights lit on the platform.
In the blue light, a metal bottle about the size of a small spray can and another metal bottle about the size of a thermos, with a yellow handle recessed into the lid, sat there quietly.
I had not even lifted my hand to take them when two projections unfolded like prompt labels on the outside of the large bottle and the small one: [Human epidermal living-cell composite cluster], [Ether Initiation Factor].
Were these the materials I was supposed to take back to the medical room?
Smaller than I had imagined, especially this [human epidermal living-cell composite cluster] that was so critical to treating Alice’s external wounds.
Held in my hand it was smaller than my palm.
I could not even feel its weight.
I gripped both bottles tightly and could not help drawing a deep breath.
There had been a few problems along the way, but overall it had gone fairly smoothly.
[“User: 0109, Yulin. You have a custom product that has not been collected. Collect now?”]
?
As I picked up the two products on the platform, the platform that had risen from the floor slowly sank back beneath the ground and became part of the metal floor again.
A beam of red light dropped from the ceiling, and then a projection screen with a red border unfolded in front of me.
In the center of the screen were two rings turning in opposite directions.
In the center of the rings two buttons were displayed: [Collect] [Later].
A product of mine?
It was only a short sentence, yet it could not help making my mood surge.
[User 0109], and my name.
So that was the setting?
My reincarnation had been set in this place called Eden, making me a member of this ruin.
Thinking of it that way was still very exciting.
My origin, the story about me—if I could understand this place more deeply, I would find it someday, right?
Angels…
Eden…
I reached out and tapped the [Collect] button on the screen.
If I followed the tropes of those otherworld fantasy works I had read, this was probably my reincarnation perk, even though no figure like a goddess had appeared the whole way.
As my hand tapped the button on the screen, prompt text on the screen and a voice prompt from somewhere I could not place popped out together:
[“Halo authentication will now be performed. Confirm yes or no?”]
[Yes].
I pressed confirm on the screen.
[“Halo authentication passed. User 0109 Yulin. Attempting to search the Archive Bureau for the quantum model. Failed.”]
Ah.
Right.
Even I had heard it so many times I was sick of it.
This place called the Archive Bureau was always a failed connection.
[“Attempting to search quantum models from the offline archives of factories online across the entire domain. Found: 1.”]
[“Exchanging data with the offline archive of Factory A-01. Complete.”]
[“The product’s quantum model is encrypted with the Halo protocol. Attempting Halo communication with User 0109.”]
The halo above my head lit the instant the voice prompt finished.
Right after, the factory issued another prompt:
[“Loading quantum model via user Halo. Production quantity: 1. Preparing workbench…”]
An orange-red rectangle lit on the floor.
Then a platform extended from beneath the floor inside the rectangle.
This time the platform was a full circle larger than the one before, and nearly twice as high.
Then, as the orange-red band of light circling the platform began to turn, a faint whirr— also rose from inside the platform, as if some mechanical part were working in there.
[“Workbench calibration complete. Beginning print. 1% 3% 9%…”]
A faint mechanical hum came from inside the platform that was almost as tall as I was, but I could not see what was working inside it.
Even so, this counted as watching a factory in Eden at work.
Aside from marveling at how advanced the technology was, all that remained was a pile of things I could not understand.
I had clearly been set as a member of Eden, yet I knew nothing about this place called Eden.
Often I could not even understand what these cold machines were saying, let alone try to uncover what had happened here to leave it deserted like this.
How many years had it slept in silence under the yellow sand?
Perhaps the fact that the factory and the surgical pod could still function at all was already a miracle.
As for the rest, like everything I had seen along the way in Eden, they had long since fallen into a deep sleep in the deep dark.
[“A message has been detected in the data packet. Play during the operation?”]
A message?
Don’t tell me…
There really is a goddess?
A goddess left me a message?