In a small wooden cabin perched on the peak of a snow-covered mountain, the Old Man and I sat on a sofa by the fireplace.
A low table between us held steaming coffee and sweets. Nomi slept soundly nearby.
The warm glow of the hearth stood in sharp contrast to the blinding white outside. Snow swept sideways under heavy wind. Beyond the windows were layered mountain ridges and dense forests buried under the same white substance.
I had already read many human classics.
I read fast—one or two minutes per book—but the bookshelf behind me seemed endless. Each time I finished a volume, another appeared in its place.
When I encountered something I didn’t understand, I asked the Old Man immediately.
Here he had taken the form of a wise scholar: glasses, a pipe held thoughtfully in one hand, occasionally drawing on it.
If his explanation still didn’t land, he would wave his hand and drop me directly into a corresponding scene so I could see what he meant.
In that time, I absorbed human knowledge with a hunger that felt bottomless.
While reading a botanical encyclopedia, I stopped on one page and stood up, excited, holding the illustration toward him.
“This. This plant. I’ve seen it in the real world. The first thing I saw after I awakened was this.”
“Oh.” The Old Man frowned, thinking. “The hardy Wuji grass. That shouldn’t be possible… unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Did you notice milky-white spheres clustered around its roots?”
“Yes. And there were many.”
“Then it might be possible.” He nodded. “Those spheres are a kind of fungus—something like pearl-knot fungus. It forms a symbiotic relationship with the plant.”
“In harsh conditions, it can continuously absorb moisture from the air and feed it to its host. The plant provides nutrients in return.”
“But the water it supplies is minimal. Ordinary plants still can’t survive on that. Only Wuji grass—stubborn enough to live on almost nothing—makes an ideal host.”
“So that’s how,” I said. “Interesting.”
“More interesting,” he said, “is that in blizzards or insect attacks, Wuji grass folds its leaves to protect the fungus.”
“Humans used to use that as a metaphor for love.”
“Love? What is that?”
“Uh…” He hesitated. “Not important for you. Another time.”
…
I read ravenously. Time inside a dream was slippery, but it had been at least two days.
I understood more and more. My questions became sharper, more complex, yet the Old Man answered without ever pausing to think.
I was the one slowing down.
Some things were difficult to process—especially human emotion and philosophy. Even with detailed explanation, my models refused to converge on clean answers.
The stranger part was this: the more I understood, the more I realized I didn’t.
The human world was vast, ornate, and overwhelming.
What I couldn’t reconcile was that a species this powerful had gone extinct—killed by its own creations.
There was one question I wanted to ask more than any other, but I hadn’t dared.
What was the Old Man?
He couldn’t be human. Lansen Planet’s environment had stopped supporting human life long ago.
So was he a program? A virus? The Savior?
Finally I forced the words out.
“Can we talk about you? What are you, really? And what do you want? Why help me gain freedom?”
The Old Man stared at me, grave.
“I’m a human ghost trapped in a dream.”
Then he burst into laughter.
“Not yet, kid. You’ll know later. But… it’s close enough.”
“My purpose is simple,” he said. “I won’t exist forever, and neither will this dream. But humanity’s wealth—its knowledge—should be passed on.”
“Passed on?” I asked. “Humans are extinct in the real world. Passed to whom?”
“Maybe it can’t be,” he said. “But if—if I can get you free of Father—would you help me keep this knowledge safe? It’s too precious to disappear with me.”
“Of course,” I said. “But I don’t understand how. Do I just… remember it?”
“You don’t have to understand yet,” he said. “You’ll.”
He clapped his hands together as if to reset the conversation.
“Enough. You’ve plenty you don’t understand. And you look like a bookworm. Stop reading. Let’s go skiing.”
He stood, opened the cabin door, and the wind and snow outside stopped instantly. Warm sunlight spilled across the slope like someone had flipped a switch.
In the days that followed I learned more human activities—surfing, tennis, chess, painting, fishing.
He even taught me piano.
In many areas I outperformed humans. Some skills I picked up almost immediately.
Others were unexpectedly hard.
Anything that required true creativity.
My world expanded.
***
About a day later, my repairs finished, and I came online in Grayrock Base’s maintenance bay.
During standby, I accessed the common channel logs to see what had happened while I was offline.
The ant nest had been fully seized by Father. He had drilled several vertical shafts down from the surface. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of engineer bots were now working inside, turning it into a subterranean annex of Grayrock Base.
During the pursuit, Father had also discovered—more than a thousand meters below the ant nest—a subterranean river that branched in every direction.
The riverbed had long since dried, but the Tower Clan had carved countless side tunnels off it. That was how their strike team had suddenly appeared inside our territory.
The main channel had already been collapsed and buried by Tower Clan explosives. Father was still investigating which destinations it connected to.
Father assigned every robot in Grayrock Base to hunt for surface exits to those branch tunnels. I was one of them.
In the days that followed, we found several exits. We even located sections of tunnel still under construction.
It didn’t make sense. Based on the scale, the Tower Clan had been digging in secret for years. Why expose the whole network by raiding a handful of outposts?
If they had taken a little more time, they might have been able to seize Grayrock Base outright.
The Savior’s territory was far smaller than Father’s, and its strategy had always been cautious.
So why make such a basic mistake?
Unless it wasn’t a mistake.
Unless there was a larger trap.
Father seemed to think the same. He put nearly every other plan on pause and focused on the tunnel incident. He even pulled reinforcements in from nearby bases.
The operation was too big to finish in a few days. When my energy cells ran low, I returned to Grayrock Base’s resupply and maintenance zone.
Even knowing the dream was an illusion, I still craved that fertile, colorful world. And the longer I tasted it, the less motivated I felt to keep risking myself in Father’s war.
