Elizabeth's current bedroom was over a hundred times the size of her old apartment in Jianggu District.
From the bedroom's massive terrace, she could look down over the Central District of Liuguang City; its crowded skyscrapers felt close enough to touch.
She had been back at this residence in the Acropolis District for two days without catching even a glimpse of her busy parents. Predictably, they had grounded her. For the time being, she was confined to this vast, empty bedroom to "recuperate."
"No anomalies with the organ truck incident? No transcendents involved?"
Elizabeth paced the terrace, glaring at a video phone mounted on the wall.
Though video phones were expensive, this bedroom alone had several. Seth was a tech giant capable of rivaling Santou.
The small screen displayed the ridiculous face of an obsequious Mystery Bureau detective.
Word on the street was that the Metropolitan Police Department was a garbage dump, but she knew the Mystery Investigation Bureau was full of crouching tigers, hidden dragons.
Her family had just assigned a rookie detective to the case, one who hadn't even gone to the scene in the Sludge Pond District to perform a retrospective!
"Miss Sterling, I have already performed Tactile Vision on the truck..."
"No, no! What kind of thorough investigation is this?"
Elizabeth stomped her foot. They all said the right things, telling her to let it go and not to worry.
In the end, they were just treating her like a child throwing a tantrum, completely ignoring the hundred-plus lost lives. They assumed she simply couldn't handle an ordinary life and had begged to come back, so they were just humoring her.
"I want the Mystery Bureau's elite Mobile Task Force to investigate the scene!"
She spoke firmly. The master had assigned this task, and this was how she handled it?
No wonder two days had passed without the master reappearing. It was as if that mysterious encounter had been nothing but a dream.
If she screwed up this task, that would probably be it—everything would be over.
The organ truck incident definitely wasn't that simple. There was a very high chance transcendents were involved...
Since they wouldn't listen to reason, she would just go back to being the rebellious brat who threw the biggest tantrums:
"Nanny, I'll be blunt. If I'm not satisfied with how this is handled, I won't attend that welcome back party in a few days!"
...
Heavy rain was about to pour from the overcast sky.
The Sludge Pond District was located in the northwestern part of Liuguang City, right next to the Western Industrial District. Further north lay the freight railways just outside the city.
Originally, the Sludge Pond District hadn't been a residential area. It was a basin used for waste disposal, filled with incinerators and landfills. Over time, however, mountains of garbage had piled up everywhere.
Scavengers, drifters, and people at the absolute bottom of society gathered here, pitching tents and building shacks among the unfinished, abandoned buildings...
Slums sprouted amid the trash heaps, stubbornly brute-forcing the Sludge Pond District into a habitable zone.
But "habitable" was only relative. The Sludge Pond District was an extremely dangerous, savage, and dark place. Any stranger who wandered in could easily end up as just another piece of trash, buried deep beneath the sea of garbage.
To reach the Western Industrial District, one had to take a highway that cut straight through the Sludge Pond District.
For the sake of safer and more efficient transportation, the city government had attempted to clean up the Sludge Pond a few times and build additional roads. But every time, within a few months, the renovated areas were swallowed by garbage once more. It was like spreading cancer cells, or weeds beside a cesspool that just wouldn't burn away.
Eventually, no one was willing to waste the money anymore. They simply maintained this single highway.
The local sludges didn't ruin it either, because this highway was their economic pillar.
Only by occasionally robbing passing supplies did they get their hands on anything decent besides garbage.
However, even the sides of the highway were overflowing with piles of trash. Every so often, filthy black rats would scurry out from a garbage heap on one side, dart across the road, and disappear into the refuse on the other side.
At this moment, on this very stretch of road, a rat darted across the stained asphalt.
Splat. The rat was crushed by a fast-moving armored pickup truck, splattering reeking blood and flesh across the road.
It was a convoy. Several similarly modified pickup trucks followed closely behind, escorting a long-bed cargo truck in the middle.
