By the time Lin Miao arrived at the Stone Ridge Mountain Tunnel, it was already noon.
If it weren’t for Lucy wrapped in a blanket hiding by the bed, refusing to go any further, Lin Miao might have skipped work for the first time since the game launched.
He hadn’t even called in sick.
However, because Lin Miao had assigned the tasks in advance, the players arrived at the Stone Ridge Mountain Tunnel just after nine, but Sol and the others had no complaints.
After all, they had fought so intensely yesterday; what’s wrong with sleeping in a bit?
In recent years, the Night Wanderer had significant losses outside the city due to Dog Town issues, and their income declined year by year. But after all, they’ve operated here for fifty to sixty years. In the tunnel, their stash is truly a mixed bag.
Many things were left in the depths of the tunnel branches because they were hard to transport, hard to sell, or not valuable enough. Over time, even the Night Wanderers themselves forgot about them.
Some might have been there for twenty or thirty years until the players arrived and opened the containers once again, bringing the items to light.
Weathered books crumbled when touched, heaps of disorganized clothes, cloned meat that had mostly gone bad.
Tons of metal ingots, heavy and not precious metals, mostly copper, iron, steel, tin, and difficult to smuggle.
Who knows if they robbed a train only to find it full of iron, and then left it alone.
Engines, oil pumps, cylinders, compressors, electric hydraulic pumps... These items clearly had a special appeal to the Night Wanderers. This American biker gang loves modifying vehicles, so they hoarded a large number of car parts in the tunnels, even having a specific area for car modifications, with quite a bit of Chun Er and gasoline stored as well.
These items, Lin Miao thought, could be displayed in a shop and sold to players, inspiring their worldly intelligence to create vehicles of their own.
The alternate dimension version of the Crucible Car!
In serialized fashion!
Food, not much to say, the vast majority were synthetic foods, with only a very small portion of canned goods, but...
"Lin Miao, you’d better come over."
The communication was from Sol’s side.
"Did you find something valuable?"
"I don’t know if it’s valuable, but I think you better come and take a look."
Sol paused for a moment before continuing.
"Remember not to attract attention when coming over, especially Panam, don’t let her follow."
Sol’s tone was heavy, indicating that the item they found wasn’t convenient to discuss over coms, urging Lin Miao to come over.
The location Sol provided was deep in a tunnel branch, where the temperature was lower than in other tunnels.
Halfway there, players Tutu and Adcardo’s Scorpion stood guard, but both had unnatural expressions on their faces.
Seeing his boss arrive, Tutu quickly came up, tugging at Lin Miao’s clothes as he complained,
"Boss, it’s so disgusting in there, damn! They’re like living CS."
Hearing the players say that, Lin Miao grew even more curious,
"What’s going on? What did you find?"
Tutu whispered a few words in Lin Miao’s ear, causing his brows to furrow,
Promptly heading toward the depths of the tunnel, not forgetting to leave a word to Scorpion,
"Keep an eye on Panam, it’d be best if Mitch took her out of the tunnel and off somewhere else."
The further in he went, the lower the tunnel’s temperature, even to the point where breathing created visible mist, and thick cables could be seen on the ground, clearly powering some kind of high-powered electrical device.
It was a freezer room.
A huge iron door blocked the way, with Sol waiting patiently at the entrance.
Lin Miao asked, "How many are there inside?"
"Thirty-three..." Sol sighed, "We even found some of our own people, who we thought had been victims, but didn’t expect..."
He shook his head, not continuing, turning to open the freezer door, walking into the chilly air, Lin Miao still wondered how the bare-chested man dared to enter like that.
If the players were to shoot a horror movie in the future, the scene Lin Miao witnessed would undoubtedly be an excellent source material.
Frost lined the grey-white walls, faint mist surrounded shadowy figures hanging from the beams, motionless.
These were all naked corpses, male and female, most of their limbs had been cut, with only a few having intact arms and legs, some with their stomachs cut open, entirely empty, internal organs entirely missing, clearly taken by the Night Wanderers.
"Why did the Night Wanderers hang them here?"
"I heard these things are only done by scavengers, right? And these were just unconfirmed rumors."
Strictly speaking, Lin Miao might have been knowingly asking, because what he did could be worse than what the Night Wanderers did, but villains didn’t have human rights.
As for cannibalism... honestly, it’s not like there’s no food, who would go crazy enough to eat their own kind.
"There are some things... I don’t know if you’ve heard of them," Sol’s tone was calm, but Lin Miao could sense the anger buried beneath.
"Two years ago... a production environment air report from a major food factory detected suspected red blood cells and E. coli cell remnants... but the company’s marketing department covered it up."
"Guess how I found out? They threw the test technician’s corpse on a garbage heap, but forgot to remove the chip from the body."
Lin Miao thought Sol was joking
Damn, 70% of Night City’s food comes from this Mexican food factory, even his and the player’s food largely comes from this company.