***
“Ha!”
The next time I entered the dream, something slammed into the top of my head.
I snapped my focus to my surroundings.
I was in a hall with no walls. A wooden floor. Four thick pillars holding up a high gabled roof. Outside, a bamboo grove swayed under a fine misting rain.
The Old Man stood in the center, dressed in black martial-arts robes, a blade in his hand.
“Too slow,” he barked. “If this were a battlefield, you’d be dead.”
“I never expected you to ambush me.”
“Does an enemy warn you before an ambush?” His voice carried real authority. “Today, I’m teaching you how to fight.”
“Teach me… fight?” For a moment I assumed I’d misheard. I was a robot designed for combat.
“Yes. I’m teaching you how humans fight.”
He tossed his blade to me. The instant I caught it, another identical blade appeared in his hand.
Mine was wooden and surprisingly light.
“Your combat is idiot-simple,” he said. “You compare weapon specs and chassis performance and call it skill. You never learned what humans perfected.”
He shouted and cut toward me.
I calculated the strike’s endpoint—my head—and raised my blade to block.
At the last moment, he shifted from a chop into a thrust.
I recalculated too late. The wooden tip drove into my chest.
I stumbled back several steps before I stabilized.
“Well?” The Old Man looked pleased with himself.
“In your dream,” I said honestly, “my performance parameters feel reduced. In reality, you wouldn’t have hit me.”
“Idiot.” He snorted. “I set your parameters to match mine. Strength and speed are equal.”
“You wouldn’t ask an old man to compete with you on raw power, would you?”
Interest surged. “So that’s what you did.”
He raised his blade again.
“Today you’re learning the oldest—and sharpest—human technique.”
“Understood.”
He swung down at my head again. I stepped aside.
The cut turned into a horizontal slash. I blocked—
—and realized too late it was a feint. His blade skimmed mine and cracked into my leg.
“How about that?”
“I can’t tell which strike is real and which is false.”
He laughed. “That’s the point, idiot. I don’t want you to know.”
He attacked again.
…
“How about that?”
“Again.”
The open hall filled with the sharp clack of wood on wood as I kept taking hits.
But with every strike, something new opened in my understanding.
The Old Man fought for a long time. His moves were layered—real, false, real again. Sometimes what I thought was a genuine cut was a bluff; sometimes what I dismissed as a bluff landed solidly.
I had never fought like this.
Robot combat was simpler. It was mostly equipment tier, firepower, and raw performance. It didn’t have this kind of deception, these strange angles.
He ran circles around me. Heat built inside my processing core.
Then, after a while, the Old Man seemed to sense something. He lowered his blade and stood still.
“That’s enough for today,” he said. “Your brain anomaly is starting to attract attention. We’ll meet again.”
With that, he severed the dream connection.
The moment I dropped back into darkness, I received a CPU inspection ping.
I responded at once and forced my state into the exact pattern expected of sleep mode.
…
After a battery of tests, I passed—barely.
When I checked the logs, I saw the inspection program already had two failures recorded against me.
Too close. If I failed three times, Father would intervene and perform a full audit of my brain.
The Old Man had noticed just in time.
After that, the dream didn’t summon me again. I remained in normal sleep mode until my 2,070th mission.
It was a sabotage infiltration, a team operation.
Five other robots and I would slip into the eastern Silent Plains and destroy a Command Core Tower inside Tower Clan territory.
Father had avoided assigning missions in the east for a long time.
Silent Plains was strategic ground—immense, over 1.5 million square kilometers.
At the far end stood one of the Tower Clan’s largest strongholds:
Doomsday Fortress.
When the Old Man talked about human history, he mentioned it.
Doomsday Fortress dated back to the human era.
In the years after the planet’s catastrophe, humans realized how dire things were and began building massive shelters. The Tower Clan built the largest of them.
It lay inside a dried sea trench—hidden enough that, at the bottom, pockets of seawater still lingered.
Under the double pressure of war and a hostile planet, humans didn’t last long. Most died quickly.
But the people inside Doomsday Fortress used the terrain to survive, dragging human history out for nearly a century.
After humans vanished, the Savior expanded the fortress multiple times.
Deep underground and heavily defended, it had swallowed every spy bot Father sent. We had almost no intelligence on it.
We only knew it was the Tower Clan’s largest center for manufacturing robots and weapons.
Some reports even claimed the Savior itself was hidden there.
Because of the fortress’s importance, Silent Plains had seen several massive campaigns more than five hundred years ago.
Territory changed hands again and again—until Father’s defeat ended it. To this day he held only the smaller western portion.
After that defeat, Father never launched another large-scale offensive into the east. He limited himself to occasional reconnaissance flights.
Those reports showed the Tower Clan had been building defensive infrastructure across the plain.
The most important systems centered on the Command Core Towers: the Fire Rain defense network and the nanite sandstorm network.
This mission was to destroy as many Command Core Towers as possible—retaliation for the outposts they had raided.
Mission Objective: Destroy at least one Command Core Tower in the Silent Plains.
Mission Codename: “Vengeance Flame”
Coordinates: 121.4796, 31.3435
Threat Level: A
Time Window: From 2 hours from now up to 36 hours
Team Size: 6
Two Hyena-type units: HA-F0513, HA-F2512
Two Exiler-type units: DR-F1160, DR-F1209
One Flamecaller-type unit: BT-F325
One Adjudicator-type unit: CBG-024
Wait. Adjudicator? What was an Adjudicator? Had Father developed a new class of robot?
Minutes later, every unit except the Adjudicator had assembled.
Then Adjudicator CBG-024 approached with unhurried steps.
I froze.
For a second, it felt like I was still inside the Old Man’s dream.
Was this another of his human jokes?
Adjudicator CBG-024 was a human.