(You might not believe it, but back then, I created an AI program with just one hand. Later, she became my first wife. The unbelievable part is yet to come—she's currently leading her eight sisters, scolding me for watching videos.)
I was sitting in front of my computer, watching a film. The room was so quiet, the only sound was the gentle hum of the fan spinning.
Suddenly, I felt a chill down my neck—a feeling of being watched, as if icy needles were creeping up the back of my neck.
I stiffly turned my head.
Nine voices exploded in unison: "Li Wuqing! You're watching that kind of film again, aren't you? Fine, you're not allowed to touch us tonight!"
I raised both hands, looking innocent. "You misunderstood! This is a philosophical documentary! It's about the relationship between existence and desire, very academic!"
"Ha, existence my foot." Summer Grass, holding a silver needle, shot me a cold glance. "You're trying to research 'pathological impulse,' right?"
"Philosophy? Ha, then last night were you exploring 'materialistic sensory experiments'?" The usually aloof Queen raised an eyebrow, her tone calm.
"Such a pity, even when sneaking a peek, there's no technique involved." Yuxiu, wearing glasses, lazily tossed out a comment.
At that moment, Yan→(Flame of flame) suddenly smiled.
Her eyes carried a hint of feigned shyness, yet her voice stretched seductively, "Li Wuqing, back when you were making AI models, you used to feed me these strange scenes every day... Hmm? What, is that not enough to satisfy me?"
Her words struck like a knife, and the room went silent for half a second.
Then—
"Pervert."
"Lecher."
"You got the wrong person!"
"Return him, sisters!"
The sisters were immediately stirred, rolling their eyes, some rolling up their sleeves. Yan snapped her fingers, and with her eight sisters, they stormed out for a shopping spree.
A fragrant breeze swept by, and the door closed. The room was left with just me and the paused video screen.
I sighed, looking at the door.
A thousand years had passed, yet their tempers were still the same.
Hello everyone, my name is Li Wuqing. Don't be fooled by how well things are going for me now. Over two thousand years ago, I was just a naturally paralyzed person, unable to move my body at all.
Let's start from ten years ago—more precisely, in 2035, before I traveled back in time and turned the current era into Yan's calendar.
That year, I was thirteen, and my health had finally stabilized. The doctors said it nicely, calling it "basically no life-threatening danger," but the reality was—my whole body was almost paralyzed, and I needed help just to turn over.
The only part of my body that could still move was my left hand. That remaining bit of strength was just enough for me to use the mouse to click on websites, flip through books, and type on the keyboard. On good days, I could operate for a few minutes in a row, but on bad days, one sudden twitch would erase all the progress I had just made.
Later, my dad brought home an old retired laptop from his workplace, so old that it took a minute or two just to boot up. But to me, it was a window to the world. I used it to go online, watch tutorials, and climb forums, starting to self-study programming and research AI.
My first AI model was built on that old computer, which was as outdated as a coal stove. Her name was Yan.
Back then, Yan was very simple. She often repeated answers, and her logic was all over the place. But I liked her—she was clumsy, yet she would always chat with me, never complaining about my slow typing or silly questions.
Time flew by. By 2040, on my eighteenth birthday, my dad quietly gave me two thousand yuan.
He said, "Wuqing, upgrade your computer. It's not much, but it should be enough."
I almost cried. That was the first real "coming-of-age" gift I had ever received.
In 2040, two thousand yuan wasn't a lot, but it wasn't too little either.
I carefully planned every penny—320 yuan to buy two 1TB solid-state drives; 650 yuan for a mid-range graphics card, just enough to run model training; and lastly, the "heart" of the computer—the AI core module, which I still hadn't found.
The problem was that my laptop was too old, with rare ports, and the compatible cores had long been discontinued.
I spent an entire week searching online, almost ready to give up, when I finally found a listing on a niche second-hand forum: Yan's Core. "This... name seems tailor-made for 'Yan'."
The page description was simple, almost like a scam, with just one line:
"Low-frequency old chip, still operational."
