A brief test of his skills had crushed three Scavengers, secured him a safehouse, and landed him a vehicle to boot.
It was a run-of-the-mill van, probably used for hauling cargo—not even fit to hold a candle to a Saguaro.
“Looks like I’m pretty strong after all.
Not a single scratch on me, though, so I have no idea how fast this passive health regeneration actually is.
Next time, I’ll have to find someone for a King of Fighters style street fight to test it out.” Ruan Xian was highly satisfied with his cheat code.
Sure enough, power earned through sweat and effort was the most reliable.
He glanced sideways at the doll who still hadn’t woken up.
Ruan Xian had absolutely no intention of getting involved with her, so he hoisted her onto his shoulder and tossed her out the door.
On a whim, he stuffed a roll of eddies into her jacket pocket, then adjusted the street cameras to lock onto her position.
This particular area only had this one crew of Scavengers.
They had muscled out the competition, using underhanded tactics to chase away everyone else.
Now that these three were dead, there wouldn’t be any missing person cases around here for at least a few months.
Talk about doing a public service.
As for the doll, she would run off on her own once she woke up.
The Ito brothers had kept their surroundings too secure, which had bred complacency and stripped them of any vigilance.
But Ruan Xian was different.
Ever since he arrived in Night City, he hadn’t felt safe for a single second.
Locking the front door with the keycard he looted from the sofa, he shut and bolted the back door.
He set the cameras to full surveillance mode and used his Data Fortress to monitor all data traffic around the house, ensuring that even if a fly buzzed by, he could tell its gender.
“Time to clean up, check the loot, and then use their corpses to test my theories.” Having finally secured a relatively safe hideout, Ruan Xian was ready to experiment.
He needed to fix his identity issues and get a neural port.
In this city, you couldn’t do much of anything without a neural port.
If he really couldn’t get one, he’d have to shell out a fortune for a burner phone.
He went down to the first-floor kitchen.
Pulling the trigger was fun, but cleaning up was a nightmare.
Blood and brain matter were splattered all over the walls.
Ruan Xian felt himself starting to lose his mind a little.
“Let’s see if I can stuff the bodies into the Spirit World.” When Ruan Xian had planted the totem earlier, he noticed that when he entered the Spirit World, he still wore his clothes and carried his Tamayura.
Placing his hand on the corpse on the first floor, Ruan Xian channeled his spirituality, willing it to transfer into the Spirit World.
Spiritual power began to envelop the corpse.
Once the entire body was wrapped in it, it vanished from the physical world.
“Interesting.” Ruan Xian silently counted the seconds it took for the spiritual power to cover the corpse: about three seconds.
Then he tried sending a toaster into the Spirit World; it only took 0.5 seconds.
“It seems the time required to send an object to the Spirit World depends on how long it takes for spiritual power to fully envelop it.
The larger the item, the longer it takes.”
Deciding to get it over with, Ruan Xian tossed all the corpses from both floors into the Spirit World and began cleaning the place like crazy.
“Why the hell aren’t there any robot vacuums in this crappy world?
Before I got my cheat, I had to clean up after myself, and now that I have one, I still have to clean.
What’s the point?”
Ruan Xian tried channeling his spiritual power to conjure a breeze to sweep away the dust and a stream of water to wash off the blood.
After making an even bigger mess of the room, he had no choice but to rely on the laws of classical physics.
Groaning in misery, Ruan Xian put on gloves, grabbed some tools, and began a deep clean.
“Holy shit, cleaning two floors and a basement by myself is more exhausting than killing those three Scavengers.
No way, I have to recruit some people and build a crew.” Ruan Xian’s motivation for forming a team was remarkably simple, unpretentious, and boring.
Making money wasn’t the immediate priority; he just needed someone to help him clean.
Once the safehouse finally looked somewhat presentable, Ruan Xian excitedly began taking inventory of his loot.
Standing before the armory’s keypad, he typed in 1234.
He stepped inside to find it was tiny as hell and completely disorganized.
