As a weirdo, I like being a Kamen Rider

He pointed to the side of the pool table—next to the number eight ball—where something had appeared out of nowhere: an empty lighter casing. A Zippo, the brass was almost worn through, and the lettering on the cap had been engraved but was now flattened—only the tail of the letter S was still recognizable.

Shotaro stared at the empty lighter shell, his Adam's apple bobbing.

“He didn’t guard it for a hundred thousand years,” Philip said softly, his fingers unconsciously tracing the creases of the paper—the paper fibers were new. It wasn’t an artifact from a hundred thousand years ago. “He’s waiting. His way of waiting is to keep this place in a state of ‘ready to return for business at any time.’ So the pool tables can’t be dusty. So the light boards can’t fall off.”

He looked up at the darkness on the second floor.

"—Because these things aren't decorations. They are your coordinates."

Quiet.

Then the dark area at the stairwell moved.

The silhouette of a fedora emerged from the shadows. Then came the cheekbones, the jawline—deeply shaved, not gaunt, but as if time had smoothed away all the excess. The skin looked normal in the dim lighting of the pool hall, but if you stared at the edges—

No. I'm not looking at it anymore. I'm not going to pile up those things.

He is Shotaro Hidari. Old? No. Time doesn't add or subtract anything on this person; it only polishes him.

His gaze first fell on Philip.

Those grey-green eyes checked again—then looked away, scanning over Wakana, Sherrard, Tsukasa Kadoya, Lin Chen, Akiko, and finally back to Philip.

"Welcome! Is there anything you need to ask of me?" The voice was hoarse and deep, with each word spaced a half-beat longer than in normal conversation, but it wasn't weak—it was because the vocal cords hadn't been used to speaking to so many strangers in a long time and needed to be recalibrated.

Chapter 166 'The Dead World'

Data Shotaro leaned against the edge of the table, his fingers unconsciously fiddling with the number eight ball. The black ball rolled twice, hit the cushion, bounced back, and came to rest between his thumb and forefinger. He stared at the ball, as if looking at something very far away.

“One hundred thousand years.” He repeated these three words, his tone flat, as if reading a summary of a commission that had nothing to do with him. “The flow of time in the data world is different from what you perceive. On the surface, physical time has only passed about eleven years—that’s the Wind City you see on the city walls, it’s still turning, the sun still rises, and the wind still blows. But the iteration cycle of the underlying data, converted to human perception, is one hundred thousand years.”

He put the number eight ball back on the felt, pulled his hand back, and put it into his trench coat pocket.

"The first fifty years were the hardest."

Philip didn't speak, but he knew the weight of what Data Shotaro meant by "difficult"—this person could be described as "a bit troublesome" after being thrown from the third floor by the dopant and breaking two ribs.

“It took me fifty years to confirm one thing: I’m not dreaming, nor am I insane.” Data Shotaro’s grey-green eyes remained impassive in the dim light, his voice as calm as if he were reviewing an old case. “Philip, I told you, what’s the first lesson for a detective?”

“After eliminating all the impossibilities, whatever remains, however absurd, is the truth,” Philip replied quickly.

“Yes.” Data Shotaro’s lips twitched, the curve somewhere between a smile and muscle memory. “So fifty years later, when I look in the mirror at a face that hasn’t aged, I finally crossed out the option ‘I’m crazy.’”

Akiko stood at the top of the stairs, her hands clasped together. She wanted to say something, but something seemed to be blocking her throat. Ten thousand years. She would complain even if waiting for the bus for more than twenty minutes. This half-baked guy had waited for ten thousand years.

Data Shotaro noticed her expression, turned his head, and deliberately softened his tone: "Don't make that face, Director. I wasn't awake for 100,000 years—I was unconscious for a long time at the beginning. The aftershocks of the Gaia Impact shattered the duality of me and Philip, but not completely. My consciousness data was stuck between the Limit Memory and the Earth's database, neither here nor there, equivalent to... what you understand as a vegetative state. I lay there for... well, based on my perceived time, about 30,000 years."

Tsukasa Kadoya put down his camera, leaned against the wall, and his expression became unusually serious.

“That period wasn’t actually painful,” Data Shotaro said, pulling an empty pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He crushed the empty pack and casually tossed it into a metal bin in the corner. But he never smoked. “The pain only comes when you wake up. Because when you open your eyes, the wind is still there, the people are there, but nothing is right.”

