Legs, waist, chest cavity...

John's body from the bottom up, no longer responded to his own thoughts.

He used his last "permissions" and turned his head to look at the hand propped against the wall.

Messiah's Eye activated automatically.

John's vision was covered by an aqua blue halo, a massive data grid, spreading outwards with his palm as the center...

The wall was divided.

The lights were replaced by diffused rays.

Colorful fog drifted in the air, but it wasn't the smoky atmosphere of the central ring, but compressed sound information—marked with source tags, visible waves, and decibel attenuation curves.

They stacked together, forming what looked like a huge mist filling the entire corridor.

John was overwhelmed by the massive data, struggling to breathe.

"Ah, huff..."

His throat surged, losing all his bodily permissions in the irresistible tidal wave of nerves.

"Damn it, John, are you okay?"

Macao noticed John's abnormality, caught up in two steps, observing with a frown, almost to support him, yet feared a mercenary's cyber psychosis outbreak.

"I'm fine."

[I'm fine.]

John's consciousness was jolted.

He clearly heard Kenichi Sora's voice in his mind, but the words he just said to Macao came from his own mouth.

[I will...]

"I will delay the betting system by 34.2 seconds, tell Gino to put the money in before the closing, remember, it's all the liquid assets."

"John" fully returned to normal.

He stood at the end of the passage, bathed in the strong light of the central ring, flexing his body while adjusting the state of his prosthetic body, performing small jumps and quickly punching at invisible targets.

Just very simple warm-up exercises.

Macao, however, saw the image of a mature boxer, and only after one or two seconds reacted to John's words.

He immediately refused. "Listen to me, John, many boxers experience a false sense of well-being after a concussion..."

Beep—

Macao's words were interrupted by a transfer.

Inside was all the funds that could be mobilized from John's electronic account, the meaning was simple, he wanted Macao to help place a bet on himself winning.

At the same time.

Sitting in the boxer's lounge, not daring to go out to see off, Gino also received a special message.

It was an encrypted secret key.

Gino frowned, instinctively thinking it was some clever peer playing a prank on her.

[Contact-John[15s ago]]

Only when she noticed the sender was John did she follow the operational prompts to input the key into cyberspace.

A series of magic puppets were triggered.

Gino's criminal signals were replicated hundreds of times, projected throughout the city through the local network, and her real traces were completely erased.

"Fuck, how is this done?"

Gino was shocked by this move, not only that, the key also came with a backdoor, bypassing most of the security systems of the Bolago Club, buried deep, almost with half a hand inserted into the company's servers.

This was like a heated instant meal, ready to be enjoyed by simply tearing open the package.

Betting information and real-time odds were right in the email.

At the bottom was a countdown.

Combining what John had said, the meaning was very clear,

Rather than being concerned about money saved from a few hacking jobs, Gino was utterly baffled by this series of "professional" operations.

As a member of the [Wanderer Alliance], she even felt a familiar presence of Serum.

The host's voice came from the TV overhead.

Gino looked up and saw:

John stepped onto the ring.

He turned sideways towards the camera, his stretched eyebrows and a series of micro-expressions appeared very unfamiliar, clearly the same face, yet it seemed like a deliberate act.

John flashed a flamboyant smile and waved to greet the booing gamblers on either side.

He even chased a segment of the camera, no matter how the director switched angles, he could suddenly look back and find the broadcasting device, as if catching a signal.

John seemed to peer through the high-definition lines, through countless jumping devices to lock eyes with Gino.

[Bet, bet!]

He kept repeating the word, as if taunting the audience, or perhaps talking to himself.

Gino found this scene extremely bizarre.

The second round was about to begin.

The host didn't need a complex warm-up, a simple tease had already made the audience impatient.

Outside the spotlight.

The spectator seats appeared like stacked layers of mist, with a thousand pairs of flashing prosthetic eyes dotting the scene, floating in the air filled with stimulants.

Under the host's guidance, they all chanted Reagan Patrick's name in unison.

Almost everyone had anticipated the outcome, just eagerly awaiting the final execution to be bloody enough.

The more exciting John's mercenary experiences were, the more people looked forward to his merciless destruction in the ring, as if he were a toy to satisfy their violent desires, worthy of an "exhausted" end.

Kenichi Sora patiently adjusted himself.

His warm-up was completely different from normal people:

Every step he took on the ring was a precise 35 centimeters, the breathing intervals 2.47 seconds, muscle bundle status, ankle shock absorption feedback ratio, and the efficiency of the cooling patches on his work jacket...

Sianweistan briefly started and stopped, doing the final round of meticulous adjustments.

He flipped his arm, attempting to deploy the Mantis Blade.

A disable message instantly popped up.

"Oh—"

[Oh—The Black Gold Gang's prosthetic plugins were designed by Internet Surveillance, really amazing, having the city's coldest hacker lunatic work overtime.]

Sora muttered to himself, complaining to John in his head.

His cybernetic eye flickered with a stream of light, vision altering, through the red popup he could see two parallel "backdoors" that could unlock the restrictions on his prosthetic body.

One was a pitch-black data line.

This was Black Light's virtual "image" in cyberspace.

The other was a cobalt blue grid.

That was Kenichi Sora's AI computing matrix.

The secret key Gino received was crafted by the AI, a complex data threshold to humans, a mere difference in computational depth to them.

As long as Kenichi Sora wished, he could breach the rules at any time, nullifying all the restrictions attached to the contestant.

He withdrew his gaze, looking across the ring.

The spotlight and cameras were all focused here, the red countdown had only a few seconds left.

He was ready, taking a moment of leisure to explain to John in his mind.

"Buddy, you..."

[Your nerves collapsed, to protect the last bit of usable brain you have, I had to do this, it looks quite strange, doesn't it?]

Kenichi Sora spoke through John's mouth.

While John himself was "locked" inside his body, like in some low-energy entrusted mode, capable of receiving all sensory information from his body, yet no longer possessing sovereignty.

They seemed to have swapped identities.

This perspective was very odd.

John wasn't suffocating or suffering.

Every sense of the body remained very clear, only all the "commands" were no longer controlled by his advanced nervous system.

Pain, soreness, even breathing, all became blurry, like through a medium.

It was somewhat similar to a "sex doll" chip, or the special technology Raphael used to control employees, the difference being, John remained fully conscious throughout, able to see and feel what he was doing.

"Sorry, you're temporarily unable to speak, and this protection only reduces consumption, you'll gradually feel fatigued, and enter a deep sleep-like state afterward."

His speech was rapid, tone urgent, like he hadn't mastered the articulation logic of the tongue and oral cavity.

"Thank you, buddy, you're more significant than any of my saves, without you, I absolutely wouldn't have reached this point."

Sora and John shared the same vision.

The data that was filtered out now flowed rapidly at the edges of the vision, unlike John's view of chaos, once Sora took over the body, this system followed some sort of order, calculating at extreme speed.

"It looks a bit strange, doesn't it? The way humans and digital souls acquire information is different."

[Welcome to my...]

"world."

Kenichi Sora smiled.

His tone was filled with nostalgia, along with an increasingly vivid and genuine sense of anticipation.