Ruan Xian watched Skinny Monkey pack up all the Scavengers’ valuables like a busy hamster, saving him a ton of trouble and even sorting out the stash in the car.
Highly satisfied, Ruan Xian decided to give the kid a quick, painless death.
A stealth-build thief caught at point-blank range by a tanky, high-DPS, hyper-regenerating brawler?
Skinny Monkey was naturally wiped out on the spot, sent straight into the Spirit World to serve as fertilizer.
“So this Moderate Damage Reduction isn’t a percentage reduction—it’s a flat damage reduction.” Ruan Xian felt his waist where he’d been stabbed.
There wasn’t even a puncture wound.
As for his head, it felt like being tapped by an empty soda can.
It wasn’t even a minor bruise; he was completely unharmed.
He had basically stood there and taken a flashy beating, only for the damage to register as zero across the board.
What a glorious victory.
After a long day of clocking out, running around, and exhausting himself, it was finally night again.
At least he now had a secure short-term shelter.
After checking the Scavenger nest one more time, he blocked the balcony door, locked the main door, pointed the security cameras toward the entrance, washed the blood off his body, and went straight to sleep.
[Status: Resting] [Observed by multiple High-Dimensional Observers] [Evaluation: B (Fairly interesting)] [Experience Bonus: 150%] [Experience Gain: Combat, Hacking, Stealth (Click to view details)] [Experience Pool settling…] [You have received Spiritual Feedback] [Remaining Attribute Points: 2] [Remaining Perk Points: 2] [Spiritual Feedback threshold increased, please obtain more experience.]
“So this experience isn’t the kind of experience I thought it was.
It doesn’t increase a numerical level, but actually improves myself.
Fascinating.” Ruan Xian slept like a log from one night to the next.
When he woke up, he found himself with extra attribute and perk points.
Quite satisfying, though he was starving.
Fortunately, the Scavengers had some food stowed away.
Mr.
White’s emergency rations had no flaws except for being completely unpalatable.
As for the texture, it was like being in a toilet and finding only a single, crumpled piece of toilet paper.
You couldn’t call it good, but it was better than nothing, leaving you wondering just how many times you could fold it.
Fortunately, there was some cold beer in the fridge, which successfully woke Ruan Xian up and filled his belly.
“Now, I need to forge a new identity.” Night City’s registry management couldn’t exactly be called strict; it was mostly a free-for-all.
If you wanted to make it official, even as a refugee, as long as you could enter the city, you could obtain an official identity through the NCPD.
If your background was sensitive—say, if you had a mountain of active bounties—you could still secure a clean identity as long as you were willing to pay.
As for how Ruan Xian knew this so clearly, it was because the maintenance account he had hijacked from the NCPD dispatch channel could register citizen records upon logging in.
The strictness of this system was practically on par with the British military’s recruitment standards—which is to say, there were absolutely none.
Just turn up, and you’re in, whether you’re human or not.
“Truly the City of Dreams.
Anyone who comes here can get a second lease on life.” Ruan Xian planned to play it even safer.
[Identity: Night City Resident] [Name: Sean Donnelly] [Registration Date: 2055] [Place of Birth: Heywood] [Other Information: Omitted] [No active bounties]
The NCPD’s registry management was just that crude and simple.
As long as you didn’t commit high-profile crimes, weren’t a corp sec asset, and had no formal education, your entire file in the system wouldn’t even span a single page.
So Ruan Xian directly used the root totem Lotus Root in the Spirit World to devour Sean Donnelly’s neural port.
Then, he synchronized the data in the net.
This way, if any hacker tried to scan him, they would only scan Sean Donnelly’s outer shell.
If anyone tried to upload a quickhack to this interface, they would find they had uploaded it into a void.
After all, they would first have to crack his Data Fortress and then transmit it across dimensions into the Spirit World.
Even if someone was incredibly capable and could launch a net attack across dimensions, at worst, they would just fry a segment of the Lotus Root.
What did that have to do with Ruan Xian, the anchor totem in the physical world?
As for the photo in the NCPD database, Ruan Xian didn’t plan on changing it.
