“Such a huge abandoned factory, and not even a scrap of ‘trash’ worth picking up.”
Lin Ke complained internally, settling for picking up a few fist-sized concrete fragments from the ground and storing them in his backpack.
Throwing a fist-sized stone with full force could cause formidable damage.
It would let Hunter Lin Ke practice, adding proficiency to his Throw skill, and could be hurled at a crucial moment to land on an enemy’s face, inflicting multiple effects like blinding, stun, and bleeding.
Nodding to himself, there was even a tiny chance of triggering an instant-death effect.
“Damn!
These concrete rocks are practically perfect ranged weapons!
Sure enough, there’s no such thing as useless trash, only people who don’t know how to use it!”
Thinking this way, Lin Ke picked up a few more rocks from the ground before preparing to leave the scavenged, abandoned factory.
Before leaving, however, Lin Ke needed to know which direction to take next.
Being unfamiliar with the place, blindly pressing forward was a bad idea.
He needed a clear target direction.
Besides, since there was such a large abandoned factory here, there ought to be more buildings, or perhaps a town, nearby.
He needed to find a high point to climb up and survey the surrounding situation.
Lin Ke locked his gaze onto the tallest structure in the abandoned factory.
It was a structure built entirely from silver-gray alloy materials, roughly six stories high, resembling a high-voltage transmission tower.
“You’ll do.”
Lin Ke walked to the base of the tower and walked around it once.
He discovered a metal ladder welded to the tower’s frame, through which he could climb to the very top.
However, likely due to years of neglected maintenance, many parts of the metal ladder were severely rusted.
Several footholds were missing along the middle section of the ten-meter ladder.
“Let’s test if it’s sturdy first.”
Lin Ke grabbed the side rails of the ladder with both hands and shook it forcefully back and forth a dozen times.
With clattering noises, rusted iron flakes rained down like water.
Fortunately, the ladder itself held firm without snapping, remaining tightly anchored to the iron tower.
It looked like there wouldn’t be a scenario where the ladder detached from the tower and collapsed halfway through the climb.
Although it still looked a bit risky, Lin Ke stepped onto the creaking rungs and began climbing.
His physical fitness, amplified by the system far beyond ordinary human limits, was his confidence.
Even if his foot slipped, his single-arm grip strength of over a hundred kilograms could easily hold his body suspended on the ladder.
After snapping two crossbars underfoot, he safely reached the highest point of the tower without further incident.
The wind at the top of the tower was somewhat strong.
Lin Ke gripped the sturdy iron frame behind him with his left hand to steady his body, using his right hand to shade his eyes as he looked out into the distance.
At the edge of his vision, the black horizon of the ocean lay to his left, while his view to the right was completely blocked by a massive black shadow standing along the shore.
He blinked twice.
“Holy shit!
No way!”
His right hand quickly pulled out the portable binoculars from the Monster Hunter world and held them to his eyes.
Through the refraction of the dual lenses, Lin Ke’s vision crossed dozens of miles of wasteland, clearly revealing the true face of that black shadow.
It was a city!
Standing beside the sea was a massive cluster of high-rise buildings wrapped in a hazy mist.
Those tall, imposing structures combined to form an ultra-modern megacity.
With a single glance, his entire field of view was captured, and he couldn’t bring himself to turn his neck even half an inch away.
Time flowed silently.
As the sun rose, the sunlight dispersed the heavy mist, and the distant architecture grew distinct.
Through the lenses, the city bristled with skyscrapers, each architectural design unique and overflowing with futuristic style.
Densely packed skyscrapers rose in stacked layers like towering mountain ranges, dominating the entire skyline ahead.
Even the AVs flying through the air seemed as small as birds, taking off and landing within the forest of steel.
On the exterior walls of those high-rises, various neon advertisements remained clearly visible even in daylight.
In particular, a projected light screen soared into the sky at the city center, appearing from afar like a giant sword piercing the cloud layer into the heavens.
Under a background of red and blue, advertisements for firearms, erotica, and technology saturated the scene with pure cyberpunk flavor.
His gaze unconsciously lingered on those ads for a moment.
“So vivid!”
Lin Ke lowered his binoculars and sighed.
The distant metropolis was colossal, and what he could see was merely its outer shell.
More of its inner streets and neon lights were drowned behind the city’s back and beneath the shadows of its skyscrapers.
Even though he had never been there and was seeing this massive city for the first time, Lin Ke already knew its name.
Although many scenes differed from the game, dozens of iconic landmark buildings were nearly identical to the game’s 3D models.
It was Night City!
“Good morning, Night City!”
“Welcome to Cyberpunk.”
Standing atop the tower, Lin Ke in the morning light greeted Night City, while Lin Ke in the cave greeted himself in the morning light.
Knowing where he had arrived, Lin Ke had already decided on his next direction.
That would be the city of sin directly ahead—hailed in 2077 as “the worst place to live in America.”
Raising the binoculars to re-examine the surroundings, he needed to survey the terrain and roads between this abandoned factory area and Night City, planning his route toward the city.
A Protein Farm.
A greenhouse canopy used by BioTechnica to grow genetically modified wheat.
A molten salt solar thermal power plant.
A solar photovoltaic power plant.
Dogtown.
Various iconic landmark regions appeared both familiar and slightly unfamiliar.
It took Lin Ke half an hour to map out two routes to Night City.
The first route was to head left, crossing roughly 10 kilometers of wasteland to reach BioTechnica’s farm, then following the highway around the greenhouse farms to directly enter Pacifica or detour toward the Santo Domingo river valley.
The advantage of this route was that he could walk along the highway; the terrain was flat, smooth, and short.
The disadvantage was also the highway—because it was the main arterial road leading from the border into Night City, traffic was dense, and crowds brought trouble.
