The group continued to message back and forth, while Kenshin noted that there were other towers in the area. However, Sonar and he felt that grouping was the one the tunnel most likely led to.

  Trace placed his suit to the side and relaxed on his bed while participating in the messages. Corporations using the sewer system weren’t anything new, everyone wanting to avoid being noticed used them. Despite that, he had never heard of anyone putting that much security down there. In his admittedly limited experience, it was sort of an unspoken code that the runoff tunnels were for everyone. You could place certain safeguards near the entrances of your territory, but that was typically it.

  The gangs all did that.

  Once again, this was a perfect example of the corporations not playing by the rules everyone else abided by.

  Trace swallowed a couple of gel tablets that Sevorah had gotten for him. They were literally brain food and would help to keep his energy levels stable while he went through the enhanced learning modules. At the same time, he would also have the nanites scanning his brain every minute or so, collecting data for Deckard and her.

  The two were working together on this project, and he was their guinea pig.

  As long as he could keep studying and pushing forward, then he was mostly fine with it.

  ***

  Trace wiped away the crud from the corners of his eyes and took in the notification with a satisfied smile. The last few percent had slowed down, and with the nanites getting destroyed because of diverted energy that had also lengthened the process, some. Still, his muscles were finally done.

  - Muscular System Repair (Percent Completed): 100%

  - Muscular Strand Integration (Percent Completed): 02%

  - Skeletal System Integration (Percent Completed): 04.174%

  - Energy Diverted (Percent of Nanite Destruction): 11%

  He finally had a healthy body. All those years of living on the streets and abusing it just to stay alive, eating whatever he could get his hands on, had been fixed. Well, mostly, at least when it came to his skeleton and muscles. It didn’t mention anything about his intestines, nerves, or organs, and obviously, his brain was still a big dud.

  Still, he was miles better than he had been before he found Deckard.

  Hopping out of bed, he did a few light stretches and turned to the screen of the man in question.

  “Hey Deckard, you awake?”

  “I am now,” Came the sleepy, grumbled response as his avatar appeared on the screen. “What do you want?”

  “I’m going to make a big deposit on the warehouse to Georgie today. All that equipment we liberated and have been selling is going to help me pay for a chunk of this place. I was just wondering if you had been thinking about designs, for what you want done in the basement?”

  The man snorted. “Of course I have, and then I changed them, and changed them again. My original design was stratospherically expensive and had everything I could ever want inside it. That version was the wish list model, and since then I have been performing revisions. Each time, I will take another item away and run calculations, along with creating a virtual environment and checking how it all performs.”

  “In other words, you have ideas, but nothing finalized yet,” Trace summarized bluntly.

  “I’ve been busy,” Deckard huffed.

  “Whatever, that’s fine. Let me know when you have something. I’m going to hit up the tech market and then go to the junkyard.” Trace grabbed his mask, guns, and knife and headed to the tech market.

  As he was driving inside his truck, Trace pondered what he was going to do. Raiding that warehouse had truly proven to be a windfall of credits. However, all the scavs in New Denver had gone quiet in one way or another for the moment. He was sure they were still operating, only now they were being more secretive in their movements.

  In other words, he couldn’t count on another big payday anytime soon. Not one related to scavs in any case. There were still the gangs and everything outside the city walls. The gangs were giant question marks in his mind, as he had never really dealt with them before.

  That tiny one near his warehouse notwithstanding, and nearly all the good stuff there had been from the building's previous inhabitants. Sure, gangs had a ton of weapons, but did they have anything else that he and Monroe could sell?

  The point was, while Trace had originally been intending to send a chunk of change to Georgie, perhaps that wasn’t the smartest move.

  Just maybe, he should keep some of those credits, or even most of them, and buy himself a new learning module. It was a tough decision. Trace wasn’t used to saving money, even for a relatively small amount of time. Credits had always been hard won and gone the next second. There had never been enough of them to save, at least not longer than the next meal.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  He realized things had been changing for him. They had been for a long while now, and yet, this was the first time he had ever possessed extra.

  Bypassing the parking garage at the tech market, Trace made up his mind. He was going to buy a learning module, specifically one for intermediate system breaching. He had been going through the basic version of system breaching for a while now, and ever since he had gotten his most recent perk, it had started to really click for him. Pieces of information that his mind had been glazing over and ignoring had suddenly begun to appear and make sense.

  As it was, he finally felt confident in progressing to the intermediate course. It would be expensive, assuming he could even find it, but it should be doable. The learning modules tended to be cheaper than the specific use temporary application modules.

