Chapter 199

This planet belonged to the Jiang Consortium. It housed the research center and pharmaceutical factories of the consortium’s medical group.

A great many legal and illegal studies were conducted here.

Large numbers of drug-test subjects underwent human experimentation on the planet. If they were unlucky enough to die, the liability waiver in the agreement they had signed absolved the company of responsibility. At most, their families received a payment to settle the matter quietly. But in this era, reproduction, sex, and marriage had all become separate matters, so quite a lot of people had no family at all. If they died, they died.

That was capitalism for you. Never harbor any illusions about capital.

Everyone living on the planet was either an employee of the medical group or an employee’s family member.

The entire surface of the planet was covered in greenery, making it look exceptionally beautiful.

There were no “roads” on the ground. All routes were in the air, and daily commuting was primarily conducted through transport tubes.

Skyscrapers towered everywhere. In the spaces between them, public transit tubes crisscrossed and wound through the area less than one hundred and fifty meters above the ground like blood vessels. Public transit vehicles sped through the transparent tubes.

At the intersections, vehicles approaching from different directions frequently roared past one another with a time difference of only 0.1 seconds, creating an extremely dangerous spectacle. In reality, however, every public transit vehicle in the tubes was centrally coordinated and efficiently operated by computers. The seemingly perilous 0.1-second gap would never result in a collision.

Above one hundred and fifty meters was the airspace for private flying cars, shuttles, and airships.

Private vehicles were “hung” outside the balconies of buildings, allowing their owners to board directly from home.

There were no underground parking garages here.

That was why, during the first zombie outbreak, when Jiang Cheng led the residents of the youth apartment complex in clearing out the zombies, they had completely overlooked the underground parking garage.

“Jiang Cheng” did not own a private vehicle. She had hardly ever gone down to the complex’s underground levels.

And in Jiang Cheng’s world, she had never even seen a design like an underground parking garage.

Neither of them had any frame of reference that connected to the concept of an underground parking garage.

Jiang Cheng slept soundly.

Her brain had effectively gone without rest for one hundred and twenty hours.

This was the first time she had truly slept.

After waking up, she went to the research institute’s psychic-energy testing building. Most research and experiments involving the brain and psychic energy were carried out there.

The spacious, lofty office contained luxurious sofas facing a curved wall of floor-to-ceiling windows.

Jiang Cheng stood before the glass and gazed into the vast space outside—

The twenty-story-high wall was an integrated array of fluid chambers. The entire wall was densely packed with them, resembling countless coffins. A drug-test subject lay inside each one, having sold the use of their brain to a pharmaceutical company for research.

Numerous robots flew busily through the air, maintaining the integrated chamber wall.

They pulled out some chambers and inserted others.

They regulated the various drugs added to the nutrient solution and monitored the vital signs of every subject.

From time to time, a chamber’s red alarm light would flash, indicating that the experimental subject inside was in critical condition. The robots would then fly over at once to make adjustments and attempt a rescue.

Jiang Cheng sat down on the sofa. Dozens of light screens unfolded before her simultaneously.

The screens were filled with people she knew.

Although many of them looked different in reality from how they had appeared in the “World,” she could still recognize them at a glance.

“Li Jiangbing” was still a huge man—massive beyond belief.

That was because more than eighty percent of his body had already been mechanized.

Medical technology was highly advanced in this era. But advanced technology did not mean widespread access. Cutting-edge treatments came with exorbitant prices.

In this era, the average natural lifespan of a “natural human”—someone born without genetic selection—was one hundred years.

The average lifespan of a genetically selected person was between 135 and 150 years.

For a super-selected person like Jiang Cheng, the projected natural lifespan was between 150 and 170 years.

But the rich and powerful could live far beyond 170 years. They had all kinds of methods for extending their lives to around 220 years, or even longer.

Organ replacement using biochemically grown organs cultivated from one’s own body was the best option, but it was expensive.

Mechanical replacements were the worst option, but they were cheap.

The result was that once more than eighty percent of a person’s body had been mechanized, they automatically lost their citizenship and became subhuman.

