"Clatter."
Steel Jaw's shiny golden electronic wallet fell to the ground, making a sharp sound.
Wang Ye was breathing like a broken bellows, and thin wisps of blue smoke were still rising from the pink arm on his right.
He felt half of his body was numb from the vibration; his gums were even chattering.
Old Jack, who had been hiding under the operating table, was now staring at him like he was an alien.
"Old... Old man, what are you looking at? Haven't you seen a Grand Master manifest before?"
While stubbornly pretending to be tough, Wang Ye used the momentum of his trembling body to lung forward.
The posture looked like some profound lower-body martial arts technique, but in reality, his legs were just too weak to stand.
His left hand accurately pinned down the wallet.
[Unowned (Unconscious) Account Detected. Balance: 4,200 Livelihood Bandwidth.]
[Severe survival crisis detected. Extract immediately?]
"Cultivate! Cultivate it now! This Priest cannot bear to see riches gathering dust!"
Wang Ye roared in his mind, his fingers trembling as he swiped across the sensor area of the wallet.
Ding!
The red alert in the upper-left corner of his retina vanished instantly, replaced by a soft green.
[Bandwidth Balance: 4248:15:22]
[Visual sampling rate restored to 60Hz. Color mode reset to: High Dynamic Range (HDR).]
The mosaic vanished instantly. Wang Ye could even see the cigarette butts stuffed into the cracks of Old Jack's white ceramic face.
The suffocating "low-fidelity" feeling receded; he finally felt this body belonged to him again.
"Wang Ye... that random scribbling of yours just now, what kind of hacking technique was that?"
Old Jack walked over tremblingly, staring at the still-smoking pink arm.
"What hacking? This is called physical consecration! This is electromagnetic transcendence!"
Wang Ye forced himself to stand up by leaning against the wall. The pink arm was making "clack-clack" metal cooling sounds due to overheating.
"But pops, this egg-beater has too much kick. This Priest's kidney stones were almost vibrated to pieces."
"Be glad you're alive. The torque of this old antique motor has no limit."
Old Jack curled his lip and dug out a greasy plastic knob from a pile of junk.
It was a voltage potentiometer stripped from an old desk lamp, with a chipped edge.
"Here, weld this into the control line of that junk arm. You can adjust the speed manually."
Wang Ye's eyes lit up. He grabbed the knob and pressed it onto the wire head on his shoulder.
"Excellent. This shall be called the 'Manual Gear Causal Drive'."
He tried twisting the knob, and the arm emitted a gentle "humming" sound, no longer showing the destructive force from before.
He wrapped himself in his tattered long trench coat, hiding the pink mechanical arm under a black cloth cover.
Although he had over four thousand points, it was still far from enough for his sister Wang Xiaomong's "genetic maintenance fee" next month.
In this damn Neon City, if you have no money, even the air is taxed.
He pushed open the clinic's broken door, stepping into the eternal acid rain and bizarre neon lights.
Wang Ye crossed through narrow back alleys and returned to the home located in the deepest part of a tenement building.
The room was small, filled with the burnt smell of overheated circuit boards and the sweet-metallic scent of cheap nutrient paste.
Wang Xiaomong was curled up in a swivel chair piled with electronic junk, her small face as white as paper.
The red light in her retinas flickered faintly in the dark, another sign that her bandwidth was about to hit zero.
"Bro... you're back."
Her voice was very light, with the stiffness of an electronic synthesizer.
"I'm back. Bro just 'cultivated' some affinity; it's enough for us to splurge for a while."
Wang Ye touched her head affectionately, transferring two thousand bandwidth points to her name.
Seeing the red light on Xiaomong's face disappear, the heavy stone in Wang Ye's heart finally fell.
"Bro, your hand... why does it smell like engine oil?"
"Don't talk nonsense. That's a 'Dharma Treasure' Bro just refined. It smells great."
Wang Ye settled his sister and sat alone on the window sill, pulling out the gold watch he had snatched.
It was just a gold-plated imitation, but it should be enough to trade for two decent computing cores in the Ghost Market.
He put on his cracked sunglasses to hide the trace of confusion about the future in his eyes.
Half an hour later, Ninth District, Ghost Market.
This was a scavenger's paradise and a dead man's end.
The acid rain was mixed with the flickering shadows of holograms. Stalls selling cybernetic parts hung signs saying "Buy One, Get Two Free."
Wang Ye moved through the stalls like a real street loafer, searching for hardware that could run the physical formulas in his head.
He stopped in front of a mechanical monk's stall.
The monk was hitting a glowing electronic wooden fish while hawking discarded chips stolen from the uptown.
Wang Ye squatted down, picking through a pile of scrap metal. Finally, he locked onto a pitch-black board.
It was a charred GPU core, looking like a burnt brick.
But in Wang Ye's intuition, the superconducting links inside actually still had a faint magnetic sensation.
"Monk, how much for this scrap iron to prop up a table leg?"
Wang Ye weighed the GPU core as if he didn't care.
"Amitabha, Almsgiver has a good eye. This is a wisdom chip blessed by Manjushri Bodhisattva."
The mechanical monk's racing lights flashed a red ring: "One thousand bandwidth points. Not much, right?"
"One thousand? Why don't you go rob a corporation? Fifty points, not a penny more, or this Priest will commit suicide right in front of you."
Just as the two were spit-fighting over the price, the surrounding air suddenly turned cold.
That cold was the exhaust from high-precision air conditioning, carrying a sense of unreachable nobility.
The crowd parted automatically, and a gorgeous lady in a silver-white carbon fiber combat suit walked over.
She wore a monocle, and her eyes were cold enough to freeze the surrounding acid rain.
"This core, I want it. Five thousand points."
Su Ling didn't even look at Wang Ye, directly throwing out a number that nearly stopped Wang Ye's heart.
Wang Ye got anxious; this was his only chance for a turnaround.
His left hand secretly felt for the desk lamp knob on his shoulder, forcing a profound, crooked smile of a hidden master.
"This female Almsgiver, everything has a first-come, first-served order."
"Moreover, this Priest observes your destiny is tied to peach blossoms, but your forehead is dark; this artifact has too much Malice, I'm afraid you can't handle it."
Su Ling stopped, her monocle locking onto Wang Ye's shoulder, which was still slightly vibrating.
"Get lost, or die."
Wang Ye's legs went soft, but he knew if he chickened out now, he might have to sell his kidneys later.
He twisted the knob, and a dull roar, like the heartbeat of a giant beast, came from under the black cloth on his shoulder.
"Hehe, how about we make a bet? If I can make this scrap 'manifest divinity,' you let me have it, how about that?"