Chapter 482: Chapter 321: The Ultimate Secret
After Sikinkov was "interviewed" by the people from the corporate giants, the internal wind direction in the Public Security Bureau shifted silently.
The newly formed disciplinary inspection department, although not officially abolished, had its personnel replaced under the directives of the City Council.
The original fresh blood with simple backgrounds and independence was swapped out for seasoned individuals with vested interests in various departments, rendering the department virtually defunct from a functional standpoint.
The emerging positive trend was cut down at the waist, as several violent attacks by residents from the Border District occurred repeatedly in the Inner City, accompanied by a surge of rhythm-setting posts online.
The Public Security Bureau turned a blind eye to this, allowing the chaos to continue fermenting.
As tensions between the Inner City and the Border District rose again, an unprecedented undercurrent was quietly surging in another normally overlooked corner.
The Northern Industrial Development Zone, the industrial core district of New Moon City, is the pillar of various industrial capacities and also a cold, steel-like sweatshop factory.
This area is filled with dense clusters of factories, towering chimneys spewing smoke continuously, dyeing the sky a somber gray, while numerous sewage outlets spray industrial waste into the surrounding rivers, with the air permeated by a pungent chemical smell.
Undoubtedly, the workers here suffer the most.
Even though in this world technology is advanced and robot technology is very mature, with many automated robot models available on the market to replace humans in production operations.
But a harsh reality is that using human labor seems more "economical" to capitalists.
The workers in the Northern Industrial Development Zone include those from the Inner City, who carry decades of home loans and have children needing education; they silently endure extremely long working hours and receive meager pay not proportional to the work intensity in order to sustain their families.
There are also many civilians from the Border Zone who, unable to survive in that chaotic environment, humbly seek a means to eat, some even willingly waive their wages as long as food and accommodation are provided.
In a large metropolis like New Moon City, where life is difficult everywhere, the most abundant resource is human labor, ready for arbitrary exploitation.
Imagine, if you were a capitalist.
A human worker who would work submissively for a daily meal cost of 30 moon dollars, and, if they died, could be appeased simply with a few thousand in compensation.
And a "precious" robot costing hundreds of thousands, requiring regular paid maintenance.
Which would you choose?
Hence, apart from the high-end industries with stringent technical and efficiency demands, humans remain the main workforce on most low-end production lines, and robots hardly ever surpass these flesh-and-blood beings.
Su Mo was now in the West District of the Northern Industrial Development Zone, originally a core industrial area. After numerous economic reform policies drove many factories eastward, this place gradually became abandoned.
The past glory of the West District was washed away by time, leaving behind only a desolate wasteland, where towering chimneys no longer spew thick smoke, standing bleakly on the empty skyline.
Once bustling workshops now lay empty; abandoned machinery sat quietly in corners, so rusty they couldn’t echo their past thundering sounds.
Derelict buildings displayed rusty stains, with inferior concrete ground splitting into numerous cracks, while withered weeds swayed in the wind, long devoid of past lively traces.
Su Mo stood at the entrance of an abandoned mine shaft, wearing a mechanical wristband and performing various operations on its screen.
Ever since the Fools’ Association incident ended, he would bring the probing robots developed by Future here every day, positioning them into the drilling sites within this mine shaft.
To others, everything in the West District, including this mundane mine shaft, was merely an outdated industrial ruin.
But only Su Mo knew that beneath this seemingly barren land lay a secret capable of turning the Human Realm upside down.
Over this time, Su Mo had invested over a hundred probing robots here, these small mechanical forms easily traversed rock crevices, sending back high-frequency signals for comprehensive scanning.
Whether in terms of detection precision or depth, these small robots personally developed by Future were far superior to ordinary geological radar.
As Su Mo was receiving feedback signals from these probing robots, a sneaky shadow approached him from behind.
This was a scavenger, not uncommon in the West District; some were unemployed workers optimized out by factories, having nowhere else to go and ultimately ending up on the streets.
Others were from the Border District, crossing mountains to try to find goods here that couldn’t be found there.
After all, this used to be an industrial hub, where digging and shoveling could unearth quite a bit of scrap metal, sometimes even intact machine parts which could sell for a good price.
This scavenger was disheveled, carrying a large bag, poking his head around behind Su Mo, grinning with yellow teeth: "Hey man, cracking open a treasure chest here?"
"Cracking open a treasure chest" was how scavengers jokingly referred to rummaging through garbage.
You never knew whether the junk pile you were flipping through contained waste or treasures, filled with excitement much like the act of opening a treasure box in a game; it was a form of self-mockery by these impoverished individuals about their lives.
While waiting for the signal, Su Mo had nothing else to do, so he smiled back: "Yes, how’s it going today, did you crack open any fancy treasure chests?"
The scavenger waved his hand: "These days, there’s no such thing as fancy treasure chests, they’ve been opened long ago, all that’s left are scrap chests, finding some copper and iron would be lucky enough."
