"Hey—! Mop-Head! ****, I almost didn't recognize you! I thought you'd rotted in some ditch!"
"Barney! You fat pig! Getting fatter every day! Watch your filthy mouth—you want a beating?"
"Whoa, whoa, easy—holy—those legs are something. Who's this?"
"Oh, my girl. Brought her to get her cyberware redone. Need to make some cash."
"Oho! Mop-Head, not bad! Bagged yourself a stunner! Heh—rides like a dream?"
"Cut the crap. Lend me Susan for a few laps."
"Sure. Oh right, Mop-Head, take a look—Susan's been backfiring a lot lately."
"Because your fat ass crushed her, duh! Did you damage the igniter? Don't tell me you cheaped out and used the Whirlpool Gang's bootleg gas again? I told you that stuff's literal gutter oil."
"I didn't! I would never do that to Susan! You gotta believe me!"
Ayako stepped out of the garage, watching the black, chubby biker banter with Li Pan.
Barney was an ordinary local thug—eyes and limbs replaced by back-alley budget implants. Obese from cheap carbs and too much couch-net time.
"Susan" was his motorcycle—an otaku painjob plastered with anime girls.
Ayako didn't know bikes, but hardly anyone rode them anymore. City highways were controlled by the traffic AIs, speeds insane—without superhuman dynamic vision and smart routing, no normal person dared manual drive, let alone weave through traffic on an engine bike.
Out in the outskirts, though—on roads so bad they were basically garbage fields—biker gangs scavenged car engines from dumps, slapped on wheels, and built all kinds of drift wagons.
"Ah, ignition circuit short. Okay—there, that's the right sound."
"Mop-Head! I can always count on you!"
"Lend me Susan for two days, I'll fill her up, and I'll add three days to your Fly-TV premium account."
"Mop-Head~~ I love you! Mwah!"
"Scram."
Barney hopped into the garage, jacked a cable into his neck, flopped on the air mattress, and went happily online.
Ayako stared, curious. "Your ex?"
Li Pan rolled his eyes, pulled on a biker jacket, and answered offhand,
"Old partner for scavenging and street racing. This was our hideout. Some idiot got drunk and discovered that line taps a paid outside-net TV feed, so we all share the account. When we've got money we stream premium flicks, blow off some steam. Hop on."
Ayako took the rooster-comb helmet he tossed her and swung onto the back seat.
"You were really street trash before? How'd you end up as a Company dog?"
Li Pan gunned the throttle. The girl behind him didn't cling to his back or grab his waist—she sat straight, clamping the bike with her thighs, steady as stone. Huh. Strong legs.
Probably not a fan of physical contact.
Li Pan shrugged. "Life squeezed me into it."
They roared off, gaudy rooster helmets blaring lights and music—walking noise bombs.
Blending in worked; they didn't draw the Whirlpool Gang's attention. Even armed patrols passed without stopping them. Not surprising—too many people lived in the Zone. Despite repeated NCPA lockdowns and raids, the place teemed with life. Who had time to check everyone?
Yeah—cockroaches.
You'd spot one in a restaurant corner and get grossed out, but no matter how many you stomped, they never went away. Pry up a baseboard—whoosh, a whole nest. A self-sustaining ecosystem.
Cockroach lives are cheap; squashing a few is easy. Wiping them out is hard.
Dying in the Industrial Zone was easy; surviving wasn't that hard either. With the perimeter sealed, "legal currency" lost its use. You could live without money.
Night City was a mountain of luxury trash. The elites' leftovers alone could feed the cockroaches. Add the Public Safety System and private foundations dumping charity for tax write-offs—food relief, refugee stipends.
And with periodic economic crises, factories ran excess capacity rather than risk shutdown bankruptcy. Unsold inventory got trashed—never given away to city workers, of course—so the dumps feasted.
So resources weren't actually scarce here.
The NCPA and the yakuza types who once "worked for the Company" and squeezed the people had long since been beheaded, skinned, and hung from light poles by the Whirlpool Gang. If you could find work, you could live better here than a wage slave outside. Ironic.
But people need more than food and shelter. The Zone was quarantined from the public net; legal trade was impossible. Only barter and black money flowed.
The Zone produced salvage, and the Whirlpool were savage lunatics. Even the underworld downtown looked down on them—no investment, few high-end vices.
Most deep-net ports inside were controlled by the Whirlpool. The masses numbed themselves—drugs, braindreams, booze and sex, gang robberies, even mutual slaughter—to fill the void.
The Whirlpool weren't "good guys," just laid-off locals who robbed outside and clashed with the NCPA. They didn't squeeze locals as hard.
