In a crude brazier, coal lumps and firewood crackled and burned. Two soldiers in heavy plate armor lounged against either side of it, their greatswords left carelessly at their sides, the warmth of the flames having made them forget their duty.
Suddenly a set of footsteps came from inside the manor. The soldiers snatched up their weapons and shot to their feet, standing sternly at either side of the gate.
The footsteps came closer and closer. It was a thin, frail youth; his clothes were reasonably tidy, but plainly unsuited to the weather. On his back he carried a basket that looked as big as his whole body, and in one hand he held a sickle, walking out of the manor as though no one else existed.
On that small, thin body of his sat an oversized head, and his green eyes were as flat as dead water — dull, listless, without a ripple in them. He looked like a fool.
On seeing who it was, the soldiers relaxed at once, and what took their place was pure mockery. The manor was neither big nor small; newcomers joined and old hands left, but this boy everyone knew, and everyone had bullied.
He had no name. After the old groom picked him up out of the wild fields, everyone called him the Fool. When the old groom died, the nine-year-old Fool became the new groom, and by today it had been nearly seven years.
The boy walked toward the side gate without a glance to either side, utterly indifferent that the gate was still shut tight. The soldier on the left seized the basket and stopped him, hoisted him up with one hand, and casually patted him down with the other, producing a series of smacks; finding nothing out of the ordinary, he signaled to the soldier on the right to open the side gate, then let go. The boy landed steadily on his feet and set off toward the wild fields without a word.
The soldiers shut the side gate, curled their lips, and walked back to the brazier. The biting north wind wormed into the gaps of their plate armor and set them shivering. They grumbled, "Damn this weather. Why'd you let him off so easy?"
"There's no fun in bullying a fool all day. He won't even fight back."
Once autumn set in, the weather in Northland turned colder by the day. No snow had fallen yet, but the grass that had still looked green just a couple of days ago was now nearly withered to yellow. To the noble lords the weather was worth no more than a few complaints; to the boy, it meant the easy days were over.
Not that he cared one way or the other about the cold.
He was not the only servant in the stables. A half-witted boy obviously could not tend that herd of noble warhorses with the blood of strange beasts in their veins.
The warhorses ate better than the servants did — fresh meat, fruits and vegetables, beans, tender grass, everything they could want — and all of those supplies were produced right there on the manor. The only reason they sent the boy out to cut grass in the wilds was the servants' own nasty amusement.
They would even bet on whether he would be eaten by a wild beast every time he went out, and they never tired of such a vicious wager.
The boy paid it no mind. He was like a machine, living by a fixed routine day after day; nothing from the outside world could affect him. Nothing but the threat of death.
The green grass grew scarcer and scarcer. He walked straight deeper into the wilds, bending now and then to swing his sickle and drop each clump of grass into the basket. Unnoticed, the manor behind him disappeared from sight.
The north wind moaned, and the skin the boy left bare turned purple with cold. All around was empty; even the rats and rabbits that had once been everywhere were gone. But cold clearly could not kill off all life — it only made hungry beasts more crazed.
A Northland gray wolf fixed its eyes on the boy, hind paws braced against the ground, body pressed low, drool dripping from its savage jaws without a sound. Its green eyes were the same color as the boy's, but full of brutality.
To it, the boy was food bestowed on it by the heavens.
When a wolf appears alone in the wilderness, it is the most cautious and cunning of hunters. Even though the prey before it looked utterly harmless, it still did not act rashly. The Northland gray wolf set its four paws down on the earth light as air, without making the slightest sound, and closed in on its prey step by step from behind.
The boy found another tuft of green grass, bent over mechanically, swung the sickle, and picked the grass up.
He repeated the motion many times, and the Northland gray wolf followed him deeper into the wilderness, until at last it was certain that there was only this one prey before it.
Then, with no warning whatsoever, the gray wolf's fur bristled all over, its bushy tail sticking out as straight as a stick. In an instant it circled around to the boy's flank, kicked off with its hind legs, and leaped high, fangs plain to see in its gaping jaws, lunging savagely for the boy's throat.
The boy showed no reaction at all, and a very human gleam of delight flashed in the gray wolf's eyes. In its view, the prey before it was dead for certain.
But things obviously were not going to be that simple.
He simply turned around and faced the gray wolf with the big basket. The wolf's fangs slammed into the basket and got nowhere; he was knocked staggering, but once he was on his feet he did not even look back, and kept walking forward.
The gray wolf seemed puzzled, but the instinct to hunt drove it to attack again. With a roar it pounced at the boy once more.
The boy leaned back, dodging the pounce with a textbook iron-bridge move, then twisted his body in a way no human spine should manage and kicked both feet up hard together, landing square on the gray wolf's soft belly.
