novelraw Chapter 131: Yesterday, Rewritten
Chapter 131: Yesterday, Rewritten
The eerie feeling of having his handwriting imitated gripped Lin Jie's heart, the black investigation journal in his hand now feeling scalding and ominous.
This private object had been invaded without his knowledge.
This was an attack method more disheartening than spatial distortion or mirror-image provocation;
it no longer assaulted Lin Jie's senses or image, but the foundational memories that constituted him as the independent individual "Lin Jie."
After regaining his composure, he laid the diary flat on the table and began flipping through it page by page with extreme care.
He would examine his own history, which was being tampered with, like a rigorous textual scholar, and find the inevitable flaws left by the "counterfeit" within the implanted lies.
He soon discovered the pattern of the tampering.
His core memories since his transmigration—struggling to survive in London, contacting I.A.R.C., and fighting life-and-death battles with UMAs—were all preserved intact.
Whether it was the bloody despair of the "Sea Witch," the phantom-like killings of the "Ripper," or the victory on the desolate moors of "Dartmoor," they were all like soul steel seals that could not be easily erased.
However, in the gaps between these real, blood-and-fire-laden main trunk memories, the "counterfeit" had, with the skill of a grafting gardener, cleverly inserted some branches and leaves of yesterdays that Lin Jie had never experienced.
He saw that after an entry recording his early days in London, where he gnawed on black bread due to financial hardship, an extra passage had been added—a childhood recollection written in the same helpless, self-mocking tone by "himself.""This reminds me of my childhood days in Oberammergau. My father was a stern carpenter and one of the best painters in town. He always forced me to practice sketching for entire afternoons."
"He said, 'The Stein family bloodline flows with a perception of beauty;
you must not waste it.' But back then, I only wanted to go catch the winged squirrels in the Black Forest behind the house."
"Once, because I slacked off, he punished me by not letting me have dinner. Hungry, I hid in the studio secretly gnawing on the dry, hard black bread used to wipe charcoal pencils. Thinking back now, the taste of that bread then didn't seem much different from the inferior bread produced in London today..."
The implantation of this memory was seamless. Not only did it deeply tether him to the Cartographer Karl's hometown of Oberammergau, but more cleverly, it logically linked the false past to the real present through the shared detail of gnawing black bread. When reading it, one would only feel it was a natural emotional response to the scene, without suspecting its authenticity.
He continued flipping backward.
After an entry recording his awe at the vast ocean of knowledge upon entering the library of the Underground City, he found another passage of academic reflection in a scholarly tone.
"Although the library of Heidelberg University is equally magnificent, the danger and forbidden nature of its collections are far incomparable to this place."
"I still remember, back then, in order to complete Professor Schmidt's doctoral thesis on 'The Alienation of the Thing-in-Itself Concept in Kant's Transcendental Idealism within the Germanic Mythological System,' I once shut myself in the ancient texts section for months on end."
"But even the most profound ancient texts there merely contained the footprints left by human reason exploring the boundaries of the world. Every book here, Lin, you must remember, every single word could be a key to an abyss that truly exists and can consume your reason..."
If the previous memory was clever, the implantation of this one could be described as malicious.
Not only did it fabricate an academic history for Lin Jie studying at Heidelberg University, but it also dragged the innocent Professor Schmidt into the mix, turning him into an important mentor and witness in his false life. More fatally, it began to imitate Lin Jie's thought patterns, lecturing himself in a tone of self-warning.
It was no longer satisfied with tampering with facts;
it was attempting to define Lin Jie's personality.
The terrifying thing was, after reading this content and then recalling the details of that time, the memory images that appeared in his mind were identical to those in the diary.
His perception of the past was being subtly replaced.
This was definitely a more dangerous attack than the mirror-image imitation in the mirror—it was polluting the very source of his fundamental question, "Who am I?" from within.
Once he was convinced by these false memories, once he began to harbor even a sliver of doubt about his real transmigration memories from the 21st century, he would be lost in this enormous labyrinth woven from past and present, truth and falsehood.
Lin Jie felt his temples throbbing from the pressure akin to worldline correction. He was forced to forcibly close the diary and shut his eyes, using his tempered mental strength to wage a memory war against forgetting in his mind.
He forced himself, over and over, to recall the life fragments belonging to the real "him" from the 21st century.
He remembered watching the "Journey to the West" cartoon in his grandmother's old house as a child, and how the omnipotent Monkey King planted the seeds of heroism and rebellion in his heart.
He remembered the shock and novelty of the whole world opening up before him as a teenager when he first accessed the internet from his father's old computer.
He also remembered the countless sleepless nights, filled with caffeine and the scent of book ink, spent in the university library to complete his graduation thesis on social changes in the Victorian era.
These memories were filled with details and emotions only he could appreciate. Perhaps they weren't as legendary or dramatic as the implanted memories, but they were utterly real.
In this painful memory war, Lin Jie, relying on his extraordinary information processing and logical analysis abilities, captured the single, most fatal common flaw hidden beneath all the lies.
He abruptly opened his eyes. He had found it!
He discovered that although all the implanted false memories had no logical flaws in terms of factual arrangement—such as locations (Oberammergau, Heidelberg), people (father, Professor Schmidt), and events (learning painting, writing a thesis)—they all eerily lacked the most crucial core element that any real memory necessarily carries.
"The warmth of emotion."
Those memories were all too cold.
They were like video footage faithfully recorded by a calm, objective bystander with a camera.
You could see the fact that "young Lin Jie" was punished by his father for slacking off in the Oberammergau childhood recollection, but you couldn't feel the genuine fear and rebelliousness of a real child being punished by a strict father.
You could also see the fact that "college student Lin Jie" burned the midnight oil studying diligently to complete his thesis in the Heidelberg academic recollection, but you similarly couldn't sense from the words the mixture of anxiety, exhaustion, and the eventual sense of accomplishment and joy a real scholar feels when exploring the boundaries of unknown knowledge.
These false memories had only skeletons, no flesh and blood.
They were dead.
They were counterfeits mechanically generated and simulated by some program that lacked genuine human emotion.
This discovery dispelled the confusion in Lin Jie's heart.
He had found this UMA's Achilles' heel.
It could replicate information, imitate behavior, and tamper with memories, but it could not empathize nor create even the most trivial of genuine human emotions.
It was merely a perfect imitator.
But it could never become a true creator.
Because it had no heart.
Lin Jie began to conceive in his mind a counterattack script, filled with genuine emotions, that would cause the counterfeit to collapse from its inability to understand and replicate.
Just as he grasped this weakness and prepared to proceed with his next plan...
"Knock, knock."
A somewhat odd-sounding knock came from outside the door.
Immediately after, a respectful young voice came through the door panel, carrying a tone of natural, taken-for-granted familiarity.
"Herr Stein?"
"Your dinner is ready."