They had no right to vote, could not participate in political elections, and could not sit for civil service examinations.

They received unequal pay for equal work. For the same job, they could earn only fifty to seventy percent of the standard salary, and they were usually restricted to low-end work.

“Li Jiangbing” had only his head, neck, one shoulder, and one arm left. Everything else was mechanical.

His mechanical body had been designed in the exaggerated form of a muscular man. The term “exaggerated” was relative to a normal human body. In truth, the fact that he still retained a human shape was not particularly exaggerated.

That was simply how society worked. Employers liked those bizarrely shaped mechanical bodies. It seemed that the more inhuman the design, the more it amused them. As a result, people with grotesque mechanical forms found it easier to get jobs.

Li Jiangbing’s entire body was hard and rigid. No wonder his supernatural ability was water-based and soft.

He must have longed for a soft body.

The forty thousand subjects were released in batches.

In the plaza-like rest hall, “Li Jiangbing” found “Su Yu.”

In the “World,” Su Yu’s bones had all been shattered.

The real-life “Su Yu” was hardly any better.

She lay on a hovering bed.

At a glance, the bed was clearly a cheap, crudely assembled secondhand model.

Anyone who was willing to sell their body to a pharmaceutical company for all kinds of experiments could not possibly be financially well-off.

They became drug-test subjects precisely because they were poor.

“Li Jiangbing” sat beside Su Yu’s bed and spoke with her.

Both of them were shy and gentle.

But Su Yu’s condition looked terrible. She could not even raise the bed into a sitting position like an ordinary patient.

Her entire body was limp, bones included.

Jiang Cheng asked, “What’s Su Yu’s condition?”

She looked like she was about to die.

Uncle Jiang pulled up her records. “She was an elementary school teacher. When the accident occurred on Beiyu-3 Mining Planet, she was there with her students on an educational field trip.”

The various illnesses of ancient Earth—including cancer and AIDS—had long since been treatable in this era.

The common and troublesome illnesses of this age were various forms of radiation sickness.

Uncle Jiang continued, “When the Beiyu-3 mining disaster occurred, there weren’t enough seats in the escape pods. She put her students inside and stayed behind. Her entire skeleton has now turned gelatinous. Temporary supports were installed in her brain and chest cavity to keep them functioning.”

Su Yu’s problems were not limited to her bones. Her brain and internal organs had also been irradiated, and she was slowly approaching death.

She was only an ordinary-salaried teacher. Just keeping herself alive had already exhausted all her savings.

Jiang Cheng said bitterly, “Why is she such a bleeding heart everywhere she goes?”

Then she said, “Let me hear what the two of them are saying.”

Numerous small metal spheres hovered in the air throughout the rest hall. They were surveillance cameras.

No one paid them any attention. This was the rest hall of a pharmaceutical company’s experimental building, a public space.

One of the metal spheres received the command and flew silently over to the two of them.

From her side, Jiang Cheng could now hear their conversation clearly.

“Li Jiangbing”: “I’ve saved up some money. Let’s replace your skeleton first. Biochemical bone is out of the question—the money isn’t enough. We’ll start with a metal skeleton.”

“Su Yu”: “It wasn’t easy for you to save that money. Don’t waste it on me. I’ll just live one day at a time.”

Li Jiangbing was a demi-human, and his pay was already lower than that of ordinary people.

He didn’t even have a body he could sell to pharmaceutical companies for quick money by participating in research. The only medical studies he could sign up for were psychological ones.

Su Yu said, “It’s all right. I do have some research value. I signed a long-term observation contract with them. They collect data on radiation decay and organ failure from me. My basic living expenses are covered. Is the money you have enough to buy a heart? You should get a cultured heart first. Then you’ll be able to reclaim your citizenship.”

Legally speaking, that was possible.

But in reality, Li Jiangbing looked completely mechanical. Even if he regained his citizenship with the help of a biochemical heart and became entitled to equal pay, he would still face discrimination in the real world.

Employers might not be willing to hire a machine-man who had to be paid at least the minimum wage for citizens. There were plenty of cheaper machines.

