72: The Floating City of Jinling: A Wind Chime Tower Covered with Human Bones

As the black iron sliced through the thick mist on the river.

The legendary "Floating City" ahead finally revealed its hideous true form.

It was not the "shelter" described by survivors at all.

But rather a steel monster built upon corpses and bones.

Around Jinling's Zijin Mountain, the once-prosperous business district had long since sunk beneath the water.

Only twenty or thirty of the tallest skyscrapers remained, like a row of giant black tombstones, piercing the water's surface in isolation, standing tall under the hazy sky.

However, these buildings were not isolated.

Countless rusty steel cables of varying thickness, precarious suspension bridges, and even aerial corridors welded from cut-up abandoned containers.

Like a giant, deformed spider web, they forcibly connected these isolated buildings together.

The wreckage of neon lights and the beams of searchlights intersected on this massive web, outlining a chaotic and vast aerial community.

“What is... that sound?”

Standing on the deck, Su Qingyu tilted her head slightly.

Besides the sound of the wind, she heard a dense, crisp clattering.

It sounded like countless wind chimes ringing, yet it carried a spine-chilling coldness.

Jiang Ran raised his binoculars, and his field of vision zoomed in.

On the lowest suspension cables, dozens of meters above the water's surface, dense clusters of white objects were hanging.

They weren't wind chimes, nor were they decorative ornaments.

They were human skulls and femurs strung together.

Like strings of ghastly pale cured meat, they hung beneath the swaying steel cables, clattering against each other in the damp, cold sea breeze.

Making a crisp “clack, clack” sound.

“It's ‘Bone Whistles’.”

Jiang Ran put down the binoculars, his voice so calm it betrayed no emotion: “Here, these are boundary markers.

Warning outsiders: either follow the rules, or become parts hanging up there.”

As the black iron slowly approached, the details of that steel monster were infinitely magnified in their vision.

If the upper-level cableways connected with neon lights were a spider web,

then the base of the buildings near the waterline was covered in skin-crawling ‘barnacles’.

Those were countless rusty iron cages, rotting container slices, and precarious wooden shacks.

They were densely packed, welded onto the buildings' originally sleek glass curtain walls, layer upon layer.

Like tumors frantically multiplying on a host, they spread up to a height of dozens of meters above the water.

“Are those people?”

Su Qingyu frowned slightly.

Between those rust-covered iron cages, countless thin, withered figures were climbing at dizzying heights.

Most were naked, or wore only a rag around their waists.

Their skin, due to long-term immersion in radiated water, had taken on a sickly blackish-red hue.

These people looked very much like some kind of humanoid insects, grabbing slippery steel pipes and dangling cables, moving nimbly without any protection.

“Plop! Plop!”

From time to time, someone would jump into the dark river water from their ‘home’ over ten meters high, clutching a heavy stone like dumplings being dropped into a pot.

Only after a long while would they resurface, clutching a piece of rotten copper wire or half a rusted can in their hands.

These were the ‘Tanka’, the very bottom of the Floating City's ecological chain.

“Splash—!”

Above their heads, at a height of about fifty meters, a massive sewage outlet suddenly opened.

Yellowish-brown sewage, mixed with domestic waste and industrial residue, poured down like a waterfall.

Instead of avoiding it, the Tanka living on the lower levels excitedly leaned out of their cages.

Some even used basins to catch the ‘blessings’ leaking down from the upper-class elite district.

In their eyes, there might be scraps of food that hadn't completely rotted away mixed in.

This extreme vertical stratification nakedly wrote the words ‘cannibalism’ into the drop of every floor... That suffocating slum scenery did not stop Jiang Ran; instead, it made him more cautious.

In this place full of chaos and plunder, once a warship of the black iron's caliber sailed into the port ostentatiously,

it would immediately become a piece of fat meat in the eyes of all factions.

Even if he wasn't afraid of trouble, there was no need to fight a defensive battle before finding his target.

“Stop right here.”

Jiang Ran pointed to a massive, broken pier of a cross-river bridge several kilometers away.

It was located in the Floating City's blind spot, and the giant concrete shadow was enough to conceal everything.

As the engine shut down, the black iron silently glided into the shadows.

“core, activate the optical deflection field.”

At Jiang Ran's command, the black iron's Lv5 Biological Armor began to undergo subtle changes.

It wasn't a mythical total invisibility.

Instead, by fine-tuning the refractive index of the armor's surface, it allowed light to ‘slide’ along the hull.

To the naked eye, the originally sharp-edged silhouette of the warship quickly became blurred and distorted.

Eventually, it became like a ripple of water melting into the shadows, perfectly blending with the surrounding dark river water and concrete piers.

Unless the opponent possessed military-grade active sonar, this was a ghost.

“Old Chen, watch the house.”

As Jiang Ran spoke, he took off his originally sleek combat suit and put on an old canvas cloak covered in oil stains and radiation dust.

“If anyone comes within two hundred meters, don't bother with warnings; just use the close-in weapon system to tear them apart.”

“Don't worry, as long as I don't turn on the lights, not even a ghost could find this place.”

Old Chen patted the console with a mischievous grin: “But as for you two, don't get mugged.”

Jiang Ran didn't respond, only glancing back at Su Qingyu.

She had also changed into a loose gray robe.

