1-1 Copy Ability

What on earth was I supposed to do now?

The middle-aged man agonized alone, but there was nothing he could do about something like this.

Uh… this might be crazy, but did I end up somewhere like another world… or something?

Even though I hadn’t been summoned by some magic circle or anything?

On my own?

Just like that?

At my age?

Even though I was a middle-aged guy with a wrecked body who usually stayed shut in at home?

I’m not some kid, so please—cut me a break……

I remembered an old novel called The Hero of Another World.

If I recalled right, it was Japan’s first story about someone being transported to another world.

The protagonist was a high school soccer player—a boy with amazing physical ability.

If someone had to go to another world, I wanted it to be some energetic, curious kid like that.

Please—if there’s some young guy out there who wants to go to another world, trade places with me.

In cases like this, haha…

Uh, “Status Open,” maybe?

I tried saying it, just in case.

……

No, this was bad. I was seriously confused.

Hey, old man—face reality!

Since I’d been shut in at home so much, I read a lot of web novels even though I was an old guy, so I’d been poisoned by that kind of thing.

But a window actually appeared in front of me!

No way!

But when I looked closely, it also felt like a familiar PC screen.

Like a flat image floating in midair.

F-for now, I tried tapping it.

There was no mouse attached, after all.

I tapped “Computer.”

The screen showed drives A through F.

I understood C and D.

F had to be the optical drive.

When I opened drive E, it said “Item Box.”

When I hovered the cursor over it, the description read: “An infinitely storing domain.”

Huh? Was this… the item box you saw in fantasy novels?

Not knowing what else to do, I tried taking a bag out of the car and shoving it into the screen.

The bag vanished instantly, and I jumped.

What the hell!?

Looking closely, drive E now showed “Bag 1.”

When I tapped it on the screen, its contents expanded.

But how was I supposed to take this back out?

When I tapped it, a big message appeared: “Remove item? Y/N,” so I tapped Y.

So this screen worked like a smartphone or a tablet.

Well, these days there are PCs you can operate with a pen, too.

The bag’s handle suddenly appeared in my hand, and I startled.

Whoa— I almost dropped it and panicked.

Seriously?

Then I tapped the Item Box help, and an explanation popped up.

I didn’t get it.

But I didn’t get it—and yet, since I had it, I figured I might as well try using it.

For now, since it said food wouldn’t rot inside, I stored some food.

Actually, I stored the entire car.

It worked. The whole thing went in.

Huh.

I got worried about whether I could get it back out, so I took it out once.

It was fine.

It came out properly.

Then I put it away again.

After that, I checked the detailed Item Box explanation one more time.

That sounded like another overpowered, cheat-like skill explanation.

Reading further, it said enlargement and reduction copying was possible.

Partial copying was possible too.

But… “rare visitor”?

Did that mean someone like me—some “lost wanderer across time and space”?

I felt like I’d once seen an explanation of the term “rare visitor” online.

Hmm… that was… “visitor belief,” wasn’t it?

Something like a deity’s arrival, or a noble guest visiting, or something like that.

Didn’t it also include the visitation of ancestors’ souls?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t any kind of noble guest—just a nosy middle-aged man.

Still, hadn’t the word eventually come to mean just an ordinary “guest”?

For a mountain village that deep, if it was depopulated, even that would be a precious visitor.

Even double MP was already plenty overpowered, but this was beyond imagining.

I created a file and named it “Master Copy.”

Then I tossed in “Car,” and expanded the car file inside.

A list of the objects inside the car started scrolling endlessly.

For now, I decided to copy water—the water of life.

I’d loaded a box containing six two-liter bottles.

I right-clicked and selected Copy.

I chose Normal Copy.

Then MP displayed.

It said 10/10 MP, Lv1.

Uh… so how much could I use with that?

I tried copying.

Thump— a whole box of bottled water appeared at my feet.

Whoa!

But with this, I wouldn’t have to worry about water.

No—this helped!

A real survival situation that starts with finding water would be absolutely impossible for a worn-out old guy like me!

MP became 5/10.

Was the number based on price or something?

I didn’t really get it.

Maybe 1 MP was about 100 yen worth?

Then 5 MP would be 500 yen.

