For Aelita, every day should be new.

This sounds like nonsense, but consider that she lives on an underdeveloped agricultural planet like Jestal.

Her meaning here is to be a cog that sustains the empire's vast production equipment, which requires her to face the same repetitive work day after day, watching the cycle of round wheat from sowing to ripening, and then harvesting these similar produce into storage, so that the land can complete the cycle with it.

On such days, not everyone has the heart to make each day a "new day". More people are just repeating a certain part of their past life in a constant cycle of work.

For Aelita, the repetition of the cycle always gives her a sense of guilt for wasting her time. Therefore, she will try to find something fresh as possible in her boring and heavy work. When she was young, the clouds of different shapes on the horizon, the weeds on the roadside ridges with different shapes from round wheat, the illusory rainbows projected near the atomization sprinklers; As she grows a little, the novelty comes from the intricate inner workings of the Empire's vast production machine—of course, she just peeks behind others at every chance she gets, and doesn't really understand the mysteries, but that's dazzling enough for an uneducated young girl.

She had fantasized about some ridiculous things, such as being suddenly chosen by the sages of the Mechonist one day to qualify for those esoteric knowledge. She also knows that this is almost impossible, but who can condemn a little girl's fantasy of the future?

But Jaystar was so remote and barren that even the Mechanics were slack off on maintaining the tools of production here, and in at least the seven years that Aelita had had seen Cybori come to heal the dead mechs only three times. None of these three glimpses of miracles happened.

Then Jacob appeared. This stranger whose origin is a mystery is not only "new" to the whole of Jestal, but also has an almost omniscient knowledge for a little girl in the agricultural world. So naturally, he was stuck with Aelita, who was always hungry for something new.

Over the past decade, Aelita has become accustomed to getting the freshness she needs from knowledge: she has learned to read and write in low Gothic, learned basic math, understood some basic physical and astronomical phenomena, and is even able to calculate the calendar and calculate the approximate schedule for the next farming period before the planetary government issues the latest edition of the Farm Time Instruction Manual. She was undoubtedly one of the top scholars in the Fourth Agricultural Production Planning District, but she still felt that it was not enough—interest was the best teacher, and she still pestered Jacob every day to try to learn something new from him.

Of course, Jacob often complained that he was too annoyed, but during the harvest festival, the group made it from the Fourth District, where they almost never left, to the cargo station on the edge of the First City. Aelita was so happy to see everything new in the past few days, and by the way, she also gave her teacher a vacation. She didn't realize it herself, but old Hank laughed at her: You're finally going to get Jacob to stop for a few days.

When she heard this, Aelita was indeed a little angry, but she turned her head and threw the old Hank's assessment behind her: there were too many new things, especially after entering the first city, she was overwhelmed by things she had never seen before. She was so busy matching what she saw with the stories she had heard on the radio, and she didn't have time to pay attention to the old man who knew how to tinker with all sorts of strange things—she really couldn't figure out what was so good about something that almost burned through her stomach.

The grain transported has already been divided into warehouses and handed over to the old man in charge of taxation for checking and loading. Their work at the terminal was effectively over, but thanks to the magnanimity of Governor de Ville, they could still stay here during the festivities instead of moving on to the next farming period.

This was a delightful for Aelita. She wakes up early in the morning and takes the earliest bus to the city to wander around, only to come back when it gets dark. Therefore, when the old Hank slowly moved himself to the outdoor square at the height of the sun, and wanted to bask in the sun, he found Aelita nearby, which was enough to surprise him very much.

But in an instant, old Hank understood why this was happening: Aelita was talking to a girl who was apparently from "outside".

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"I thought the two of you had only met for the first time this morning." Jacob, or Sevita, looked down at Alita with his arms crossed, "It's noon, and you said you were going to go to the city with her, and you said you wouldn't be home at night." Aren't you afraid that she will sell you? ”

Alita crossed her waist and puffed out her new friend's defense: "How come! We've been talking all morning, and I'm sure Rikka must be a good person! Good people just like you! ”

"Then I think your definition of 'good person' should be reconsidered." Sevita said self-deprecatingly.