She had smeared some coal dust on her face, hiding that overly exquisite visage, leaving only a pair of cold, clear eyes visible.

The two of them climbed down a rope ladder onto a black inflatable assault boat that had been prepared in advance.

The motor emitted a muffled chugging sound from its silencer, carrying the two toward that steel jungle shimmering with eerie neon... The inflatable boat slowly pulled up to a floating dock made of discarded buoys and tires lashed together.

This was the ‘Customs’ at the lowest level of the Floating City, and the only entrance to that steel spider web.

The air was thick with the smell of engine oil and a lingering scent of blood.

Seven or eight armed thugs, wearing modified bulletproof vests with yellow tape wrapped around their arms, were leaning lazily against the rusty railings.

On the tape, the words ‘Mutual Aid Society’ were written crookedly with a marker—this was the largest gang here and the maker of the rules.

A small line of survivors wanting to enter the city stood at the dock entrance, the atmosphere oppressive and hopeless.

“Slap!”

A crisp sound.

A dirty velvet bag was slammed hard onto the muddy deck.

Several gold rings and a thick gold necklace rolled out of the bag's opening, glinting with an alluring luster in the dim light.

“Please... this is pure gold!

It's all pure gold!”

A man with a face full of stubble knelt on the ground, death-gripping a guard's leg:

“My wife is sick, if you just let me in to buy some medicine...”

“Get lost!”

The guard kicked the man in the solar plexus, sending him curling up like a cooked shrimp.

The guard glanced disgustedly at the gold on the ground, as if looking at a pile of non-recyclable trash.

“Gold? Is your brain fried from radiation?”

The guard spat a thick glob of phlegm onto the gold necklace:

“Can you eat this stuff? Or can it generate electricity?

In the Floating City, this thing is too hard even to wipe your ass with!”

He pointed to a broken wooden sign hanging behind him, which had a crooked price list written in red paint:

【Entry Fee】: 1 Fully Charged High-Energy Battery OR Intact Human Organ (Cornea/Kidney/Liver/Level 1 Tendon)

“No battery?”

The guard pulled a rusty dagger from his waist and tossed it in front of the man with a ‘clang’, a cruel, playful look on his face:

“Then use parts from your body to pay.

One finger for one temporary pass.

Choose for yourself.”

The surrounding crowd in line was dead silent; no one dared to speak, and no one even dared to take a second look.

The man tremblingly grabbed the knife, looking at his wife waiting for life-saving medicine not far away, his face covered in tears and snot.

Finally, gnashing his teeth, he pressed his left pinky finger onto the mooring bollard.

“Squish.”

Blood splattered.

The guard didn't even glance at the severed finger, simply kicking it to a mutated hound waiting nearby to eat meat.

Then he tossed down a dirty plastic tag. “Next.”

Before the smear of bright red blood could be washed away by the rain, the guard impatiently tapped the railing with the back of his knife.

“Next! Hurry up!”

Jiang Ran stepped forward expressionlessly, with Su Qingyu following half a step behind him.

Despite wearing a loose, tattered cloak and having dust smeared on her face,

Su Qingyu's pine-straight posture and her gait, which seemed far too light even in the sludge, still caught the guard's attention.

His murky eyes swept greedily over Su Qingyu, and the guard's mouth, full of yellow teeth, split into a grin:

“Lift the cloak, show your face.

Inspections have been strict lately; I need to check if you have any ‘contraband’... or mutation spots.”

Several thugs around them let out a burst of lewd laughter, their hands reaching suggestively toward the holsters at their waists.

Jiang Ran didn't speak, and his footsteps didn't even pause.

The moment the guard reached out to grab Su Qingyu's hood, Jiang Ran's hand emerged from beneath his cloak, and his wrist gave a gentle flick.

“Clang! Clang!”

Two palm-sized metal plates, entirely matte black, slid across the slippery deck and accurately bumped into the guard's boots.

The guard froze for a moment and instinctively looked down.

The next second, his pupils constricted sharply, and the previous arrogance and lewdness instantly turned into extreme shock and greed.

On the sides of those two metal plates, a row of faint blue indicator lights was glowing—the sign of a full charge.

“Military-grade solid-state battery plates.”

Jiang Ran's voice was cold, as if he were discussing two pieces of scrap metal: “High-purity goods refined by the Furnace Gang.

One piece is enough to run the heater in your crappy sentry box for half a month.”

In this post-apocalyptic world where even flashlights had to be used sparingly, this high-density military energy was true ‘black gold’.

The guard was like a dog seeing a meaty bone.

He quickly bent down to pick up the two batteries, stuffing them into his shirt and clutching them tightly, for fear his companions would see and steal them.

“Ahem... well, rules are fixed, but people are flexible.”

The fleshy folds on the guard's face instantly squeezed into a smile.

He didn't even bother to look at Su Qingyu again.

He kicked open the rusty iron gate behind him and bowed slightly, making a ‘please’ gesture.

“This way, bosses! Watch your step, it's slippery!”

Jiang Ran didn't even look at him, leading Su Qingyu across the boundary where the bloodstains from the severed finger still remained.

The moment they stepped into the shadow of the gate, Jiang Ran turned his head and whispered in a voice only the two of them could hear:

“Look closely.

Here, a human life isn't worth as much as two kilowatt-hours of electricity.”