Night City is a strange place—
chaos and order, ignorance and civility.
Like a whale-fall graveyard: a place where life returns to the wheel.
And yet, on the picked-clean carcass, countless new lives gnaw their way into being.
Blossoms at dawn, gone by dusk; born by day, dead by night.
The spiral of life and death never stops.
Those who long for death love NANA—
because her voice sings a fierce love for life and a yearning for the next, like an angel fallen to earth unfurling her wings, lifting everyone toward an ideal country that never was and never will be.
Those who long for life love NANA too—
because she can sing the anger inside them and, in a dozen shifting keys, roar back at the world.
The only pity was that this crowd-pleasing concert had power—too much power.
Hemmed in by alcohol, drugs, sex, music, and the oppressive heat, the crowd's emotions spiked past the red line and—boom.
Crying and screaming, cursing and jumping, cyberpsychosis flashing across faces, guns drawn and fired at random. The NCPA riot squad—usually happy to look the other way for a fee, but lately jumpy as startled birds—was dispatched to clear the scene, forcibly shutting down the party before it could bloom into another city-wide riot.
Thus ended NANA × NANA's first concert.
With the net throttled by censors and the venue's recording rigs smashed in the chaos, almost no HD footage survived online.
But the tens of thousands who were there that night were converted on the spot.
The Church of NANA.
With their personal implant chips, they looped their own angelic takes, then uploaded them. Only then did everyone realize: almost every person had cut a different version.
It became an instant deep-web obsession. Veteran musicians and hackers ran software to analyze the mixes and discovered the truth: in a very real sense, both girls were superhuman.
One voice low, one voice high; together their ranges covered nearly every frequency the human ear can perceive. Under that kind of stimulus, each listener would choose—without knowing it—the part they loved most.
"NA! TRANSBEAST!" detonated across QVN and every social platform.
People scrambled to debate, to collect every version like charms, and—like they were bewitched—to hunt for the next showtime.
All of that would happen in the days to come.
"Phew…"
Fushan Nana stretched like a cat, her voice hoarse.
"A post-show smoke hits different…"
Li Pan looked down at the woman he'd hauled out of the crowd and back into his arms, then set his palm on her abdomen.
"What are you doing?" Nana smiled.
"Breathe. Like this—inhale… exhale…"
Feeling the movement of qi in her dantian, Li Pan confirmed it this time.
If she could follow him into the Interstice—and actually see the blood-hands—then Nana had cultivation aptitude too.
Only aptitude, though. She was a long way from a Dao Seed. Any orthodox sect would turn their nose up at that.
But someone else might not.
"Nana, you interested in conquering the world?"
Nana laughed aloud. "Conquer this screwed-up world?"
"Mm." Li Pan nodded. "And every other realm."
She swung a leg over his hips and bit him. "Sure. Let's go conquer the world."
Li Pan grinned, hugged her, and stood.
"Then I've got a gift for you."
She nuzzled at his ear.
"You've been giving me lots of gifts. I'm running out of storage…"
"…Not that kind of gift. Eyes up."
"Huh?"
Nana lifted her head—and saw a shuttle drop out of the night, hovering over the rooftop of the apartment block where they'd holed up.
"Shi—… fuck! Is that yours?!"
She hopped off him, equal parts envy and spite.
"Tch. Company dog."
Li Pan had no comeback. In more ways than one, he really had sold his soul to the company.
He buckled his pants and stood. "Come on. Let's take a spin. You drive."
Despise company dogs all you want—mechanics can't resist bikes, and no astronaut alive can turn down a chance to redline in space.
Nana bounded into the Solarbus Shuttle, peeled off the leather straps and goth metal trinkets she'd layered on, and pulled a one-piece flight suit from the cockpit deck.
"You can actually fly, right?"
Li Pan handed over pilot authority and, copying her, wriggled into a suit of his own—not without nerves.
Truth be told, he'd never actually been to space. Not even the space elevator.
Dreams and QVN military "exercises" didn't count. He was a man chained to gravity—an army sapper by trade.
He trusted full autopilot. He trusted the bikes he tuned himself. Crash the thing? Whatever. You get up and ride again.
Space, though… if the ship popped, would this body hold up? He wasn't sure.
And unlike Nana, eyes bright and fixed on the sea of stars, Li Pan had a touch of claustrophobia—courtesy of an academy accident.
He feared the cosmos, the Xuyuan, all the vast, empty black—from the bottom of his heart.
Nana glanced over.
"Don't be a p***y. I've ridden more ships than you've—never mind. If I scuff it, I'll pay."
Ah. Shipboard personality toggled. That was… oddly reassuring.