The person he was talking to clearly did not understand what it really meant.

"Don't you just think anyone can be a threat!" The girl with short straw-colored hair and a few freckles on her face dragged Rika Fujimaru menacingly, and lifted her up before the latter could react to what was about to happen, "But you see Rika is so small, and so light, how can she beat us even if she wants to do bad things?" ”

- Based on the metric system of the second millennium of human beings, which Rika Fujimaru is more accustomed to, she doesn't think she's short. She was 159 centimeters tall, which is around the average height of adolescent females in the country she was born in. It's just that this is the 41st millennium of human beings, and in such a long period of time, it is natural for human genes to change slightly:

So even though Aelita grew up on an underdeveloped agricultural planet where food rations were quite scarce, even though she was not adequately nourished and had to do heavy labor since she was a child, even if her living conditions were definitely not as good as those of Fujimaru Rika, who was born in the middle class and had been "reasonably" tempered by many heroic spirits, she still grew to a height of nearly 180 centimeters at the age of seventeen, and easily lifted Lika with more than 50 kilograms of equipment above her head.

Never underestimate the carrying power of a girl who often does farm work. This is true even if the dominant farming method in this era is large-scale mechanized operations.

“…… That's, Aelita. Rika Fujimaru said dryly in mid-air, "Although I appreciate you speaking for me, I'm really going to be angry if you continue like this." Also, Jacob, right? Do you think I can't see you're smiling? ”

So Sevita no longer forced herself to hold back a smile - he directly asked Alita in confusion "Why are you angry?" You're a little one, huh? He laughed uncontrollably in question.

An imperial envoy who can reasonably think that he is a colleague with a proto-body, and is escorted by the Forbidden Army on a mission, is unsuspectingly carried into the air by an ordinary peasant girl on a remote planet. For Sevita, this is probably the funniest he's seen in the last 100 years. Even if he would be executed for some messy crime in the future, he must laugh heartily now.

The good news is that Fujimaru Rika doesn't seem to think that they are lawless (in the Empire, many times, "law" here refers to the "face of superiors") and can be sentenced; The bad news is that she started to go berserk with impotence in mid-air. The violent struggle made it impossible for Alita to hold her steadily, so she was put back on the ground by the new friend she had only met this morning, and then she was encircled in her arms:

"You're the little one." Aelita rested her chin on the top of Rika Fujimaru's head and said contentedly, "It's a little one, it's cute." ”

"I won't be happy if you compliment me on my cuteness." Standing incense made such a protest with a loud voice, but she really couldn't say any more condemnation because of it.

Sevita was still laughing. Probably because he doesn't laugh very often, and the fact that he doesn't use it very much, makes his laugh look like a bellows leaking. Normally, Ritsuka would have taunted him for this, but now, she just curiously pulled up Alerita's sleeve that had been messily running up because of the action just now, exposing her left forearm to the air: "What's wrong with you here?" ”

"Huh? Ah, this. Alita glanced at her arm, then unconcernedly let go of the hand that was around Lika, and pushed her sleeve up from the bottom to the top, revealing the gray, blue, and abnormal texture, like a large irregular piece of shiny scales of skin, "This is 'blue gray', a chronic endemic disease that can be contracted by long-term exposure to Jestal's special ratio of pesticides, which is normal for us." ”

Fujimaru Rika stared at the diseased skin with a thoughtful expression: "...... Is that so? Didn't the doctors here think of a way? ”

"Hmm...... When the disease began to spread almost a decade ago, Governor de Ville ordered a reward for finding a doctor who could cure it. Aelita recalled vigorously, after all, ten years ago she was a seven-year-old girl, and some details were really hard to remember, "and then ...... Then ......"