Make them mad, though, and they'd harvest your organs and hang your skin.
Li Pan led Ayako to a derelict building. She couldn't help asking,
"We looking for your ex?"
"What? Why? We're infiltrating the Whirlpool—we need their people. Hey! Bobo!"
Ayako had seen plenty of strange folks, but this one still shocked her.
Where others were highly cyberized, this guy was almost all machine with a few meat patches. Organs bubbled in glass jars linked by tubes; a steel-toothed grin like a ghost. Hard to believe he was alive.
"Damn, Mop-Head! You shaved!"
Bobo clanked when he talked.
"Bobo!"
Li Pan cheerfully kicked a drug-fried junkie out of the way and toppled Bobo's stall.
"Pay up, ****! You still owe me for that shipment!"
"I thought you were dead! I spent it!"
"You mother—" Li Pan drew and aimed at Bobo's metal rod. "Say that again."
Bobo quivered. "How much was it again? Kinda forgot."
"Three forty-five point seventeen."
"Come on, just three hundred… Here, take this transformer. Cost me two-fifty."
Li Pan booted the rod aside. "Stuff your 'two-fifty'. Do me a favor. My girl wants in."
Bobo sprang up; the wheeled gun on his back and the ammo belts at his ribs clattered.
"Fine, fine—lemme make a call."
Li Pan glanced at Ayako.
"I've got beef with them. We'll say you want in. We slip inside and take a look."
"That your friend?"
"Friend my ass. He's a love rival. For obvious reasons—me being better-looking—he got dumped… then I got dumped too. Later we did business—smuggling scrap into the Zone, back when NCPA perimeter patrols still tried. Call it a mutual-interest thing."
He noticed Whirlpool punks ogling Ayako's legs. He moved as if to sling an arm over her shoulder—without touching—and whispered,
"If someone tries to mount you, don't draw the knife yet. Yell that you're taken. By their rules, they have to skin me before they can touch you. Saves hassle."
Ayako wasn't surprised. She tilted her head, curious.
"You've actually skinned a love rival?"
"What? No. Duels are how they settle 'stealing women'—or men, if you like. They duel for a piece of meat here, too. Just grab a few Whirlpool boys to notarize it. They follow their own rules.
Free love is fine—no one cares who or what you sleep with. Bobo got doused in acid doing under-the-table work. Boss stiffed him on medical because he's an illegal Zone resident. Joining the Whirlpool was his only shot at living."
After a while, Bobo shouted from inside,
"Hey, Mop-Head! Why's your girl wanna join again?"
Li Pan bellowed back,
"She's got her eye on a bag! Wants to sell her face! I'll pierce a few more holes in that pretty head for her, haha!"
Ayako stared at him, appalled.
"Blend in," Li Pan muttered. "When in Rome…"
Bobo returned. "Alright, let's go. Ride with me."
"No need. I've got wheels."
"Suit yourself."
A hulking metal cyborg led the way in a kart-mounted cannon. Li Pan and Ayako followed on the bike, swaggering right into the Zone.
The outskirts were ringed with blocky residential towers—once worker housing. Built in wartime with reinforced, blast-resistant concrete—worlds apart from your average ruined shells.
"So many people live here…"
If her family hadn't gone bankrupt, Ayako would never have set foot in a place like this.
Li Pan—mostly repeating what friends told him—chatted idly about the Zone.
In Takamagahara's good years, productivity was boosted with benefits—apartments, healthcare, education—like the current Pacific incentives. A diligent 996 man could support a big family, and the Zone swelled.
Then came defeat, financial crisis, factory closures. Mortgages once carried by factories went unpaid. Eviction orders came—kick workers into the street.
But these workers had military backgrounds—engineers, sappers—not helpless civilians. They fought back. Bank agents got their skulls caved in and tossed off balconies.
The usual corporate playbook followed: send local gangs to threaten families into moving. Works on office drones. But here, neighbors had known each other since childhood—coworkers and comrades. Already depressed from defeat and layoffs, they snapped. They seized the gangs, fed them to the machines alive—so brutal even the East Castle Society called the cops.
The NCPA stormed in, arrested labor leaders, beat them to death in custody, and the conflict went nuclear. The local precinct burned; union militants formed the Whirlpool Gang and started guerrilla war in the Zone.
Right—send 5,000-yuan auxiliary cops to fight veterans of corporate wars? What a joke.
So the NCPA gave up showing up. Only Cerberus dropped by with TV crews now and then to stage a "crackdown" for the cameras.
