Chapter 82: Showing you my memories
Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations
Editor: Karai
The old book that Zhou Pingbo gave to Lin Xu was called Tears of Love, and both books were illustrated, and the archaeologist confirmed that the two books had the same content based on the identically ordered illustrations, except for a slight difference in the written language used.
Lin Xu puzzled over the French language in comparison with the two books, and spent three or four days mastering the basic words and grammar, but the exact pronunciation was still a bit vague. After all, what he wanted to translate was a piece of phonetics, and he needed to study how to pronounce these words according to the language pronunciation rules. The paper print in his hand made him occasionally recall his studies and life before the apocalypse began, and everything felt like a lifetime ago.
Outside the porthole was a dark universe, the sunlight spilling over Earth to the Victoria, and Lin Xu caught a glimpse of Blizzard’s cold, slender form in the afterglow. The two fleets had been rearmed, and most of the ships had activated their protective force fields, so that any small rock or man-made junk floating in space would be bounced off or shredded if it touched the force fields.
Blizzard was about to return to the Victoria after completing its cruise monitoring mission. Lin Xu stared at the yellowed pages in his hand, his heart floating in a blur of emotions, he hadn’t seen much of Heinrich in the past few days, but now he finally saw Blizzard and couldn’t resist dialing Heinrich’s communication.
“Heinrich, do you have any free time after the mecha returns?”
“There’s an hour gap, what’s up?”
“Don’t leave Blizzard, I’m coming to you.”
Lin Xu put down his book and pen, and headed for the mecha warehouse, area H exclusive for Blizzard, with an elevator shaft leading directly to the warehouse. As the elevator doors opened, Blizzard came into view below the knee, and Lin Xu took a few steps forward, tilting his head to get a better view of the giant mecha. The gunmetal giant had just returned to the chamber from the vacuum of cryogenic temperatures, the white frost on its surface reflecting the cold light.
As Lin Xu approached, Blizzard was brought to one knee by its manipulator, the mecha’s mechanics humming as it operated, and it reached a hand down to Lin Xu, who stood on the index finger of the metal palm and was transported to the cockpit door. The breeze swept over Lin Xu’s ears as the mecha hand rose, still carrying the scent of steel.
The hatch opened, and when Lin Xu stepped inside, the arm was waving hello to him with inexplicable excitement. Heinrich’s gaze twitched slightly, and after pressing a few buttons to return the arm to normal, he nodded to Lin Xu. Lin Xu responded, walked around him to sit in the familiar left driver’s seat, then pulled off the mental energy link helmet and put it on.
“What did you want?”
Lin Xu adjusted his seat and explained to Heinrich his reason for coming, “I think you need to know the details of the apocalypse three thousand years ago, and the story of my past. Words cannot explain it and it is more convenient to read the memories in the mental energy link, one hour should be enough.”
Heinrich’s harsh facial lines seemed to loosen a bit with Lin Xu’s words, stripping away the oppression that hadn’t been ripped off after the mission.
Human consciousness, memory were very private things. In the interstellar era, the more people use various electronic devices connected to their brains, the more they care about mental privacy.
The psychic connection of a two-person mecha required both partners to trust each other completely and open their mental domains to each other, which increased the difficulty of developing a two-person pilot. Now, however, the mental energy control method used by Lin Xu alleviated the violation of each other’s mental domains, ensuring a stable co-connection, but also creating a divide.
Heinrich was not completely without the desire to explore, but Lin Xu had consciously built a high wall, which meant that he wanted to block access to the outside world, and Heinrich could only carefully put away all thoughts and actions and keep quiet about his desires.
Now, Lin Xu said he wanted to open himself up. Heinrich nodded and said, ” Okay.”
However, before initiating the empathic communion, Lin Xu thought about the previous situation in this cockpit and asked, “Before you showed me your parents’ encounter… What happened afterwards?”
Chu Suifeng’s blast to the dragon was simply more difficult to end than Lin Xu’s meeting to knock down Heinrich and bite him. Heinrich thought for a moment and pressed the co-link button, “Katrina had told me about it, you can listen to it.”
After a burst of start-up white light, Heinrich tuned the two men’s shared view to Blizzard’s cockpit video replay. After Lin Xu accessed Blizzard’s panoramic camera view, he saw a young silver-haired boy appear in the left pilot’s seat, looking expectantly at the blonde alpha female sitting in the right pilot’s seat, which was Katrina.
The mecha engine was in the off state, and all the button lights in the cockpit were out, so you didn’t have to worry about being stormed by a flurry of presses from little Heinrich, who seemed to ask something that made Katrina smile.
“Both of them? That’s something to be said.”
“At the time our starship landed on a deserted star, the crew was tired from the long space travel, and after confirming that the danger level on the deserted star was extremely low, so Suifeng allowed everyone to walk off the starship, blow the wind and feel what it was like to step on solid ground.
“I also walked around with her, suddenly, we saw a shirtless man in a remote corner grabbing our ship’s omega medic, mouth yelling and do not know what he was saying, the medic shouted in fear, and Suifeng immediately rushed up with a kick, shouting ‘where this rascal came from, don’t be violent! ‘
“He was confused at first, but after seeing the angry Suifeng, cheerfully got up and again let out a roar of strange words, Suifeng kicked him down again, ‘Speak the Imperial language or are you illiterate?’