A case of water cost about that, didn’t it?

Or since it was called MP, maybe it meant “paying with energy.”

I copied one more.

This time, I created a new water file in the settings.

And if I copied these two-liter bottles, I could set it so they would automatically go into that file.

But that was annoying.

When I looked again, the explanation said I could move objects in and out just by imagining storage.

I couldn’t afford to accidentally use up the “Master Copy.”

What if you could only copy objects from the Master Copy? What would I do then?

I had to be careful.

I needed to confirm this too.

When I used up MP and leveled up, I didn’t collapse or anything from MP shortage.

That was important.

Somehow, this “MP” might be nothing more than “allocating space.”

Like “allocating storage space on an HDD for a game.”

That might be all it was.

And when I used up my MP, it became 40 MP / Lv2.

It should have become 20, but because of EXP± skill support, it started at double, apparently.

Next was food.

When I copied food items, it became 40 × 2 × 4 = 320 MP, Lv3.

When I wondered how far it would go, the description said it recovered over time—fully restoring in 24 hours.

So if I couldn’t exceed that recovery amount through MP consumption, that would be the cap?

Thankfully, that seemed like a problem for later.

As I kept copying food, it rose to 320 × 2 × 8 = 5120 MP / Lv4.

I finished copying the food, but I had a bit of MP left, so I copied toilet paper too.

Was it just me, or did this “two-ply soft roll” feel like it would be the most precious thing in another world?

It reminded me of the oil shock when I was a kid, when trading companies caused a toilet paper hoarding panic.

Still, at least I wouldn’t have to become a “leaf man.”

Or the “unclean left hand,” for that matter……

Then it became 5120 × 2 × 16 = 163,840 MP / Lv5, and at last I had enough MP to copy the car—no, all the cargo.

I copied everything at once, and a “Car Copy” file was created.

I tapped it and tried pulling it out.

The thing created by copying was, without question, a real car.

Even if I pushed or pulled, it didn’t budge—it had the solid feel of a genuine off-roader.

I checked again, and sure enough, it was a copy, not the original.

My head spun.

Could something like this really exist?

For a man past fifty, it was a harsh reality that was hard to accept.

If it were some flexible-minded kid, would they accept it instantly?

Like, “Sweet—free car,” or something.

I pulled out the original car too, and sure enough, two cars stood side by side.

Both were loaded with cargo.

I felt like I was going insane.

I was scared the real “Master Copy” might disappear, so for now I put the copied one into drive E.

When I tried to drag it into drive D, the file bounced back.

Huh?

Did the bounced copy file go somewhere?

This was bad!

I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Thank goodness it wasn’t the master.

This kind of “file gets rejected and disappears” thing happened on real PCs all the time.

I frantically searched for the file, but when I looked closely at the screen, the optical disc drive—what had been drive F—had become drive G, and a new drive F had been created.

Apparently, that was the equivalent of a normal PC’s D drive: “Item Box Drive D.”

And inside it, “Car Copy” had been stored.

I tried to pull it out directly, but it was locked so I couldn’t.

It seemed the system required copying it into drive E once before you could remove it.

Maybe it was a safety feature, to prevent you from losing the master object.

The help said I could move things in and out by imagining it, so without using my finger I tried tossing the master “Car” into drive F.

“Car” and “Car Copy” were lined up in drive F.

I wondered whether items in drive F could never disappear, so I tested it with a random pebble.

When I tried throwing it into the “Recycle Bin”… it vanished.

T-too scary. I decided I would never use “Delete” again.

That said, when I used Restore to return the recycle bin item to its original location, the pebble came back properly.

This part worked just like a PC.

Would objects in the recycle bin eventually vanish over time, like on a PC?

Testing that would take time.

Knowing me, by the time I could test it, I’d probably have forgotten I even meant to.

Apparently, this screen—or system—could function as an ordinary PC too.

Drives C and D had data in them as usual.

And drives E and F were for physical objects—F was the locked, master-only drive—something like that.

For now, I created a file in drive F called “Cargo Only.”

I opened the copied car file and moved the cargo into “Cargo Only” inside Computer > Local (F).

Finally, once I had an empty car, I copied it into drive E.

There it displayed as “Car (Body Only).”