As for the Night Corporation—Takamagahara was too busy imploding. Plenty of hard-to-demolish urban villages elsewhere. Who had time to tidy a trash heap? Let it rot. Clean it up later.
Beyond the bristling, gun-turreted towers—past dead gardens, schools, clinics, kindergartens—stretched a gigantic dump.
Unlike the outer-city landfills, this was pre-sorted bulk: chips, rare metals, high-tech scraps stripped and repurposed by Whirlpool crews and ordinary residents. After human sorting, the debris was reforged into usable materials.
Following convoys of haulers over trash hills into the heart of the Zone, even Li Pan was stunned.
Takamagahara's—no, the Whirlpool's—Super Factory.
The ornamented façades were long stripped and reused. What remained was the skeletal spine.
In a furnace-hot, sulfur-stinking, choking haze, a vast black iron beast rose and fell, rumbling.
A western-fantasy black dragon of steel. Enormous mechanical arms like bone wings heaved in the smoke, tipping the "grain" from garbage trucks into a molten maw to be burned and reforged. The clangor was a dragon's low song.
Mega Industry Mechanical Robot—MIMR: a super-scale industrial automaton. A production line that could produce production lines. Feed raw materials and blueprints; it would fabricate a complete automated industrial system—building a factory on the spot, then splitting it into modules for transport.
Not just factory lines—war machines, SMS platforms, starship modules—everything.
Back in the era of Neo-Tokyo-8, this was bleeding edge. Now it's commonplace. The latest OP orbital factories each were MIMRs; there were hundreds, thousands in the Jovian sphere alone. That was true productivity.
Still, these Whirlpool maniacs—fixing one up from trash? Incredible. Children of workers indeed.
Li Pan handed Ayako a metal dust mask from the saddlebag. The air was basically crematorium grade—PM way past 2.5.
"So… big…" Ayako breathed, shaken.
Li Pan smirked. "You should see mine."
She glared.
"I mean our Company factory. Where's your mind at."
She snorted and scanned the turrets and troops. "It's too big. How do we find my mom? Maybe she's been taken…"
"Easy. We ask. Bobo!"
"What?!"
"Any hot new girls lately? Something worth two rounds?"
"Pah! All tanks!"
Li Pan turned to Ayako. "Sounds like your mom didn't join. She may be dead. You check the prosthetics morgue for fresh ones. I'll hit the mass grave for the cold ones—see if we find parts that belonged to her."
Ayako said nothing—then Li Pan felt her arms tighten around his waist, her body pressing to his back.
Leaving school to face the world's snarling face—scared? Or anxious for her mother, craving a solid back to lean on? Maybe both.
At the gate, Bobo grabbed a string of soldier dog tags.
"Have your girl wear this—she can pick implants first, then queue for surgery."
"Thanks, Bobo!"
"**** you. We're even." He flipped the bird and rolled off.
Li Pan gave Ayako the tags.
"You scout inside. I'll circle the crematories. Meet back in two hours. If you want out, just hand the tags to the guard and say you changed your mind.
Lots of people lose their nerve when they see the operating room. For a few bags and shoes, selling a kidney doesn't feel worth it. Of course, plenty of doped-up idiots charge ahead anyway.
Hackers here are listening—don't use comms. They'll flag us instantly."
Ayako nodded. Ninja infiltration was a core class; no more instructions needed. With tags on, she queued to "join" the Whirlpool.
Li Pan rode around to the crematorium.
Where there are many living, there are many dead. In Night City, gunfights happen; deaths happen. The Whirlpool, when they could, recovered bodies to harvest parts. Seven or eight implants on everyone these days—fresh organs, hair, teeth, corneas—all had buyers. It was a major revenue stream.
A human body was value head to toe.
Guided by the stench and the qi, he greased the gate with a handful of bullets and entered the morgue.
He hadn't expected to find something immediately.
Not Akiyama Masako.
"Ten-Heart Disciple Duan Kecheng pays homage to the Venerable Lord! I did not know you had descended—I failed to welcome you! Forgive my offense! May the Lord's divine arts reign supreme; may your life be as long as Heaven! Ten thousand years to unify the Three Realms! Invincible in war, unassailable in assault! A sage in civil and martial virtue, for a thousand ages—"
Li Pan blinked at the kid who sprang from a heap of corpses, kowtowed through a full ritual, and finished his chant.
"You… reincarnated?"
The boy, a bullet hole in his forehead, beamed.
"By your grace, my Lord, this disciple has seized a body and been reborn. Once my cultivation is restored, I shall pacify this realm and spread our sacred doctrine! The might of our faith will shake the worlds!"
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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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