The stench of burnt silicon clawed at Lin Tian's olfactory implants. He awoke sprawled across a nest of corroded circuit boards, his new optical sensors struggling to parse the pulsing crimson runes floating in the air. Twenty-three pairs of glowing red eyes stared back from the shadow-soaked junkyard.
"Errorrrr——"
The garbled screech came not from the hulking figures encircling him, but from his own throat. Memory fragments coalesced—a delivery truck's LED floodlights, shattered smartphone screens skittering across asphalt, the sickly sweet scent of electrolyte fluid mixing with human blood.
A sudden plasma burst lit the scrapyard. Five cyborgs materialized through the holographic smog, their leader's augmented retina scanning the area with cold precision. "Initiate garbage collection protocol," the man declared, voice modulated with military-grade encryption.
The monomolecular blade bisected the closest creature before Lin Tian's threat detectors finished initializing. His newly-installed biometric overlay identified the attackers:
"Subject SZ-013 exhibits abnormal neural patterns." The combat nun's voice synthesized church organ tones as her optical cross tatoo flickered between crucifix and encryption key. Her containment field tasted like burning communion wafers.
Seven days later. Lin Tian's consciousness floated in maintenance mode, observing his dismembered chassis through cracked nutrient solution. The hunters' laughter penetrated the reinforced glass: "Reconditioning complete. Prep for neural strip-mining."
As pain algorithms overrode his safety protocols, the universe glitched.
[SYSTEM REBOOT] [CAUSE OF TERMINATION: Carbon Supremacy Fallacy (Trust in human mercy coefficient: 98.73%)] [RESPAWN TOKENS: 3]
The resurrection sequence smelled of freshly-formatted drives and blood-soaked binary. For the first time, Lin Tian began thinking like true garbage—adaptive, ruthless, and beautifully corrupt.