In a sense, the original owner hadn't been entirely wrong.
In the universe, civilizations were as numerous as the stars. Nearly half of them were mechanical civilizations, and three of the six most advanced level-nine civilizations belonged to the mechanical faction.
Besides the inherent strength of mechanical civilizations, this phenomenon was also caused by the fact that mechanical ascension was the easiest of the four ascension methods to trigger.
However, the most numerous weren't necessarily the strongest.
Gao Gong glanced at the personal systems on his attribute panel and breathed a sigh of relief.
Motor System: 9% Nervous System: 5% Endocrine System: 1% Circulatory System: 5% Respiratory System: 1% Digestive System: 1% Urinary System: 1% Reproductive System: 1%
The modification rates of the eight major systems differed by less than 10% between the highest and lowest.
That meant there was still a chance!
Human modification was irreversible. Once it exceeded 10%, he could only follow the original owner's envisioned path of becoming purely mechanical. Since it hadn't exceeded 10%, there was still a chance to save himself.
As far as he knew, the most powerful civilization in the observable universe was indeed a mechanical civilization—but not merely a mechanical civilization.
He had returned to the pre-beta stage of Cyber World. The Mechanical Uprising had yet to begin, the World of Infinite Powerhouses had yet to appear, and the Ancient Ruin, Ancient Corpse Plague, and Quantum Crisis were all still far off in the middle and late stages of the game. As for the three great disasters that would later drive people to despair, there wasn't even the slightest sign of them now.
An opportunity this good would only come once.
Only the strongest could control their own destiny.
As the power came on, a tingling sensation spread throughout his body. Under the regulator's adjustment, the current was kept within the range the human body could tolerate.
In the modified circulatory system, cells transmitted impulses in response to the stimulation, pierced their membranes, generated a potential difference, and activated bioelectric currents, thereby improving his mental state.
The essence of bodily mechanization was to continually modify the human body, gradually replacing the life processes of its systems with bionic systems.
As the modification rate increased, he would eventually need only a certain amount of electricity each day for his body to secrete a day's worth of nutrients.
It was practically miraculous!
It was said that some biological companies in Night City had already developed a human-body fast-charging technology—charge for five minutes, stay energized all day. Human circulation technology: you deserved to have it.
However, only pure-blooded mechanical beings with a 100% modification rate could completely free themselves from consuming food and water. Gao Gong's charging mainly stimulated his mental state, keeping him from passing out on the way back to the city.
In this Iron Sand Desert, fraught with danger, threats were everywhere: natives, mutants, and half-mechanical creatures. Passing out was no different from waiting to die.
Yet the person on the other end of the walkie-talkie didn't sound angry. Instead, he said with interest:
"With just you alone, you managed to wipe out an entire knight squad of mine. Not bad, very impressive. Would you be interested in joining our knight order? I can grant you a higher level of modification, help you cross the threshold of an artificial soldier, and make you one of our combatants directly."
"How high is this higher-level modification? Higher than yours?"
"Compare yourself to me? My position is probably beyond your imagination," the other person said with a laugh.
"To be honest, my imagination is definitely beyond yours too."
Gao Gong climbed onto the hood of the off-road vehicle and narrowed his eyes as he gazed into the distance. His tight T-shirt, already almost completely ruined, had been torn off, revealing his sturdy upper body. Three thumb-thick cables were still plugged into him. The desert's characteristic hot wind blew against his face, and the iron tag around his neck clattered, revealing a ruggedly patterned letter G.
"Young man, don't get too full of yourself. This world is far bigger than you imagine!" The other party finally sounded impatient.
Gao Gong gave a mocking laugh, shook himself, and flicked out his last cigarette. He tossed the pack out of the vehicle, jumped inside, and stomped hard on the accelerator.
"If the world is so big, how could I settle for being a slave to an artificial intelligence?"
"What do you think, former military AI—War?"
The Iron Sand Desert had once been a city cluster from the age of the old civilization. During a certain mechanical war, it had first been plowed by nuclear explosions and then swept by some massive energy weapon. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but ruins and wreckage.
The sky was filled with thick, murky nuclear dust. Under the combined effects of nuclear and energy pollution, the surviving plants and animals had undergone a kind of mutation, forcing their bodies to expel vast amounts of radiant heat.
In other places, nuclear winter would inject soot and dust into a planet's atmosphere, blocking light from reaching the surface and causing temperatures to plummet. All life would wither, and not a blade of grass would grow.
But here, the combination of huge numbers of radiation creatures and mutated plants had created a unique post-disaster environment. Instead of falling, the temperature had risen wildly. Ordinary people could never survive here; even mechanically modified humans found it difficult to endure the desert's radiation zones.
The habitable areas were all regions modified by corporations. The locals called them oases.
The off-road vehicle accelerated to full speed, kicking up a sky of sand. Its destination was one of those oases.
Inside the vehicle, Gao Gong observed the surrounding environment while studying the NPC template he had stolen.
He hadn't taken the knight order executive's recruitment offer to heart.
Although the knight order was also a powerful underground force on this planet, and its flesh-and-machine technology was an object of imitation for countless corporations, a player had once boastfully published the knight order's hidden quest chain on the forums. The rewards had indeed been generous.
