Chapter Ninety-Six: Guilmon Vanished

"Who would have thought Grandma knew how to chat online, too... So this is what they mean when they say nobody believes the truth?" Feng Xue teased Ruki. Still, it was rather amusing. In the year 2000, computers were not even as common in Nippon as they were in the Central Kingdom, so the person on the other end probably never imagined such a fashionable old lady.

"That's my grandma, not yours!" Ruki seemed to protest in a huffy sort of way. Feng Xue had no idea what she was really thinking, but that was how it seemed to him. What he did not realize was that while he wore a wry smile, Ruki had shown the faintest, almost imperceptible smile of her own.

Ding-dong.

Though it was a Japanese-style garden, there was still a doorbell. Glancing at her grandmother, who was still happily chatting with an online friend, Ruki went to answer it herself, and then—

"What do you want?"

"Seriously, aren't you two worried that the person opening the door might be one of Ruki's family? Terriermon is one thing, but at worst they'd just think the boy looks a bit effeminate. But how are you going to explain Guilmon?" Feng Xue rubbed his forehead weakly. Stories like this, where the logic made no sense at all, appeared all the time in manga and anime. Most people who traveled through worlds got used to them after seeing enough, but Feng Xue was still a beginner.

"Well..." The two of them clearly had not considered that. They looked at each other, then could only scratch their heads and laugh awkwardly.

"Spit it out. What is it?" Ruki asked only after they had walked along the path. "You come to someone's house all of a sudden and say you need help. Don't you know it's incredibly rude to have a girl wandering around outside in the middle of the night?"

"Guilmon suddenly disappeared..." Takato's voice was heavy, as if the blow had hit him hard. "He disappeared right here!"

Yet the spot Takato pointed to showed nothing unusual, or rather, nothing that could be seen as unusual.

"Here?" Feng Xue suddenly felt a familiar presence. It was not the presence of a Digimon, but something else entirely, a sensation he could not for the life of him remember where he had encountered before. But when he lowered his head, he abruptly noticed that his own hands seemed to be growing faint and translucent as well. In an instant, however, they returned to normal.

"Is it because my data is more stable?" Feng Xue guessed, while racking his brain over where he had felt that presence before.

"Jianliang!" Terriermon suddenly cried out. Half of its ear had also become faint and ghostlike, apparently affected by the same phenomenon.

"Looks like there really is something around here!" Jianliang hesitated, then said, "Terriermon, go home first. Impmon, you'd better not stay around here either!"

"No need. I've already guessed roughly what's going on. There's no danger to me here." Feng Xue shook his head and refused Jianliang's suggestion. Seeing that Feng Xue showed no sign of fading, Jianliang did not bring it up again, but instead sent Terriermon back home.

"You said you know what's happening here?" Takato was so agitated that he grabbed Feng Xue by the shoulders and shook him. However, the difference in their heights was so great that the scene looked rather comical.

"Mm, just a few guesses." Feng Xue nodded. "There ought to be something underground here with a very strong attraction to data. If a Digimon's own data is insufficient, or if it cannot control that data well enough, it will be drawn away by that force."

"Not enough control?" Jianliang repeated the phrase in confusion, clearly unable to grasp the meaning.

"For Digimon, data is not only the substance of their bodies, but also the condition that allows them to use their abilities and survive. Otherwise, why do you think Digimon fight just for the sake of fighting?" Feng Xue said, only to find that the two of them were suddenly shaken. A guess formed in his mind.

"Guilmon and Terriermon... they haven't ever absorbed data, have they?" Feng Xue asked in surprise.

"Mm. Guilmon was only just born!" Takato answered, and Jianliang also nodded silently.

"What can I say? Even if Digimon come to the real world, they remain Digimon in essence. Food in the real world can sustain life, but it is not data. For Digimon, nourishment is not data, because unlike data, it is not absorbed forever; it is excreted instead. So even if they keep eating, the amount of data inside them does not increase. On the contrary, it decreases when they use their abilities. A small Digimon like Terriermon is one thing, but how many times has Guilmon used his finishing move since birth? The data concentration in his body was already too low. When the concentration drops too far, the body's structure becomes unstable. To preserve itself, a Digimon will usually digivolve backward. That's also why Terriermon reverts so quickly after evolving."

"But Guilmon didn't revert. He disappeared!" Takato said anxiously. He had never imagined that Digimon needed data in addition to food.

"Weren't you the one who said he was born as a Rookie? With nowhere left to retreat, the only option was to preserve his life by becoming data, I suppose. Under normal circumstances, that would only mean being unable to use attacks, or becoming sleepy and listless. But whatever is underground here clearly draws data. A Digimon whose structure is already unstable gets pulled by that force, and of course it drifts away."

After hearing Feng Xue's explanation, Takato suddenly realized that he knew far too little about Digimon. Thinking back, Guilmon really had been sleeping more and more lately—something he had never even heard of for a Digimon, falling asleep from exhaustion. At the thought of this, Takato could not help feeling guilty.

"You said drifted away? So Guilmon is still alive?" Jianliang immediately seized on the point that mattered most.

"That's right. If nothing unexpected has happened, Guilmon should now be preserved somewhere underground in the form of data. But even if you can bring him back, if he doesn't absorb some data, he'll disappear sooner or later. If you really don't want to hunt, then just use cards whenever you can. The data from cards is only external, but it's still better than food from the real world. It's still not as good as obtaining data through battle, but at least it can stabilize a Digimon's body. Just don't overdo it, or if he turns into a Numemon, don't say I didn't warn you." Having given his answer, Feng Xue fell silent and followed behind Ruki instead. The more he thought about it, the more familiar that presence seemed.

What, exactly, was it? It could not only disrupt the stability of a Digimon's data structure, but also draw a Digimon's data away. Feng Xue felt a faint unease, because the true nature of the Digimon world seemed to far exceed even the fragments revealed in the original work. When watching the anime, he had often glanced over those mysterious-sounding terms without a second thought, never pausing to consider what they really were. Feng Xue, however, had undergone professional training in plot analysis, yet even so, the things an anime could reveal were only the tip of an entire world's iceberg. This time, for instance, whatever had appeared did not even have a name in the original story.

That left Feng Xue with nothing at all to base a guess on.