"Huff… huff… huff…"
Beads of vapor fogged the rebreather mask. A dim headlamp cut through the murky, polluted swell; the seabed below was pitch-black mud, piled high with mountains of trash.
Li Pan lowered his head and looked at his hands and feet.
He was inside a full-body hazmat diving suit to keep the highly polluted seawater from seeping into the implants. The tight breathing rig and wetsuit hugged a very full pair of thighs and chest; from under the ribs and along the spine came the prickling sting and numb thrum of implants kicking in, every sensation fed right back into his nerves. He couldn't help kneading the two "bundles" twice—good handfeel, and the novelty factor wasn't bad either.
Orange: "Hey. I opened my permissions so you could link in and help me find stuff, not so you could feel me up."
Li Pan: "Ahem. Sorry, sorry. Just… checking the gear."
Orange probably rolled her eyes, raised her searchlight, and kept sweeping the seabed garbage dump for the target container.
Because when Li Pan ditched those containers he'd ripped out every chip or locator the Pharaoh could detect and tossed them into the sea, they couldn't home in by signal now. And there were a lot of wrecked containers down here. Orange hadn't seen the goods in person, so she'd also bought a set of super-dream streaming gear: Li Pan could link directly into her system to share sight, sound, and bodily senses. When it came time to lift the container, he could also help drive the mechanical arms.
Night City's legit tech tree wasn't much, but the crooked branches were… lush.
For example, all kinds of super-dream interactivity, live-experience streaming, body-swap play—mature as hell. They'd invented phones you could taste with ages ago, and not just taste—if you paid a small fee, you could literally enter a streamer's body, experience a life swap for real, and bliss out for five to ten minutes.
Well, no point getting moralistic. People are curious about the opposite sex's body. Not everyone can afford a second shell or wants surgery. A couple of super-dream rides is a cheap game with novelty.
Of course, for the sharer, it's still your body. Let the wrong hacker link in and you might get scrubbed into a vegetable and shipped to a nightclub or a chop shop. Only a few platforms—or truly trusted partners—offered private links.
Orange: "Hands!"
Li Pan: "Ahem. This suit's too silky—slid down by itself… okay okay, no more touching."
After a short self-fondle detour, Orange.Li Pan stopped fooling around and kept sweeping the trash sea with the lamp.
There was plenty of junk down here: rotten fish and shrimp, cement barrels, busted sedans, whole apartment blocks. With sea levels up and "new districts" and seawalls going up, residents of Night City's east side were forced from their homes, shoved out to ghost-estate suburbs in the west to buy "new" units, juicing a brief real-estate boom. You know the result: old homes flooded, new ones abandoned mid-build. Without a legal address you could be "legally" laid off, and swarms of folks became homeless.
Takamagahara squeezed the people dry through that migration, cleared cheap land in the east for a "new development zone," and bought itself more time. Night Group wasn't any better now—its Pacific Zone plan was a straight copy of Takamagahara's.
From the Company's viewpoint: no orders from other planes, no industry, no planar specialties, no advanced tech—World 0791 was worthless. Every faction's fighting now was just to wring the last drop from a dying behemoth called Takamagahara.
So yes, it looked like Li Pan had gone wild and wiped out two houses equally—but the scales had actually tipped hard toward Night Group.
Because the Company also flattened Tokugawa's forces while they were at it. Now there was no one left in Night City who could check the vampires.
Missing a prince? Big deal. There were plenty of elders. With a Blood Grail, you just promote another. The Secret Party had tons of families; someone would fill Fabius's seat.
No Tokugawa army? Then Takamagahara's base in Night City had collapsed. They were already in endless civil war; now with their local magnate clan erased, the factions were scattered. No one could rally Takamagahara's strength again.
Hashiba? Please. They gulped a huge chunk of Takamagahara's Kansai assets and can barely digest that. The Company's smackdown spooked them—no way they'd meddle in Night City now.
Night Group, meanwhile, seized the moment and gorged itself, annexing Tokugawa and Fabius legacies everywhere.
Weird as it sounds, after Li Pan's rampage, Night Group's favorability toward him actually ticked up a notch…
Anyway, everyone was busy grabbing money; no one came to interfere with their scavenging. Smooth sailing: they found one target.
Orange: "This the container? Hiss… that handprint… you really 'threw' it here?"
Li Pan: "Mm. Threw it with an implant. Good—mil-grade alloy, no breach to the outer shell. This is the pricey one. Take it to the plant first."
Orange.Li Pan surfaced, remote-called the rented salvage boat, then dove to rig slings and self-inflating lift bags. They hauled the container aboard, towed it into harbor, and loaded it onto the rented semi. The back-end haul to the factory didn't need his puppeteering.
Li Pan disconnected, blinked, and sat up from the big bed in the Paradise Hotel.
Shiranui Kiriko was in the indoor pool's medicated bath cultivating, twisted into some advanced yoga-like pose, digesting the yang-essence she'd just topped up.