"Copilot seat. Hands off. Mouth shut. You open it and we explode."
"I'm not that scared," Li Pan muttered.
Nana chuckled, slid on gloves and visor, jacked into the shuttle's local, and tapped through the holo-controls.
"Round the moon and into the hangar."
"Sure. Fly as you like," Li Pan said.
"TOKYO TWR, SBS882L. Manual pilot. Destination LEO-PORT. Request PTS Autopilot Guide."
The public transit AI cut in on the channel:
"SBS882L, TOKYO TWR. PTS Autopilot Guide TWY SAI-777X. Wind one-eight-zero…"
Li Pan said nothing, slotted his chip into the avionics, and skimmed the showroom manual.
Properly speaking, you took classes to fly planes or starships—and a single lesson cost a few million. Too rich for his blood. He listened to Nana's calls and read the book.
TOKYO TWR was the local metro tower. Officially it was Night City now, but to avoid confusion, the transit system kept the old labels.
Anything that flew had to file, register, and hook into PTS for autopilot. Some craft retained manual control for a qualified navigator, but even then you still had to request a PTS Autopilot Guide.
Think of it as your personal robot ATC, glued to your wing from takeoff to dock. It plots your route. You can ignore it and stunt around, but maybe don't ignore no-fly and control zones—being hard-locked by a fire-control radar is not a joke.
"Injecting AGS anti-G gel. Prepare for launch."
They buckled in. Needles bit through the flight suits; a black colloid flooded their veins.
Called AGS, the stuff looked like road tar. Cheap, synthetic, and standard issue for crewed craft, it buffered the body against high-G acceleration. It sucked, but it beat a snap-broken rib and an internal bleed.
Li Pan hardly needed it, strictly speaking—but he got space-sick, so… why not.
"SBS882L—launch! OHHHH-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
Cackling, Nana slammed the throttle. The shuttle etched an exponential arc into the sky, punched through gravity, tore past the atmosphere, and burst into the glittering sea of stars.
Li Pan stared wide-eyed into the void, then back at the blue-white Earth.
He'd seen it a thousand times in QVN sims and dream rides. In person, it still hit different.
Humans really are tiny…
"Gods, that's good—that's so good. It's been ages since I got a hit like this. Don't mind me. I like it rough."
She threw him a lascivious wink.
"Oh, you can take this much incoming?" he shot back.
"If I can't swallow, I spit and keep going. Ha—ha-ha-ha!"
Yeah. Too many headjacks. Something in there was miswired.
The shuttle accelerated through the stars. Soon, a silver ring came into view—a band slipped around the Earth.
"That's…"
"Uh-huh. The Equator LEO-PORT—low-Earth orbital ring. Near-space is clogged; let's swing past the Mare and sightsee. Go go go! WARP five!"
You could get to the moon in under a second at five-c, but this wasn't a Navy battleship. The shuttle was no WARP200 jump queen. Under the Guide's supervision, they cruised onto an acceleration track, ramped to sublight in a safe corridor, then kicked the drive to hop lunar, and finally decelerated into a circular orbit.
All told, it took at least half an hour.
Worth it, though. Out of fourteen billion people, how many ever looped the moon?
And Nana couldn't help herself. In lunar orbit she popped the AGS safety, set the Guide to auto-circle, and tackled Li Pan, fingers ripping at his suit seals.
They waged another war—in space this time. Maybe it was psychology. Maybe it was his freshly reforged Dao body. Either way, the dual cultivation hit like a flood. By the time they were done, the cockpit was… a mess. They clung together and watched the moon roll by.
Tsk, tsk. Three point six million for a shuttle to pick up girls? Money well spent. When you've got it, life really does have two modes.
"Didn't know you were loaded," Nana said. "A shuttle, fine—but renting a hangar too? Hey, Mop-Head, hire me—I'll be your pilot…"
"Wait—are we… wrong way? Mop-Head, you got scammed. This route is for cruiser-class bays!"
Back from a dozen lunar loops, the shuttle let the Guide slot it into port. Nana stared at the projected path, eyes narrowing.
"Oh, right. I've been trying to say—then you kept going 'ah ah ah' and I forgot. The shuttle was the interview, a test drive. I, uh, just bought a new ship. Not sure if you can—"
"AAAAA—HAYABUSA! The new stealth model?! With a cloaking field—oh my god—!"
Good enough answer.
Li Pan blink-authorized.
A tug's tractor beam latched the shuttle and towed it into the HAYABUSA's drone bay.
My ship. Not bad looking.
HAYABUSA—"peregrine." The hull looked every bit the alloy raptor. Four high-energy slots, seven mids, three lows, two medium rig bays. As a covert-ops cruiser, it couldn't throw the weight a front-line brawler could, but it excelled at stealthy work.
