Chương 63: Chapter 64: The Chinatown Sump Audit

The freezing mountain vault dissolved instantly into an unforgiving, absolute dark. Ethan pulled his hands away from the interface console, his real-world chest heaving in a sharp, ragged sequence of gasps as his physical nervous system disconnected from the neural grid. The virtual Midbar was gone. He sat forward on the edge of his narrow canvas cot, his bare skin instantly slick with the stagnant, humid heat of Room 12-04.

The low-frequency thrum of the Chinatown Sump's primary regional power cap vibrated straight up through the floorboards—a dull, heavy industrial hum that never truly stopped. He didn't jump back into the pod. His head was throbbing with severe neural fatigue, his eyes burning under the green glare of the room's single utility light. He stood up unsteadily, his bare feet touching the cold, damp linoleum. He walked three steps across the narrow concrete room to the sink, turning the tap to pour a cup of water.

He drank it slowly, leaning his forehead against the cold, vertical face of the wall. The walls were covered in cracked, chalky layers of cheap white paint that had blistered from the sump humidity, flaking off in dry gray scales onto the floorboards to reveal the raw, damp industrial concrete underneath. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes tracking the glowing digital block projected directly from the standard housing meter box screwed into the concrete over the sink.

The counter had officially rolled over the midnight threshold while he was tracking bronze hilts in the dark wadis: [MANDATORY SECTOR LIQUIDATION NOTICE] Chinatown Housing District — Sector 4 State Lease Reclamation Enforced. Purchasing Entity: Horizon Global Infrastructure Consortium.

Current Lease Status: Terminated. Eviction Grace Period: 58 Days. Replacement Allocation: Northern Sump Sector 12 — Legacy Block 88. WARNING: Allocated Replacement Sector operates on a strict Smart-Grid Cap. Max Wattage Throttled during peak load hours. Medical utility exemptions nullified. Ethan stared at the glowing crimson digits, his jaw tightening. Fifty-eight days left.

If he didn't secure the six thousand silver shekels for the private Jurong East pod, Horizon Global would dump them into Legacy Block 88, throttling his grandmother's life support during peak hours. A weak, sputtering click broke the silence of the room. Across the concrete floor, his grandmother had slid open the plastic shield of her therapeutic capsule. Her weathered eyes slowly adjusted to the green utility light, tracking her grandson's shadow by the sink.

"Ethan," she rasped softly, her voice a thin thread that caught on a shallow cough.

"Why are you still hovering by the tap? Come and sit down." Ethan swallowed the last of the tap water, consciously loosening his shoulders and forcing his face into a calm, easy expression before he stepped into the light. He sat down on the low plastic stool beside her capsule, reaching out to take her frail, paper-thin hand.

"Just clearing the neural lag, Grandma. I'm just taking a short break." She looked at his bloodshot eyes, her thumb idly rubbing his calloused knuckles.

"A break? You look like you haven't slept in three days." Ethan let out a soft, relaxed chuckle, intentionally masking the tightness in his chest.

"It's okay lah. Seriously. I'm just hustling hard in the game. We're doing really well now." She raised an eyebrow, her sharp old-school skepticism cutting through the dim room.

"Hustling hard? Don't try to act smart with me, Ethan. I have eaten more salt than you have eaten rice, okay."

"We have to move, Grandma. The land here is being taken away anyway," Ethan said softly, his voice warm but completely steady as he painted the illusion of absolute safety for her.

"But I've already made almost enough for a downpayment. We are getting out of this block before the deadline. I've already locked in the plans for the new place over Jurong East." She turned her head slightly, her gaze tracking past his shoulder toward the glowing crimson notice on the utility meter. A bitter, cold scoff escaped her lips. Her grip tightening around his wrist with sudden, trembling anger.

"Back in my day, the government would have never sold this land off to a commercial consortium for private profit. There used to be a social compact. They used to protect public housing." She snapped her eyes back to Ethan, her expression hardening with immediate, terrified suspicion.

"Tell me the truth, Ethan. Where are you getting this downpayment money so fast? You better not be doing stupid things like borrowing from loan sharks."

"I haven't touched the loan sharks, Grandma. Trust me," Ethan said.

"The new place has got a dedicated medical grid line—no caps, no throttles, and the air filtration system is fully automated. From the upper glass window, you won't just see the upper canopy gardens. You'll be able to look straight down toward the glimmering towers of Queenstown where you grew up, back when the air was clean and the sky was clear." She stared at him for a long, heavy moment, trying to find a crack in his confident facade.

But Ethan's gaze remained wide and peaceful, completely hiding the fact that his virtual workshop was currently reduced to dead dust and he was hiding in a wilderness cave. Slowly, the defensive tension left her weathered face, her eyes softening as she leaned back against her gray caked filtration pillow, her mind drifting to a sky she hadn't seen in decades.

"Queenstown," she murmured, a faint, genuine glimmer of hope breaking through her exhaustion.

"Clear air on the balcony again?"

"No lah, just inside the pod," Ethan joked, squeezing her hand gently.

"If we get those, then we'll really gotta borrow from loan sharks. It's just a tiny studio apartment, but it's a private property so we'll no longer be at people's mercy."

"Alright, child," she whispered, her eyelids growing heavy as the capsule's automated sensors began to cycle the low-power sedative oxygen back through her mask.

"Remember to take care of your body." The plastic shield slid closed automatically, sealing her back inside the quiet, protective hum of the pod. Ethan stood up slowly, the peaceful smile instantly dropping from his lips as his face hardened back into a cold, calculating line. Her parting words hung heavily in the stagnant, humid air of the room, pulling his eyes down to his own forearms. She's right, Ethan thought, a sudden wave of pragmatic realisation cutting through his focus.

When he first entered the game, he had been living hour-to-hour, treating his physical body like an expendable battery. He had simply left his body in the gaming capsule without a care, chasing fast, low-tier retail flips to survive. But pushing through the pain was only helpful in the short-term, he had to start playing the long game. His eyes drifted back to the black ring-bound binder hidden behind grandma's medical pod.

The stolen developer cheat sheet he bought off the underpaid QA intern had laid out a hidden key feature of the neural link architecture. It mapped a player's central nervous system. If a player let their real-world muscles atrophy or allowed their circulation to stagnate from prolonged immobilisation, their synaptic speed would tank. A healthy body maintained a healthy nervous system, that is to say, faster synaptic reaction time and better gaming performance.

Ethan could no longer treat his physical body as an afterthought—it was his only remaining asset. He didn't have the money for a modern gym, but he had to start somewhere. His mind automatically reached back to the gruelling, repetitive drills from his secondary school days, back when he had represented his school in Judo. It was a discipline he had long abandoned, but he still remembered the exercises that were engraved into his muscle memory.

He didn't have space to tumble or roll inside the small chinatown flat so he dropped straight down onto the cold floor, trying to do simple sets of push-ups, sit-ups and air squats. He stood up, slick with sweat, and grabbed a coarse, heavy rag from the wash basin. Wrapping his fingers tightly around the thick material, he executed a sequence of explosive, twisting towel-wringing sets.

The basic calisthenics and forearm exercise forced the blood flow rushing back through his body, clearing the neural fog from his brain. Once the trembling left his forearms and his physical pulse settled into a cold, steady line, Ethan grabbed a clean towel and a change of clothes and wiped himself down before stepping back into the gaming capsule.