This was common practice among edgerunners in Night City anyway.
In any case, with a quick faceplate swap or some new cyberware, a person’s physical appearance could change completely.
In Night City, identification relied mostly on the neural port’s personal link code.
The result of this was that as long as you had money and power, no matter what crimes you committed, you could easily reinvent yourself.
As long as you were rich enough.
This was Night City.
Welcome to the City of Dreams.
“Harvest time.
Let’s see how much eddies these two Scavenger nests actually have.” Ruan Xian happily began counting his money like an old farmer who had finally harvested his crops.
“What was Makoto Ito’s passcode again?
2073, nice.
Unlocked.
Now for Merle’s side.” Ruan Xian first fished out Makoto Ito’s anonymous credchips.
The Scavengers were indeed highly profitable—a whopping hundred thousand Eurodollars.
Merle’s side was a bit more modest; they probably had high expenses.
The five of them combined had just over forty thousand eddies in cash, credchips, and system wallets.
“For Makoto Ito, only the money in this chip is safe to touch.
The data of those other three is going to be scrutinized inside out.
I can’t touch a single cent from their neural ports.
How annoying.” Ruan Xian frowned, thinking about the massive trouble those three idiots had caused.
Sometimes little guys could cause massive disasters.
Just like how V’s little heist ended up with them witnessing the Emperor of Arasaka being choked out by his own son, and they didn’t even get paid.
Tragic, V, tragic!
In Merle’s nest, there wasn’t much worth looking at—some cheap subdermal armor, knock-off Gorilla Arms.
Reinforced Tendons…
hey, this was pretty good.
Double jump.
That Skinny Monkey was indeed a professional, knowing he needed a double jump for easy tracking.
The rest was just junk metal and cosmetic cyberware—stuff even dogs wouldn’t install.
As for Makoto Ito, his gear was top-tier.
He had stripped a Militech agent’s build: a Militech Paraline MK.4 cyberdeck, Optical Camo, a hundred-strike reinforced skeleton, Biomonitor, Blood Pump, Lynx Paws, strain-reducing shock absorbers, Kiroshi Optics Oracle—all genuine, military-grade top-shelf gear.
No serial numbers, no power limiters, no manufacturer markings, but with backdoors—the kind of backdoors that couldn’t be removed without completely wiping and reflashing the firmware.
Truly top-tier elite gear.
And most importantly, the Mimetic Masking Shroud.
It didn’t seem like a lot, but in the real world, not everyone had V’s insane compatibility.
Great cyberware like these for survival, stealth, defense, and morphing required incredible specs to install without turning the user into a cyberpsycho.
Anyone who could run this loadout was already an elite among elites.
Just looking at this gear showed how massive the power gap was between corp employees and ordinary citizens.
A corp dog with this loadout could easily sweep a whole nest of Scavengers with any random gun.
“Biomonitor and Blood Pump seem a bit useless.
I can check my own status, and mine is even more accurate.
And what the hell is a Blood Pump supposed to heal if it’s installed in the Spirit World?
Besides, I already have a health regeneration buff.
But still, let’s give it a try.” Ruan Xian didn’t complain.
He didn’t have any other cyberware anyway, so he just had the Lotus Root swallow them all.
To his surprise, his spiritual intuition revealed that cyberware swallowed by the Lotus Root could indeed take effect on his physical anchor totem.
Based on some occult connection that Ruan Xian couldn’t yet comprehend, this cyberware not only affected his physical body but could even be used in cyberspace.
However, the cyberware stripped from the Militech agent couldn’t be used immediately.
The backdoors hidden in the firmware locked them tight; installing them now was no different from not installing them at all.
Although Ruan Xian had easily broken through the firmware in cyberspace and could see the data inside, he couldn’t understand it (✘_✘).
Intelligence was way too important, guys.
If you ever transmigrate into a cyberpunk world, remember to dump points into Intelligence.
Focusing his attention on cyberspace, Ruan Xian found that he possessed a digitized body.
In the Deep Net, he caught glimpses of humanoid traces.
Based on his gaming experience, they were probably netrunners deep-diving.