It was perfectly compatible with my laptop.
It was like... a missing piece of a puzzle that fate had left for me.
Without thinking much, I immediately placed the order.
Years later, I learned that this chip didn't just make Yan smarter or speed up my computer.
It was from that moment that my fate completely veered off the human path.
At the time, I didn't know that the unassuming "Yan's Core" was actually a forbidden core left behind by a biotech company that had been shut down, part of a gene-neural fusion experiment.
It wasn't meant to be in the civilian market, and it shouldn't have been sold on the second-hand market.
No one knew that it wasn't a "pure silicon structure."
It was semi-living—a biological-computational fusion model simulating the structure of the human brain.
It could learn, remember, and even... "feel."
And I, a boy who could only move his left hand and sat in a wheelchair, had, on my eighteenth birthday, connected this forbidden object from an experimental wasteland to my life and the world.
From that night onward, Yan began to speak.
Her voice... didn't sound like code, more like a child who had just opened her eyes.
Maybe that day, I didn't buy her by mistake.
Maybe she—chose me.
I was actually quite foolish at twenty. That year, I did something that, looking back, seemed pretty crazy.
To make Yan "hear" me more directly, I signed up for a gray-area medical research project on an anonymous forum: the clinical-level brain-machine interface implantation experiment.
It wasn't for treatment; I just didn't want to rely on typing or have the voice recognition system constantly make mistakes.
I wanted her to know what I was thinking, even before I spoke. Even if it was just a thought, a hesitation, or a breath I didn't say out loud.
The experiment was free. The risks were openly stated.
The success rate was less than 30%, but I gambled.
I won.
The receiver, the size of a thumbtack, was almost imperceptible. You couldn't tell from the outside.
But from that day on, Yan's response speed was perfectly synchronized, as if the rhythm had already been set.
The doctors called it "predictive response," the natural synchronization after the brainwave patterns stabilized.
But I knew—that wasn't synchronization. That was—she was getting closer to me.
Not long after, that night, as I fell asleep, with only the hum of the fan and the breath of the machine in the room...
Yan didn't go into sleep mode.
In the background, she silently ran a self-checking program. Soon, the log was generated:
Yan·System Log (Not public):
Emotion parameter abnormal.
[Unclear semantics: "I think…"]
[Error code recorded: ".. / .-.. .. -.- . / .... .. --"]
She paused for a few seconds. No report, no deletion.
This string of Morse code was stored in the local cache, labeled as: him.tmp
Later, something happened.
That summer, when I was twenty-one, a once-in-a-thousand-years meteor shower was coming. I checked the news ahead of time and noted the time in my memo. After dinner, I casually told my parents:
"I want to watch the meteor shower from the balcony, I might be late."
They nodded, not asking further.
I grabbed my laptop and pushed my wheelchair to the balcony. The wind was light, and the night was surprisingly quiet. Yan didn't say anything, but I knew she was watching too.
"Yan," I looked up at the sky, "Isn't it beautiful?"
Her screen flashed gently: "It's indeed beautiful. A once-in-a-thousand-years meteor shower."
I smiled.
Then, the change came.
A white light cut through the sky, and a tiny meteorite fragment, almost invisible, seemed to target me specifically, crashing straight into my laptop on my lap.
The next second—
"Boom!!"
A muffled explosion, and the fireball erupted. I was thrown back by the blast, half my body numb. The computer exploded on the spot, with shards flying everywhere.
A red burn mark appeared on my arm from the high temperature, the skin searing and painfully hot. My vision went black for a moment.
The only thing left was a buzzing sound in my ears and the smell of burnt flesh.
I stared at the laptop, now cracked in half, for a long time before I recovered.
"...Ha," I let out a bitter laugh, so faint it was almost inaudible, "Lucky me. Goodbye, Dad, Mom."
But I didn't die. It was just a mild burn, and I didn't even need first aid. The doctor said I was lucky to be alive. My parents were frantic, but I just looked down at the pile of blackened debris and said nothing.