Well, an office isn't the best place for this stuff—he doesn't exactly relax there, cough…
Seeing her sunk in meditation, Li Pan hurried into his formalwear, slipped out quietly.
Look—the thing wasn't that he wasn't interested. He wouldn't have kept at it otherwise. But it's about mutual benefit versus one-sided drain.
When Shiranui was a mere mortal, she couldn't siphon much; she didn't have the "stomach" for it. So Li Pan didn't mind feeding her some cultivation, even planning to "subdue" her once and for all—so she'd stop crawling under his desk at every chance, thinking only with her lower dantian and wrecking his work.
Who knew the wheel would turn so fast? With the Great Tengu buff, Shiranui's stamina and recovery bar had caught up to—and even surpassed—Li Pan's Nine Yin Third-Turn!
Now the two could grapple head-on, and she could endlessly refine Li Pan as a cultivation furnace, converting his qi while her power skyrocketed.
Li Pan was getting fleeced: pure altruism in exchange for sensory pleasure and mental fatigue, while his true qi bled down. Who could stand it?
No way. Keep this up and he won't just lose to monsters and to the Collectors—he'll get pinned in bed by a kunoichi!
Major crisis!
And it's the kind no outsider can fix. His Nine Yin Refining Body, Fourth Turn—he was still one step short, the door right there, and he just couldn't cross.
He'd killed plenty of fiends lately, hadn't he? What was wrong?
In Li Qingyun's timeline there wasn't even a bottleneck here. Was it really because Li Pan had too many "good friends," and indulgent dual-cultivation was hurting his Dao?
He cabbed to the factory, preoccupied, flipping through the Nine Yin Manual and coming up empty.
Fine—he sprawled on the factory roof, entered Still-True View to take a look.
On his side, the world had almost ended; on Li Qingyun's side, the pot scrubbing continued.
But he was nearly done. After swallowing a hundred-thirty-odd cauldrons of "pot wash," his true qi was steady as an old dog; his foundation was ironclad. Nine Yin, Sixth Turn, at the peak—and he vaguely felt a breakthrough coming!
So that side sails through, this side stalls. The gap was… rude.
Li Qingyun sighed, pulled out the picture-book to see if there was a dual-cultivation secret art he'd missed.
Sadly, the "male lead" wasn't human—wasn't even a snake—more like a qilin-type divine beast. Not exactly the same species. The meridians and qi routes were mapped in detail, but hard to apply directly. Eye candy only.
He'd already combed Still-True View's methods. Most were unworkable in 0791, and none beat his Nine Yin anyway.
Surgery to learn the Immortal Concubine's secret arts… yeah, no.
A spark: Li Qingyun fished The Supreme Nine-Heaven Mysterious Maiden's Demon-Cleaving Secret Canon from under the cushion and flipped it open.
The teacher had said it wasn't a cultivation method per se, but maybe it would help by analogy?
He read a page carefully…
Uh… didn't get it.
Every character made sense; put together they didn't. Blink, and he'd forgotten which line he'd just read.
Anyone who's taken higher math or quantum mechanics knows the feeling…
Right. His comprehension wasn't high enough for this heavenly book.
"Boom!"
Li Qingyun looked up. A peal of thunder—muffled, like a stick whacking his chest.
He frowned, thought he'd gone loopy from reading, did a quick divination, swept his sense across the view.
The Void Sea was calm. Nothing there.
"Boom!" Again, closer.
This time it was clearer. This thunder wasn't in Still-True View.
Li Pan opened his eyes, melted from the view's ethereal incense straight into the stench of Night City's factory floor—and almost fainted.
But the weather report hadn't called for rain…
"Boom!"
Third one. Right overhead. Not a hallucination.
Li Pan's and Li Qingyun's hearts thumped in sync with the three peals…
A horrible guess flashed across Li Pan's mind. He shut his eyes—then snapped them open.
Crack!!
The instant he opened them,
a lightning bolt crashed straight down on his head!
He screamed, blue fire spraying from nose and mouth, his whole body shuddering. It was a waterfall of thunder, a bucket of sky-fire poured over him!
Damn—his hands were charred, coal black…
Wait—not right.
Clay.
It was the clay doll that got struck!
And that feeling—so familiar!
Heavenly Thunder!
Celestial tribulation!!
Even the clay doll had reached Nine Yin, Sixth Turn—condensed a nascent soul—and was crossing the tribulation!
Li Pan was speechless.
Truly speechless. The clay doll was lying out in vacuum, on a meteorite. Nothing around it. How the hell was it cultivating?
You could break through in a void with nothing at all… and he was the one stuck at the bottleneck on Earth!?
He was crushed.
Really crushed. The thunderbolt had stunned him.
Why? Wasn't the rule "slay ghosts, level up"?
Why was he still stuck while the doll leveled?
Sure, he didn't do the killing—the sword did. But he was part of the DPS! Didn't he get a share? Something was bugged!
Great. Li Qingyun at Nine Yin, Sixth, racing for Seventh. Li Clay at Nine Yin, Sixth, undergoing tribulation.