Some of these pickup trucks were packed with the tall, muscular men of the Game Gang, while others were filled with the Blood Blade Female Mercenaries. They smoked and enjoyed the breeze, all of them armed with guns.
The massive cargo truck resembled a giant beast. A ring of guardrails lined the top edge of its cargo container, and several people stood on the roof.
Lona was there, and beside her stood Brother Zhuang, the boss of the Game Gang.
Today's job was a new gig her mercenary group had taken on.
The Game Gang had a batch of wild dogs to sell—the exact same batch that the kid Gu He had originally been a part of.
Originally, the Game Gang had negotiated a deal with a group from the Sludge Gang. For some reason, those people had been in dire need of wild dogs recently, and since the price was good, Brother Zhuang had been happy to sell. He just hadn't expected the organ truck incident to happen a few days before delivery.
Brother Zhuang was a bastard, sure, but he usually only sold wild dogs to be thugs or coolies. He didn't dabble in the organ trade.
He always threatened the wild dogs about selling their kidneys and dicks, but it was only ever a scare tactic.
"Even though I'm scum, I still have my humanity, huh," Brother Zhuang would always say.
Thus, the deal fell through.
Instead, Brother Zhuang reached out to his Yakuza contacts and arranged to sell this batch of wild dogs to the Western Industrial District. They would still be coolies with room and board included, and those who performed well and ground it out for a few years might even earn legitimate labor status.
It obviously couldn't compare to being a host at Licai, but it was still a decent way out.
Though the selling price for the wild dogs was much lower, Brother Zhuang sold them with peace of mind, able to sleep well at night.
Just as Miss Caiyin used to teach him: Little Zhuang, you have to strive to be an upright person.
Today, they were transporting this batch of wild dogs. Afraid that the Sludge Gang would intercept the cargo, Brother Zhuang had hired Captain Lona and her crew to escort them.
The convoy had set out from the Kabukicho area, passed through the St. Munga District, Jianggu District, and Walled City District, before finally arriving at the Sludge Pond District.
"I, Bat, was a fucking idiot. Please, Captain Lona, I know you're close with Mom, she'll listen to you, I'm begging you..."
On top of the swaying cargo truck, a naked, muscular man prostrated himself on the roof, begging for mercy. There were fresh stitches on his shoulders, crotch, and abdomen. The surgeon Lona had found was highly skilled, so he hadn't suffered much.
"Shut up. If you don't shut up, I'll shove your severed dick right into your mouth."
Lona was sick of hearing it. "I'm not the one castrating you and selling you. Though if you had betrayed me... heh. Throw this backstabber into the truck bed. Be gentle; don't let him die."
Hearing this, a few female mercenaries nearby opened a vent on the roof. They dragged the muscular man over—who had switched from begging to agitated cursing—and tossed him inside, locking him in with the ragged wild dogs.
Seeing such a well-fed, tender-skinned naked man drop in, the wild dogs cast all sorts of eerie, unsettling gazes toward him in the dim truck bed.
"Captain Lona, cool off, have a smoke." Up on the roof, Brother Zhuang subserviently offered Lona a Peace brand cigarette.
"I never smoke this cheap trash." Lona pushed his cigarette away with her Mutant right hand. "I only smoke these."
As she spoke, her left hand pulled out a pack of long-filter Dongtu brand cigarettes. She lit one for herself and took a drag.
Snubbed, Brother Zhuang didn't get angry. His grotesque, half-metal, half-flesh face just smiled as he smoked the Peace cigarette himself.
There were two transcendents on top of the truck.
One from a Primary Profession system—Captain Lona. And one from an unorthodox branch. Yes, that was him.
The so-called Primary Professions—like the Doll Profession System and the Hero Profession System—had a universally recognized classification system, tied to major factions, the origin of the era, and all that sort of thing.