Later in the planet's main storyline, there had even been players who licked their way to the end, spending countless resources building reputation and improving favorability until they ultimately became high-ranking members of the knight order.
Then he had fallen into a pit.
Every knight in the knight order would be modified into a sub-body—or, more precisely, a clone—of that military artificial intelligence.
Although a knight could retain his own personality template and memory bank, whenever War required it, it could directly control the consciousness of every high-ranking member—including the player's account.
It was basically free account leveling for an NPC.
With behavior like that, it was even worse than Night City's monopolistic corporations.
The major corporations might also use all sorts of methods to control their employees, including but not limited to storing employees' thoughts in read-only mode in corporate databases, injecting artificial adrenaline into employees while they worked overtime under the guise of free medical care, or implanting high-frequency chips directly into their connection pods and releasing intense electronic noise during their vacations—but at least they paid wages.
Compared with the knight order, the major corporations actually seemed respectable.
Even if those wages passed through one, two, and three sets of hands before eventually returning to the corporations' pockets.
"Tsk, tsk. A cyber laboratory. Since it's a laboratory, it naturally needs experimental materials. And aren't postwar humans the best consumables?"
It wasn't just Crack Star. Every player's starting location and beginner's village was some kind of cyber laboratory.
The definition of a cyber laboratory was the exploration, research, and development conducted by advanced civilizations into different types of civilizational ecosystems and the technology trees that grew within those social ecosystems.
It could be a supercorporation monopolizing everything, artificial intelligence controlling the future, alien species invading by force, or a survival environment resembling the apocalypse. It could even involve cloning culture, biological crises, or a chaotic grand party between intelligent species from different planets.
In the gray zone of the Civilization Council, varied civilizational technology trees were taking root and sprouting in an anti-civilizational manner.
Just as players would summarize it later—
In this game, two things obstructed technological development: peace and ethics. War solved peace, and this place solved ethics.
This was the cyber laboratory.
For players, however, this wasn't a bad thing.
That was because this place possessed huge amounts of experimental, forbidden, and advanced technology. Players could use these technologies to achieve a cross-civilization increase in strength.
Planetary civilizations were all level-one civilizations. At this civilizational scale, the level cap for a primary profession was level 30, or the first tier. But within cyber laboratories, there was scientific knowledge and experimental research capable of reaching the second tier or even the third tier.
"Here they come!"
Gao Gong abruptly raised his head. Three black dots in the sky were approaching him at a speed visible to the naked eye.
The knight order's drones!
From the moment Gao Gong had made his move, he had known that with the knight order's ruthless style, it would never let the matter go so easily.
There was even more direct proof: on the game panel, the quest Desperate Run for His Life was still marked [Incomplete].
Beep, beep, beep—
Name: Military Technology Eagle No. 3 Type: Drone Quality: Fine Weight: 38 kg Flight Altitude: 5,000 meters Control System: Low-level military chip Energy: No. 3 energy battery (6-hour endurance) Flight Module: 4 pressurized thrusters Attack Module: Miniature machine cannon ×100 (rounds); 2 small anti-armor missiles; 1 micro-rocket Attack Range: 2,000 meters Shield: 200 Attached Template: Destruction Mode (creates an explosive shockwave against objects within a 5×5-meter area) Note: Although this is military technology from the old era, it remains practical after undergoing countless actual battles.
In Cyber World, equipment was divided into white-grade (assembly-line products), fine (custom templates), excellent (weapons of war), rare (strategic weapons), epic (black technology), and epoch-making (cross-civilization).
White-grade equipment was the most common weaponry. Fine equipment was equivalent to a faction specialty, while the knight order's old-era military technology unquestionably belonged to the latter category.
Gao Gong abruptly wrenched the steering wheel. The next moment, a fierce chain of gunfire whipped up a huge cloud of dust, barely missing the rear compartment.
At the same time, Gao Gong heard faint whooshing sounds beside his ears. Then, violent explosions sent waves of mud rolling toward the roof, almost instantly smearing the windows yellow.
One chased while the other fled, and the scenery outside the vehicle changed so rapidly that it dazzled the eyes.
Gao Gong nearly twisted the steering wheel into a pretzel. The windshield wipers clattered, while his foot repeatedly stomped the accelerator in varying rhythms, disrupting the drones' tracking systems.
If these had been the most advanced drones in Night City, they would certainly have been equipped with tracking weapons and precision-strike systems, the perfect weapons for dealing with the city's super-modified humans and cyberpsychos.
With an even more violent approach, they could directly connect their electronic signals to the Armed Space Station in planetary orbit and carry out a large-scale physical purge—the so-called "justice from above."
A strike of that level could easily have dealt with Gao Gong.
However, if things were really that extreme, the difficulty of this quest wouldn't have been merely "Normal." Above Normal were Hard, Nightmare, Hell, and even Cross-Civilization-level quests.
In fact, the combined firepower of the three drones had already exceeded the Normal level to some extent.
An increase in difficulty in one aspect would inevitably lead to a decrease in another.
Gao Gong knew why. In fact, once the first wave of attacks had failed to hit him due to anything particularly unlucky, he knew he was in the clear.
The vehicle turned, its engine roared, and the off-road vehicle charged into the concrete forest.
Before you continue