Feng Xue stared dumbfounded at the affixes, his eyes nearly popping out of their sockets. Every single one of these affixes was incredibly useful; with just a little arranging and combining, he had already come up with all kinds of combinations.
There was nothing else to say. He spent another five million, bought a set of materials, then paired it with two cheap Chixiao swords as concealed blades. At his main body and at the prosthetic clinic respectively, he crafted a five-star prosthesis with five traits and six skills—
Name: Mechanical Arm · Explosive Arm
Position: Right Hand
Rating: Five-Star
Traits:
【Strength Amplification】: The wearer’s Strength check becomes three times its original value.
【Grab/Leap】
【Roar-Powered Output】
【Insurance】(Kong Wu) / 【Concealment-Breaking Strike】(Main Body)
【Golden Cicada Sheds Its Shell (Concealed Sword)】
Skills:
【Throwing Technique】: Launches a grab attack against a close-range target that is difficult to block.
【EX Throwing Technique】: After a brief charge-up, launches an extremely powerful throwing technique. Durability drops to zero after the attack ends.
【Energy Release】
【Great Strength】
【Dark Canopy (Concealed Sword)】
【Heartfire (Concealed Sword)】
Evaluation: A powerful prosthesis that takes strength to the extreme. Aside from its somewhat poor durability, it has virtually no flaws.
……
However, because Insurance had been added, the Second Son Arm that had originally only possessed the two affixes Insurance and Great Strength was also replaced. Its affixes became 【Army Breaker】+【Heartfire】+【Silk Spinning】, while that two-star concealed sword was switched to the 【Protect the Master】 trait.
While the stand-in was changing Kong Wu’s arm, Feng Xue’s main body was in no hurry to attach this giant arm. Instead, he rearranged the affixes, preparing to forge himself a sword.
He had possessed the Sword of Hell for some time now, but because he had not installed the Second Son Arm, the progress of his swordsmanship had remained stuck. The main reason was that he did not have a sword suited to himself.
Now that a miraculous affix like Sword Spirit was right before his eyes, how could he possibly not be tempted?
Moreover, weapons were different from prostheses. They did not require Source Energy fusion; affixes and the like could be added later. What he needed to do right now was forge the sword itself!
Originally, he had planned to use Chixiao’s blueprint, but after crafting two cheap Chixiao swords, he changed his mind. A Chixiao sword made with only one-tenth of the materials still retained its original trait of absorbing energy. Then, could the remaining nine-tenths of the space accommodate some other design? For example, something for which he likewise had the blueprint, and was capable of crafting—
Moye?!
However, this was not a job that could be completed immediately. First, he had to use cheap materials to craft a set of Moye, then disassemble it according to Moye’s simplified structure and try to fuse the two material-reduced designs together, producing a weapon that combined the strengths of both.
The early stage of this process required quite a bit of trial and error and waiting, but it did not occupy too much of his attention. Thus, while his main body was conducting research, John, who had once again lost his status as the most expensive character, returned to his post. Only, he did not immediately begin carrying out missions. Instead, he first went to rob some Scavengers, using a stolen portable operating table to install a homemade neural interface on himself.
It was not for going online. It was simply so he would have a prosthesis capable of using 【Dark Canopy】.
……
The night deepened. John, who had completed the interface assimilation, walked down the street with a violin case on his back. Even so, everyone who saw him showed wary expressions. There was no helping it—in the district, no one had the leisure to casually stroll out carrying a violin case. No matter what was inside the case, it certainly was not a violin.
“So somehow, this actually feels even more conspicuous than walking down the street with a sniper rifle!” John glanced at a passerby in the distance who had a rifle on his back yet drew no attention at all, and for a moment he felt rather speechless. Still, he did not actually take out what was inside the violin case. After all, he had not brought a gun this time.
“After all, the intensity is still low. The more trump cards I can hide, the better.”