"Then the local barefoot doctors were helpless about it, and the 'blue gray disease' itself only caused some changes in the surface properties of the skin, and there was no visible effect on the function and longevity of the human body, and the matter was not resolved." Sevita, who had finally had enough of laughing, added, "Jaystar is not the kind of planet with abundant resources, Governor of Toddville, the upper bureaucrats here are generally not very concerned about things other than improving the productivity of the whole world, and there is no kind of aristocrat who spends a lot of money to make himself look good, so the 'blue gray' is still an 'incurable disease'. ”

“…… Is that really good? This condition is a chronic disease, right, ten years is possible for a chronic disease to be nothing, isn't there also a chronic disease that quietly develops to an advanced stage and then suddenly becomes fatal? ”

Alita was stunned for a moment, the girl with limited knowledge and obvious bias had obviously not thought about such a possibility before. However, Sevita easily answered Rika Fujimaru's question: "It seems that this disease has always existed, but it has become epidemic in the last ten years. I don't know very well the pathological causes and pathogenic mechanisms of 'blue-gray disease', but-"

He paused for a moment, deciding that he should give himself some virtue for the sake of the planet's management doing the real thing: "—but everyone knows that Raj Hasting, the chief agricultural technology officer of Jaystar, is also a severe blue-gray patient, and his medical history may be ...... Twenty or thirty years? I don't quite know. Anyway, he can be seen in the live broadcast of the speech at the end of each year, and the signs of 'blue gray disease' are obvious. If there was any danger in this disease, whether it was out of desperation or duty, the elite elite like him would not have been indifferent to it for so long. ”

“……”

Rika Fujimaru didn't refute further, but it seemed that she still had doubts. Alita tugged at her carefree, "It's okay, don't worry about it." If you want to talk about long-term patients, old Hank has only been suffering from this disease for a long time, he said that he has been for more than 40 years, but now he is not just as alive and well. ”

As she spoke, she pointed to an old man who looked to be seventy or eighty years old in the sun as if no one was basking on the edge of the square—an old man who might have been only forty or fifty years old, given that most of the civilians in the agricultural world were not equipped to accept the technology of life extension. The sun was shining and the temperature was mild at the cargo station on the outskirts of the first city, and the old man, whose almost all exposed skin had turned a shiny blue-gray texture, was leaning comfortably against a pile of straw and falling asleep.

"Hmm......" Rika Fujimaru gave a slightly subtle expression, "I think this level of ...... Pathological changes...... How much do you need to see a doctor? ”

"It's a pity, Miss, the civilians in such a small remote place really don't have that kind of conditions." Sevita's tone already lacked a hint of unpleasant irony, "Besides, even in the strictest definition of the Empire, it's not that serious. Old Hank only had about eighty-three percent of his skin turned blue-gray, not even mutated. ”

“…… But look at his right hand ......"

"Right hand?" Aelita tilted her head in the direction of old Hank, and as if she suddenly remembered something, she said, "Ah, you said his right hand only has four fingers, right?" That's because when he was younger, his little finger and a small palm were swept into the machine and cut off. Later, the fracture healed, and the scar was not visible from the skin of the 'blue gray', which made it seem as if his hand had only four fingers from the beginning. ”

Fujimaru Rika looked very hesitant: "...... So it seems to you that the hand has nothing other than the problem of only having four fingers and proportions, right? ”

She followed Aelita's question, but turned her gaze to Sevita. This made the latter inexplicably glance at Old Hank's right hand again, and then he could be assured with Astarte's eyesight that it was indeed so.

After getting two people to say in unison, "No problem, huh?" After that, Fujimaru Rika nodded slowly: "...... I understand. ”

She turned her gaze to Old Hank's right hand again and asked, "Let me confirm again, this 'blue gray disease' is a chronic disease caused by long-term contact with local pesticides, right?" ”

In Fujimaru Rika's eyes, Old Hank's right hand has become a structure similar to a bird's claw - and it is normal for a bird's claw to have only four "fingers".