Thanks to Li Pan's hustle, the world got saved—again.
…Don't worry about how it was saved; just answer this: was it saved or not?
Anyway, peace settled once more. The dreadnought poofed down a pile of trash, then biu—blinked away.
Dawn came all at once.
Hooray, wage slaves! Everyone can get back to overtime and mortgage payments!
After a 24-hour panic—wiping out two great houses and turning Night City into a wreck—every faction called a ceasefire. Somebody had to clear the corpses and wreckage off the expressways, right?
Li Pan granted the whole company a special day off. He himself went back to the desk to keep typing.
He had to. If he didn't ship 0113's people and ship out the ship, 01 might suddenly remember the "wipe the world" plan and get itchy again.
First: pull the fleet back to Callisto to stand by, and file reimbursements to the Company War Account for ammo, fuel, and spice. The numbers made his scalp prickle at a glance. No wonder 0113012 was jumping and blasting like it was having a blast—when the company reimburses it all, how can you not go wild? Damn.
Next: the "Collector S68" raid. With 01044 dead, Li Pan didn't dare report the giant infant and the blood-hand, so the op settled as a failure. A pile of keys burned for nothing.
But the Collector project was just beginning. Very soon, a flood of out-realm cadres would come "on business trips," each gunning for the GM's seat. They'd all request to descend in grade-5-plus combat bodies; the quarantine and customs paperwork alone would be a mountain—left to the acting GM to clean up.
The "Taishui" handoff needed a logistics backup and archive, too—maybe he could hitch a silver key off it… Damn! It got sent straight to 0113! Fine, now he owed 0113 three…
The Pharaoh/Unit-01 test drive needed a report as well… What, only one key for the trial? He'd suited up twice, endured two rounds of tapeworm socketing! Count it as two keys at least, c'mon! What's that—stims? And "Baal of Babylon"? Sigh. One is one. He still owed 0113 two keys…
Employee conversions for 0791035 and 0791036 consumed their key quotas, but still needed acting-GM signoff and backups.
Also, 0791034's Shuten Dōji wasn't reported to HQ, and 0791037 had a whole menagerie of shikigami—by company definition, that's "apostle-class." He had to update their dossiers so parachuted managers wouldn't mistake them for enemy apostles and delete them on sight.
Meanwhile Eighteen had bought a mountain of gear from TSC Tianhan; Finance's shrill bean-counter kept calling to insinuate how much kickback Li Pan had pocketed…
Security, Customs, the Night Clan, Takamagahara—phones rang nonstop. He had to soothe each one.
Maybe he shouldn't have given everyone the day off…
Still, it was manageable. Mostly because he'd pumped too many stimulants earlier—one-shotting that prince—and the drugs hadn't worn off. The file cabinet hadn't reset the buffs either, so he was brimming with energy, buzzing, unable to wind down. If he didn't do something, he'd pop.
So he soloed a mountain of paperwork and reports all day, working until midnight before things "wrapped up."
To be clear, "wrapped up" just meant the stims finally wore off. The work? It never ends. Work is forever.
"Sigh… what am I even doing this for… Wouldn't it be simpler if this world just got wiped?"
Drowning in fatigue, yawning, he packed three skull-cap goblets—Princess Tokugawa Chihime, the Tokugawa family head, and Prince Maxim of Fabius—into a box to take home as apartment décor.
Damn it, 01 might not care for this "junk," but they were trophies he'd bled for. He'd keep them.
Oh, and 01044's relic—the snow globe…
He glanced at the crystal sphere: Night City was its usual grimy cesspool, but at least there'd been no world-ending visions for a week.
Maybe this really had wrapped for now.
Whatever else, 01044 might've gotten herself killed, but thanks to her they'd averted the apocalypse once more. He'd keep the thing as a memento.
Li Pan squeezed into the subway home… With his chips reset, cabs wouldn't take him and even elevator doors wouldn't open; he climbed in from outside. Guess he'd need implants again.
Maybe it was psychological, but the busted sofa in his shabby apartment slept better than the office couch.
And this time, he really did dream.
Unlike the Li Qingyun transmigration—no isekai cultivation filter—this was a genuine, muzzy dream.
He dreamt of a bizarre stage. On it, a withered, rotten throne. To either side, countless indistinct shadows—no clear shapes or colors—layered upon one another, whispering.
From behind the curtain, a figure emerged and sat on the throne.
Looked like… the Pharaoh?
Yes—a black Pharaoh, the spitting image of Pharaoh/Unit-01.
The black Pharaoh reached a hand toward him, murmuring something he couldn't make out.
Li Pan offered the skull goblets in both hands—and armfuls of intestines.