Per the agreement, two bits of military hardware were still aboard: a radar cloak and a covert warp beacon. Cloak does what it says. The beacon, once you penetrate an enemy AO, broadcasts a lockable mark so the flagship group can jump to your space—tactical surprise in a can.
Smugglers use the same trick: slip into pirate turf under cloak, then ping the freighter to warp to your mark and drop the goods.
Problem is, the tactic's old. Didn't you see TSC's battleships flash-jumping all over the map? They don't need beacons and flag-led jumps anymore.
And with the HAYABUSA's power grid and CPU limits, those two mil-grade toys each hog a high slot and can't run together. Cloaked? No warping—too easy to clock. Beacon hot? No maneuver—need signal strength. Plus they chew through consumables.
Still better than a civilian tub.
Nana stared like he was a ghost.
"This is yours? You sure you're a regular company dog? Not some isekai rich kid speed-running the game? Did I just walk into that script…"
"Less shōjo manga, please. It's on a loan…"
Li Pan rolled his eyes and led her to the captain's cabin.
"Help me check her out. Oh—and here's a five-gram sample. Real?"
Nana frowned at the vacuum vial of orange, sand-fine powder.
"Not five grams. Maybe half."
"…Half? Hah. Stingy bastard."
"Half is enough. Nana, can you take the ship out? Black—no PTS."
She took the keys and ran system checks.
"It's a bare hull. Two high slots aside, you're naked—no shields or plates, civilian engines. To take her out you need to buy basics and stores—big money.
"And I can't run it alone. I can navigate, sure, but no PTS means either a custom independent autopilot OS or a vat-grown bionic/clone crew. Otherwise you hire a manual team.
"Without transit assist, they need to think the star charts I feed them—level-4 smart-assist chips minimum, plus astronaut-grade lobe-core brain jacks.
"Even if we skip hardpoints and E-war and pretend maintenance crews don't exist, we still need at least two more in the cockpit—no, four—to get this cruiser moving."
Four—no, five—to run a cruiser? Meanwhile 0113012 solo-ed four or five fleets across half the sky. Takamagahara really was behind the curve…
Cost-wise, hiring pilots beat an independent OS (too advanced, too pricey) or a bionic crew (not much cheaper, and Security would make you file permits—instant gossip).
Which meant the Steel Queen's job was… a stretch, for now.
Bottom line: unless he wanted to drift an empty hull into an asteroid and waste eighty million, the HAYABUSA wasn't going anywhere without another spend.
And Li Pan was nearly broke. Looked like he needed to hustle up, say, a trillion first…
"Mop-Head."
"Mm?"
"There's a pile of corpses in the hold."
"…Huh?"
Amakusa Shirō, that son of a—had really thrown in a pile of dead men as a bonus.
And not just any dead men—
"Night Corporation's vampires?" Nana asked.
"And a few werewolves…"
Li Pan stared at the Night Riders torn open—heads and spines ripped out—then at the naked, snarling, half-augmented bodies with gunshot wounds and blackened veins like they'd been poisoned.
They were shrink-wrapped in poly, all packed inside a giant gel bladder to spoof bioscanners. The smuggler's standard: stuff the cargo into a container, strap on a cheap rocket, guide it by drone, fire it into orbit, and let a junk-magnet tractor beam pull it into your bay.
Li Pan drew a long breath and scrubbed his face.
Mother. Mothermothermother—…
He'd been played.
That rose-and-sword crest—Emilius's Night Riders. The Grand Duchess's personal guard.
No wonder Night Corp found no trace of the attackers at the scene, only "suspected" werewolves.
They'd shipped the bodies to his hangar.
He hadn't wanted to kill the Grand Duchess—how was this still haunting him?!
"I checked the ship's logs," Nana said softly. "This vessel made a covert beacon rendezvous in Night City's airspace, then shepherded an unnumbered freighter for a near-Earth orbital drop.
"A beacon that bright can't be hidden. TOKYO TWR pinged right away, asked for fleet and mission IDs. The HAYABUSA didn't answer—just cloaked and ran.
"Cloak hides your shape for a while, but PTS still archived your coordinates and signal. If that beacon goes hot again, Security will follow the chain right to us."
Li Pan looked at her, speechless.
"The ship's dirty," Nana said, all business. "We need to get rid of it. Fast."
.
.
.
⚠️ 30 CHAPTERS AHEAD — I'm Not a Cyberpsycho ⚠️
The system says: Kill.Mercs obey. Corporates obey. Monsters obey.One man didn't.
🧠💀 "I'm not a cyberpsycho. I just think... differently."
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