  I describe a possible scenario for the origin of proton mass in terms of
Cheshire Cat, half-skyrmions, topology change and interplay between hidden
chiral-scale symmetry and induced local symmetry. This differs from the
standard constituent-quark scenario. As the baryonic matter density is
increased toward the vector manifestation (VM) fixed-point at which the $\rho$
mass is to vanish, the effective in-medium mass ratio $m^*_\rho/m^*_N$ is to
tend to zero proportionally to $g^*_\rho$ where $g^*_\rho$ is the in-medium
hidden gauge coupling constant. I develop the thesis that the intricacy
involved in the mass generation could be decoded from experiments at RIB
accelerators and massive compact stars.
