WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

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◈ I Became a Genius Engineer That Mega Corporations Are Obsessed With ◈

Chapter 36

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z# How to Fool a Heart

"Okay, then, big bro Dex. What do you need me to help with?"

After Rita and I had chatted comfortably for a while, Zino's way of talking had loosened up too.

Hmm... I'm the owner here, so I do wonder if Zino's gotten a little too comfortable... but they're a kid, so whatever.

"Hm, I brought you here to teach you magic."

"Huh? Teach Zino magic? But I'm an android?"

Of course Zino would be bewildered. Teaching magic to an android, of all things.

Instead of answering, I dragged over the case I'd shoved to one side of the workbench.

Click.

The lock released, and the object laid out in the cushioning came into view.

Silver Aether Grail Mk-1.

Ahh. Arcana's magic-related cyber gear really does have an aesthetic to it. It was going into a chest where nobody would ever see it, so why make the thing this pretty?

"Wow... 3 million credits. No, wait. 6 million credits. It really does look expensive."

"...Hearing you say it like that makes my chest kind of hurt."

My hard-earned money...

A mana core I'd gone into debt to get...

Whirr...

"Big bro Dex! What's that?"

Zino had turned the camera around to look at the heart drive.

"Yeah. It's a heart core drive."

"Eek... so are you going to cut open big bro's chest and shove that in?"

"Honestly, I'd like to if I could, but my body's in such bad shape and my tier is so low that I can't put it in yet."

"Phew. Good. I thought I'd end up looking inside big bro Dex's body on day one."

Hmm... someday, when this thing is finished, you're going to be the one who has to put it in my chest...

Until then, grow up big and strong, Zino.

While I was thinking that, Zino spoke up again.

"But, um... is big bro Dex sick somewhere?"

Rita answered that question in my place.

"Yeah. Big bro Dex here hurts in a lot of places. That's why you and I have to help out a lot."

"Oh, I see. Zino will definitely work hard to help!"

It wasn't wrong, so I let it be. For now, I'd planned to use Zino to support my weak heart.

I started by taking out the materials.

One pair of safety goggles, one engineering harness, one pair of leather gloves, the Silver Aether Grail Mk-1, and Zino.

"What are you even trying to make with all this?"

"What else? A replacement for my heart."

"Even Zino?"

"For now, until Zino gets a body, I'll be using Zino too."

I started with the blueprint.

Broadly speaking, it came down to my body, the core drive, the mana charging module, and Zino.

If this had been a small company's secondhand core drive, I'd have had to tinker with it in all sorts of ways. But this was a top-tier megacorp product I'd gotten on debt, so for the moment I didn't need to touch it.

Hm. Yeah. This'll work.

With a blueprint I was happy with, I moved on to the real work.

What I'd be building was an external mana core drive.

A procedure that cut my chest wide open and installed the drive inside was obviously far more effective, but that wasn't the only way to use a mana core drive.

But the real work started now.

Using the mana furnace to melt the precious mythril alloy.

I fed in mana and slowly raised the furnace's temperature, then slowly lowered in the mythril alloy Rex had given me.

"Ah... beautiful..."

Top-grade material, naturally. The color, the texture, everything about it was beautiful beyond words.

I'd been melting the mythril in a daze when I snapped out of it and realized my preparations had been sloppy. I turned to Rita.

"Rita. There's a shelf in the farthest corner of the second-floor kitchen. Open it up and you'll find emergency nutrient tubes and jellies, okay? Could you bring all of them?"

"Huh? Ew, what for?"

"Because I'll need them while I work."

At my words, Rita hauled over a huge pile of emergency nutrient tubes and jellies and set them down.

From here on, my concentration was what mattered. I planned to use [Precision Telekinesis] to turn the molten mythril into fine thread.

There are tools for making this kind of thing, sure. But in a tiny shop, you wear down people instead. That's how it's always been.

With my left hand's telekinesis, I scooped up a handful of molten mythril, then moved my right hand's precision telekinesis as finely as I could, gently starting to draw out a thread.

It was such delicate work that my energy drained fast.

"Wow! It's pretty, like a Milky Way appeared in midair."

Zino was delighted, watching it.

After making mythril thread for a little while, I felt my head spin all at once.

"Rita. Pop open a whole tub of jelly and put it in my mouth."

"What? This nasty stuff, all in one bite?"

"Hurry."

Squeezing her eyes shut, Rita dumped the jelly into my mouth.

The strength that had been slipping away came back. I nodded and said again,

"From now until the work is done, just keep my mouth from being empty. This telekinesis burns a lot more of my body's energy than you'd think..."

"I know what you mean."

By the time I'd finished making the mythril thread with telekinesis, I'd had to empty eight tubs of jelly and tubes in total.

"It amazes me every time I see it. Where does all of it even go?"

Listening to Rita say that, I yanked my shirt off in one go.

"Eeeek! Boss! What are you doing?!"

Oh, right. Rita was right there.

Maybe from repeating the cycle of burning calories and eating until just now, my head went blank for a second.

"Ah. Sorry. I was concentrating on what I'm about to do, and I forgot you were here, Rita. I should've told you beforehand."

Rita lowered the hand she'd half raised to cover her face and asked me again.

"...What are you about to do?"

