Chapter 121: Pressure

Adam wasn't entirely convinced that the relaxed looks on everyone's faces weren't just forced facades, so he detached himself from the group to take a closer look for himself.

"Where are you going?"

"There's something I want to check."

"I'll come with you."

Shae followed along behind him, temporarily separating from the rest of the group as well.

She didn't say anything or ask Adam what he was doing. Instead, she merely followed him in silence as he diverted off the wide street and made his way down a narrow alley, where he caught sight of a lone straggler.

The straggler was squatting in a corner, smoking a cigarette in an expressionless manner, and upon noticing Adam's scrutiny, he immediately erupted into a torrent of abuse, throwing up classic phrases such as "What the fuck are you lookin' at?", "I'll gouge your eyes out if you keep staring at me!" and "That's a fine-looking chick you have with you there. Is she your bitch?".

Deranged and aggressive. Just like most of the people in this city.

Adam approached the straggler in silence while scrutinizing the cocky expression on his tattooed face, and he couldn't bring himself to believe that someone like him was truly free of mental health issues.

"What the fuck do you want?" At this point, the straggler could already sense that something wasn't quite right. As a local of Shadow City, he had developed a high degree of sensitivity to even the slightest inkling of danger, and he immediately spat out his cigarette while reaching for the gun that was holstered to his waist. However, before his hand had a chance to reach the gun, his psychic world had already been invaded.

Adam had already activated his neuron transmitter in secret, then invaded the straggler's psychic world from a distance after lowering the transmitter's mechanical electrical synaptic output.

Not long after entering the straggler's psychic world, Adam invoked Nun and ordered it to possess the straggler's psychic body.

After that, the possessed straggler led Adam on a tour of his psychic modules.

From his birth to his formative development, then to the first time that he left Shadow City to go to Sandrise City...

Just as Adam expected, the straggler had not had an easy life.

He didn't know who his father was, and his mother was a local resident of Shadow City who raised him like a pet, spurred on by her maternal instincts. He had quite a few brothers and sisters whom he regularly fought with over food and toys, and it was also very common for him to receive beatings from his older brothers.

At about 11 to 12 years of age, he had already learned to commit theft and robbery in densely populated places, and he had also picked up the vices of smoking and drinking.

He left Shadow City for the first time at 15 years old, and that was also the first time that he experienced discrimination.

Following him into the psychic module that contained this chapter in his life, Adam saw that his first stop after leaving Shadow City wasn't actually Sandrise City. Instead, it was a village near Sandrise City.

However, those villages were extremely xenophobic, particularly toward residents of Shadow City.

They had heard far too many stories about Shadow City, and they knew that all of its residents were cold-blooded killers who would commit murder at the drop of a hat, who were deranged bottom-dwellers of society who refused to follow the rules and had been abandoned by society as a result.

The villagers didn't kick him out, but they made his life there extremely difficult.

Everyone treated him with disdain and gave him the cold shoulder, and even the business owners refused to sell anything to him. After enduring this discrimination for some time, he finally snapped and turned on a group of people whom he had heard denouncing him behind his back.

However, that didn't amount to anything. Those people refused to engage in a direct conflict with him, and after avoiding him, they immediately contacted the police.

Even though he had lived his entire life in Shadow City up to that point, he had heard about fearsome Mechguard officers were, so he immediately fled the village.

After that, he traveled to Sandrise City. He had heard that people in the big cities were all very busy, so no one had the spare time and energy to care about what others were doing.

Initially, upon his arrival in Sandrise City, he got himself into a great deal of trouble due to problems surrounding his identification information. However, he was then able to secure a fake ID through some illegal organizations, thereby allowing him to roam the city with a relative degree of freedom.

The city was lavish, alluring, pristine, and orderly.

In the beginning, the straggler fell in love with this place, but it didn't take long before he fell into the depths of despair.

Everything required money in the city, and there were many places that he couldn't even go to. It was as if everything in the city were segregated by invisible barriers, ones that were impossible to bypass.

Most importantly, the skills in thievery that he had relied on to make ends meet in Shadow City could no longer be used in Sandrise City. There were surveillance cameras, Mechguard officers, and law-abiding citizens everywhere, and soon, he fell into crippling debt.

He owed money to the loan sharks and the organizations that had organized his fake identification documents, and he felt as if shackles were gradually being thrown onto his back, making it difficult for him to even draw breath. Every single day, he felt as if he were wading through a swamp, impeded and controlled at every turn by an invisible hand.

Adam noticed that it was also during this time period that more and more aberrations began to appear in his psychic modules.

On the busy streets, Adam could see all types of emotional aberrations everywhere, such as taxi drivers, gangs who had arranged bank cards for him, the advertisements in the sky, the pedestrians on the ground...

Many of the people around him began to mutate, and there were far more aberrations in that psychic module than any of the other ones in his psychic world.

Finally, the straggler crumbled under the pressure, fleeing Sandrise City and returning to Shadow City, where he had remained up to this point.

Following his return, he whiled his days away by drowning his sorrows, and he no longer yearned for the outside world. Somehow, he was much happier than before. He hadn't done anything positive or constructive during the past few years, but his mental health was remarkably good.

There was barely even any emotional baggage in his mind, let alone emotional aberrations and anomalies.

This observation dealt Adam another heavy blow, and at this point, he was even beginning to believe that the stadium director was a philosopher, a notion that he had previously dismissed as downright ridiculous.

After making these observations, Adam silently withdrew Nun and exited the straggler's psychic world.

After returning to the real world, Adam saw Shae looking around while standing at the entrance to the alley, and the unconscious straggler had clearly also been dragged from his original spot to somewhere that was more inconspicuous and out of sight. It was clear that she had been standing on lookout duty while Adam was exploring the straggler's world.

Following Adam's awakening, the straggler also gradually returned to his senses. Here in Shadow City, power was the absolute currency, and the one with the bigger fists was always right. The straggler was well aware of this golden rule, and he immediately rushed out of the alley after regaining consciousness.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm searching for emotional anomalies."

"Why's that?"

Adam paused for a moment to construct his words, then told Shae a partial truth, even though Nie Yiyi and the others had most likely already guessed this partial truth. "I grow stronger by battling psychic anomalies."

"I see." Shae wasn't very surprised to hear this. She had already heard Adam mention something similar in the past, and she had witnessed the transformation that Adam had undergone after his battle against the nun anomaly. She was no idiot, and she immediately asked, "I'm assuming you need to search for a suitable target?"

"That's right, but surprisingly, all of the locals of Shadow City seem to be very healthy."

"If locals don't fit the bill, then let's target outsiders. There are many fugitives on the run here. Compared with fugitives who can still lead relatively normal lives, like Oni no Hanzou, all of the fugitives who've fled to this city are ones who have no other choice. I'm sure a considerable proportion of them must be suffering from mental health problems."

"Alright, that sounds like a good idea."

"When do we begin?"

"Right now."