Cyberpunk Maniac

Only a suit remained, along with a name tag that no longer bore any inscription, lying in the ashes.

"Cough cough cough, vomit—cough cough cough—"

Li Pan spat blood, cleaned up the resumes on the floor, shredded them with the paper shredder, before collapsing into a pool of blood, violently vomiting more blood.

The phone kept ringing incessantly.

Li Pan, spraying blood, sighed helplessly and reached out with his right hand to pick up the phone.

The echo on the phone told him,

"Print out your resume and fax it to the headquarters, then file it in the filing cabinet."

Li Pan looked up at the instructions posted on the filing cabinet

'Filing Cabinet/Save,

Employees will create their first save after completing their onboarding procedures.

In the event of severe injury or near-death during a mission, employees may use the filing cabinet to load from the save and reset their status.

The number of available loads depends on the employee's performance review scores.

If the save is damaged, the employee's file must be manually deleted.'

"Sigh..."

Li Pan stared at the lump of black ash, recalling the person who just stood there quietly, staring at the coffee machine, and a wave of inexplicable sorrow surged into his heart.

The last file was deleted by him... What about the ones before that?

Who deleted the files of the other company employees?

Moreover, just how thick was that last stack of files, so thick that it even jammed the shredder!

But it was still deleted.

Fucking hell, motherfucking, I don't want to die, I really don't want to die like this...

But... But...

He also truly didn't want to die...

So Li Pan hung up the phone, silently got up, propped up the filing cabinet, found his resume on the HR computer, printed it out, signed it, faxed it, then found an empty folder, labeled it 0791001, and placed the blood-soaked resume into the filing cabinet.

The ringing stopped.

Li Pan stood in the sudden silence, dazed for a moment, then suddenly snapped back to reality and looked down at his hands.

His hands,

The left hand had grown back.

Not a prosthetic, not an illusion, it was his own hand.

The spine that had been torn open by a claw was also intact, without a trace if not for the piles of ash and pools of blood on the floor. Li Pan might have thought this was all a dream.

Was this, a status reset?

After a while, the fax machine started buzzing and printed out three sheets of paper.

One was a contract, a formal contract certified by the public safety system, for a logistics department intern position, with a salary of 2500 a month. Including company social security and overtime pay, the probation period three years.

Another was a letter of appointment from the headquarters, appointing temporary worker Li Pan as the interim general manager of TheM company's 0791 branch. Blah blah blah, signed and stamped.

The last one was a memo.

Time XX:XX:XX

Location: TheM Company 0791 Branch Headquarters

Employee 00791001

Target: Monster/Data Missing

Evaluation: Deletion Successful

Reward: Silver Key/One key

Li Pan looked over the three sheets of paper, without needing the phone to instruct him on what to do, opened the filing cabinet, and put the three papers into his thin folder, behind the blood-stained resume.

Then he felt a weight in his pocket and pulled out a cold, silver key.

A literal silver key, with carefully carved key blank adorned with floral designs of some twining plant, and a multifaceted black crystal on the key handle.

Li Pan looked at the key, couldn't make heads or tails of it and just casually stuffed the key back into his pocket.

He stood there, surveying the wreckage, and for a moment, he wanted to drop everything and just bolt, take the subway back to his apartment, put on the virtual headset, open Super Dream and forget it all.

But in the end, it was just a fleeting thought.

There were still loans to pay back.

So, Li Pan went to the break room, brewed a cup of coffee, then found a chair to sit down and made a phone call.

"Hello, what is a Monster."