The black Pharaoh seemed pleased, chuckled, and the courtiers struck up music: sighing horns losing air, claws raking glass, cats shrieking—an uncanny symphony humans cannot compose, comprehend, or express.
And somehow, to that nauseating, eldritch score, Li Pan's spirit felt exalted—as if he'd received immense grace and affirmation.
He grew giddy, trembling—until he could no longer bear the vast comfort of being thus affirmed.
So he tore open his own face, and tore open his dream.
When he opened his eyes, the face in the mirror—familiar yet strange—was unrecognizable.
Fragments of face in a fractured mirror; after a while, the broken memories reassembled.
The date blinked on the mirror: 8:00 a.m. He was late.
Still woozy—drug aftertaste in his mouth, body aching. Felt like the whole day had been skipped in a single cut.
But the three goblets and the snow globe sat quietly on the coffee table. So—just a bad dream.
As you think by day, so you dream by night…
He splashed water on his face and headed straight to an implant shop.
Whatever else, cybernetics were the most cost-effective way to boost combat power right now.
Of course he wanted a dreadnought, an 8-grade doomsday frame, piles of supertech to flex.
But he was broke…
His account had only 2.8 million—couldn't even pay for a single dreadnought jump.
With monsters getting stronger and the Collector crawling with terrifying demons—and his last full-kit run nearly flipping the table—even with resets he knew this wasn't the place to cheap out.
Think bigger: as long as you live, any price is worth it. You can't take money with you. What's the point of hoarding it?
This time he aimed straight for grade-5 military.
A smart-assist brain chip was a must. Better to buy once than kludge consumer junk plus a forest of dongles.
He bought HT Tech's grade-5 military chip—the newest on 0791: Xingtian-11 Performance, Battlefield Pack—¥488,888.
Compute uplift over his last chip wasn't huge—on par with Fuxi-15; no generational leap. The edge: integrated ICE-like firewall and FCA lobe-enhancement features. Not built for hackers or navigators so a bit weaker there; but the new cortical protection architecture—a nano "helmet"—meant even if the firewall were breached, it could sever the brain-link in time and electrically/thermally insulate, so some hacker couldn't fry him into a vegetable.
Xingtian's selling point was battlefield survivability: ECCM, anti-jam, anti-intrusion. You could mount military weapon modules and interface with most weapons OSes and maintenance flows. There was even a special-forces stealth-infiltration mode to proactively go offline and avoid being scanned on hostile LANs.
One skulljack to rule them all—no more stuffing your head with random brands.
He added a tyrosine injector, an adrenal augmentation kit, and an emergency monitored hemopump.
The classic "junkie set" in the army: tyrosine for nutrients/repairs/sedatives; adrenaline as combat stims; hemopump to generate blood under heavy trauma—i.e., the red/blue/yellow suite widely abused by militaries.
Back at the academy he'd used Takamagahara meds—they didn't hit hard, wrecked the body, and were short-lived. Not cost-effective.
The Company's cocktails, though—that was raw tech superiority. Add a file cabinet that preserves buffs while erasing side effects, and the cost-performance of doping rockets to the moon.
Raw syringe jabs are hard to dose and absorb; with the dedicated monitored injectors, you store drugs in-body and meter them on demand for max effect.
Those kits were cheap—grade-4 military was fine, under 100k total. The pricey part was the consumables.
And of course: new skin and plates—the ¥99,998 bundle.
He looked like a lizard-man as it was; without the business suit, people would assume he'd escaped a lab.
Base-body upgrades: about 700k. Lesson learned (many times). He wouldn't splurge on flashy nonsense again—losing those grade-6 implants to a reset still made his heart bleed.
"Welcome to ChaosTech Support. I am your Xingtian assistant, now linked to the Public Safety System.
Citizen Li Pan, current cash balance: 2,100,437.06. Next loan payment: 13,542.37. Total liabilities: 29XXXX.XX.
Your next payment settles on the 15th. Please maintain sufficient funds.
Your mental deviation index: normal. Thank you for using PSS. May your path be smooth."
Leaving the implant shop, he didn't head to the office yet. He bought an encrypted data chip, updated his cloud save and account info, made a call, and soon Orange rolled up in the Emperor 620.
The SUV had been armored into an IFV—grade-5 plates inside and out. Every street cam pivoted to scan it when it stopped, like they were terrified of trouble.
Li Pan didn't get in; he handed Orange the chip.
"I dumped a few containers in the Pacific. Approximate coordinates are on this. Go fish them up—bring back what you can. If Night Clan are nearby, drop it. Stay safe."