Only Li Pan was stuck at Third Turn—killing himself by day at work, pinned for dual-cultivation by night, fifty million in loans on his back…
He was tired of life.
He didn't snap out of it until Orange's truck pushed through traffic back to the factory, where he helped unload.
There was no "snapping out of it." He could only numb his hollow heart by making money…
The container held mostly art: famous paintings, antiques. Private hoards, many labeled online as "stolen," "damaged," "contraband"—and basically "untaxed." If he tried auctioning them, who knew when they'd sell; he'd have to front 30% luxury tax first.
So, slush money for Fabius's tax evasion and black trades.
A quick scan: no monsters—pure art was useless for cultivation. And even if he made a few hundred million, Nine Yin was still stuck. What was the point? He was bored. He tossed out, offhand,
"Orange, pick one. Consider it your cut."
Orange grabbed a landscape oil painting. "What's this worth?"
Li Pan glanced. "Anywhere from a few thousand to a few million."
Orange gaped. "Why that huge a spread!?"
Li Pan shot some video, picked three physical pieces as samples, and left with them.
"Depends who you sell to. The value of art is impossible to pin down. To some it's worthless; to others it's priceless. You can't buy joy.
"These are basically money-laundering tokens. Some factions can't move equity across borders without tax trouble—or Committee attention. So they set up private foundations, throw an art piece on the invoice, and shuffle hundreds of millions.
"They're genuine, too—and shipped across worlds. Freight and upkeep aren't cheap. Someone will bite. I'll find someone who knows the scene. You keep hauling the other containers."
Li Pan headed to the Mithraic Bank and met his private manager, L.
Not many people smash a faction's compound one day and walk in to do business the next.
Capitalism's virtue: if there's profit, you can sit down with enemies. And Li Pan was a VIP of the Secret Party. His price wasn't high.
"Flat—two hundred million. You know whose they are; Night Group has already appraised them internally. Public estimates put these over twenty billion. If their clan was willing to pay that much to collect—and haul them while fleeing—the other elders will want them too. They'll move."
Of course he wasn't really pricing at twenty billion; those list and "max" estimates are for shouting. Even accounting for profit, fees, and upkeep, asking one percent for a fence job was perfectly reasonable.
L didn't refuse outright, but raised a snag.
"Council's fighting over Fabius assets. They're also voting on the prince's seat. Cash is tight everywhere. No client can wire that much right now. And a bank moving that sum could draw… attention."
"Not my problem. I talked you up so hard last night I only executed Fabius, left the Secret Party a road to live on. You don't even kick back a finder's fee for saving your skins—and won't do a fair trade? Fine. The second I step out that door, consequences are on you."
Li Pan turned for the elevator.
"Mr. Li! Please—wait! I'll speak to my manager!"
Spooked—word of Li Pan had gotten around. L looked afraid he'd turn back from the elevator and start cutting heads, and hurried off.
Li Pan wasn't about to be polite. He also couldn't afford delays. After the last forty-eight hours he'd learned fast:
World 0791 was too dangerous. Once the Company and the Collectors started swinging, anything could happen—demon gods ending the world, corporate wars, fleet barbeques, Committee Correctives.
He needed cash, fast. Finish the Red Tengu job, buy his own starship. If things went sideways, he could load up family and friends and punch out.
Even if Takamagahara's ships were garbage, WARP 15 was still fifteen times lightspeed—two and a half minutes Earth to Jupiter. The stealth recon ship was cruiser-class; per Nana, it'd carry a good eighteen hundred people. More than enough for everyone he cared about in Night City.
A lifeboat for the lot of them.
L finally brought a branch GM, and they haggled for ages.
Credit where it's due: a real GM keeps his cool under the axe. He went through the crate item by item, shaved this, shaved that, and hacked that one percent down again—final deal: one hundred and fifty million…
And not in a single wire. The Mithraic Bank signed a thirty-million "ocean garbage cleanup" contract with Panlong Construction as collateral and earnest.
Then, like the old "Night City Development Fund," they set up a new "Pacific Environmental Protection Fund." The remaining 120 million would be paid out over ten years.
Li Pan knew he'd been sliced several times—especially that decade-long payout—what a joke. But he needed cash now. No real choice.
What company opens its doors and immediately books hundreds of millions? You're insulting the tax bureau's IQ. This was already a win.
That's the world: muscle alone doesn't cut it. His starting line and credit rating were too low. In Capital's jungle, you play by their rules and swallow dumb losses.
The one upside: with those two funds as anchors, Panlong Construction would see at least 1.7 million a month in recurring inflows for ten years. Stable revenue with no defaults would bump his citizen credit rating hard.
Under Public Safety's regime, that meant invisible perks—NCPA not flagging your plates, smart bullets choosing other targets…
Bottom line: Panlong's cash on hand now topped eighty-five million. Add a thirty-million loan, talk to Amakusa Shirō about paying the tail in installments, and the promised cruiser-class stealth recon ship should be within reach.
If they still wanted more… he had a few more containers stashed. Open another.
.
.
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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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