Alliance Country, Ring City.
8:00 AM. The faint morning light struggled to squeeze into the narrow alley.
"An E-57 model kidney, seventy percent new. Could fetch 4,000 yuan on the black market."
On the pockmarked concrete ground, Old Cheng used an iron hook to flip over a corpse. Its back looked like it had been sliced open by a combat blade, a gory mess revealing the shattered bionic organs within.
"Too bad. The left kidney is completely ruined."
"The artificial liver is just a basic model, too. Tsk, tsk. Probably another hot-headed kid who took out a loan against his organs."
Shaking his head as he spoke didn't slow his movements in the slightest. With practiced efficiency, he quickly dragged the body away.
Lu Chao watched the scene unfold without a word.
He just expertly spread out a black body bag and helped drag the corpse onto it.
A long bloody smear was left on the ground. He hooked his hands under the corpse's armpits, and even through the rubber gloves, he could feel a bone-deep cold.
The corpse's ghastly white face and wide-open eyes stared straight at him. Even though he had grown used to his new identity, it still made him uneasy.
"What a miserable life."
Turning his head slightly, Lu Chao avoided the dead youth's stiff gaze.
The concrete walls on both sides of the alley blocked out much of the sunlight. Not far away, five more bodies lay strewn about in pools of blood, with other figures in yellow-striped cleaner uniforms moving quickly toward them.
A month ago, he was just an ordinary office worker on Earth. The goriest thing he'd ever seen was a car crash.
But now, he dealt with corpses every day, gradually growing accustomed to the putrid, nauseating stench he once found unbearable.
He was now in the body of Lu Chao, a citizen of the Earth Star Alliance who happened to share his name.
Nineteen years old, and raised in an orphanage.
A C-level temporary worker for a third-party contractor assigned to the Patrol Department's cleaner team—this was his current identity.
SSSHHHK!
With that, the zipper closed, and the body bag bulged slightly.
"That guy, Old Huang, sure got lucky."
"The neural link on that body is still intact, and it's even got a Wasp II visual enhancer. Should be worth 8,000 yuan."
Old Cheng's voice rang out again, filled with undisguised envy as he jutted his chin toward the back of the alley.
Lu Chao followed his gaze. The alley was pocked with bullet holes, and dozens of gleaming brass shell casings lay scattered in a corner.
This was clearly the scene of a gang shootout. The firearms had already been taken.
Several colleagues were processing the five bodies strewn about nearby. One of them was carefully using a pair of tweezer-like tools to extract a pair of thin, contact lens-like devices shimmering with a faint silver light from a corpse's eye socket.
A visual enhancer worth 8,000 yuan—equivalent to two months' salary for a cleaner—was undoubtedly a hefty sum.
But...
"That doesn't seem to have anything to do with us," Lu Chao said with a casual shrug.
This past month had been enough for him to grudgingly adapt, absorb the original owner's memories, and understand the rules of survival for a cleaner.
After accepting a commission from the Patrol Department and being dispatched on a mission, they had to gather within a specified time to handle the bodies and clean the scene.
It sounded simple, but it came with certain risks. They might come into contact with unexploded ordnance or, in rare cases, face exposure to diseases and radiation from certain weapons.
As for any spoils from the body-collecting process, Patrol Department regulations stipulated that all bodies and cybernetics had to be taken back to the company morgue after the cleanup, after which the families would be notified to claim them.
No one was allowed to hide or dispose of them privately.
"And what if no one comes to claim them?"
Old Cheng chuckled, revealing his yellow, smoke-stained teeth.
"Then the company has to dispose of them to recover some of the cleanup costs."
"And whoever is in charge of storage and disposal naturally gets a one-percent reward."
The calculating look on his face made Lu Chao open his mouth to speak, but he said nothing.
"Right."
Without another word of protest, Lu Chao swallowed what he had been about to say.
Claiming a body required paying a cleanup fee, and some of the dead, like him, had no family to speak of.
It was obvious that people like that would be recycled for a second use, even in death.
The black market, back-alley clinics, pharmaceutical companies... countless eyes were watching.
'A fucked-up world,' Lu Chao thought to himself. This world was completely different from Earth.
Perhaps it was because it had gone through nuclear war, a wasteland era, and had established contact with extraterrestrial civilizations multiple times.
Even after rebuilding civilization, the Alliance Country still retained many of its blatantly barbaric rules.
WHOOSH!
As he was lost in thought, someone brought a pressure washer from outside the alley and began spraying down the ground.
Amidst the splashing, bloody foam flowed across the ground. Lu Chao gripped a mop and began scrubbing back and forth in coordination.
The bullet holes couldn't be fixed, but at the very least, they had to wash the block clean.
Bloodstains, urine, bits of flesh, and any potential radioactive residue—all had to be handled by his rubber-gloved hands.
His mind raced with thoughts as he worked in silence, his eyes fixed on the pools of blood on the ground.
"By the way, I heard they might cut our pay starting next month, us temps."
