hotmtlnovel Chapter 17: The System
Chapter 17: The System
chapter 17: the system
sun jack held the chip in his hand and voiced his request to king kong.
he had spent all of last night pondering and ultimately decided that directly implanting 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 explanation 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 replacing his entire body with metal parts.”
as he spoke, sun jack gave tapai a hearty pat on the shoulder. tapai played 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 alarm. “don’t touch it! that thing’s dangerous. it can transfer consciousness. i barely managed to disable it after a huge struggle. if you accidentally 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 circular metal device resembling a pair of eyeglass frames. he installed the chip into the device and handed it to sun jack.
taking a deep breath, sun jack placed the odd contraption on his head.
with a hiss, a bright yellow light flashed in front of his eyes. to his surprise, it was a pair of glasses—not with glass or resin lenses but a projected virtual display.
“selling this way is just... a tax dodge,” king kong muttered defensively.
sun jack’s eyes narrowed as he glanced 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 accepted it as another fact of life here.
after king kong gave his combat prosthetics a thorough tune-up, the group returned to the funeral shop upstairs.
sun jack looked around at the shop, his new glasses 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-translate feature, every unfamiliar language on the neon ads seamlessly switched to chinese, and the garbled voices in the background transformed into understandable speech.
“@account setup,” he thought. streams of binary data flowed before him, and a balance 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 black frame.
seeing it, his heart skipped a beat.
“in a place 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 surveillance all along?