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“You really are rich.”
Little China, Watson.
Rooftop duplex.
Lucy stood at the entrance, looking from the square landing pad on the green rooftop lawn to the open-air pool nearby.
In the end, she could not help saying it.
Rook accepted the accusation without shame.
In his previous life, he had been a broke shut-in who spent too much time on AAA games.
Now he was an inventor in Night City with money, a rooftop villa, and beautiful women in his orbit.
The system had a sense of overcompensation.
After parting from Jackie for the moment, Rook brought Lucy to tour the duplex the system had rewarded him.
It was only one street away from Afterlife, and the view from the roof made Night City look almost manageable.
“Lucy, don’t say it like that,” he said with a shameless smile.
“Weren’t you going to eat the rich?”
He took her hand and led her toward the house.
Halfway there, he stopped, leaned near her ear, and asked in a low voice, “Nervous?”
That dragged her straight back to the night before.
Now she understood what instant karma felt like.
She gave him a seductive glare, pulled her hand free, and walked into the duplex first with a deliberately sexy stride.
“It’s pretty,” she said, looking around with obvious longing while forcing disdain onto her face.
“Too bad it doesn’t feel lived in.”
Rook stepped in behind her.
“It will.
This place won’t lack warmth for long.”
“Who said I’m moving in?
And why are you so sure they’ll come to you?”
Lucy looked pleased despite herself, but she refused to admit it.
“Whoever answered, that’s who.
As for whether they’ll come, the answer is simple.
No one in Night City can resist becoming a legend.”
She rolled her eyes.
“I’m going to see if there’s food.”
“Go ahead.
I’ll be in the workshop.”
Rook knew the timing was not quite there yet.
They liked each other, and both of them knew it, but the final step still needed time.
For now, he had something more urgent to handle.
Once Lucy entered the kitchen, he went to the workshop.
The room was about fifteen square meters, with weapon racks mounted along the walls.
Unfortunately, the racks were empty.
Rook walked to the back corner and placed the cyberware fabrication bench on the floor.
It was larger than he had expected.
On the left was a production station for operating system chips.
According to the instructions, it could consume commercial cyberware OS chips to manufacture new ones: Militech, Zetatech, Stephenson, Biotechnica, Raven Microcybernetics, Sandevistan-class systems, and more.
The rarity of the consumed chips determined the quality of the output.
On the other side was the skeletal frame station.
Finally, there was a synthetic skin station.
By consuming nanofiber synthetic skin already on the market, it could produce material with roughly 80 percent skin realism.
But Rook had a better option.
RealSkin cosmetic cyberware schematics.
Purple tier.
Ninety percent skin realism.
To reach one hundred percent, he suspected he would need an Iconic-tier reward, something closer to a full biofabrication cradle.
The bench looked complicated, but its workflow was straightforward.
If Rook wanted to manufacture a Source Frame: Windrunner, for example, there were three steps.
First, consume ten operating system chips of the same quality to produce one Windrunner OS chip.
The chip’s attributes would scale with quality: white, green, blue, purple, or orange.
Second, consume ten cyberware skeletal frames of the same quality to produce one Windrunner skeletal frame, again across the same five tiers.
Mobility, offense, and defense would all scale with quality.
Third, instead of using the bench’s default 80 percent synthetic skin, he could use the RealSkin schematics.
Ten commercial nanofiber synthetic skins would produce one higher-grade exterior.
That was when a strange hesitation hit him.
Jackie and Maine were easy to handle.
But Lucy, Sasha, and Rebecca were different.
They were cute, flesh-and-blood women he cared about.
Was he really going to push them into permanent mechanical conversion?
After a long moment, Rook asked quietly,
I hope you enjoyed this chapter.