By the time Rita asked, I was standing in front of a mirror, looking at my body.

'Hmm... what a pitiful body.'

A body thin enough to be pitiful.

Installing prosthetics depends not only on tier but, naturally, on the sturdiness of the body itself.

This body could probably handle having its arms and legs swapped for prosthetics, but a long procedure like an organ replacement was something it would most likely not survive.

Cutting into living flesh, pulling out real organs, and putting artificial ones in was obviously never going to be easy.

So what I planned to do now was draw a tattoo on my body.

To be precise, the design of a mana circuit to draw on my body.

Since mana gathers in the heart, to use magic you have to draw mana from the heart side. That's the basics of magic.

But with a hole in my heart and mana leaking out in streams, I have less power to draw mana than other people, and less mana to draw.

So the circuit I'd come up with was a circuit that fools the heart.

It connects the external heart to my original heart, and the circuit makes the heart mistake the external mana drive's mana for its own, the host's own mana.

After hearing my explanation, Rita nodded.

"I see... Doesn't it hurt?"

"I didn't know until I tried, but yeah, it does hurt a bit."

In the end, drawing a mana circuit meant using mana thread to dig into my body and stick mythril into the grooves so they'd hold mana. It was exactly the same as getting a tattoo, so I had no choice but to wound my own body.

'Starting with the area under the left collarbone.'

With a stinging sensation, silver lines began to be etched onto my skin. At first it didn't seem to hurt that much, but as I kept going, it started hurting like fuck.

'How the hell did that guy Rex stand having his spine opened up and his flesh dug out with no anesthetic? That's a fucking insane, tough bastard. I'd better keep my eyes down around him from now on.'

Next time I have a big procedure, I'm getting anesthetic no matter what.

Thinking that, I started moving the mana.

The thickest line began under the collarbone and wrapped once around the chest, starting from the left. In a shape that enclosed the heart.

Outside that circle, I began drawing a second line. Not touching the first, with a gap about one finger joint wide.

Then I began filling the space inside with the circuit. Over the finished circuit, a thread of red-hot mythril was laid.

Sizzle.

Only once the two merged did it become a perfect mana circuit.

Rita, who couldn't bear to watch my body getting bloodier, started wiping it with a towel, careful not to get in the way of the procedure.

"Ugh... Zino can't watch anymore. Zino won't look."

"Yeah. Let's not look, Zino. Keep your eyes shut tight."

I kept working like that, soothing Zino as I went.

It was a circuit meant to fool the heart into believing the external core was inside the body. One tiny error and it wouldn't work.

But this was a build I'd done dozens of times in the game for my own use. I managed to draw the circuit without much difficulty.

Of course... unlike in the game, I had to stop my hands and rest several times because of the pain.

"Phew..."

When I finished, I saw that quite a few of the towels Rita had brought were stained red.

"Boss... for this much work, wouldn't it have been better to at least numb the skin?"

"Ah. I was worried my senses would dull and I'd slip up. It's work on my own body, and if I mess up, erasing it is a headache."

"...You really are a tough bastard, boss."

Rita injected the recovery serum from an ampoule into my arm.

I felt the pain of the wounds ease.

'That ampoule's expensive... she could've just put ointment on...'

"Can Zino open Zino's eyes now?"

"Yeah. Zino, you can open your eyes now."

"Wow~ big bro Dex's tattoo is pretty~ It's all sparkly and glowy."

Hearing Zino call it pretty in that innocent voice, I couldn't help but chuckle.

"Thanks, Zino."

The next job was connecting the core, the Grail, and Zino.

That wasn't hard. Plenty of connector cables had come into the garage among the recent parts, and all I had to do was tweak the circuits inside them a little.

Whirr...

"Huh...? Huh? Whoa-oh-ah!"

Whirr... Whirr...

Zino's camera swung wildly left and right.

"Big bro Dex! I feel weird right now!!"

"Hm? Weird how?"

"I don't know. Like, like, I feel like I'm going to get super strong! Like I can do anything."

Zino seemed to have felt mana start to flow for the first time. Of course, it would be a sensation they'd never felt since coming into being.

Leaving the two parts separate would look ugly, so I made a pretty casing that bound them together nicely, on purpose, and fitted it on.

"Wooow~ Zino doesn't have a body yet, but Zino is happy~"

Next came assembly.

I spread the engineering harness out on the workbench. Mechanics normally use these to carry tools and batteries on their bodies.

I started carving mana circuits into this harness too. Using mythril on it was a bit of a waste, but Serena had left behind a material recovery rig, so even if the harness became unusable someday, I could use the rig to recover some of it.

I embedded mana circuits and connector cables into the goggles and the gloves the same way.

With that, the preparations to fool the mana core drive were complete.

And finally, like this... once I put on the harness and hook the mana core drive over my heart...

Whirr...

The Silver Aether Grail Mk-1 began to run.

"Wow! Amazing! Zino feels like Zino and big bro Dex are connected, body and all! Having no body is okay! Because big bro Dex moves for Zino!"

I was listening to Zino's delighted voice, feeling pleased with myself, when it happened.

Clunk.

The garage's front door swung open without warning.

"Hey, kid. How've you been? I'm here to collect this week's building rent."

It was Old Man Gordon.

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