Putting all his looted items into his system inventory, Lin Ke turned to look at the pickup truck beside him.
[Thorton Mackinaw “Ghoul”] Quality: Common Description: Built in 2067, rear-wheel drive, 420 horsepower.
Upgraded with Nomad tech, featuring heavy bulletproof armor plating.
Curb weight: 4,458 kg.
No country song is complete without it; the model even has its own museum in rural Tennessee.
Note: Its flatbed is large enough to fit two cows—or, of course, two corpses.
He threw the cold corpses of the dark-skinned brute and the Japanese grunt into the truck bed, covering them hastily with a canvas tarp.
Climbing into the Mackinaw, Lin Ke began to fiddle with the controls to see if he could drive it.
*Vroom—*
To his surprise, the moment his hands touched the steering wheel, the engine roared to life with an automatic ignition.
Future tech, awesome!
It seemed this vehicle didn’t have specific biometric locks or electronic lockouts; anyone could drive it.
Brilliant.
He never expected his first car in life would be acquired in a cyberpunk world.
Lin Ke happily studied the truck’s controls.
There was no clutch or gear shifter in the Mackinaw.
Aside from mechanical buttons and connectors whose functions Lin Ke didn’t know, there were only the brake, gas pedal, and steering wheel.
Operation was incredibly simple.
Through the digital clock on the dashboard, Lin Ke also learned the current date and time of this cyberpunk world:
May 11, 2075 9:40 AM
This timeline was quite early.
The red-haired lady shouldn’t have run into trouble yet.
As for the cat girl, he wondered how she was doing.
Lin Ke didn’t dwell on it.
This was no place to linger.
To prevent any other Wraiths from tracing them here, he decided to make his getaway.
Under the influence of his learning talent…
After driving in a few circles to get the hang of it, he confidently stepped on the gas, turned the wheel, and headed toward the main highway leading back to the farm area.
As for potential trouble on the road?
He had a car and guns now—what was there to fear?
If things went sideways, he would just empty his magazine.
“Night City, here I come!”
As a first-time driver, Lin Ke didn’t drive very fast.
Thus, the moment his truck rolled off the desert wasteland and onto the smooth, straight highway, he got an immediate taste of Night City’s local flavor.
“Fuck you, is driving a bit faster gonna kill you?
I could drive faster with my dick!”
“Get the fuck out of the way, or I’ll blow your head off!”
“Dumbass…”
Lin Ke was tempted to slam the pedal to the metal and ram them off the road.
However, considering he had just arrived in Night City—knowing the geography but none of the people—he couldn’t very well start gunfights right off the bat.
Suppressing his irritation, he merely pressed harder on the accelerator to speed up.
With a car, the dozens of miles went by in a flash.
[Note: Distance units are standardized to kilometers and miles.] [Note: Weight units are standardized to jin, kilograms, and tons.]
A fork in the road appeared ahead.
Looking at the road sign, turning left would lead to Pacifica after three kilometers.
However, in the game, Pacifica was a lawless wasteland.
Bullets flew freely in the streets, there were no NCPD patrols, and it didn’t even fall under Night City’s legal jurisdiction anymore.
Thus, Lin Ke had no intention of turning left and kept driving straight ahead.
Two kilometers ahead: Night City.
Welcome to: Santo Domingo.
Santo Domingo’s Arroyo district—or the southern industrial zone—was home to numerous heavy metallurgical plants, nuclear power stations, and toxic waste landfills.
Towering smokestacks constantly spewed thick, black smog, casting a dingy gray pall over the entire district.
As Lin Ke drove through Arroyo, a thin layer of black soot quickly coated his windshield.
He wouldn’t have minded if it only obstructed his vision, but the smell of the air was truly unbearable.
He felt like a few more breaths of it would put him in an early grave.
Even with the windows rolled up, a faint, persistent burnt stench lingered at the tip of his nose.
This sensory reality was something the virtual Night City in the game could never replicate.
Out on the streets, almost every passerby wore an air-filtering mask.
The few who didn’t either had cybernetic lung implants with fully modified respiratory systems,
or were simply poor—so poor they couldn’t afford a filter mask, so poor they had to scavenge through dumpsters just to find scraps to survive.
