Chapter 3: On the Road

Communication went smoothly. Mo Wen, having been “rescued” by him, now acted as a guide, leading him into the city to meet with K Ai. The two sat together in the front seat of a gang’s off-road vehicle, while the back seat—designed to hold only six—was stretched thin with eleven corpses.

All the bodies from both gangs had been loaded, except for those that were simply too difficult to retrieve.

The unmistakable stench of death wafted forward relentlessly. Mo Wen, long accustomed to extreme environments, felt nothing unusual, but K Ai, who was driving, couldn’t suppress his nausea and retching, looking as if he might vomit acid at any moment.

Mo Wen was at a loss about how to handle the situation. Since he frequently faced death himself, he was strangely unfazed by such experiences, but this peculiar ordeal was clearly no help to a normal person who would die if killed.

It was K Ai who had carried those corpses onto the vehicle in hopes of selling them for some money. Even if the bodies were thrown off now, the smell would hardly dissipate.

Mo Wen could only watch the changing scenery outside the window, hoping K Ai could endure without vomiting all over him.

The deserted town outside quickly bored Mo Wen. The sandstorms beyond the town failed to capture his attention, but the depressions scattered in the sand looked nothing like natural formations.

“What are those depressions?” Mo Wen asked.

Suppressing his nausea from being confined with his mortal enemies, K Ai replied casually, “Nuclear blasts. Didn’t you know?”

“During the company wars, this area was bombed. If it weren’t for the Group’s humanitarian support troops installing anti-blast systems, you’d only see a dead wasteland here. Even so, the town’s residents eventually evacuated, leaving behind a company-run ghost town.”

“Many gangs like to conduct deals in the town. The company knows about it but turns a blind eye for various reasons.”

The idea of company wars was entirely foreign to Mo Wen, yet it seemed significant.

Trying to probe indirectly, Mo Wen said, “Oh, so those blasts were left over from that time. Who exactly were fighting here?”

K Ai shrugged indifferently. “Who knows? Anyway, it’s all over. Even if you knew which company dropped nukes on your city, it wouldn’t matter. That’s a question for the surviving veterans.”

“But I heard the winning companies treat their veterans well, taking those ruthless ‘heroes’ into the inner ring.”

“The inner ring?” Mo Wen sensed another key point. He tried to frame his questions subtly, letting K Ai fill in the gaps with his own assumptions.

Having been asked twice about basic knowledge, K Ai might not have thought much under ordinary circumstances, but faced with someone who inexplicably wandered into unfamiliar territory, killed his gang leader, and displayed an almost inhuman composure afterward—his physical prowess rivaling any advertisement—K Ai couldn’t help but feel something was off.

This guy nearby—could he have escaped from some laboratory?

Though the companies were far away, this humanoid monster was right in front of him.

With cybernetic assistance, K Ai still feigned normalcy and said casually, “Don’t you call it the inner ring where you’re from?”

“The inner ring here refers to a city within the city, mostly inhabited by company personnel. Everything is much better there—not just security and public services, but the inner ring residents can even have their offspring become posthumans.”

“It’s just that the approval process is tough. People from gangs or wandering families rarely get in. Among those carrying guns, only a few company-aligned mercenaries deemed valuable get the chance to settle there.”

“But if you can’t get in, you can wait for it to come to you. The inner ring keeps expanding, and sometimes instead of evicting native residents, it just assimilates those affected by the expansion.”

New confusion stirred within Mo Wen. Posthumans—he guessed they were genetically modified humans or something similar.

But that wasn’t the main point. The key was that during “expansion,” outsiders were forcibly relocated.

Based on Mo Wen’s shallow understanding of the cyberpunk world and profit-driven capitalism, this was obviously abnormal.

If there weren’t some agonizing pre-death toil, forced midlife reproduction, postmortem body donations, inheritance of debts, and contract slaves whose value circulated endlessly within the company, then the inner ring’s outskirts must be some kind of experimental zone where getting caught meant automatic dedication to the company.

Mo Wen asked, “Have you ever contacted anyone who got caught up in the inner ring’s expansion?”

K Ai replied, “Yeah, I have a classmate who was lucky enough to be included, and we still keep in touch from time to time.”

Mo Wen was skeptical. “Are you sure it’s your old classmate and not some cheap AI-generated fake?”

K Ai froze for a moment, instantly grasping the monster’s implication.

If it were anyone else, he might have laughed off the suggestion as a “company conspiracy theory,” but this was no ordinary person speaking.

He had chatted online with his classmate and even video called him, but he had never been inside the inner ring. AI large language models and synthetic image technology could create nearly indistinguishable fake people given enough data—though the Group’s recently issued Temporary New Law deemed this illegal.

The nausea K Ai had just suppressed surged once more, twisting his stomach.

Fake people… no…

Mo Wen reconsidered and found the theory unlikely. “If they really made fake people to chat with outsiders, it would be to make the inner ring seem appealing. But since the entry approval is strict, it doesn’t seem like they’d try to deceive people into getting in.”

“Wait, you can’t get in, yet you chat online? You can connect to the inner ring’s network?”

K Ai quickly caught on. “Yeah, you can connect, and not just the inner ring. Though the global network was down for weeks during the company wars and only the intercity net was available, the Group fixed it quickly.”

“The information online is tangled and complex, but when cross-checked, some things are hard to fake…”

Mo Wen interrupted, “Don’t trust cross-checking. Even what you see with your own eyes could be staged. With powerful algorithms online, all the information you receive can be processed into a closed logical loop, only showing you what you’re supposed to know.”

K Ai was stunned.

He had never considered such possibilities before, but after having it spelled out abruptly, an inexplicable fear began to spread in his heart.

The world suddenly felt alien; everything once clear and bright through the network was now cloaked in shadows.

Was his understanding of the world correct? Did his goals truly exist? What meaning did his current actions hold?

K Ai felt electric currents running back and forth through his brain, tingling at the base of his skull. Suddenly, he was terrified to return to the city, as if some dreadful truth awaited him ahead. Yet his limbs refused to obey, and his body forced him to go back.

At that moment, Mo Wen’s voice pierced his eardrums: “Don’t zone out while driving!”

“We’re going to crash!”

Mo Wen grabbed the car window frame with one hand and considered where to grab K Ai with the other. Unable to drive himself, he was ready to jump out and escape.

K Ai hadn’t yet fully recovered, but the vehicle had already instinctively turned to avoid danger.

Then, K Ai released the steering wheel and smiled at Mo Wen, who had probably killed his gang brother out of goodwill by accident, “Don’t you know cars nowadays have automatic navigation? It reacts way better than most people.”

Fake person evidence +1. Not even knowing such a basic fact, K Ai suspected this guy wasn’t even a test subject but some relic from the past—a mimic creature.

Even wanderers had to know how to drive!

Perhaps while settling Mo Wen, he needed to teach him how to drive.

Mo Wen was displeased. “If there’s automatic navigation, why do you keep your hands on the wheel? Are you just playing around?”

K Ai sighed, “The signal outside is weak with some error margin. Even if the danger is small, you have to be cautious. Now that we’re fully connected to the intercity net, I can let go safely.”