As a reminder, I won't be translating the chapter this week. But since the official release won't come out until Wednesday, I thought I would do this for anyone who can't wait.
Kai asks who gave the doll her tagchip. The doll doesn't know what he's talking about, and he says she's wearing one around her neck. She pulls out the tagchip that we've seen in her memories.
The doll doesn't know what it is or when it got there. Kanitarou gives the run down on tagchips: every human has one inside them and they give humans their freedom and rights. The doll is ecstatic.
The doll thanks Kai for giving it to her, and he explains that he didn't do it. The doll wonders where it came from for a second, maybe it was the ramen stall owner, but decides it doesn't really matter. She asks Kai to show her how to use the tagchip, but Kanitarou rains on her parade by reminding her that they don't work on toys.
Cue long explanation by Kanitarou on how tagchips are implanted that I skimmed because it hurt to look at. The doll gets pissed at him and complains that he always talks too much (I felt a sense of kinship in that moment). Kai wonders whose tagchip it is and why they removed it from their body.
The doll says it must have been the ramen stall owner again. On the subject of the ramen stall owner, she thinks of ramen, and then of the dream she had of ramen, and then the dream she had of the tagchip.
That train of thought leads the doll to her dream of the girl with the blindfold. Kanitarou calls her stupid because dolls can't dream. Kai asks her what the girl looked like and Eko brings her pot out so the doll can show her her memories. But before they can do that Eko notices that the tagchip is saying something and snatches it away.
The tagchip displays the image of a 5-star girl whose name is listed as Number 32, and says that she's dead. The doll notices that this is the same person who appeared in her dream and Bon notices that she looks exactly like Mizuha.
Gugu asks what happened to the Guardians, and Bon says that Mizuha dissolved them but the remnants formed Kaibara Cybernetics. Hylo says that Mizuha was dead by the time tagchips were implemented (meaning she couldn't still be alive by the life extension affect of the chips). Gugu asks if that means 32 is one of Mizuha's descendants, but Tonari says no, it's clone of Mizuha.
Tonari reveals that she learned of this some years ago, when she spied on Kaibara as a ghost and saw that they have a number of children who resemble Mizuha. She told Fushi, but they apparently already knew about it.
In order to keep Hayase's bloodline alive, they have a ton of Mizuha clones working at Kaibara as employees. Bon realizes that Number 32 means the girl is the thirty second clone.
Tonari wanted to get rid of the doll because Kaibara can track the tagchip to their location, but getting rid of the tagchip should work as well. Hylo and Messar agree with her.
The doll tries to get them to change their minds, because she needs the tagchip to become human. She believes that 32 gave it to her so she could do that. But Tonari asks her why she wants to do that in the first place.
The doll is taken aback and feebly starts to reply that it was because the ramen stall owner told her to, but Kanitarou butts in and declares that if Tonari, Hylo, and Messar try to take the tagchip, he'll stop them with his super arm.
March and Eko join him. Bon and Kai try to deescalate the situation, but March makes them join her. Gugu is still undecided. The chapter ends with the two teams facing off.
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If you haven't read these chapters yet, here and here.
Since they had the doll imbue a pot with her memories/dreams and then do nothing with it, that pot is most definitely going to be important later. Chekhov's gun. But I don't know how. I don't think there's anything in the dream that wasn't in the doll's description. Eko already looked at the pot, right after the doll made it, but she got distracted. Maybe Fushi sees 32 from the doll's perspective and she reminds them of the nameless boy.
The mud Eko uses to project her thoughts is special and specifically reacts to human brain waves, but I wonder if there's a stipulation that you have to be human to leave your memories on an Earthenware pot. Because if so, the pot would serve as further proof that the doll is human. Just keep an eye out for it.
Tonari always seems to put her ghost form to more practical use than anyone else. Another way in which she uses her death for her friends' benefit... The first time she died, she found Bon and taught him about Fushi, and now she regularly uses it to spy on Kaibara. Makes me wonder if she used it for anything else while she was dead during the previous era. Maybe to follow the Defense Corps./Kahaku around to make sure they weren't planning on double crossing Fushi.
Tonari insists Mizuha's clones are only related to Mizuha on a surface-level, despite mistrusting Mizuha for her relation to Hayase for most of the present era. She denies Mizuha's connection to Kaibara, and stresses that these girls are just ordinary girls and not at fault for whatever's happening with the company. Since a lot of Tonari's dislike for Mizuha was an extension of dislike for herself/her belief that children are responsible for their elder family members' fuck-ups, to me this indicates that she's also being more lenient on herself.
Another aside about Tonari's behavior: she's committed to letting Fushi make decisions for the group but she clearly regrets it. She's kind of like Fushi's confidant, in a way, because she's privy to information that no one else knows.
The fight between the immortals gets shut down without actually being resolved—with Hylo and Tonari bowing out when Fushi gives their verdict and Messar just not caring very much one way or the other. It's over so quickly, actually, that I think it'll probably crop back up again later. It's also funny that Hylo and Messar share the same opinion on many things but Hylo just can't fucking stand agreeing with him.
Fushi keeps remaking the Aoki house, that hurts a lot... they continue to recreate a building that they lived in five hundred years ago because it's the place that they think of as "home," except the house is in ruins because the people who kept it clean and who turned it into a home for Fushi are no longer alive.
Fushi now sits at the head of the table instead of Satoru. Further signifying that they're actually taking control as a leader and decision maker, totally different from how they were in the present era. But they're doing this by shutting everyone out again. I believe it's more out of a desire to keep their relationship with Hayase's descendants and their other friends separate than because they don't want to put their trust in anybody, but let's be honest it's probably both.
The chapter contains flashbacks to two other scenes with Satoru. The first is from Chapter 160.2. Satoru did give Fushi the sphere, they touched it and passed out. Satoru says afterwards that it was too much information for Fushi to take in at once, which checks out because the sphere contains the ability to create anything. It's infinite data. But they did touch it, so they could hypothetically recreate it.
Fushi was also a sphere, before they were anything else. If the knockers take all of their vessels like they did in the previous era—although their number of vessels has probably grown exponentially—they'll be reduced to just a sphere and then the knockers could just wish that they were dead, or however it works.
The second flashback is to Chapter 164.1. This is where Satoru mentions that he already cast off this power—although he's vague about whether this is the sphere or something else—which could mean he physically cast it off. Deeply ironic that Fushi doesn't even have the power to control knockers nor wants to and the knockers haven't so much as touched them for fear that they might. Also deeply ironic that in the present era, the left hand was about to merge with Fushi and probably kill them but a different knocker shot it in the head first.
I'm super intrigued by how the story will proceed with Fushi no longer being the perspective character (at least momentarily). Seeing them from someone else's point of view again... having their thoughts hidden from the readers... why do I feel like this is because they know something that's not meant to be revealed yet. The way they react to the doll, too... it reminds me of the way they treated Mizuha and the left hand, being especially compliant with their desires. Quite possibly because of her connection to Kaibara and Mizuha's thirty two identical buddies.
If 32 was an employee at Kaibara, she had to have known that just giving the doll a tag chip wouldn't have done any good by itself. And, again because of her status as a Kaibara employee, she also must have known about the sphere. So it seems likely that her plan was to have the doll find the sphere and make her wish all along. And Fushi probably knows something about this plan, given the way they keep staring daggers into her whenever she says anything about becoming human.