Orange didn't ask how he'd managed to chuck containers into the Pacific. She nodded and drove off to buy dive gear.
Right—those were House Fabius treasures. With limited time, he couldn't steal it all; he'd stashed a few crates, ripped the trackers, and tossed them into the garbage sea. Only now had he mapped rough positions from memory.
He'd lost too much these days. If he didn't claw something back, he'd go broke. The Fabius stash was all priceless; after a day and a night, if hidden trackers still existed they'd be reclaimed by the Night Clan. If not—this haul was his.
Recover a piece or two and he might just break even.
He arrived at the office to find everyone assembled.
0113's tech really was insane: Yamazaki Ayato and Shiranui Kiriko were back in human form—at a price.
Yamazaki was now an apostle of the "Eclogite & Gabbro Prayer-Beads." Aside from a new set of arcane tattoos on his right arm and slightly darker skin, he looked similar—but exhausted. Ice pack on his forehead, staring at his right hand like it wasn't his—phantom pain, probably.
Shiranui looked unchanged, but her qi felt different. Before, she felt like "water." Now, like "mist." Her shinobi Suiton was intact, but a blazing energy now boiled her "water," steaming off her entire body; she seemed in a state of extreme heat and excitement.
So much so that when she stared at Li Pan, her eyes practically spat fire—gaze sliding straight to his lower half—making his skin crawl.
"Uh, what's with her? Not cured? Brain broken?"
The professional onmyōji gave the professional answer:
"The Company took the 'Taishui' out of Ms. Shiranui, but the tengu's power remained. Since we captured the Ōyama Hōkibō sealed by the previous Hattori Hanzō, we sealed it into Ms. Shiranui as well. She's now a jinchūriki of the Great Tengu.
It's fine. New sealing sigils take getting used to—superhuman power, heightened desire and vitality. She's an experienced jōnin; give it a few days."
Fair enough—0791's staff weren't exactly weak now.
Company asset Orochi.Eighteen was already off the charts; once TSC upgraded the comm satellites, who knew how strong it'd get.
And A-Qi, Kotarō, Shiranui, Yamazaki, Ashiya—those five were bona fide apostle-class.
Old Liu, Rama, and Husky were hardly "ordinary" either…
Hm? Wait—something extra in there?
Rama: "Oh, Husky? He's broke and homeless—and owes Master Liu for the IVs—so he's sticking around to pay it off."
…Whatever.
"Ahem, everyone—quick stand-up."
Li Pan clapped, gathered the office, and outlined the current situation and the Collector-first policy.
"In short, HQ will be seconding a bunch of heavy hitters to deal with the Collector.
If you've got the chops and the drive, and you can capture the killer of 01044, the manager's chair is yours. I don't mind.
But since we're colleagues, a word of advice: you only live once. When it's time to chicken out, chicken out. When it's time to bail, bail. When it's time to slack, slack.
If you court death, you'll die.
That's all. Dismissed—go find yourselves something useful to do."
He had barely stepped back into his office when Shiranui slipped in and shut the door.
He tensed. "What are you doing? Calm down! I still haven't recovered!"
Shiranui smiled, bringing coffee.
"Boss, don't misunderstand. I just wanted to thank you for saving me again. I brewed this for you—please."
Nonsense! You snatched it right out of A-Qi's hands!
"Hey—verbal thanks are fine. I mean—not that I—look, no need to be polite; you can go."
His own qi was running short; he wasn't about to pour out more yang to help anyone train. Hard pass.
Shiranui covered her mouth and laughed.
"Boss, what are you saying? I have self-control."
Then why are you sitting on my desk? And hooking my leg?
"Actually, it's about the Kōga. As you instructed, the Kōga seized the Tokugawa line and offered them up. I wonder if the Company is satisfied with their performance?"
"Oh—want to be Company dogs? Fine. We're about to go at it with the Collector again; we need bodies.
You handle it—sign a long-term mercenary outsourcing contract on the Company's behalf. You're authorized. If there's nothing else—"
"Thank you, boss—oh dear, I spilled the coffee. It's fine—don't move. I'll clean it up for you…"
Damn! This kunoichi really is full of tricks—and as a jinchūriki her grip is way too strong!
Looks like I need a kickboard mounted in front of the desk…
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⚠️ 30 CHAPTERS AHEAD — I'm Not a Cyberpsycho ⚠️
The system says: Kill.Mercs obey. Corporates obey. Monsters obey.One man didn't.
🧠💀 "I'm not a cyberpsycho. I just think... differently."
💥 High-voltage cyberpunk. Urban warfare. AI paranoia.Read 30 chapters ahead, only on Patreon.
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