Li Pan climbed all the way to the rooftop, where he spotted a van.
Hah, that chubby streamer was pretty crafty after all. Well, of course—if it was all just "Ghost Tower exploration," why waste strength climbing forty stories? Better to just bring the van down remotely from the first floor instead. Much less effort.
But of course, it wasn't just an ordinary "van." Circling around it, Li Pan—being mechanically trained himself—could tell that the thing had undergone all sorts of modifications, most of them illegal and way beyond regulations. Not that the NCPA bothered to care.
In truth, the van was little more than an empty shell—kept only for the license plate and a thin facade. The chassis had been swapped out with a turbine engine and vector nozzles, allowing for short-distance vertical lift-offs. Most likely salvaged from an old floater vehicle. The motors inside had been rebuilt, the roof bristled with satellite dishes and signal relays, stacked with a mix of DIY gear and military hardware. The setup ensured a powerful livestream signal. This guy really was a professional geek-streamer.
Of course. Did people really think streaming was that simple? Just flapping your lips? These days, no job that made money was simple. Even talking nonsense well was a skill—not everyone could fill dead air; plenty killed the vibe in three sentences flat.
Having checked things out and seen nothing amiss, Li Pan clocked his attendance and prepared to leave.
He had originally planned to summon his floater car up to the rooftop, but the streamer's equipment had taken up all the space. And since that fat guy had mouthed off at him earlier, Li Pan decided he might as well scare him a little—let him make a fool of himself live on stream. Snickering under his breath, sword slung over his shoulder, he crept back down.
He descended all the way to the ground floor.
Stepping out the main entrance, Li Pan blinked at the sight of his floater car waiting for him.
But the fat man was gone.
From rooftop to lobby, there was only one staircase—the fire escape—allowing free access. The fire doors connecting to each apartment floor were all sealed shut. Even though the tower was unfinished, developers didn't want squatters moving in and lowering surrounding property values, so the power had been cut long ago. Without a chainsaw, no civilian weapon could breach them.
Yet somehow, such a big guy, with all his gear, in broad daylight—just vanished?
What was going on? Was there really a monster?
Li Pan deployed his company drone, circling the tower to scan every floor, then checked the rooftop again.
The fat man's van and all his equipment were still there. Nobody else around. The Ghost Tower Zone remained desolate and silent. His floater car's surveillance picked up no human movement at all.
Frowning, Li Pan couldn't figure it out. So he hefted his blade and climbed up again.
This time, he meticulously checked every possible exit on each floor.
No signs of forced entry. No traces of a struggle. No fight. The fat man simply wasn't there. Such a large body, and yet he had vanished into thin air—right after crossing paths with Li Pan.
Was this… the monster?
Still frowning, Li Pan entered the van.
The livestream rig was still broadcasting. But the fat man's device had already gone dead. Under normal circumstances—with that much equipment set up on the rooftop—it was basically a mobile comms tower. Signal loss in the Ghost Tower Zone should have been impossible.
And on the streaming platform, the chat was going insane. Tens of thousands of viewers had flooded in.
What else would they be saying? Obviously claiming that the streamer had run into a cyberpsycho mid-stream, got chopped up, blood everywhere…
Damn it, they even made it sound real. Li Pan almost believed it himself.
So he called up Tech Support 18, donned his gloves, and began checking the van while also deploying a drone to direct-link into the onboard server.
18 was efficient. After a quick remote operation, she broke through the ICE and cracked it open, digging out everything—home address, social security number, medical history.
The fat man's name was Zhang Martin. On the platform he went by the handle "Martin Rousi." According to the data, he'd once been a senior engineer, working on military plasma engines and propulsion components. A highly skilled technician. Life had been good—he'd even paid off his student loans.
But when the war ended, stability brought a different kind of disaster. Night Corporation enterprises surged into the market, backed by tariffs and government protection, dumping goods at low prices. Local defense contractors here in High Heaven City bled losses. Layoffs followed. Martin Rousi got the axe. Thanks to his non-compete clause, he couldn't work in the same field, so he turned to geek-streaming: building rigs, modding cars, coding, reviewing chips, troubleshooting PCs.
But everyone knew the truth—tech content was brutal. For every new chip, tens of thousands of channels rushed to upload content. Profits couldn't even cover the cost of the hardware. Unless you were a top-tier influencer, you couldn't make a living. So he tried every angle—eventually turning to "urban legends" and paranormal streams, using his tech background to compete with liberal arts vloggers.