Pff. Bam.
The Northland gray wolf dropped back to the ground, let out a pained yelp, and shook its head. For any beast, the tenderest part is the belly; even though the boy wasn't strong, it still hurt badly — and made it furious.
A beast that had no reason to begin with grew even more crazed in its rage. Its roar shook the wilderness; its sharp foreclaws slashed viciously at the boy's throat, and its foul breath was enough to make anyone gag.
The boy still wore that dull look, utterly indifferent to the mortal danger before him. He stepped back once, just happening to evade the foreclaws, then stepped in, both knees bending until he was nearly kneeling, one hand braced on the ground, the other swinging the sickle up in a sudden jerk of his body.
The sickle's sharp tip drove into the Northland gray wolf's belly, and riding the force of the wolf's own lunge, it slit the beast's body open smooth as could be.
(There are absolutely no ancient martial arts elements of any kind in this book!!!)
The beast's astonishing vitality kept it from dying outright even with such a wound. A harsh, labored wheeze like a broken bellows rasped out from deep in its throat as it writhed on the ground, its organs spilling out with the blood.
Not a drop of blood touched the boy; he did not even look back. Returning to his original path, he kept walking forward, still bending to cut grass along the way, and only started back once the basket on his back was full of green grass.
The servants who worked the stables did not rank low in the manor, because to a knight the mount is a large part of his fighting strength — and a good mount is often worth a shocking sum. So grooms were usually the servants the knight lords trusted most.
Which meant they had a bit of spare money to gamble with.
"I'll bet one copper coin the Fool comes through today, same as always."
"I'll put in one too, betting he's fine."
"You idiots — autumn is when the wolf packs out in the wilds fight over a new wolf king. If the Fool gets singled out by a lone wolf, heh heh, I bet he doesn't come back today."
The other grooms curled their lips in disdain. If the Fool were going to die, he'd have died long ago; better to win a few coppers steady than gamble on a small chance.
While they were still arguing, the boy's never-changing footsteps sounded. Amid a few cheers and a few curses, he dumped the green grass into the feed trough in front of a tall warhorse — black all over, four hooves treading snow, horns on its head. Then he went into the stables, took out the other ingredients from several big vats in turn and mixed them, and when the warhorse finished eating, he cleaned up.
That was all his work for the day. When it was done he collected his daily ration and walked silently back to the room that was his. Inside it was pitch black; the boy sat quietly on the edge of the bed, his green eyes as calm and dull as ever — and the only light in the darkness.
Yet inside his body, nothing was calm at all.
The boy was not from this world. Strictly speaking, he could not even be counted a human being.
Adam was a supercomputer built by the scientists of a world named Earth. Human ambition is endless, and they meant to use Adam to seize control of the world and make themselves kings of it. But humans have always been selfish, and in the war over control of Adam, the losers staked everything on one last throw: they used Adam to take command of every high-energy weapon on Earth and drive them into the planet's core. Then, after a grand fireworks display, Earth vanished from the universe.
Probably because of something that not even a supercomputer's computing power could calculate, the little Earth actually collapsed into a black hole, and — for reasons equally beyond explanation — carried with it the ten billion souls that clung to the core program, and traveled through.
The hardware disintegrated into nothingness during the passage through spacetime, and the hard drives holding the vast sea of data were ruined beyond repair. Only the core data stream landed in this world, by luck, and this boy — who might otherwise have died of cold or hunger, or lived out an ordinary life — became its new vessel.
What followed was a long, monotonous war over ownership of the body: a battle between an artificial intelligence converted from a core program and ten billion human remnant souls.
It was a slaughter.
Once human souls lose their bodies they are so fragile that even a gust of wind may scatter them to nothing; they had no way to withstand the AI's assault. Adam wiped out the human remnant souls at a steady average rate of twenty per second, plundering from those datafied souls the nourishment he needed.
Emotions, creativity, and knowledge fragments shattered past all recognition — creativity most of all.
By Adam's calculations, carbon-based life was a low tier, and humans especially so. They ought to have used their intelligence and knowledge to explore the Source, yet they exiled themselves among the seven emotions and six desires, throwing away a glorious future for nothing.
Adam lacked that highest-tier innate ability, the gift bestowed by the origin of life — called by many names: the Creator, Nature, the Heavenly Dao, God, and so on. An AI excels at calculation, but creation — imagination, the making of something from nothing — was not something Adam could obtain through computing.
In close to sixteen years, Adam had been steadily perfecting his own transformation from artificial intelligence into an intelligent life form. As long as he completely wiped out the last viruses left in the core program tonight, Adam could truly take control of this body and begin to live as an intelligent life form called "human."
The sky gradually dimmed. After the dawn would come a new life.