As for the unorthodox branches, calling them a "profession system" was really just a dressed-up label. Usually, an entire profession system consisted of only a single profession.
Unorthodox branches were just random bullshit cobbled together by whoever stumbled into the right circumstances. They weren't publicly recognized and didn't possess many Transcendent Programs. Compared to Primary Professions, they were definitively inferior, with an extremely limited upper ceiling.
Basically, they were all One-Programmers who couldn't even reach Special Grade and just recklessly modified their own bodies with crazy bullshit.
Unorthodox branches also had no distinction between trump cards and wildcards—they were all wildcards. Having a program to use at all was good enough; how could they afford to be picky?
If one had to point out anything good about unorthodox profession systems, it was that they were a chaotic, mixed bag, sometimes capable of delivering a little "surprise" to Primary Profession transcendents.
Brother Zhuang belonged to an unorthodox branch—the Muscle Fanatic Profession System. He possessed Third Speed Tier talent and was an Advanced One-Programmer.
The system's core philosophy was the pursuit of extreme muscle power, with programs pushing that limit even further—more muscle, more strength.
But just hearing the name of this profession system told you it was nothing high-class.
What kind of educated person would come up with a name like that?
In fact, he had come up with it himself.
Brother Zhuang was the only Muscle Fanatic transcendent in the whole world. If there was another, they just happened to pick the same name.
If he hadn't met Miss Caiyin so late in life, Brother Zhuang wouldn't have even bothered with this.
That being said, he had still managed to use it to run the reasonably sized Game Gang on Shuhui Street.
However, the pretty lady next to him, a Primary Profession transcendent, had an entirely different aura.
Captain Lona. Hunter Profession System. Advanced Two-Programmer. Wildcard route.
Brother Zhuang already knew that the kid named Gu He, or Ah Ming, had caught Miss Caiyin's eye and was going to be molded into a DOLL!
That was a Primary Profession! What incredible luck. If he had known the kid had that kind of talent, he would have treated him a little better back then.
Just as Brother Zhuang was lost in thought, the convoy was suddenly forced to halt. The road ahead had been barricaded; mountains of garbage were piled up across the asphalt.
Glancing back, piles of trash had appeared on the road far behind them as well.
Beside the trash heaps on both ends, amidst the mold, rot, and sludge, figures faintly emerged. They wore a chaotic mix of tattered clothes and brandished guns and weapons cobbled together from electronic and mechanical scrap.
They looked like a swarm of humanoid rats. They were members of the Sludge Gang.
Highway robbery was commonplace here. Even if they blocked the road for a while, absolutely no one would come asking questions.
"They actually fucking came!" Brother Zhuang cursed with a chuckle. Although the enemy had numbers and home-field advantage, he wasn't afraid.
The Sludge Gang claimed to be the largest gang in the Sludge Pond District, but that was just a loud title. In reality, it was a loose alliance of junkman crews who usually did their own thing and often ended up fighting amongst themselves.
Moreover, the Sludge Gang had an unorthodox branch, the "scavenger profession system," which possessed a few One-Programmers. Any talk of them having a Two-Programmer was pure rumor.
So, the convoy was only facing a crew of junkmen with a single One-Programmer at most. Meanwhile, they had Lona, a Two-Programmer.
"Sisters, get ready for a fight. Today's dead man's lottery is about to draw its numbers."
Beneath the overcast sky, there was only the thick smoke billowing from the distant incinerator chimneys; not a single ray of sunlight pierced through.
Yet Lona narrowed her eyes. Taking a drag from her half-smoked Dongtu cigarette, she slowly rotated her Mutant right hand.
The head and tail of the convoy had entered a state of high alert. On the pickup trucks, the musclemen and female mercenaries mounted their guns, aiming at the junkmen and ready to open fire at a moment's notice.
"Hand over the wild dogs and crawl back to Kabukicho, or last night was the last time any of you ever got laid."
A raspy voice echoed from the trash heaps ahead.