He might encounter armed robberies, kidnappings, or extortion.
His flesh-and-blood body wasn’t powerful enough to ignore firearms; a small handgun could still threaten his life.
Thus, the second route Lin Ke planned was to head right.
This required traversing dozens of miles of wasteland, bypassing three molten salt solar thermal power plants, and taking the long way around the dam’s mountain road to enter Rancho Coronado in Santo Domingo.
The advantage was high stealth and personal security by traveling alone.
The disadvantage was the distance, as the entire journey crossed arid desert terrain that wouldn’t be easy to navigate.
Squatting on the tower, Lin Ke reached up and scratched his head.
It was a tough choice.
To go wild?
Or to play it safe?
While Lin Ke was still wavering on the tower, a faint tapping sound echoed from his side and reached his ears.
It sounded like gunfire, and it wasn’t far away!
The thought flashed through his mind, and Lin Ke turned his vision with the binoculars toward the direction of the gunfire.
Soon, his gaze locked onto two trails of yellow dust kicked up on the wasteland.
Ahead, an off-road motorcycle and a pickup truck behind it engaged in a chase across the desert terrain, driving diagonally toward his position.
“Trouble’s coming!”
Zooming in his view…
The motorcycle rider up front wore a tight black leather suit.
From the slender waist and the upper body vibrating with the vehicle’s bumps, it was clearly a woman with a great figure.
This female rider wore a black air-filter mask and dust goggles, obscuring her face from Lin Ke.
However, her sleek, flowing light-pink short hair added a splash of color to the monochromatic wasteland.
Behind her, in the pickup truck, the driver was a short Asian man.
Two black hemispherical crystals replaced his eyeballs, embedded in his eye sockets.
At a glance, he looked like a oversized insect.
In the passenger seat sat a dark-skinned, muscular man.
His exposed skin showed distinct cyberware implant seam lines, and both of his arms were metallic cybernetic limbs gleaming with a chrome sheen.
Inside the vehicle, the dark-skinned man had just pulled his cybernetic arm holding an assault rifle back inside the window.
The yellow-skinned youth driving spoke up: “Big brother, don’t shoot!
It won’t be fun if you wreck her!”
“Damn it, then step on the gas and catch up!”
The dark-skinned man had a naturally fierce temper.
He had only wanted to shoot out the motorcycle’s tires, but the pickup was bouncing too violently and he missed.
Hearing his minion tell him how to do his job, he slapped the driver on the head and roared at him.
The driver ducked his neck, instinctively responding, “Hai!”
The motorcycle ahead had to weave around shrubs, while the pickup truck smashed through blocking bushes, barging forward in a straight line.
The distance between the two closed rapidly.
By the time they were a hundred meters from the branch airfield, the gap was down to ten meters.
The yellow-skinned driver’s optical cyberware zoomed in on the visual frame, staring fixedly at the female rider through the windshield.
Suddenly, his optical eye captured a human figure standing on the tower.
“Why is there someone up there?
A bonus loot, haha!
Let your granddaddy see what you look like!”
The driver excitedly licked his lips.
But before he could command his optical eye to zoom in, the image before him dropped frames, and the audio module in his cyberdeck threw an error.
[WARNING: INVASION DETECTED.
WARNING…]
Before he could react, his vision went completely black.
“Ah!
I can’t see!
Shit, this chick is a Netrunner!”
The yellow-skinned driver yelled in terror.
In the darkness, his hands gripped the steering wheel tight, but his foot slipped off the accelerator.
“Damn it!”
The dark-skinned brute no longer cared about taking her alive.
He leaned half his body out of the passenger window, raising his rifle to fire.
Before he could pull the trigger, electrical arcs suddenly sparked across his cybernetic arms, followed by a sharp buzzing sound as the micro-motors embedded in his arms overloaded.
His cybernetic arms malfunctioned and hung limp, dropping the rifle onto the wilderness outside the vehicle.
“Shit!
Don’t let me catch you, or I’ll slice you up alive and eat you!”
Watching the motorcycle rapidly pull away, the dark-skinned man let out a roar of frustration.
[Optical Reset Uploaded] [Cyberware Malfunction Uploaded]
The daemons took effect.
Hearing the sound of the receding truck engine behind her, the female rider let out a breath of relief.
“This damn world.
No matter where you go, these roaches crawl out.”
Riding her off-road motorcycle past the abandoned factory, the female rider intentionally slowed her speed, raising her head to call out a warning to the youth standing on the signal tower.
“Find a place to hide.
My daemons will only keep them busy for five minutes at most.”
Her optical eyes, equipped with ten-fold optical zoom and dynamic tracking, had allowed her to spot the idiot standing on the signal tower from far away.
Who knew how he had survived to this age?
The Badlands was no place for sightseeing.
Seeing the guy standing there gaping like a fool, the female rider dropped that single sentence and ignored the idiot further.
Twisting the throttle, the motorcycle engine roared as its wheels kicked up a cloud of yellow sand, accelerating toward the distant city.
[Lucy] [Age: 20] [Identity: Netrunner] [Cyberware Coverage: 43%] [Description: A dream-chasing punk girl, a top-tier cybernetic netrunner.] [Note: This world is a hell to her; the moon is where a new life begins.
The false dream of the moon is her spiritual pillar.]
The text overlaying the corner of his eye faded away.
Watching the receding splash of color, Lin Ke snapped out of his daze, pushing his jaw back up.
He really hadn’t expected to encounter a character from the anime here.
“Edgerunners plus Cyberpunk 2077?
I love this world!”
“Still, since I can see Lucy here, the current timeline shouldn’t be 2077 yet.”
“Besides, she told me to hide…
but why should I hide?
I’m not letting a starter gift delivered right to my door go to waste.”