His voice paused here.

“I walked out of Narumi’s office, and the streets were exactly the same. The factory chimneys were still smoking, and the reflection from Fuuto Tower was as glaring as ever. The coffee shop on the corner was still open, and the owner was still that bald uncle. I said ‘Good morning’ to him, and he said ‘Welcome, what would you like?’ But the look in his eyes was wrong—it wasn’t that he didn’t recognize me, it was that he recognized me but didn’t recognize anything related to ‘Shotaro Hidari’. I wasn’t in his database.”

“I thought it was mass amnesia, or some kind of large-scale memory alteration incident.” He shook his head slightly.

"Later I realized that it wasn't that they forgot me—it was that I was still there, but they were no longer. The consciousness, memories, and personalities of all the residents of the original Wind City had been dismantled. They were broken down into the smallest data units, scattered, reassembled, and running a completely new identity program."

The Gaia Impact didn't create an 'ideal world,' but a simulated world reconstructed using Earth's memories. Those who survived weren't human, but data entities generated using humans as templates.

Lin Chen listened quietly by the door frame.

"Do you know what the most ironic thing is?" Data Shotaro suddenly laughed, a very faint laugh, so faint that it was almost unbelievable for someone who had lived for 100,000 years. "The rebuilt world has no impurities. No Sonozaki family. No Kamen Rider. No you—Philip. Everything related to 'Earth's memory' has been erased, including the memory itself. This world is clean, peaceful, and perfect."

It's so perfect that every night when I lie in bed, I feel like I'm the bug in the system.

There was silence for a few seconds. The table tennis light tube emitted a faint hum.

“I tried to escape.” Data Shotaro pulled a hand out of his pocket, spread his fingers, and looked at his palm. “I forcibly broke through the data boundary using the Limit Memory. The first time I broke through three layers of firewalls, but I was detected by the system's error correction mechanism when I reached the seventh layer.”

The error correction program looked like a mixture of fear and dread—not real fear, but an anti-intrusion program the system had concocted from fragments of my memory. It cleaved me in two, splitting me at the data level. The pain…”

He thought for a moment, then said in a tone that described the weather, "I wouldn't really recommend it."

"How many times have you escaped?" Sherrard's voice came from outside the door, as calm as if he were asking for a case number.

“I can’t remember.” Data Shotaro folded his fingers and put them back in his pocket. “For the first ten thousand years, I tried about ten or twenty times a year on average. Later, the frequency dropped—not because I gave up, but because I found that every forced breakthrough would trigger an adaptive upgrade of the system. I was getting stronger, and the firewall was getting stronger too. By the fifty thousandth year, the error correction program on the seventh layer could already simulate the complete form of the W beyond-limit memory.”

He paused for a moment: "We can't beat our own memories."

"So you're not going to run away?" Tsukasa Kadoya asked. The angle of the question was as tricky as ever.

"Run," said Data Shotaro. "Change direction and run. Stop running outwards and start running inwards."

"Inwards?" Akiko didn't understand.

“The underlying logic of the data world,” Philip answered for her. “He doesn’t push boundaries outward, but rather infiltrates the system’s architecture itself. Going inward is more dangerous than going outward—external firewalls will only reject you, while the internal architecture will try to assimilate you.”

“I’ve been assimilated twice.” As Data Shotaro said this, his thumb unconsciously rubbed the empty Zippo lighter casing in his pocket. “The first time was around the 40,000th year. I infiltrated the core data node of Fuuto and accidentally triggered assimilation.”

My entire being was torn to pieces—consciousness, memories, personality, all shattered, drifting in the bottom-level data stream of Fuuto for nearly ten thousand years. For those ten thousand years, I was nothing. Sometimes I was a melody in the memories of a coffee shop owner, sometimes a fluctuation in the wind speed sensor atop Fuuto Tower, sometimes just a gust of wind—literal wind, blowing around the corner of the shopping street, because half of Shotaro Hidari was mixed in with that gust.

No one spoke. The only sounds in the billiard hall were the hum of the fluorescent lights and the faint whistling of the wind in the distance.

"How did you manage to piece it back together?" Wakana asked softly.

