In the suburbs of Haicheng.
Inside a low-rent apartment.
Jake lay flat on the freezing floor tiles, his chest feeling as if pressed down by a thousand-pound boulder.
His heart pounded frantically in his chest, yet his blood felt blocked by something, unable to flow to the tips of his limbs.
He suffered from Tetralogy of Fallot, one of the most complex malformations among congenital heart defects.
Without surgery, most children didn’t live past the age of two.
Jake had undergone a free radical corrective surgery when he was one year old, considered a fortune amidst misfortune.
Yet his heart still couldn’t be completely cured.
Pulmonary valve regurgitation, chronic right ventricular dysfunction…
these sequelae had followed him all along.
He couldn’t do heavy physical labor, nor could he stay up late; even prolonged mental stress could trigger a crisis at any time.
Relying on living cautiously and taking medication regularly, he had managed to live to the age of 23.
He was too immersed just now.
After editing the video, he immediately started playing the game without pause.
Staring at the screen for hours on end, fingers never stopping, adrenaline surging, which caused him to suddenly be unable to catch his breath.
At this moment, Jake was curled up on the floor, listening to his own gasps echoing in the empty room.
The tips of his fingers went numb, fine specks of light blooming at the edges of his vision.
This was normal.
In another two or three minutes, these symptoms would gradually subside, his heart would slowly calm down, and then he could climb up to keep working.
This little bit of time, Jake didn’t plan to waste either.
Maintaining his curled-up posture, he reached out with one hand to grab his phone on the table, fingerprint unlocked it, opened the food delivery app, found that milk tea shop in his favorites, and placed an order.
The phone screen showed:
Estimated delivery time: 20 minutes.
A few minutes later.
The oppressive tightness in his chest began to recede.
Jake slowly pushed himself up, sitting against the leg of the coffee table for a few seconds to make sure his legs were no longer weak, before holding onto the edge of the table to stand up.
The computer…
His first instinct was to look at the screen, but the screen was pitch black.
“Damn.”
Jake cursed.
When he had the attack just now, his hand accidentally brushed against the power button on the PC case, turning off the whole machine.
The game recording couldn’t be gone, right?
He pressed the power button and hurriedly clicked into the screen recording folder, his hand still trembling slightly.
Good news: the recording was still there.
Bad news: it only recorded the desktop.
Those gameplay visuals were completely lost, leaving only the eye-care green desktop wallpaper and his own muttering while playing the game.
“Welp, worked for nothing.”
Jake smiled helplessly: “How could I make such an amateur mistake…”
The recording wasn’t long, so he didn’t care too much.
Checking it once before recording next time would do…
Jake entered his social media backend again.
The urgent priority was to ask the client whether there were any task quotas for today.
For instance, how many hours of gameplay footage or bug logs had to be submitted.
If there were, then he’d have to keep grinding this afternoon.
Jake clicked into the message tab, wanting to find that anonymous user with the solid black avatar, but no matter how he scrolled, he couldn’t find any chat history with the other party.
He refreshed twice.
[No new messages]
“Strange…”
Jake muttered while looking at the message box.
Could I have accidentally deleted it?
He clicked into the task records again.
[No ongoing tasks]
Jake scrolled through once, from last month’s gigs back to last year’s, going back and forth three times.
Nothing.
He couldn’t find any gig record related to this game at all.
“I don’t believe this…”
Jake opened customer support again and typed an inquiry:
Can you check the chat history between me and a certain user?
Probably from this afternoon.
Customer support replied quickly:
Hello, all chat records on the platform are saved in your message tab.
If not found, it may be that the other party has deleted their account or unfriended you.
The platform cannot recover it.
Jake stared at this line of text, silent for a few seconds.
Deleted account?
Unfriended?
In just tens of minutes before and after, that person vanished into thin air like that?
“Forget it…”
Jake threw his phone onto the table and slumped into his chair back.
At least he didn’t have to work anymore.
Twenty-four hours of gameplay duration for two thousand yuan reward sounded pretty nice, but if a sick guy like him really ground through it, he’d probably end up in the hospital tomorrow.
Now everything was set—video gone, boss gone, gig gone.
Saved the trouble.
Ding!
Just at that moment, the doorbell suddenly rang.
Jake froze for a second, remembering the order he had just placed.
Milk tea arrived?
Didn’t it say 20 minutes?
He lived in an old residential building in the suburbs; logically, it shouldn’t be this fast…
Jake walked out of the kitchen and opened the door to look.
Parked at the doorway was a motorcycle, filling up the entire hallway corridor, the 6th Street American stars and stripes paint job on its body especially glaring under the dim yellow light.
Beside the motorcycle lay two items.
A black canvas duffel bag, bulging, containing who knows what.
A large white cardboard box, square and neat, printed with the Night City logo.
“???”
Jake stood at the doorway, stunned for several seconds.
Wasn’t this the motorcycle he had just jacked in the game?
The 6th Street paint job, the stars and stripes on the fuel tank, and even the locations of those bullet holes were identical to those he shot while controlling David.
He squatted down and unzipped that black canvas duffel bag.
Inside lay quietly a section of metal spine covered in stained blood, dense neural connection points at the sockets, printed with the Militech logo.
Apogee Sandevistan.
Jake then opened that large white cardboard box.
Inside lay several guns.
Lexington pistol, Ajax assault rifle, plus two fragmentation grenades, with rolls of banknotes arranged neatly underneath.
He counted them.
1054 eddies, even the amount didn’t differ by a single bit!
Jake squatted there, mindlessly staring at these things for quite a while.
“Gear manifested in reality?
Real or fake?”
“Couldn’t be someone pranking me, right?”
He picked up that Lexington pistol; its appearance was as exquisite as in the game, heavy in the hand, looking nothing like a toy.
There were bullets in the magazine.
He ejected it to inspect, then loaded it back in.
Jake didn’t know much about firearms, unable to tell real from fake on short notice.
He picked up a stack of eddies, pulled one out, searched online to compare images, and then shined his phone’s flashlight on it.
Not only did this thing look identical to real Eurodollars, but it even had all three core anti-counterfeiting features: watermarks, security threads, and color-shifting ink.
It couldn’t possibly be any more real.
The exchange rate for eddies was 1:8, which meant a full 8,500 yuan!
“Pie falling from the sky?”
Jake rubbed the texture of the banknotes in his hand, his eyes filled with confusion.
Toward this kind of thing, he was always skeptical.
The pistol couldn’t be authenticated on the spot, but eddies could—just going to the bank to exchange them would bring the truth to light.
But before that…
He looked at the 6th Street bike before him and said: “Got to deal with this thing first.”
This old residential building had no elevator, and the stairwell was extremely narrow, accommodating only a few people walking; if he didn’t get the motorcycle downstairs, he’d have trouble even going down the stairs.
Jake tried pushing it, but the bike frame didn’t budge at all.
This thing weighed two or three hundred jin at least; his heart couldn’t handle that kind of load at all.
Need to find someone to help…
He stood at the doorway, looking at the motorcycle, falling into deep thought.
…
A few minutes later.
The delivery guy, carrying the milk tea and breathing heavily, climbed up the stairs.
Looking up.
He saw Jake smiling right at him.
That smile wasn’t quite right, looking like a cat waiting at a mouse hole: “You’re finally here, I’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”
“What are you doing?”
The delivery guy realized something was off.
He covered his chest, backed up half a step, and blurted out: “I only deliver food, I don’t do door service!”