  He left the market behind and drove to the address he had gotten from Stick-Point weeks before. It ended up being near the junkyard on the east side of the city. Not super close to it, but within a few miles of it.

  He was actually near the old Asian market. The place he and Ko had been going to eat when they had gotten sidetracked by a cyberpsycho. Trace slowed as he passed the intersection where he had hopped out back then, his eyes looking for any lingering traces of the incident.

  Unsurprisingly, there was nothing. People wanted to move on with their lives and forget about those incidents as soon as possible. Construction was one of the few things that the city excelled at as a result. Destruction today, construction tomorrow, and a gleaming building the next day. It might just be a hollow shell, but it would hide the scars from view, and that was what mattered.

  Finding a somewhat decent place to park, Trace headed to the market. There were lines of tables all set up along a single path. On one side, there were the temporary application modules. While on the other, there were the learning modules. Further down, he spotted tables with used tech being displayed.

  The place was fairly crowded, however, everyone present was being respectfully quiet.

  Sticking to the side he wanted; Trace began perusing the modules one after another. Some had their price listed, but many did not. On those, he witnessed other people haggling with the seller on the price. It was a different form of business than what he was used to, and while he found the idea interesting; he knew he was going to be terrible at it.

  Sure enough, when he finally found the ‘Intermediate System Breaching’ learning module, there was no price listed on it.

  “How much for this module?” He asked, pointing to it.

  “Ah, as you know, modules are very expensive-”

  “No, those modules are expensive,” Trace countered, cutting the seller off, and pointing to the other side of the aisle. “Learning modules are cheap by comparison.”

  The seller sighed and raised a hand to their forehead. “Come on, it's a game. All the sellers do it and you’re supposed to play along.”

  “I… don’t know how to haggle,” Trace admitted. Even after watching the others do it for the last several minutes, the process still made absolutely no sense to him.

  Even after the seller explained to him how it worked, he was still confused. Why would they add this extra step to the selling process? Regardless, he did his best to play along with the seller, eventually buying the module for fifteen thousand credits. He thought that was a good price, but all he had to base it off of was the cost of the equivalent elementary temporary module, which ran at a minimum of sixty thousand credits.

  Trace stored the module in his pocket and paused, glancing at the seller. “If I may ask? Was what I just paid for this module a good price, or do I need to work on my haggling?”

  The seller laughed. “Oh, you definitely need to work on your haggling. That said, I went easy on you. You only overpaid by five hundred credits. Intermediate modules begin at thirteen thousand credits and go up to about twenty thousand, usually. I’ve only seen one or two rare ones go that high or higher before. Advanced modules begin at twenty-five thousand and go up to thirty-five thousand, but again, the same rules apply. As for expert modules…”

  The seller spread their arms helplessly. “Good luck finding those here. Strictly speaking, they shouldn’t be too much more expensive than the advanced modules, but the corporations rarely sell them. Scarcity drives up their prices a fair bit.”

  “Thanks for the information,” Trace smiled at them, not that they could see through the mask, as he turned away. “I’ll be back for more of these in the future.”

  He had thought that Pushman had spent absolute loads of money on his collection of learning modules. And he had just by the sheer number of them that he had. However, there was a world of difference between paying five to ten thousand credits for a basic learning module and the amounts he had previously been envisioning. Pushman had a few intermediate learning modules, but the vast majority of them were all basic.

  Now that he knew their actual prices, he would need to think more carefully about which ones he wanted in the future. They were indeed expensive, but they were also far cheaper than buying the temporary application versions.

  In this case, he was hoping to learn enough about system breaching so that he would be able to break into any car systems on his own in the future. He could already manage most low-end doors since they were never updated or patched. Newer doors were a problem still, but that was why he would continue to study and learn.

  If he had realized that the learning modules were that much cheaper than the application modules, he would have bought a couple of them long ago. It was his own fault for taking this long to make the trip, and for not asking more questions, he supposed.

  Regardless, now that he did know, his next trip wouldn’t be too far off. He already knew that much.

  The day was still in its early hours and Trace was feeling like it was going to be a good day as he drove to the junkyard Monroe liked. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking for, but that was how these sorts of trips had usually gone for him. He would go out hunting for scrap material, old electronics, and just random items.

  It might not be something that he strictly speaking needed to do anymore, but that didn’t mean he was going to stop completely. It was still something that Trace enjoyed doing, along with being a valuable way to get materials and practice his various skills. As long as you were willing to sort through the trash, then you never knew what sort of awesome stuff you might find.

  https://www.amazon.com/author/joshuakern

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