vncnus Chapter 17 Iron Cage Area
Chapter 17 Iron Cage Area
After signing the employment contract.
After shedding his status as an unemployed vagrant, Yu Jing spent the morning training with Xu Lang.
Unsurprisingly, his poor fitness level was soon exposed.
Xu Lang's attitude towards this was... fantastic!
Now Xu Lang is Yu Jing's official fitness coach, and there's no need to worry about being exposed by others.
He was curious to know how far Yu Jing could go if he could reach this level with just casual practice, and if he used a more scientific method.
In addition to various fitness programs, the two also took a basic mixed martial arts class.
To be precise, Xu Lang was assessing Yu Jing's current abilities.
Yu Jing was indeed a novice, only knowing the most basic power generation techniques, and his close-range combat skills were even more appalling.
Even so, the fighting prowess he displayed still surprised Xu Lang.
As a retired sergeant from the terrorist mobile unit, Xu Lang had seen too many new recruits with strong physical abilities.
However, he had never seen a pure hexagonal numerical freak like Yu Jing before!
This led Xu Lang, who originally only intended to use this as a means to recruit Yu Jing, to actually become excited and decide to train the young man rigorously, to fully tap into his potential and see just how far he could go.
Yu Jing naturally agreed wholeheartedly.
He has always been the kind of person who is ruthless to himself once he sets his sights on a goal.
His adventures in exotic lands allowed him to find meaning in living in this strange world.
In order to continue this enjoyment, he will never hesitate to put in the effort and sweat.
When it was noon, Yu Jing voluntarily ended the class.
The fatigue from long hours of training was one factor, but the main reason was that the online bank loan application had been successfully completed and the money had been deposited into his account. He needed to buy bullets, smoke grenades, and other weapons and equipment in the afternoon, and he also had a shooting range appointment for the evening to practice his marksmanship.
With my schedule packed full, I definitely can't afford to exhaust myself right now.
Ultimately, Yu Jing's offensive tactics at this stage still mainly rely on revolvers and silver bullets.
Unfortunately, his marksmanship was truly appalling.
You can't just stand right in front of the monster every time you fire a shot, can you?
I bought two sets of pancakes on the street for lunch and took the bus to Wu Hong Village.
Since his predecessor did not have a gun license, Yu Jing knew very well that he would not be able to buy the weapons he wanted through normal channels.
Therefore, last night I specifically checked the distribution of gun shops in the old district of Santon, focusing on the gray area where gang forces are rampant.
Wu Hung Estate and several surrounding public housing estates and neighborhoods are collectively referred to as the "Iron Cage District" by the locals in the old town of Shan Tun.
It implies a place where mad dogs are kept.
That area is one of the most corrupt and filthy gray areas in the entire Shandun old district and even in Guangsha City.
The area is rife with gangs and a mixed bag of people.
The underground trade involving prohibited drugs, weapons, and even human organs makes headlines every now and then, and gang fights, robberies, and murders are commonplace.
There are even online betting sites where people gamble on finding several corpses on the streets of the Iron Cage District every morning, a game known as the "Dead Man's Lottery."
Yet this place, which should have been burned to ashes long ago, is ignored by the government because of the abnormal prosperity created by a large number of black and gray industries, which allows it to pay a lot of taxes every year.
Or perhaps the Guangsha municipal government needs a place that can gather all sorts of scum from all walks of life.
To prevent them from scattering everywhere and causing harm to other normal urban areas.
If given a choice, Yu Jing would definitely not go to such a awful place.
But what can you do when your predecessor was just an ordinary citizen?
In order to pass the Explorers' Headquarters' assessment, we have no choice but to take some risks.
Turning his gaze away from the rapidly receding cityscape outside the bus window, Yu Jing picked up his phone and logged into the Guangsha City Paranormal Forum, casually browsing the popular posts marked with several skulls.
The Explorers' Office's visitor information page explicitly mentions supernatural events in the present world.
This made Yu Jing realize that the connection between the mortal world and the otherworld was not a one-way passage; if people could enter the otherworld, monsters from the otherworld could naturally come to the mortal world as well. The encounter with the gate hunter yesterday was the most direct example of this.
When he followed this line of thought and searched for relevant information online, he discovered that the invasion from foreign lands was far more serious than he had imagined.
Although the authorities are consciously trying to control the news coverage of this topic, the spread of images and audio recordings of paranormal events by ordinary people through private channels such as forums or chat groups has already spread like wildfire.
In this information age, supernatural events occurring in densely populated urban areas cannot be concealed.
In just a short while, Yu Jing came across case information related to last night's news on the forum.
The poster claimed that someone in their family worked at the police station in the old district of San Dun. They had been on several night shifts in the past two weeks, and after returning home, they seemed to have seen something terrifying and were in extremely poor condition.
He wouldn't say what he saw when asked, but kept telling his family never to go out alone at night, especially on rainy nights.
If this is only his side of the story, its veracity remains to be verified.
So the post that just went viral today is "Pictures don't lie".
The person who posted the message lived near the crime scene. Before the terrorist mobile unit arrived at the scene, he was testing the camera function of his newly bought phone and planned to take some photos of the street scene in the rain and post them on his WeChat Moments, and then "inadvertently" show off the brand of his phone.
Unexpectedly, the "murderer" was captured on camera.
The accompanying photo was taken at dusk, and the street scene in the photo clearly shows that it was near the crime scene. However, what really sparked discussion was the blurry black shadow in the upper right corner of the photo.
Its exact appearance is unclear, but the only certainty is that it has two pairs of oval wings on its back.
Yu Jing glanced at the comments below.
Some say the image is AI-generated and obviously fake; others say it's just a photo of a strangely shaped light sign that fell off outside a nightclub, and the poster just happened to capture it hanging in mid-air; still others are seriously analyzing what this monster is based on the shape of its wings.
In short, the comment section is full of amazing people, saying all sorts of things.
However, judging from the ratio of likes to dislikes and the overall atmosphere of the comments, most people believe that this attack was not carried out by humans!
"Next stop, Wu Hong Estate. Passengers, please prepare to disembark..."
Upon hearing the car radio broadcast, Yu Jing temporarily put away her phone, got up, walked to the back door, looked out the window, and subconsciously frowned.
Although he had learned about the "Cage District" online before coming, Yu Jing was still greatly shocked when he actually saw the scene of the district.
Guangsha City's terrain is not flat to begin with, and the old Shandun area is built against the mountainside.
This resulted in dozens of old, giant residential buildings of varying heights interlocking and stacking between their respective estates.
Their exterior walls are stained a dark brown by years of oil stains, graffiti, and even soot. Countless exposed cables are tangled like nerves between the buildings and streets. The thick ones are industrial cables, while the thin ones are probably illegally installed electricity, internet, and water lines. Silver-gray industrial pipes run parallel to rusty brown sewage pipes, occasionally spewing out white steam or dark yellow wastewater.
Under the shroud of rain, they looked like rotting animal remains piled up together.