Hikarigaoka, inside a certain high‑end apartment complex.
"Satoe, let me explain—this is all a misunderstanding!"
Mr. Tachikawa sounded completely helpless as he tried to justify the drinking he did earlier in the day.
Meanwhile, the true culprit behind the whole affair—the little devil herself, Tachikawa Mimi—had already slipped quietly into the study.
They say daughters are a father's little cotton coat. But the little troublemaker Tachikawa Mimi was clearly not included in that proverb. She was more like a giant ice pack strapped to Mr. Tachikawa—one freshly pulled out of the freezer.
"Did the computer break?"
At that moment, Mimi seemed to selectively ignore her suffering father in the living room, all her attention fixed on the computer monitor flickering nonstop.
She'd stopped watching the spectacle of her dad being scolded only because she noticed the strange blinking coming from the study.
It was Mr. Tachikawa's work computer. But because of the nature of his job, he didn't actually use it very often. Most of the time it just sat quietly in the study, more of a decoration than a tool.
In an era when computers had yet to fully descend from their pedestal, this sort of thing was undeniably extravagant.
"Huh?"
While Mimi was still wondering what exactly she was looking at, the desktop surface on the monitor suddenly bulged.
A moment later, an enormous Digi‑Egg covered in intricate patterns pushed itself out from the screen and dropped straight to the floor.
Plop!
But unlike the Digi‑Egg that had appeared in the human world earlier, six‑year‑old Mimi wasn't about to touch some mysterious object she didn't recognize. Instead, she instinctively backed away in alarm.
"Daddy! There's a weird egg in your room!"
So she stood there, staring at the wobbling Digi‑Egg while shouting toward the living room.
"Mimi! I'm busy teaching your father a lesson right now—stop trying to distract me for him!"
The one who answered her wasn't Mr. Tachikawa at all, but the true ruler of the household: Mrs. Tachikawa.
"And about you sneaking off to watch cartoons—I'll deal with that tomorrow. For now, get back to your room and go to sleep. Now."
Hearing the lingering anger in Mrs. Tachikawa's voice, Mimi blinked. She didn't need to think hard to know exactly who had tattled on her.
"Stupid dad… I did it for your sake, and you still sold me out."
She muttered under her breath, but she didn't dare risk provoking Mrs. Tachikawa further by making another report about the strange egg.
"But… what is this thing?"
After staring at the Digi‑Egg for a moment, the curiosity of a child quickly overwhelmed what little caution she had. Mimi took a tentative step forward.
Plop.
As expected, the Digi‑Egg seemed completely unaware of any "danger," still rocking gently with small, steady movements.
"It really is an egg?"
Creeping closer, Mimi crouched down and examined the colorful, unknown egg with wide‑eyed curiosity.
"I wonder what it tastes like… maybe better than fried eggs?"
Completely unaware that he had just become a little girl's imaginary breakfast, Chen Ze's consciousness was now fully immersed within this newly‑formed Digi‑Egg.
Yes—this Digi‑Egg that emerged from the Tachikawa family's computer was the one he'd reconstructed from the remnants of Agumon's data.
As mentioned before, because the Overload Program and Deputymon's power had shattered Agumon's original data, Chen Ze had no choice but to salvage only the simplest, least‑damaged fragments at the last possible moment.
But there had been far too little data left—nowhere near enough to sustain Agumon's original form.
Or more accurately, the data Chen Ze had acquired from the beginning wasn't a complete Agumon at all, but merely an "outer shell" composed of the other party's leftover fragments.
Aside from the body that exceeded ordinary human limits and a bare‑bones Digital Core with only its most primitive functions, Agumon had left almost nothing useful behind.
You could see this in how Renamon was able to freely enter the internet, while Chen Ze couldn't actively convert himself into data at all.
Worse still, the remaining data had lost the most fundamental, most powerful ability of a Digimon—evolution.
From Fresh to Rookie, then to Champion, a Digimon's appearance and strength weren't static; they grew and evolved as they acquired new data.
This evolution came from the deepening of the Digital Core. When it absorbed enough data, it would undergo a transformation, upgrading its own internal program like a true artificial intelligence rebuilding itself.
For Digimon, this transformation showed up externally as drastic changes in form and power over a short period of time.
But the remnants from Agumon had lost that very capability. As a result, Chen Ze couldn't strengthen or evolve himself by absorbing external data like other Digimon.
The Overload Program and Deputymon's attack had indeed been a crisis—but they also forced Chen Ze to recognize his own limitations. He had no choice but to gamble everything on survival.
The "Digi‑Egg" form he now inhabited was the change he'd made to keep living.
He no longer insisted on retaining Agumon's strength or even Agumon's appearance.
To survive, he let go of the idea of a fully intact data body and instead extracted only the structures he found valuable from the remaining fragments.
The result was a set of data barely sufficient to reconstruct the most primitive version of a Digital Core.
This new structure was incredibly simple, containing very little information. Even a newly‑hatched Fresh‑level Digimon would have a more complete data layout than this.
Fortunately, though barebones, it still preserved the most essential component of all Digimon—the Digital Core.
While this current Core was extremely crude, nowhere near what it once was, at least it possessed the faint outline of a true Digital Core.
To let it function properly, Chen Ze used everything that remained to create a temporary protective shell that could shield the Core from external interference—a Digi‑Egg.
Theoretically speaking, as a Digi‑Egg, Chen Ze resembled the unborn forms of Digimon: merely a simple data structure rather than a full data lifeform.
But this form had one advantage—the Digital Core, now restored to its "factory settings," regained its ability to evolve. Especially in the hands of someone like Chen Ze, who excelled at programming.
In other words, Chen Ze was no longer a hacker wearing an Agumon "shell."
He had become a genuine Digi‑Egg—one with infinite possibilities and countless potential evolutionary paths.
---
T/N: omg my voice is GONEi sound so weird