"Ultimate Memory. When my fragments of consciousness were scattered everywhere by the data stream of Fengdu, it was this memory that salvaged me bit by bit at each node. It would find a fragment, store it, and then find the next one. After ten thousand years, it pieced together about 70%. The remaining 30%... and Fengdu underwent tremendous changes during those ten thousand years."

Whether it was a forced self-evolution or not, it was clear that it had failed. He didn't mention the remaining 30%, but everyone understood.

Around the sixty thousandth year, I began to understand the rules by which this world works.

The city of Fengdu after the Gaia impact is essentially a massive data ecosystem—not a virtual world, but a materialized data world. Every street, every building, and every 'person' is a manifestation of a piece of Earth's memory.

They eat, sleep, work, and fall in love, seemingly just like ordinary people, but the underlying logic is all about the flow and iteration of data. What they ingest isn't food, but data packets. What they excrete isn't waste, but data fragments deemed useless by the system. Birth, aging, illness, and death are the iterative updates of data versions, and emotional fluctuations are the peak loads on the processor.

"And what about you?" Akiko couldn't help but ask, "Will you get old too? Do you need to eat? You..."

“I don’t need to eat,” said Data Shotaro, “but I get hungry. Hunger at the data level—not an empty stomach, but the feeling of memory usage dropping below a certain threshold. The rules of this world don’t quite apply to me because I haven’t been fully transformed.”

When Philip and I were one, our consciousness data were entangled. During the Gaia Impact, Philip's part was separated, but not completely—like leaving a layer of residue when tearing tape. I am that residue.

"Alright, enough of that. What do you want to do in this world?" Data Shotaro looked at Shotaro, who hadn't spoken until now.

No one spoke; instead, they all looked at Lin Chen. Everyone was being led by the nose by Lin Chen; no one knew what his plans were.

Lin Chen straightened up: "You should understand, right? This world is 'dead.' We're going to use this world to create a final memory that will prevent all of this from happening!" Everyone was shocked; what did this mean?

"The wind has already been drawn into the battle for Zi-O's coronation. The best outcome would be for Zi-O to recreate the world. I don't think you want yourselves to be reset like data, do you?" Everyone remained silent upon hearing this.

"We plan to create a god-level memory that surpasses the Gold Memory, allowing the W world to break free from the history of Zi-O, expel outsiders, prevent the arrival of the Gaia Impact, and at the same time create a 'god' who can truly protect the world."

"Don't rush to speak, this is a decision made jointly by both worlds." After Lin Chen finished speaking, he took out the luminous white memory chip from his pocket. A flash of white light enveloped everyone within it.

Chapter 167 Narumi Shokichi

The blinding white light faded, and everyone rubbed their eyes to recover. All they could see was an endless expanse of pure white. There was no sky, no earth, no sound; the silence was unsettling.

"Where...is this place?" Shotaro was the first to react, instinctively shielding Philip behind him and cautiously looking around.

"The World of Consciousness on Earth".

A voice exactly like Shotaro's rang out. Everyone turned to look and saw Data Shotaro standing not far away, the data stream around him fluctuating slightly, his eyes much calmer than before.

Lin Chen nodded, took two steps forward, and shouted into the empty white space in front of him, "That's right, I've brought the people. You two should show yourselves now."

As the words fell, the air in front of them began to distort slightly. Two orbs of light of different colors slowly condensed and gradually took shape. One was a soft green, composed of countless fine data streams, its outline blurred and its specific appearance indistinct; the other was a deep blue, interspersed with a large number of pulsating red numbers, flowing like blood vessels within a body, its form much clearer than the green one, and resembling a human.

"You've come, Sonozaki. Or, you'd prefer I call you Philip." The green data entity spoke first, its voice calm, ancient, and carrying an indifference that seemed to look down upon all things.

"Who are you?" Philip asked, frowning.

"The memory of Earth." Before the two data entities could answer, Tsukasa Kadoya spoke first. He crossed his arms and looked at the two orbs of light with an understanding expression. "I've been here once before, but I didn't expect there to be two."

The green data entity slowly raised its hand, its fingertips tracing a trail of flowing green light through the air. "I am the Earth's memory from the main universe." Its gaze swept over Philip, then fell on Data Shotaro. "And it is the Earth's consciousness in this data world. It is a new will born from the fragments of the original Earth's memory after the Gaia Impact."