"Apparently, the company's not doing well, and the Patrol Department is tight on funds... I've been doing this for so many years, and for fuck's sake, instead of a raise, they're cutting our pay. We might even lose our jobs."
Old Cheng's frustrated voice reached his ears, and Lu Chao's movements stiffened slightly.
"Is that so?"
He had already heard the rumors.
'But where else could I go?'
With the advancement of AI and robotics, manual labor positions were becoming scarcer. News of factory layoffs was flying around everywhere.
Furthermore, the major corporations in Ring City, and even key government departments in the Alliance Country, were all raising their standards. The educational requirements had been getting stricter and stricter in recent years.
But seven years of primary education, four years of secondary education... the exorbitant tuition fees were enough to stop many in their tracks.
The body's original owner came from an orphanage and didn't have much of an education. This had already cut off most paths for upward mobility. Easy jobs were completely out of his reach.
Taking a deep breath, Lu Chao, still in his filthy cleaner's uniform, continued to mop the ground.
The air, a mixture of blood and rot, filled his nostrils.
A puddle reflected his gaunt, exhausted face. An emotion stirred within him.
Resentment.
Yes, that was it.
He didn't want to live a second life that was just as mediocre and precarious—stuck in a low-level job with a meager income.
He didn't want to end up as recycled material after he died, unable to even rest in peace.
And besides...
[Glutton: Lu Chao]
[Life Energy: 4]
[Potential Progress: 98%]
A translucent screen quietly floated before his eyes, but Old Cheng and the others around him didn't notice a thing.
After several experiments, Lu Chao had confirmed that only he could see it.
This was the source of his resentment, his deepest secret, and the foundation of his confidence to climb higher.
The golden finger that had appeared with his transmigration was named Glutton.
As long as he devoured biological resources, he could obtain energy and slowly increase his Potential Progress.
'Just a little more.'
Lu Chao glanced at the 98% progress bar.
Over the past month, he had pushed the progress forward through his three daily meals and by spending extra on nutritious food.
His intuition told him that when the progress reached one hundred percent, he would likely undergo some kind of change.
At this thought, his mopping paused for a fraction of a second.
Lu Chao looked out of the alley.
A floating car streaked across the sky, leaving a wake against the gray heavens and drawing gasps from below.
Neon signs hovered and crisscrossed between the high-rises, like a multicolored ocean of advertisements.
From both his predecessor's memories and his own research over this period, Lu Chao knew that this world, called Earth Star, not only possessed technology far beyond Earth's but also had Superpowers.
This was a result of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations—Superpower Knowledge from the stars, with power levels primarily ranked by Life Energy.
Life Energy could be developed through several methods, and each improvement would cause a person to gradually transform, transcending the ordinary.
For example...
BOOM!!
Suddenly, a deafening explosion shattered the oppressive silence of the alley.
Lu Chao's thoughts were instantly cut off. His ears rang, and his vision went dark for a moment.
In his stunned line of sight, he saw a figure get blasted several meters through the air, flying past him.
The atmosphere fell silent for a moment, the alley floor still trembling slightly.
Until...
"Old Huang?"
Lu Chao stared in disbelief as he recognized the figure's face.
His legs were blown apart, his cleaner's uniform in tatters.
Blood gushed from his entire body, and numerous black shrapnel fragments were embedded in his flesh. He was clearly on the verge of death, beyond saving.
"It's a micro-bomb!"
"Those crazy gang members! To think they'd hide something like this inside a body!"
An alarmed and angry shout came from the other side of the alley. Lu Chao whipped his head around.
A two-meter-wide collapsed crack, scorched black, had appeared in the concrete wall on the left side of the alley.
The body bag had exploded into fluff, its remnants burning on the ground. Another cleaner had a huge hole blown through his chest and was gasping and vomiting blood, the light fading rapidly from his eyes.
"What are you standing around for? Help him!"
"Quick, tell Leader Cui!"
"Old Huang, hang in there!"
THUD THUD THUD THUD!
A flurry of footsteps echoed as people from the logistics team rushed in from outside the alley, carrying old-fashioned medical devices.
Panic, anger, grief...
Old Cheng's voice was mixed in with the crowd, but Lu Chao no longer had the presence of mind to pick it out.
The other cleaner died before his eyes, and the attempts to save Old Huang failed. His breathing slowly stopped.
Lu Chao stood rooted to the spot, stunned.
People rushed back and forth in front of him.
After several long seconds, he felt something strange on his face and raised a hand to wipe it away.
A smear of cold blood was left on his palm—splatter from the explosion.
"He's dead..." Lu Chao murmured, finally coming to his senses.
Although his predecessor's memories contained similar scenes, and Old Cheng himself had warned him about the dangers of the job, it wasn't until this moment, clutching his fists as he watched two of his colleagues become corpses to be collected, that he truly felt the chilling helplessness.
A chill crept into his heart. Lu Chao took one last look at his panel.
'I have to get stronger!'
He had to get stronger.
He had to escape this situation!