The dazzling golden light nearly blinded Qin Shi. He stared blankly at the circuit board in his hand. "Brother Ze, what on earth did you drop? Some top-tier Legendary material?"
So many incredible affixes for the Martial Artist path!
Surely it wasn't some 99%-new, authentic original Martial God merchandise?
"I learned from Luo Ji that Qin Lihao had gotten his hands on the advanced textbooks that went missing from the Cadre School back then. He planned to give them to Chen Ruofu as a congratulatory gift, so I went to Jiú Sōng Port."
By a stroke of luck, Cheng Ze's irreversible Rustification had actually saved his life. Otherwise, with a wound as severe as a hole through his chest, he would have died from blood loss alone.
"Greed led me to make a terrible mistake. I never thought the container he used to seal away the textbooks and mask their presence would be some freakish thing parasitized by an Electronic Demon. The moment I touched it, I was bewitched.
"I'd planned to pull off one last job and run, then spend the rest of my life as a Traveling Merchant Ronin. Instead, things turned out like this..."
Cheng Ze leaned against the wall with a bitter smile, looking down at his charred skin.
Could he even be called "human" in his current state?
"Brother Ze, let's tell them everything and hope for leniency. Even a few years in prison would be better than turning into some half-human, half-ghost mechanical life-form. At least you'd still have your own mind."
Qin Shi tried to comfort him.
He was well versed in Eastern Xia's criminal law, and felt that Cheng Ze's situation wasn't all that serious—at least, it wasn't the kind of crime that warranted immediate execution without trial.
The severity of the