The blue and red data object remained silent, simply standing there quietly. Its eyes were two rapidly spinning vortexes of numbers, devoid of any emotion. Red numbers danced and flashed across its surface, like error codes or flowing blood.

"The Gaia Impact was not an accident."

The blue and red data entity suddenly spoke. Its voice was a cold, synthesized tone, devoid of any intonation, like a computer reading a program log.

"It was triggered by my original self. Philip's calculations were correct; as long as my consciousness left Sonozaki Wakana's body, the original Gaia impact would stop. But the original Earth consciousness has been corrupted by human emotions."

"Human desires, hatred, and greed can unleash the power of the Gaia Memory to its fullest extent and also promote its evolution. But these emotions, like a virus, are also gradually eroding Earth's database. At the moment when everything should have ended, the primordial consciousness suddenly had a thought—it wanted to see if humanity would become the perfect being it desired if the Gaia Impact had truly succeeded."

"The result is obvious; it failed. The Gaia Impact was never just aimed at humanity, but at the entire world. At that moment, Earth died. In the 50,000th year of 'humanity's eternal existence, the primordial consciousness, inspired by your fate of scattering into Fuuto—Shotaro Sasuke—planned to disintegrate itself into data and scatter it throughout the world, attempting to push the world to evolve again. You can guess the result without me having to tell you."

"Then, I was born. It wasn't until Decade came into this world that I first became aware of the existence of extraterrestrial life. I chose to meet him, but he brought 'He' with him as well."

The blue and red data entities turned their gaze to the green data entity. The green data entity continued, "After discussing it, we decided to merge the two worlds. But the main universe isn't absolutely safe either. Just then, this man found us and made a proposal—to create a sufficiently powerful being to protect the new world after the merger."

"Ha, how laughable." Data Left Shotaro suddenly sneered, his voice full of anger. "You never asked for our opinions before deciding everyone's fate on your own. What's the difference between this arrogant attitude and that old madman Ryubei?"

"No, this is the best choice for both worlds." The blue and red data entity's tone remained unchanged, as if it were completely unaware of Data Shotaro's anger. "Shotaro, I know what you're thinking. I've prepared what you want."

As soon as he finished speaking, countless tiny data points suddenly appeared before him. These points rapidly coalesced, transforming into Gaia Memory Elements. One, ten, a hundred… they were densely packed, stretching as far as the eye could see, numbering in the millions, silently suspended in mid-air, emitting a faint blue glow.

"What is this?" Data Left Shotaro was stunned, and the anger on his face instantly subsided.

"All the data of everyone in Wind City at the time of the Gaia impact. Memories, emotions, experiences, everything, is here," the blue-red data entity said.

"Fuuto? What about people in other parts of the world?" Data Shotaro asked hurriedly.

"I'm sorry," the blue and red data entity's voice remained cold, "because the spring is in Fuuto, only the data from Fuuto was preserved intact. The data from other places were lost in the impact."

Data Shotaro stared at the sky full of memories, speechless. He slowly reached out and gently touched the memory closest to him. The cool touch sent countless familiar images flooding his mind—memories of the takoyaki vendor on the street.

"Wait!" Shotaro from the main universe suddenly spoke up, pointing at Data Shotaro and asking, "Where's this guy's partner? Where did you put him?"

“Philip has always been by his side.”

As soon as the blue and red data entity finished speaking, a clear mechanical eagle cry suddenly rang out. A golden stream of light flew out from the data Shotaro's body, circled in the air once, and landed in his hand. It was the mechanical eagle that the Ultimate Memory had transformed into.

The little eagle affectionately rubbed against Data Shotaro's palm, making a "cheep cheep" sound.

“As expected…” Data Shotaro’s gentle voice enveloped Kodaka as he whispered, “Partner, it turns out you’ve always been by my side.”

Just then, the Ultimate Memory suddenly flew up from his hand and hovered in mid-air. Countless golden data emanated from its body, rapidly condensing and recombining. Soon, a figure exactly like Philip appeared before everyone.

"Shotaro, it's been a long time," Data Philip said with a smile.

Data Shotaro suddenly covered his mouth, and symbols of 0s and 1s escaped from the corners of his eyes. He could no longer hold back, rushed forward and hugged Data Philip tightly, the two figures made of data embracing each other tightly.