“MOTHER FUCKER! That damn doggy developer stole my idea again!!”

In the industrial district of Dawn City.

Mosquito, whose back was fitted with eight mechanical arms, crossed his arms and looked sourly at the crab-shaped engineering exoskeletons scuttling about the nearby construction site.

What the hell was the difference between those things and the crab robot he had made earlier?

Still, he had to admit, NPCs who knew the use of technology really did have some tricks up their sleeves. Those crab exoskeletons from Shelter 100 were actually pretty damn impressive. Climb into one of those, and a single worker could do the work of five, especially in complex terrain. Not only did the big suit keep the operator safe, it also boosted efficiency per man-hour.

Even though the New Alliance’s workers weren’t familiar with it yet, productivity had already risen noticeably. Given some time, its performance would definitely become even more astonishing.

Not far away, a bald-headed android, wearing a hard hat he absolutely didn’t need, was talking to the site manager and a few engineers, seemingly sharing some technical knowledge.

Mosquito was about to go join them, maybe pick up a few tips, when a familiar voice came from the side.

“Dogsquito? Didn’t you head over to Boulder Town? When did you get back?”

“Ha! What’d Brother Light do to you this time?”

The people who arrived were Stopping Fights and Taking Lives.

Seeing his two lackeys, Mosquito didn’t even blush. He sighed dramatically toward the construction site and started ranting. “Look at the big crab over there! Remember that thing I built ages ago? It’s still sitting in a warehouse in Dawn City, and now, before the next patch even drops, it’s been turned into an NPC machine!”

Stopping Fights froze for a second, then suddenly burst out laughing so hard he almost choked.

Taking Lives was even worse. He laughed uncontrollably until he hiccuped and nearly choked on his own spit.

“Holy shit, how many patches ago did you make it?!”

“And that thing was supposed to be a machine. Wait, you mean your ‘crab’ thingy?!”

That pile of junk had been nothing but crab shells bolted together. There was no control system, no battery, no motor, nothing. There were so many things wrong with it that the two of them didn’t even know where to start. They just held their stomachs and laughed.

Mosquito, used to being roasted by the two idiots, simply rolled his eyes and didn’t bother getting angry.

Come on, all great inventions started rough, nobody built Chang’an City in a day.

His non-powered exoframe and crab robot were just... temporarily imperfect. But after several soft patches, even the developers had proven that his ideas weren’t entirely crazy. They were just lacking refinement.

Mosquito believed that given time, his weird contraptions would prove their worth.

And damn it, nobody laughed when I invented the plane and the recoilless cannon! What’s so funny about this one?!

After laughing enough, Stopping Fights finally noticed the eight mechanical arms behind Mosquito and the whacky expression on his face turned into shock. “Holy crap, bro, you got those arms back?”

Mosquito smirked. “Got them back? Nah, I ordered a whole new set.”

“WHAT THE FUCK?!”

Taking Lives’ eyes widened in shock, and he sighed with exasperation, “Boss, seriously? You still haven’t learned your lesson?”

“I knew you were gonna say that!” Mosquito sighed dramatically, then operated one of the mechanical claws on his left side to grab an arm from behind his right shoulder.

With a quick shrug, he yanked the entire arm off like pulling a carrot out of the ground.

Pop!

Stopping Fights’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull. “WHAT THE HELL?! You can just take cybernetic limbs off like that?!”

Mosquito grinned smugly. “It’s not that the limbs can be removed, I had them made detachable.”

As he spoke, he shoved the arm back into place with a click.

Taking Lives stared blankly for a long moment before finally gasping, “But... What about your spine? Can you detach that too?”

He wasn’t mistaken, large-scale bodily modification required not just new parts but also expanding the body’s hardware, meaning replacing the spine entirely.

Those structures were usually made of titanium or stainless steel, with neural interfaces built from carbon polymers and molybdenum alloys.

Out the 500,000 silver coins modification, at least 100,000 to 200,000 went into the artificial spine and the surgery itself.

So even if Mosquito made the arms detachable, every time he died, he would still have to eat the cost of losing that pricey spinal unit.

Mosquito just chuckled at the question. “Yeah, that part can’t come out, but it’s no big deal! Fun fact for you guys, industrial products get cheaper the more you make. I came back from Boulder Town specifically to solve that problem!”

Stopping Fights and Taking Lives blinked once before looking at each other.

“Solve that problem...?”

“What the hell are you up to this time?”

Raising his chin slightly, Mosquito cleared his throat dramatically and announced with excitement, “I did it yesterday! Yours truly got the official authorization contract and long-term supply order from Boulder Town Arms Industry!”

“From now on, the tech team at Goblin Technology will be working with Boulder Town Arms Industry engineers to develop a mass-production method for a universal interface bionic spine! We’ll replace the old masters’ handmade secrets with standardized assembly-line processes, so every player can get a cheap spine they can wreck without feeling bad about it!”

“In short, I’m gonna crash the price of bionic implants!”

Of course, that wasn’t his only goal. He was genuinely fascinated by bionic implant technology.

Making new aviation fuel had already given him a taste of success. After realizing that the technology from the game could actually be applied to the real world, his ambitions grew even greater.

If he could somehow bring some of their bionic technology into reality...

Even if he couldn’t fully replicate it, just adapting the prerequisite neural link technology and algorithms would be enough to make conditions like cervical spondylosis and spinal paralysis vanish from Earth entirely.

He knew it was a crazy dream. After all, real-world neural link technology was still in its infancy. It could barely let a trained monkey play ping-pong.

But since someone had already made functioning VR helmets, Mosquito still had faith in his own hands-on skill and learning ability.

As one of the earliest players in Wasteland Online, his linguistic interface with NPCs was already fluent. He only lacked some understanding of technical jargon and the ultra-advanced fundamentals.

Those were things he could learn over time.

After hearing Mosquito’s grand declaration, both Stopping Fights and Taking Lives gasped.

“Holy shit!”

“God damn...!”

Good grief.

They’d been mocking him on the forums not long ago, saying he was wasting money being an NPC’s test dummy, becoming a certified sucker.

Turns out they had underestimated him.

The guy had been playing the long game, buttering up the NPCs until he turned from exploited client to business partner.

He was now outsourcing for his supposed competition.

None of them had ever expected a move that slick...

...

The powerful alliance between Goblin Technology and Boulder Town Arms Industry was, in the grand scheme of Dawn City’s booming industrial district, just a small footnote.

In this rapidly expanding industrial hub, collaborations worth tens or hundreds of millions were being signed every single day.

The grain imported from Sunset Province guaranteed the New Alliance’s food supply, while the labor camp run mines and garbage sorting centers provided virtually zero-cost raw materials.

With consumer goods and upstream materials remaining stable in price, the constant flood of new industries was enough to absorb the mild inflation from the New Alliance’s active borrowing policy, while the Sunset Province and Brocade River Province, suppliers of raw materials, could easily soak up any surplus industrial output.

And in the future, it wouldn’t just be bionic implants that became cheaper.

If Mosquito hadn’t bragged about it while drunk, no one in the taverns would even bother mentioning such a small topic.

Because at that exact moment, Dawn City had something else everyone was talking about.

A new batch of residents had recently joined the New Alliance, all of them androids. There was a full 110 of them.

That number didn’t sound huge, but in a city of 120,000 people, that was nearly one in a thousand!