Deposed? I couldn't be happier! I wouldn't even be a dog to the crown prince.

Zhiyuan stumbled and pushed open the hidden door that didn't even have a sign.

A strong smell of cheap engine oil mixed with the pungent smell of burnt rubber from the coils.

It hit him like a solid wall, making him sneeze twice.

The room was dimly lit.

Several xenon lamps without shades hung from the ceiling, flickering on and off.

This is an illegal underground prosthetic repair shop.

"Old Wai! Quick... quick, help me, you son of a bitch!"

Zhiyuan roared, clutching his right arm, which was still spitting out sparks.

His legs gave way and he collapsed onto a pile of scrap metal that smelled of engine oil.

"Here it comes, here it comes, you bald monk, you're really urging me on!"

A gaunt old man wearing a tattered jacket covered in oil stains emerged from behind a pile of parts.

He was wearing a simple, homemade monocle.

He had half a lit pipe dangling from his mouth.

Old Wai walked over and kicked away a piece of scrap metal next to Zhiyuan.

He grabbed his mechanical right arm and examined it.

"Tsk, the drive shaft is broken, and the coolant has all leaked out."

Lao Wai pulled out a hydraulic pliers covered with insulating tape from his waist.

A snap.

They cut the thick copper wire connecting Zhiyuan's shoulder directly.

The sparks stopped.

Zhiyuan's twitching right arm hung down like a dead dog.

He let out a long sigh, feeling as if all his strength had been drained away.

"I told you long ago, this kind of outdated military scrap steel can't be used to lift a heavy cauldron."

Old Wai muttered something as he roughly dragged Zhiyuan onto an oil-stained iron bed.

"Same as always, pay first."

"Replacing the bearing with a second-hand one and rewriting the underlying driver will cost fifty Datang credits."

"You're robbing me!"

Zhiyuan stared wide-eyed, his left hand clutching the tattered money pouch at his waist.

"I only earned ten credits today from manual labor!"

"If you don't pay, go outside and wait to die."

Old Wai, with his pipe still in his mouth, didn't even lift his head.

"Your neural chip is short-circuited. If high-voltage electricity surges into your brain a few more times, even a god can't save you."

Zhiyuan gritted his teeth and took out fifty physical credit points, each about the size of a coin, from his cloth bag.

It slammed onto the iron bed, making a crisp, clanging sound.

"Fix it! If you can't fix it, I'll tear this lousy shop down!"

"Don't worry, it's the same old trick."

Lao Wai didn't touch the dusty computer screen next to him.

He turned around and pulled a wooden box, more than a meter long and two feet wide, out from under the worktable.

The box has peeling paint, making it look like an old item that has been around for a long time.

He opened the lid.

There are no circuit boards or chips inside.

It was a huge abacus made of rosewood.

And a bamboo counting rod inserted into a bamboo tube.

But strangely enough...

The top of each column of this wooden abacus is connected to a dense network of fine copper wires.

At the other end of the copper wire were several rough metal plugs.

Lao Wai roughly shoved one of the plugs into the chip interface on Zhiyuan's right arm.

"Old Wai, are you getting senile?"

Zhiyuan looked at the wooden abacus and his face turned green.

"I asked you to repair mecha chips, and you're trying to fool me with some accounting gadget?"

"You don't know anything!"

Old Wai slapped Zhiyuan on the bald head.

"We ordinary people can't afford high-end optical computers, and we can't even get through the government's firewall."

"But isn't the underlying operation of a chip simply a matter of zeros and ones?"

He took a deep breath and placed his hands on the huge abacus.

"Binary, that's called Yin and Yang!"

"Things our ancestors were already doing thousands of years ago!"

Snapped!

Old Wai flicked an abacus bead with his thumb.

The crisp sound of wood clashing echoed in the dark room.

Followed by.

Old Wai's hands flew across the abacus.

The crackling sounds of physical activity blended together, like a torrential downpour.

His hand speed was so fast that it left afterimages.

The wooden abacus beads rubbed violently against the slide rails, even emitting wisps of white smoke.

Zhiyuan stared wide-eyed in horror.

Accompanied by the clattering of the abacus.

His paralyzed mechanical right arm miraculously emitted a faint buzzing sound.

The indicator light on the internally short-circuited chip assembly follows the rhythm of the abacus beads.

The green light flashed intermittently.

This purely physical clicking sound perfectly matches the binary read/write logic of the underlying chip.

They forcibly bypassed the compliance certification of the TianShu system.

They rewrote the underlying driver of Zhiyuan's useless arm bit by bit.

"See that?"

Half an hour later, Lao Wai stopped and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

"This is the wisdom of our ancestors."

"No matter how powerful the Crown Prince's firewall is, can it stop me from settling accounts with wooden beads?"

Zhiyuan tried moving his right arm.

The broken drive shaft had been replaced by an iron pipe that Lao Wai had taken from somewhere.

Although it looks worse, the joints move very smoothly.

It's even more flexible than before.

"Amazing..." Zhiyuan swallowed hard, convinced.

"What's this?"

Old Wai smugly pushed the abacus with the copper wire attached aside.

He leaned closer mysteriously and lowered his voice.

"Bald monk, you're lucky."

"I just landed a big job today."

"Didn't the imperial court distribute a batch of tracked agricultural vehicles for poverty alleviation to farmers outside the city?"

Old Wai pointed to a corner at the deepest part of the dark room.

There was a big thing covered by a dirty tarpaulin.

"When that thing left the factory, its top speed was locked at 20 kilometers per hour by the Tian Shu system."

He ripped off the waterproof tarpaulin.

Below is a tracked agricultural vehicle that has been dismantled into eight pieces.

The place that was originally used to hang plows and harrows was crudely welded with two jet engines as thick as water buckets.

"I just used a counting rod array to crash its limiting chip."

Old Wai patted the cold metal shell of the tracked vehicle, his face flushed with excitement.

"I wrote an engine overclocking module for it."

He turned his head and looked at Zhiyuan, his eyes gleaming with fanaticism.

"Just wait and see what happens."

"Tonight, Suzaku Street."

"Let those aristocratic gentlemen who ride hover shuttles every day..."

"Take a good sniff of the exhaust fumes from our ordinary modified cars!"