Grinding, grinding—it was grind or starve.
By the way, the most popular category these days was actually eating streams, since "taste-enabled smartphones" had been invented. Normally Li Pan just choked down synth paste and hard biscuits while watching an immersive mukbang. It was almost indistinguishable from eating real food. Pure bliss—well, kind of.
Anyway, 18 soon discovered something worse: the guy really had been live-recording. And right after meeting Li Pan—before the signal cut—he'd "just in case" synced everything to the cloud. Li Pan's face had been captured, clearly stored on the server. Unless he hacked the entire platform's database, it was undeletable.
Shit. Unless he found this fat man again, how the hell was he supposed to clear his name?
With both evidence and victim missing, and no explanation to give, the NCPA could arrest him on the spot.
Sure, thanks to Monster Company's "special status," he could be bailed out after ten or twenty days in detention. But the bail money? He'd still have to pay that back on his own. More debt. More endless repayments. What a nightmare.
Rubbing his temples, Li Pan realized he had no better option. So he shouldered his sword and dove back into the stairwell—determined to search every inch.
If there really was a monster, why had the fat man vanished instantly, while Li Pan himself had gone up and down countless times without incident?
On the stairwell between the 26th and 27th floors—where the streamer and he had first crossed paths—Li Pan paused. From the stream records, after meeting him, the fat man had stuck around, chatted with his audience, uploaded a bit, then continued down… only to lose signal two floors later.
So… somewhere between the 24th and 25th floors, he'd disappeared?
Li Pan paced back and forth between the 24th and 27th floors, but found nothing unusual.
Still, he remembered something odd.
Back then, the fat man's sudden scream had startled him. But before that, Li Pan hadn't heard a sound from above—not even the guy's loud voice rambling to his viewers. And yet after they'd parted, he could still hear him three floors away. Why hadn't he heard him sooner?
Standing on the landing between 25 and 26, Li Pan looked up at the place where they'd met.
In the recording, the fat man hadn't noticed him at all. He had been babbling, oblivious, until Li Pan suddenly sprang out from the corridor like a monkey, sword swinging, nearly scaring the man into a heart attack.
In a "normal" stairwell, that was impossible.
So… could it be… that one of them hadn't been inside a "normal" stairwell at all?
These days, with Li Pan's endless dreams, he honestly couldn't even tell what counted as the "real" world anymore.
For now, he decided to treat whatever he could see, hear, and scan as the baseline reality.
That meant Rousi had been "normal," since his stream had broadcast everything.
So Li Pan looked down at the blade in his hand—Tonbokiri. Its cold, dazzling blue aura still flickered.
He thought for a moment, then pressed the flat with his palm, smothering the glow. He breathed deeply, letting the blazing energy inside him—roused by the Monkey Dance—gradually subside, sinking into stillness like a dead lake.
Then he turned, descending once more into the dim stairwell, as if stepping into a murky swamp of darkness.
Was it an illusion?
Li Pan felt as though he'd descended forty more floors, deep underground. Yet he knew this stairwell didn't even connect to a basement. The doors below were locked.
So… he had "entered"?
He stopped, leaning on his sword, eyes shut, doing nothing but stand.
Then he felt it: vibration.
Yes—like submerging in water, the skin faintly sensing ripples traveling through the body. The rhythm of his Nine Yin Body Refinement and the Monkey Dance stirred in resonance.
He stood still, focusing. The vibrations weren't coming from beneath him, but from above.
No… wait—the core was moving.
No—wait. What was moving was him.
Li Pan snapped his eyes open, staring upward at an infinite spiral staircase, stretching endlessly into the void.
At the center—
Something was there.
It was vibrating.
Li Pan narrowed his eyes, gripped Tonbokiri, and leapt onto the railing, moving like a gibbon across the void. His blade flared, blue fire swirling along its edge, thrusting straight toward the "core."
Vwoom—
The strike cut through the air, echoing through the stairwell like a dragon's low roar.
Clang! He landed, sword gleaming, listening intently.
The vibrations ceased.
For now.
Climbing two floors higher, he found Martin Rousi sprawled in the stairwell, soaked in sweat—or tears, or piss—reeking and filthy, as if he'd run himself half to death before tripping and tumbling down.
At least he was alive. Alive meant he still had to keep grinding, keep repaying.
Li Pan smacked him across the face. Slap! Slap!