Li Jiangbing held Su Yu’s soft, mollusk-like hand, carefully, as though he were afraid of crushing her bones.

Tears fell from his eyes.

Jiang Cheng felt a surge of anger.

This was exactly why ultra-high-fidelity virtual worlds had been banned by the government.

Jiang Cheng, a natural-born capitalist, and these people—or, more precisely, these poor people—came from two entirely different worlds. They would never have crossed paths in their entire lives.

But after ten months of sharing life and death and working together in the “world”—the equivalent of 120 hours in reality—she was now nearly moved to tears by these two poor, unfortunate souls.

How could she not be angry?

Uncle Jiang cast a furtive glance at her.

Jiang Cheng didn’t feel like dealing with him.

It had been nothing more than an ordinary treatment session.

Those two lumps of quantum cloud had turned it into this mess just to smuggle in their own agenda. She would settle accounts with them later.

She pulled up Su Yu’s file.

Su Yu had effectively sold her ruined body to a pharmaceutical company as research material in exchange for the basic necessities of survival.

She was currently living on this planet. She went nowhere—and, of course, she couldn’t go anywhere.

Her condition required chemotherapy, as well as a bone transplant. Ideally, all her internal organs would be replaced too. Otherwise, even if the chemotherapy succeeded, her lifespan would still be drastically shortened.

The most expensive part was the chemotherapy. The compounds needed to treat the type of radiation damage she had suffered were extremely costly.

Jiang Cheng entered a string of commands.

Uncle Jiang stole another glance at her.

He simply enjoyed imitating the actions of carbon-based humans.

In reality, as the assistant computer to the operations executive, he had no need to “sneak a look.” Every command Jiang Cheng issued had to pass through him.

The only difference was whether she gave him a verbal command directly or entered it through the light-screen interface. In the end, all the data would still pass through Uncle Jiang’s “brain.”

In the hall, two young men found each other and embraced in delight.

One was a university student, the other a high school student.

The university student was Zhao Yi, and the high school student was Gao Yuxuan.

It wasn’t yet the start of the school term in their star sector, and both young men wanted to earn as much tuition money as they could before classes began.

“Holy shit, you know how I died?” Gao Yuxuan gestured animatedly as he told Zhao Yi. “A giant zombie beat me to death, holy shit.”

“When I died, I found out what had happened. The system data reassigned me to play a zombie. Hahaha, I understood everything right then, hahaha. But zombies had fixed behavior commands, so we couldn’t control ourselves.”

After chatting for a little while, the two confirmed that although they were slightly different in age in reality, they could still become kindred spirits.

After all, they had been drawn to each other in the virtual world because of the foundation provided by their real-life personalities and interests.

Gao Yuxuan had far too many things he wanted to discuss with Zhao Yi.

“The timeline should have been around the ancient Earth’s turn of the millennium. I’m especially good at history, so there’s no way I’m wrong.”

“Actually, move the timeline forward another ten or fifteen years, and ‘zombies’ wouldn’t have been a problem at all. They’d have been taken out instantly. I’ve read A History of Drone Development—you know, drones had already been invented by then.”

“But did ‘zombies’ like that really exist? It doesn’t seem to make much sense.” Gao Yuxuan was bursting with curiosity. He would definitely look up the historical records when he got back.

Zhao Yi’s range of knowledge was broader, and he knew a little about the subject. “You’re younger, so you might not know this, but the original concept may have been based on heavy addicts of ‘Happy Mood.’”

“What the hell is that?”

“A kind of drug. It was popular for a while when I was a kid. People who took too much of it would completely lose their minds and become extremely aggressive. There was no way to bring them back. Whenever the police encountered one, they shot them on sight instead of making an arrest. The drug was banned later. For a while, public security in the area where I lived deteriorated badly because of it. That’s why my foster parent took me and moved away.” [Note]

Gao Yuxuan had far too many things he was dying to discuss with Zhao Yi.

But Zhao Yi had something more urgent to deal with.

“We’ll talk about all that later!” he said. “Help me find Lesi, quick. I’m afraid she’ll twist my ear if I don’t find her first.”

Gao Yuxuan burst out laughing.