Chapter 17: The System


    Sun Jack held the chip in his hand and voiced his request to King Kong.


    He had spent all ofst night pondering and ultimately decided that directly imnting the chip into his brain was too risky.


    Song 6’s earlier remarks only deepened his concerns—if even a backup heart pump could fail, how could he trust a chip installed in his brain not to malfunction? It was a gamble he couldn’t afford to take.


    "Besides," he thought, "I’m in unfamiliar territory here. What if these two are working together to scam me? At least with an external device, I can just take it off if something goes wrong."


    His exnation caught King Kong off guard. “Why’s that, my friend? Is your current system chip malfunctioning?”


    Sun Jack seized the opportunity and nodded. “Yeah, it’s stuck in there, malfunctioning. My buddy over there, well, that’s how he ended up recing his entire body with metal parts.”


    As he spoke, Sun Jack gave Tapai a hearty pat on the shoulder. Tapai yed along perfectly, letting out an exaggerated sigh. "╯△╰"


    “Is that so? Let me take a look,” King Kong offered, extending a set of tools from his split-open palm.Sun Jack leaned back immediately, dodging the invasive gesture. No way was he letting the monk check—it would blow his cover.


    Thinking quickly, Sun Jack feigned rm. “Don’t touch it! That thing’s dangerous. It can transfer consciousness. I barely managed to disable it after a huge struggle. If you identally restart it, it might turn me into someone else!”


    “Huh? That doesn’t sound like what I heard yesterday,” Song 6 said, tilting his head thoughtfully.


    “Take a guess,” Sun Jack replied with a deadpan expression.


    His barrage of half-truths and bluffs finally convinced King Kong to drop the idea. “Hmm... if that’s the case, I’ll find you an external device. I’m pretty sure I had something like that in stock.” He began rummaging through his shelves.


    It didn’t take long before King Kong pulled out a circr metal device resembling a pair of eyess frames. He installed the chip into the device and handed it to Sun Jack.


    Taking a deep breath, Sun Jack ced the odd contraption on his head.


    With a <em>hiss</em>, a bright yellow light shed in front of his eyes. To his surprise, it was a pair of sses—not with ss or resin lenses but a projected virtual disy.


    The arced projection created a slight wide-angle distortion at the edges of his field of vision, noticeably extending his peripheral view.


    The yellow disy flickered briefly. When Song 6 spoke again, subtitles appeared along the bottom edge. “How is it? How does it feel?”


    “How do I control it?” Sun Jack asked, running his fingers along the temple arms of the device, finding no buttons.


    “Just think about it. It scans your scalp for brainwave signals to interpret yourmands. Since it’s external, it can only sense and process signals but can’t manipte them. So features like the dopamine circtor and pain editor won’t work. But monitoring disruptors and temporary ICE are fully functional.”


    “Turn off subtitles.” As Sun Jack thought themand, the subtitles vanished instantly.


    “Show information.” Instantly, names appeared above Song 6 and King Kong’s heads, and in a particrly cheeky touch, a link to Song 6’s livestream popped up below his name. ??Ν?Ｂès


    Lifting his cybeic arm, Sun Jack saw the ammo count disyed at the bottom left corner of his vision: Bullets: 124 | Grenades: 0.


    “So this is what it’s like to be connected,” Sun Jack murmured, marveling at the world through the augmented lens.


    With another thought, the shelves of prosthetics around the shop lit up, each item disying its type, price, and features in a detailed ovey.


    With this device, Sun Jack felt like his brain had gained the processing power of a supeputer—and this was just an external system. He couldn’t imagine how overpowered an internal neural system would be.


    “No wonder everyone’s so eager to install systems. These things are insanely convenient.”


    “However,” King Kong warned, “since your chip is external, you’ll need to protect it. If someone steals your device, your money and everything else linked to it will be gone.”


    To this, Sun Jack shrugged nonchntly, tapping the device on his head. “What’s the difference? If it’s imnted, wouldn’t they just bash my head in and dig the chip out anyway?”


    From the look of Song 6’s mental state, it was clear that people in this world wouldn’t hesitate to go that far without any moral qualms.


    “Haha, bro! Well said. If there weren’t any shady goods, where would all this stuffe from?” Song 6 chuckled as he scratched his back with a broken prosthetic limb.


    King Kong looked aghast. “Hey! My inventoryes from legitimate sources. Don’t nder me!”


    “Legit, huh? Then why the sneaky sales? Afraid of the cops?”


    “Selling this way is just... a tax dodge,” King Kong muttered defensively.


    Sun Jack’s eyes narrowed as he nced at the other chips on the table. “So these chips... they were dug out of people’s heads?”


    Oddly, he wasn’t shocked. Perhaps the city had numbed him to surprises. He simply epted it as another fact of life here.


    After King Kong gave hisbat prosthetics a thorough tune-up, the group returned to the funeral shop upstairs.n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om


    Sun Jack looked around at the shop, his new sses lighting up with a cascade of information. Everything seemed alive and vibrant in a way he hadn’t experienced before.


    As he silently activated the auto-trante feature, every unfamiliarnguage on the neon ads seamlessly switched to Chinese, and the garbled voices in the background transformed into understandable speech.


    “@ount setup,” he thought. Streams of binary data flowed before him, and a bnce of 0.0000@ appeared in the bottom-left corner of his vision.


    As Sun Jack tested the device’s other functions, a notification window suddenly popped up in his view.


    “Hey, bro! Add me as a friend! That way we can help each other out in the future!”


    “Sure thing. Thanks for the assist. We’re bros now,” Sun Jack replied, agreeing to the request.


    “A deal’s a deal. I knew you weren’t ordinary. Keep it up—Krv1loi isn’t someone just anyone can handle.” Song 6 grinned, pulling Sun Jack into a hearty embrace before heading to the car.


    After Song 6 left, Sun Jack continued tinkering with the system. It was fascinating, almost like being in a video game.


    But then, another notification popped up, this one with a ck frame.


    Seeing it, his heart skipped a beat.


    “In a ce like this, besides Song 6, who else would know me?”


    His mind raced with possibilities. Could someone in this city have recognized him? Had he been under surveince all along?