Lin Ke glanced at an old woman scavenging in a dumpster.
Her life force flickered like a candle in the wind.
Even the organ harvesters probably wouldn’t bother targeting her.
Turning the steering wheel, he parked the truck directly on the sidewalk.
Before getting out, Lin Ke rummaged through the glove compartment in front of the passenger seat and pulled out a few items.
[Padded Protective Mask] Face Decoration Quality: Common Description: An air-filtering mask painted in the style of a green-faced demon.
Wearing it at night can intimidate the faint of heart.
Note: Secondhand.
Wearing it comes with a chance of tasting the previous owner’s residual saliva.
[Spunky Monkey] Drink Quality: Poor Description: High-fructose corn syrup juice that rapidly replenishes sugars and calories.
Note: You don’t actually believe the raw ingredient is corn, do you?
Surely not!
[XXL Burrito] Food Quality: Common Description: Synthesized with artificial additives, providing basic life-sustaining nutrients for the human body.
Note: Its only redeeming quality is its size; one is enough to last several days.
After a moment’s thought, he tossed the mask back in.
These synthetic foods were the real garbage that needed to be thrown away.
Lin Ke pulled up the hood of his hoodie jacket, covering most of his head.
After all, in a cyberpunk world where even the elderly scavengers had neural links, a pure organic like him who didn’t even possess a neural port was better off keeping a low profile.
Holding the items in his left hand, he used his right hand to pull up his collar, covering his nose and mouth as he stepped out of the truck.
His goal was the convenience store on the side of the street, and he planned to discard some trash on the way.
As he passed the dumpster, Lin Ke tossed the items in his left hand toward it.
His aim was slightly off, however, and the items traced an arc in the air before landing right at the feet of the old woman still struggling to scavenge through the trash.
Pausing her stiff movements, the old woman stared at the unopened food at her feet.
She slowly, mechanically raised her mottled, graying head, her cloudy eyes reflecting the blurry figure of Lin Ke as he walked into the convenience store.
“Looking for something?
Have a look around.”
Inside the convenience store, Lin Ke looked past the Black female shopkeeper, browsing the items stored behind a wire mesh.
Condoms, fridge magnets, makeup kits, lighters, spray paint, lottery scratchers, chewing gum, Night City postcards, disposable air-filtering masks…
almost everything was mass-produced industrial junk.
“Do you not sell sugar, salt, soy sauce, or other seasonings here?” Lin Ke asked the shopkeeper, puzzled.
“People living around here don’t have time to cook for themselves.
If they’re hungry, they grab some burritos or energy bars from a vending machine on the street or in their rooms to fill their bellies.”
“As for the stuff you’re talking about, you can try the large supermarkets in Watson’s Kabuki or Little China.” Although the shopkeeper sounded impatient, she still answered Lin Ke’s question.
Well, it seemed the “high tech, low life” of this cyberpunk world was even more extreme than he had imagined.
Having no choice, Lin Ke just asked for two lighters, three disposable masks, and a Night City postcard.
“Two lighters for six, three masks for fifteen, postcard for ten.
That’s thirty-one eddies total.
Transfer or cash?” After quoting the price, the shopkeeper didn’t move.
She merely eyed Lin Ke up and down, as if she suspected he was a penniless beggar.
Indeed, Lin Ke’s current appearance was far from stellar.
After trekking through the desert for two hours, then scavenging, and finally slaughtering two cyber-beasts, his shoes and clothes were coated in dust, and there was a rip in his pants that revealed his firm thigh muscles whenever he moved.
He looked exactly like a Wasteland nomad.
Lin Ke reached into his jacket pocket, secretly retrieving cash from his system inventory to pay.
He had looted over four hundred eddies in paper bills from those two Wraiths, which should be enough to buy some basic supplies.
Seeing him pay so readily, the shopkeeper finally took the items off the shelf and slid them through the gap in the wire mesh.
“Thanks,” Lin Ke said, lowering his collar.
He unwrapped one of the masks, put it on, grabbed his purchases, and walked out of the convenience store.
“Thanks?
Now that’s a word I haven’t heard in a long, long time.
And with a clean face like that, probably some rich kid who ran away from North Oak.”