Thinking this, John had already wound his way through twists and turns to an overpass suspended between two apartment buildings. Though it sounded a bit strange, a dump like Saint Lotan, with its countless lawless zones and illegal constructions, was so complex that it even surpassed the mountain city of Feng Xue’s previous life.
Two days had already passed since he switched identities back from Kong Wu. In these two days, he had not only cased the target, but had also contacted a few other middlemen. A middleman would not have only one expert under him, and no expert could possibly know only one middleman.
John had also taken on several jobs by now. With his flamboyant style of committing crimes, although he was not yet considered famous in killer circles due to the caliber of his targets, he had at least gained some reputation among the middlemen.
However, this was not because he intended to cast a wide net. It was simply to find someone to take the blame.
The chaotic thoughts in his mind were slowly suppressed. Relying on the multithreading of the Phantom Dragon Soul Type III, he separated the noise from the other characters from himself. Climbing onto the high platform he had scouted yesterday, he activated 【Mirage】, concealing his figure. Then, from the violin case, he took out a compound crossbow forged from D24 alloy.
Because it incorporated some of the technology from Gerbera (Impact Hand) and Tomboy, this crossbow’s evaluation had reached three stars. It bore 【Great Strength】 and 【Multi-Strike】, while the specially made alloy arrows had also been infused with 【Army Breaker】.
His breathing gradually steadied. In John’s eyes, transformed from the 【Yazi】 prosthetic eyes, his field of vision continued to extend as he gazed into the distance. At the end of his line of sight, in a plaza covered with all manner of obscene graffiti, a group of cyber-thugs so outrageous that even Shamate would concede defeat were wildly twisting their bodies.
After a brief search, a figure appeared in his eyes. His skin was bluish black, and his body was tattooed with a mechanical skeleton mixed with rivets and gear motifs, representing his status as a minor leader of the Skeleton Iron Society.
“Poison Scorpion, minor leader of the Skeleton Iron Society, new generation, responsible for the psychoactive drug trade around Ringline Plaza. Source-energy type: energy. Has hope of being promoted to cadre.”
Recalling the other party’s information in his mind, John assumed a prone shooting posture. Ring after ring of magical halo-like patterns extended in front of the arrow, yet were rendered invisible by Mirage.
The 【Great Strength】 in his right arm activated, and the effect of Tomboy’s 【Weapon Enhancement】 trait became three times its original value. If he pulled the trigger now, the crossbow bolt’s launch speed would easily break Mach 3.
But this was not the end, because the 【Great Strength】 on the compound crossbow also unfolded in sync at this moment. The crossbow mechanism’s output tripled, and the arrow’s power naturally rose even further. He did not use 【Charged Strike】 or 【Roar-Powered Output】. Much less did he go so far as to use 【EX Enhancement】. He merely narrowed his eyes, and then the entire world seemed to begin accelerating.
【Precognitive Eye】 was a miraculous ability. It could play the images that entered his eyes within three seconds at thirty times speed—and these three seconds were objective time.
In other words, if John did not consider the changes caused by his own actions, he could, at most, finish watching the next ninety seconds of the future within three seconds.
Yet during experiments, he discovered that this skill would change along with his own thoughts. In other words, when he saw a certain segment and formed a thought about what he should do next, the future would be recalculated from the moment that thought arose.
Thus, in this instant of extreme mental focus, amid the images before his eyes playing at thirty times speed, streaks of blood-red overlapped again and again. Like threads of fate, they wove an exquisite brocade in his mind. Then he lowered his head, looked at the crossbow bolt in his hand, and suddenly asked a question—
“If I pull the trigger now, will it hit?”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”
VIP launch day burst-update plan: three chapters first, then one chapter every two hours until midnight. After that, three chapters a day, making up the sixteen bonus chapters owed from the previous book. As for the rest, we’ll see how the results are.
Sigh, this promotion mechanism is something only data drudges could come up with…
I hope you readers won’t let me lose too badly.