“Alas, she had that overbearing look that I still remember to this day. After he was kicked twice, he did not resist, his expression was confused and aggrieved, just staring at Suifeng, who frowned, and I said, I think this person has been stranded on this uninhabited planet, I don’t know how he survived to be this old, as no one taught him common sense or human language. The strength of Suifeng’s two kicks was enough to break the bones, so if we leave him here alone, I’m afraid no one will collect the body, so we had to pick him back. The first thing you need to do is to take him back and lock him up.”
“Later, when he learned Imperial language, we learned that his name is Andreas, is the white dragon from before, he followed the Abyss Fleet all the way to fly here, after turning into a human, but could not find clothes to wear, but also could not speak Imperial language, and pulling the little doctor was to let him take him to General Chu.”
—
Heinrich felt a little soft smile, but he was not smiling. It was Lin Xu who was slightly hooking the corners of his mouth, and the smile passed into Heinrich’s consciousness in the flux sympathetic connection. The image in front of his eyes disappeared and was replaced by a white light.
Heinrich felt someone pat him on the back, and when he turned his head, he saw Lin Xu taking his elbow and walking in another direction, “Okay, now go to my place.”
The scene in the mental domain changed again, a flash of blinding cold light illuminating a concrete room. It was an office, four-square and somewhat rudimentary looking, with no windows and all light coming from a single chandelier overhead.
Inside was a wide desk, behind which was a row of black iron bookshelves piled high with various books and paper products, and in front of which was the only bit of softness in the space – a row of cloth three-seater sofas for hospitality, with cushions and blankets.
“It’s my mind palace.” Lin Xu says, letting go of his hand as he guided Heinrich into the room and turning to open the door. He led Heinrich to the corridor, still a patch of steel and concrete, “This is what the base under the lake originally looked like, just now it was my office. And then…”
They walked through a long, straight passage, with more rooms lined up on either side, each with characters on the closed door, and at the end of the passage, finally saw a gap of natural light coming in through the gap between the sharp-edged doors.
Lin Xu pushed open the door, the door outside the sky was bright, almost to the extent of blinding, making it difficult to see what the outside world looked like.
“We started at the earliest.”
Heinrich followed Lin Xu as he stepped into the bright sky, and the perspective and view switched instantly. He saw Lin Xu as a teenager… No, he was looking at Lin Xu’s own world from his perspective, but he could also see Lin Xu from a third perspective.
The teenager was on the slender and frail side, but not as pale and sickly as later, nor cold and jaded, always keeping himself clean and tidy, dealing with people with a gentle smile. This memory was covered with a light green tint, like a warm summer breeze, and ended when the white bird fluttered its wings and flew over.
The peaceful society before the apocalypse was similar to Imperial, and Heinrich had no difficulty in understanding it, following Lin Xu’s quiet life. His family’s income was moderate, his parents were kind, his social life was good, his grades were excellent, and his life and work were calm and smooth, without a ripple. Until the war broke out.
Somehow, Lin Xu had never had a lover, his parents died naturally before the war, and he had to face the crisis that befell him alone, but Heinrich could feel a flicker of gratitude in Lin Xu’s heart. The person he loved did not have to suffer.
The war began as a few pictures in the newspapers, a few paragraphs in the news, and the busy, noisy lives of the people were not affected in any way. But soon, without warning, the war blazed up, spreading to a wider area, and then, it was impossible to say who struck first, the nuclear war was officially started. A nuclear winter filled with hunger and sickness set in.
Then came rationing, regulation, and unrest. One side of the war attempted to create a biological weapon to reverse the occupation, but a virus leaked from a laboratory and turned humans into blood-eating monsters.
The zombie virus swept across the globe along with the war population flow, everything old was destroyed, then, each regional base was established to take over the jurisdiction of the human world.
Lin Xu’s memories of this period are filled with gray and gloomy skies, the never-ending sound of explosions and a wildly beating heart. He was an ordinary man with no power, and before the war came, he would only sit in his study and study academic theories. Heinrich could not imagine how such a man could survive in the chaos of the war. But Lin Xu was alive and well.
When he was approached by an officer from the Eastern Region’s main base, he was doing clerical work such as registering at a small base, and was also in charge of material distribution. The officer said he wanted to ask him to work as a translator, and that they wanted to re-establish diplomatic ties between the various regions of the globe and come out of the apocalypse together.
Heinrich felt Lin Xu’s eyes stop for a moment at the other officer’s rank and the tank behind him, and then agreed. It wasn’t until he stood at the entrance to the majestic East Region base that he asked, “Why me?”
A lot of people died in the war, but the senior intellectuals cultivated before the war hadn’t died out, and there was no shortage of people who knew foreign languages. The officer joked, “You’re more economical, how many languages do you know? Eleven or twelve?”
Lin Xu smiled at him, “Twelve.”
“Actually, there’s another reason.”
The first time Lin Xu attended a high-level meeting, the officer whispered to him, “A powerful person in the North Region is an old classmate of yours, so if you know him well, we might have a better chance of winning the negotiation.”
Lin Xu’s work as a translator gave him access to more senior members of the base. He was gentle and wise, polite, and knew how to move forward and backward, and it was rare to see the light of hope in Lin Xu’s eyes amid the spread of pessimism. He was a different person from the Lin Xu that Heinrich knew. The senior management put him in charge of communication with the major bases and further took over the propaganda work within the bases.
The author has something to say.
The review is about Professor Lin’s foreign language teaching, three days to learn a language (?)
