Chapter 457 - 429: Brain Demon (Part 2)

The picture shows men and women who were bound and brought here.

The reason for the sparse population in this area is that the spaces meant for living are now used to house people.

With the NCPD and Mox taking over the upper infrastructure, startling images began to appear in the database.

The Brain Demon Gang, like the Vortex Gang, are extreme modifiers, and uncontrolled modifiers can do a lot:

Like the former Vortex Gang, they would even chop off the limbs of passing youths and replace them with ill-fitting prosthetics. Neural inflammation would drive people insane, and the improper limbs would make living worse than death.

The information from the Cyber Modulator would be misinterpreted—raising an arm decoded as spinning around, gripping as letting go, and walking as squatting...

Such absurd mistakes would alter a person’s brain, eventually causing subtle and difficult-to-describe mental and neurological damage.

And the Skill Chip, as an innovative invention that digitally controls the human body to achieve effects, naturally has its barriers.

The Brain Demon Gang needs many test subjects to help them experiment with Skill Chips picked up from the black market, trash bins, and recycling stations to spot the pitfalls, some of which may be deadly.

When Reaver opened the door, a foul stench hit him—

Inside were neatly "stacked" a small pile of already dead bodies, rotting and stinking.

Most of these bodies had twisted limbs, displaced muscles, deformed bones, and most of their skin was charred and stinky as if burned, their expressions varied, horrifying enough to give one nightmares.

When experimenting with the Skill Chip, the person had to be alive; it’s hard to imagine what they went through.

Next to this testing site, there were a few deep-dive access pods...

But these were not ordinary network access pods.

The body data of those with cyber psychosis was incredibly chaotic; these ’bridge-linkers’ were "data miners" who synchronously experienced physical and mental pain—the pods were their "mining equipment."

Subjects with defective Skill Chips were very likely to become cyber psychotics. Data was hard to read, but using living people as neuro-bridges to indirectly read the data would reduce the pain and make the data more organized and readable.

However, mining this dirty data is as dangerous as some big companies mining data beyond the Black Wall. The harm comes from replicating the physiological state of cyber psychosis, and the AI attacks during the cross-over causing overload.

Both methods are cruel but effective and low cost, ensuring data integrity.

Moreover, when not experimenting, the Brain Demon Gang could also use virtual illusions to trick these people into performing simple calculations, turning them into human servers...

Of course, their efficiency definitely cannot be compared to that of professionally trained hackers or professional servers, but they are cheap, and it’s better than them remaining idle.

Nevertheless...

Nearly 200 victims were found in two buildings alone, men and women, young and old... the computational power they provided was not a small number either.

Not to mention the underground headquarters hadn’t been cleaned out yet.

[Su Xi: These beasts!]’

[Reaver: This is the most disgusting crime scene I’ve ever seen.]

V and Jack furrowed their brows tightly, their faces full of disgust.

The Scavenger treats people as commodities to be sold, while the Brain Demon Gang uses people as tools—truly birds of a feather.

"This is too sick..." Jostar agreed from the bottom of his heart.

V glanced at him, "You, a member of the Vortex Gang... have the right to say that?"

"We only experiment on ourselves! How is that cowardly?! We call it a dangerous ascent!"

Lille gave him a look—this young one truly was clueless.

Victims of the old Vortex Gang were no fewer in number. Brick might not organize such actions, but he also didn’t stop his subordinates from doing it.

[Reaver: We took down Jotaro righteously, and right next to the Phoenix Night Club, another Brain Demon Gang surfaced...]

[Reaver: Sometimes I wonder if Night City is just a place that can never improve, a cursed city.]

[Reaver: Take one down, another emerges, literally sprouting from the old corpse.]

Lille’s expression didn’t change much, but his disgust towards these things was surely even greater than theirs.

[Lille: There is still some change.]

He glanced at Jostar, who was arguing heatedly nearby.

[Lille: At least the new generation of Vortex Gang admits to only modifying themselves.]

[Reaver: If you put it that way... it’s more about comparing who is less worse, right...]

After the argument, Jostar muttered, "Without my mom, seems like she’s pretty lucky."

Jack laughed,"Honestly, I don’t know why you’re so critical of your mom, at least she raised you."

"Actually..." Jostar scratched his head, recalling how his mom had made several calls to him, "I don’t know either."

Sometimes, when teenagers run away from home, it isn’t always because of their parents.

Like Jostar, looking back, he just couldn’t accept what his mom was doing and happened to discover it exactly at that time...

But now thinking about it, it doesn’t seem like such a big problem anymore.

That bitch who didn’t care about herself anymore, he had his beloved prosthetics now.

The bastard who took that bitch away better not let him find him, or he’d use his beloved prosthetics and the boss’s shotgun to blast him into pieces.

It must be said, being mixed up with gangs, being on the streets really changes a person’s values pretty fast.

[Little Octopus: Big bro, actually I’ve always had a question.]

[Little Octopus: Why do we go on a rampage here, and yet be careful elsewhere?]

Lille sighed.

[Lille: We can’t choose where we’re born, sometimes it’s a good era, sometimes it’s a bad one.]

[Lille: Adapting to the environment is a must, an environment filled with murderers is certainly different from one screaming unity and love.]

[Lille: I just hope that in each environment, I can be someone who helps make it better.]

Here, life is viewed as disposable, and everyday violence is the norm, minimizing losses is already above the moral average.

The whole society maintains a high-intensity confrontational mindset, and at every level, everything is sacrificed for gain. You can pinpoint one specific individual’s wrongdoing, but it’s hard to convince yourself:

Killing one or two prime suspects will put an end to everything.

But in Marvel World... you should know that every major event inevitably comes with economic losses for bystanders, injuries, or even lost lives; doing so is surely low morality, and it wouldn’t be wrong to call it villainous.

Lille always maintains the mentality of learning from the masses at the grassroots level: If no one values others’ lives, don’t blame me for doing the same.

But he hopes to elevate, not to indulge here and then act as he pleases elsewhere searching for excuses to lower the standards to justify his actions, bringing the moral standards from here over there.

It has a kind of deranged feeling of threatening to kill someone’s entire family online and then acting recklessly in real life too.

[Little Octopus: Got it, flexible moral baseline.]

"Let’s move on and see what tricks the Brain Demon Gang still has."

Lille checked his equipment and looked towards the dark path leading to the basement.

Many people, out of self-interest, want him to block the European Company from entering the scene.

Lille would do so too, but his reason is that he doesn’t want Night City, this slightly improved mess, to start stinking again.

In the darkness, a camera tightly focused on the four people stepping into the basement.

...

[Host Information:]

[Surgical modification completed]

[This modification completed: 14 people]

[These technologies are just... great, nobody would dislike them.]

[You will like it.]

[Sophie: Can you handle that big guy?]

[Host: You will like it.]

[Sophie: This darn host, going on repeat again.]

[Elio: It’s still better than before... don’t complain, help me.]