“Phew. Good thing he was a weakling.”
Feng Xue looked at the man he had dropped with an elbow strike. With quick, practiced movements, he stripped off the man’s coat and backpack. Ignoring the grime on them, he swiftly put them on himself. After a brief hesitation, he decided not to finish the man off, instead directly picking up the other party’s ball bat and striding away.
Compared to Feng Xue, who had only just arrived, this scavenger had already picked up quite a lot of odds and ends. But in Feng Xue’s eyes, everything in the pack combined was not worth as much as the filter plate he had found earlier.
“Makes sense. Over here, a skilled worker only earns five credit points a day, and that’s without food or lodging, no days off, no insurance. If you could just pick through trash and make several hundred a day, who’d still go to work?”
Feng Xue inwardly laughed at himself for thinking too simply, but his pace slowed a little—
With the tools contributed by the scavenger, he could now dig out some of the larger pieces of trash that had been buried.
It was not that the people scavenging during the day were all idiots who did not know how to dig. It was just that picking through garbage was not something only you were doing. Even if you really dug out a large, valuable piece of junk, it would be very hard to carry it off openly. Not to mention that on garbage day, small pieces of trash that were easy to grab were everywhere. Since it was all a blind-box gamble anyway, there was no need to ignore the boxes you could open with a casual reach and insist on tackling something time-consuming and laborious.
Thus, on the first day of garbage day, everyone was racing against time, using the fastest speed to take away the most valuable and easiest-to-grab portion, then rushing out of the dump in dense schools like sardines. Even if some suffered losses, it was still better than having someone else snatch the prize halfway. Even the small scavenger groups tended more toward casting a wide net rather than wasting precious time digging.
Feng Xue still was not sure whether this place was the dump beside the Rust Zone in reality, or a virtual map conjured up by his golden finger. But since settings like garbage day were the same, then in this regard it should not be too different from what the old man had said.
Holding the screwdriver and the bat, he searched for garbage that looked worth his time. Although he did not come across any major haul, after more than half an hour, all the bits and pieces together still added up to around two or three hundred points.
“Not bad. Combined with [Cheap Goods], that’s enough to make half a body’s worth of three-star prosthetics.”
Thinking of this, a thought could not help but arise in Feng Xue’s mind—
How was he going to modify himself in the future?
Although compared to mechanical ascension, Feng Xue still preferred systems like cultivation, he did have a golden finger that could create prosthetic bodies. Not using it would be a bit too wasteful.
The problem was, how was he supposed to operate on himself?
If it was only prosthetics for limbs, internal organs, and the like, he could more or less rely on the highly automated auxiliary operating table he had seen in the golden finger shop. But for prosthetic modifications involving the brain, spine, and nervous system, Feng Xue did not dare entrust everything entirely to automated surgery.
Although the Phantom Dragon Soul was currently enough for his needs, in the end it was only a civilian chip paired with a purple mood. There was no way it could compare to things like Sandevistan or Kerenzikov. Even if life was fairly stable for now, as an old Zhong Rabbit, Feng Xue had likewise inherited both persecution paranoia and fear of insufficient firepower.
However, this problem did not trouble him for long, because the answer was actually right before his eyes—
Yes, it was precisely the golden finger’s character creation function.
Although it had only been for a very brief time, Feng Xue was certain that when the golden finger had turned the robot into a character, it had indeed done so through his own “source energy.” In other words, as long as he remembered the sensation from that time, perhaps he could temporarily transfer his consciousness into other robotic bodies. He might even be able to do like a certain Crimson of Pain, setting up a pile of robot bodies in his base, leaving a bit of consciousness in each one; after one body was destroyed, he would immediately transfer his consciousness into the next.
“Still, my source energy is flesh-and-blood source energy. I wonder if I can still complete consciousness transfer after bypassing the golden finger…”
Feng Xue muttered over future plans in his heart, but his feet did not stop moving in the slightest. At this point, the stolen backpack was only one-third full, and there was still a long way to go before the six-hour time limit, yet he forcefully restrained the urge to continue looting and decided to secure what he had.
After all, judging by common sense, there would definitely be sweepers or the like guarding the exits of the dump to rob scavengers. Compared with a packed-full bundle, looking as if he had not gained much was actually less likely to attract attention. In any case, he only needed to stay at the extraction point for fifteen seconds; it was not as if he absolutely had to go out.
Thinking this, Feng Xue quickened his steps by another notch. But the moment he sped up, his lack of experience showed.
He was already less than three hundred meters from the exit. Naturally, the surroundings were not like the center of the dump, where mountains of garbage and similar cover were everywhere. His movements were therefore exposed to the eyes of the people around him.
How could a scavenger with no real gains be so eager to leave? And how could his steps be so light?
He must have found something big!
Such thoughts surfaced in the minds of every scavenger who saw Feng Xue, but most of them did not step forward, because they understood that with their own strength, even if they took this kid down, the thing would not end up in their hands.
Feng Xue had no scavenging experience at all, so naturally he did not understand that before leaving the dump, one had to group up with other scavengers and withdraw together, using a sardine-like tactic to reduce the chance of being stopped by those gang “predators.”
Of course, if one’s own strength was extraordinary, that would be another matter. But Feng Xue’s appearance, without even the slightest sign of modification on his body, was clearly not enough to intimidate gang members. And so…
“Kid, you look pretty unfamiliar. Found something good? Take it out and let us brothers have a look?”
Along with words that made no attempt to hide their greed, three figures blocked his path in a half-surrounding formation. The leader was a bald, burly man with broad shoulders and a thick waist. His metallic right arm, radiating a sense of power, held a dagger crackling with blue arcs of electricity.
On either side, two underlings with crude prosthetic modifications raised inferior firearms produced by some small workshop. The crooked muzzles were faintly aimed at Feng Xue.
Although Feng Xue did not think such things could have much accuracy, he also had no desire to personally experience the legendary Brownian trajectory of bullets.
Taking a deep breath, Feng Xue looked at the extraction point still three hundred meters away on the map and tried speaking:
“Brothers, I’m a prosthetic doctor! We’re all making a living in this area, so give me some face! My clinic is in the Rust Zone…”
Feng Xue did not bring up Doctor Jiang’s name, but to these gang members, prosthetic doctors were definitely a group whose face had to be given. He did not even need the other party to believe him. As long as he could be escorted under pressure to the extraction point, that would count as victory.
But before he could even finish, the bald, burly man burst into wild laughter:
“A doctor? Why don’t you take a piss and look at yourself! If you’re a doctor, why haven’t you fixed up your own face? And the Rust Zone… I’ve been running around Scrap Iron Alley for over thirty years, and I’ve never heard of such a place. A little punk like you wants to bluff our Skull-Splitting Gang? You’re really courting death!”
The bald, burly man was quite certain. Not because of Feng Xue’s looks, nor because of this Rust Zone place he had never heard of, but simply because—
What prosthetic doctor didn’t sit in their clinic waiting for materials to be delivered to their door? How could one possibly run to the dump to pick through garbage himself!