-21- Moving Day

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Before leaving, Yvette did not forget to place an order with Welding Gun for two clean, sanitary new ID cards. Getting them required connections within the police department, but as one of the local kingpins, Welding Gun could arrange it without the slightest difficulty. In essence, the police department itself was selling them; he was merely the pimp who brought the customers in.

In fact, after speaking with Welding Gun, Yvette had already begun to vaguely suspect that she might not need to buy the ID cards at all. Unless the relatives and friends of those three thugs were willing to stuff the police with enough bribes, the local officers were far too incompetent to investigate the matter seriously. They would make a token effort and let it go. There was even less chance that they would notice the police system had been hacked and residents’ information altered.

Besides, there were more unsolved, headless cases in the Blackwater District every year than anyone could count. Apart from the hot-blooded young rookies freshly assigned there as punishment, any normal police officer had long since become an old hand. Who would care about one more case?

But Yvette had only arrived two days ago. She knew far too little about the Blackwater District, Ish City, or even the Origin Civilization as a whole. Knowing things only in theory was not enough. So, out of caution, she still paid for both ID cards, a total of sixteen thousand, bringing the balance in her account down to sixty-nine thousand eight hundred.

…

After leaving the junkyard black market, Yvette spent the evening showing Rosalind around the city center. They passed through the public park, which had been transformed into an estate after the apocalypse, enjoyed an expensive dinner, and then ascended to the observation dome atop Black Tower, taking in Ish City’s neon-lit nightscape. Everywhere she looked, rivers of magic light surged endlessly through the darkness.

Looking out over the magnificent view, Rosalind had essentially taken it as a true reflection of a heavenly kingdom on Earth and was already filling her mind with all sorts of beautiful fantasies.

Yvette, for her part, knew that no utopia existed, and that the Origin Civilization was in fact a society with an enormous gap between rich and poor. Even so, the scenery stirred something in her, and she found herself lost in thought, remembering how she had once gone with her family to buy tickets for the top of the Shanghai Tower. She had been young then, full of ambition. How could she have imagined that after graduation she would end up delivering takeout?

Fortunately, she had struck it rich through sheer luck and had now become a witch. Whether that was fortunate or unfortunate, she could not say.

The following morning, with the help of a rental platform, Yvette gave up the hotel and instead rented an apartment of a little over eighty square meters in the Wright Apartments on Acid Street.

The apartment building stood beside one of the Blackwater District’s more prosperous commercial centers. The location was excellent, and the security was relatively dependable. At least it was not like Pixel Street, where you might wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, only for a gunshot to make you so frightened that even your urine would tremble out of you. Of course, Yvette neither needed the bathroom nor suffered such fright; this was merely a scientific conjecture based on past experience.

Standing at the entrance and looking up, Yvette saw that the entire Wright Apartments formed a gigantic honeycomb structure painted bright yellow. The upper half was much thicker, with magitech vehicles constantly taking off and landing from the rooftop platform in an extraordinarily busy stream. The lower half appeared narrower and more conservative. The rooms did not even have balconies, the windows were fitted with wire grilles, and there was only a single driveway.

Before long, Yvette entered the elevator with Rosalind and pressed the button for the eighteenth floor. This was a VIP elevator reserved for tenants above the fifteenth floor. The rent in this section was more expensive, and naturally, the services were better as well.

“Hello. Are you new here?”

When they arrived at the door of apartment 1809 and Yvette had just opened it, a middle-aged man in a white coat stepped out of the neighboring apartment. He looked as though he had been preparing to leave, and greeted the two of them in surprise.

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“Yes, we only arrived today.” Yvette gave him a slight nod.

“My name is Regier Hoffman. I suppose that makes us neighbors from now on.” Regier smiled, then suddenly took a card from inside his coat and handed it to her. “Here’s my business card. If you ever need anything, feel free to come to me.”

Yvette glanced at it. “Hoffman General Practice Clinic… You’re a doctor?”

“Yes, though my fees are very reasonable, so don’t worry. Many of the tenants above the fifteenth floor are my regular patients.”

Regier glanced down at his watch and waved. “I’m running short on time. I have somewhere to be. Enjoy settling in!”

Once he had gone, Yvette entered the apartment, and the door closed automatically behind her.

Rosalind had gone in ahead of her and was already poking at a holographic display disguised as a fish tank.

Her enthusiasm came and went quickly, however. Before long, Yvette watched as Rosalind gradually lost interest in exploring the apartment and instead sprawled across the living-room sofa. Using the holographic projection function of her magitech terminal, she expertly began scrolling through short videos, looking like a salted fish that had lost all will to struggle.

“…”

Yvette shook her head, found a stool, and sat down. She went online as well, but not for entertainment. She began searching for information about the Silent War.

The Silent War had once engulfed the entire world, and there was no shortage of material about it online. The information was not difficult to find.

According to the encyclopedic accounts that had been thoroughly verified online, the war had erupted with extraordinary suddenness, without any real buildup. The governments had struck first, and by the time the companies realized something was wrong, it was already too late. From the very beginning, the corporate forces had been at a disadvantage.

What Yvette noticed, however, was that only three companies had been involved in the early stages of the war: Spiritvine Corporation, Skyvault Technologies, and Black Tower Pharmaceuticals.

The attacking side, meanwhile, consisted of the New Eden United States and the Future Collective. They were the two nations with the greatest overall strength in the Origin Civilization, as well as the regional powers of the Black Tide Continent and the Silver Mirror Continent respectively.

First came policy-based suppression, followed by regulatory intervention. That led to small-scale armed clashes, after which other powers entered the fray one after another, setting the conflict ablaze. In the end, it developed into a full-scale hot war between the Company Alliance and Global International…

It all made perfect sense.

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And restraining the expansion of the megacorporations was hardly a strange decision in itself. The methods had merely been somewhat excessive, and the companies’ resistance had been somewhat excessive as well…

She considered the matter in silence.

As for the outcome of the war, it was exactly as Welding Gun had said. Both sides abruptly brought the conflict to an end on the grounds that they did not want to cause further casualties. They also maintained complete silence, revealing no additional information to the outside world. That was where the name Silent War came from.

She spent the entire day combing through the countless discussions and conjectures online. By evening, Yvette was sitting on the living-room sofa, exhausted, rubbing her temples. She had found nothing.

In truth, even if there had been a reliable lead somewhere, buried among so many conspiracy-theory essays, she would have had no way to distinguish it.

After some thought, she decided to change tactics. She abandoned her investigation into the Silent War and began searching for tags related to the apocalypse instead.

The search results were far fewer this time. After digging through various major forums and making use of several AI search engines, she finally found a post that caught her attention.

The original poster, whose ID was Torchbearer, claimed that the apocalypse was approaching. He had therefore built a shelter and was calling on everyone to gather and contribute any important knowledge they possessed, uploading it to a server as the spark that would rekindle human civilization.

If this had been on Earth, it would certainly have been a scam, roughly the same sort of thing as those posts promising to get you a license plate for nothing. But in the Origin Civilization, where intellectual property rights were protected with almost absurd severity, the poster’s words instead seemed remarkably sincere.

Surely no one would risk going to prison just to troll a forum…

With that thought in mind, Yvette looked at the suspicious link attached to the post and clicked it. As expected, a security warning appeared.

She skillfully selected “Ignore the risk and continue,” and what appeared before her this time was a small website with a pitch-black background. In the center was an animated image of a burning candle. Beneath it was an upload module that allowed files below a certain size to be sent to the server.

In the upper-left corner of the site was a logo shaped like a burning candle. Beside it was a name that appeared to belong to an organization—

The Society for the Continuance of Civilization.