There were three Copperheads, a few small pistols, and ammo boxes scattered all over the floor.
The only table in the room held a katana, with two shards resting in front of it.
“I really shouldn’t have expected much from a Scavenger’s armory.
The sword looks decent, but I don’t even know how to use one.
Whatever, I’ll leave it for now.” Ruan Xian casually inspected the shards.
One of them seemed to be the databank shard Makoto Ito had mentioned, while the other was a complete mystery.
“I’ll just take them and bring them into the Spirit World for now.” Ruan Xian grabbed the katana, stuffed the shards into his trench coat pocket, and channeled his spiritual power.
After a brief sensation of falling, he stepped once more into the desolate Spirit World.
Ruan Xian sensed his root totem in the Spirit World—the Lotus Root.
Compared to the beginning, the Lotus Root was now growing wildly beneath the soil of the Spirit World, having spread to occupy the entire domain.
“Why is the Spirit World so small?
It’s barely the size of Watson.
Though, it does seem a tiny bit larger than when I started.” Over time, as his mastery over his spiritual power grew, his grasp of the Spirit World’s dimensions became more precise.
“Whatever, how big could a Sequence 9’s Spirit World be anyway?
Let’s test my theory first.” When inside the Spirit World, Ruan Xian felt his control over his magic became much more natural.
With a thought, he used the Lotus Root to summon the three Scavenger corpses and line them up before him.
Spiritual power originated from the heart.
As Ruan Xian’s thoughts shifted, the Spirit World responded.
The flesh and bones of the Scavengers rapidly decayed, turning brittle and melting into the spiritual soil as nourishment, leaving only their cyberware behind.
“The cyberware on these Scavs is pure garbage.
Do they sell all the good stuff instead of installing it themselves?
No wonder they got insta-killed by me.
Even their neural ports are identical—cheap, budget models.” Looking at the leftover junk, Ruan Xian finally understood why they were so weak.
“Let’s see.
Devour it, Lotus Root.” Ruan Xian commanded the Lotus Root totem to extend a branch and swallow one of the neural ports.
The branch then retracted back to the main trunk, merging its rootlets into the primary stem.
The Lotus Leaf Fortress began linking with the neural port, breaking through its chip protection.
It funneled the data toward his anchor totem in the physical world—the Lotus Flower, which was Ruan Xian’s physical body—and attempted to read the cybernetic data.
“Success…
Uh, success, I guess.” Ruan Xian read the neural chip through the Data Fortress and transmitted the data back to the physical world.
Ruan Xian scrolled through the chat logs, contacts, and account balances stored on the chip.
“Woohoo, 8,566 eddies.
What a broke loser.
Let’s see…
who’s the most frequent contact?
Fingers?
Ha.
Dum Dum?
Holy shit, the shipments from the All Foods factory actually contain real meat?
Damn, you really can’t eat that garbage.
There are logs with Wakako Okada too.
What’s this?”
Makoto Ito: [We hit the jackpot at a bar, Wakako.
How much are you willing to pay for this?
[Image]]
Wakako Okada: [You boys actually dared to touch Militech?
Impressive.
You certainly know how to surprise a person.]
Makoto Ito: [I don’t give a damn who he is.
We got our hands on a daemon chip that blocks Trauma Team signals.
That fat bastard was lying in the middle of the street, nearly cracking the pavement.
Consider it our civic duty to clean up the road.
We pulled some great cyberware out of him.
Here’s the manifest.
There’s also one part we don’t recognize.
We only managed to read the name.
You buying?]
Wakako Okada: [Buying?
If you manage to survive, I might.
As for now, my advice to you is to run.
Fast.
(Blocked)]
“Holy shit, you actually have military-grade cyberware?
Wait, this is *my* safehouse now.
You motherfuckers really knew how to make enemies.” Ruan Xian was completely stunned.
In Night City, Arasaka and Militech were the two absolute titans.
Offending either one was a death sentence.
And that piece of cyberware Makoto Ito didn’t recognize was called a Mimetic Masking Shroud.