"Hey! Hey! Rousi! Martin! Zhang Rousi! Zhang Martin!"
"Ahhh?! No, no, please don't kill me—!"
Zhang Martin opened his eyes to see a cyberpsycho looming with a sword. He screamed in terror.
"Calm down, Martin!"
Slap! Another blow.
"Calmed yet?"
Slap!
"Calmed yet?"
Slap!
"Calmed yet?"
"Waaah okay okay! Big Bro, I'm calm! Please stop!"
Only when his eyes cleared and he came back to himself did Li Pan nod.
"Good. Let's go."
"Huh? Go? Where?"
"What, you think this is your house? You wanna stay here?"
Li Pan pointed at his gear.
"I'll get you out. Keep an eye on the stream. Tell me when there's signal."
Blinking, Zhang Martin suddenly remembered—and his face went pale.
"B-Big Bro… just now, this stairwell, this building…"
"Shut up. None of your business. You want to live? Don't ask. You want to stay sane? Don't think! Move!"
"Y-Yes, Big Bro. My leg's numb. I can't stand…"
"Tch. What a hassle."
Sighing, Li Pan slung an arm over his shoulder, dragging him up.
Only then did Zhang Martin relax, gratitude welling up.
"Big Bro… thank you…"
"You want to thank me? Fine. Wire me three hundred thousand."
"Th-three hundred thousand! I don't have that kind of—"
"Then shut up!"
"…Big Bro."
"Shut up!"
"N-no, I mean—the signal's back…"
"Oh." Li Pan quickly turned toward the camera.
"Oi! You see that? Your boy Rousi's alive! Twisted his ankle, that's all! And I'm not a cyberpsycho! Any more slander and I'll come cut you down through the damn net! You say it too, go on!"
With his swollen face, Zhang Martin forced a smile.
"Y-yeah, yeah. All me. I fell. Nothing to do with Big Bro here. You all get it. Catch you tonight, stream's over. Bye-bye."
Crisis averted, Li Pan hauled him back to the rooftop, bandaged his ankle from the van's medkit, and forced him to shut down the stream and hand over the hard drives.
"Big Bro, I realize it now. You saved my life. I owe you. Here—just a token…"
Though he couldn't cough up 300k, Martin still offered a secure data card.
It was an offline blockchain communication card with near-field transfer capability. Stored on it were encrypted codes and "silent accounts" from the deep web—illegal cryptocurrency forbidden by the tax bureau.
In short: unwashed black money.
But in this age of obscene wealth gaps and rampant syndicates, shadow funds never went away. They couldn't be used openly in official systems, but on the black market—for trades, junk, or under-the-table deals—they were always accepted.
Li Pan's eyes lit up, though he kept his face neutral as he pocketed the card and clapped Martin on the shoulder.
"Good. Don't say a word. Now beat it."
"Y-yes. Thank you, Big Bro…"
Martin shuffled away, then hesitated, turned back.
"Big Bro, about this tower…"
Li Pan frowned.
"You saw something?"
"I… I think I dreamed. A family… living in this tower…" He faltered, then shook his head.
"Forget it. It was long ago. Not worth saying. Goodbye."
Li Pan waved him off, watching as the van floated away. But the matter wasn't over.
With the sword techniques taught by the Blue-Robed Figure, Li Pan could breach the stairwell barrier and come and go freely in the monster's domain. But the creature itself hadn't been found. Aside from making people vanish or lose themselves in corridors, its nature was unknown.
What was the right approach? Buy the whole tower complex? Blow it up?
For now, he had no solution.
At least the daily report could be filed. After running back and forth all day, he could finally clock out.
What, you thought he'd work overtime? Forget it. The job was just to check if the Ghost Tower monster rumors were real.
They were. Done.
What? Extra business? Fine, pay extra. First settle the base contract. A monster can make two reports—why not? That's the freedom of earning 2,500 a month!
So Li Pan summoned his drone, welded all the stairwell doors shut to keep idiots out, and drove home to write his report.
.
.
.
⚠️ 30 CHAPTERS AHEAD — I'm Not a Cyberpsycho ⚠️
The system says: Kill.Mercs obey. Corporates obey. Monsters obey.One man didn't.
🧠💀 "I'm not a cyberpsycho. I just think... differently."
💥 High-voltage cyberpunk. Urban warfare. AI paranoia.Read 30 chapters ahead, only on Patreon.
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