Chương 117: Before the Bridge Burns (2/3)

Without another word, the two turned from the plaza and burst forward, their figures plunging into the rolling fog as they raced toward the Sump Bridge. The scarred woman's boots struck the frost-rimed obsidian in a rapid staccato, each footfall sending tiny chips of dark ice skittering outward. Shi Yan's heavier tread followed half a beat behind, the iron-shod soles of his greaves grinding against stone with the harsh scrape of metal on glass.

His saber, still gripped in both hands, swung slightly with each stride, its hundred-and-fifty-pound weight a pendulum that threatened to throw his balance if he faltered even once.

Behind them, the ancient Wardens of the Ghost Market were already stirring. The distant grinding of chains had grown into a rhythmic thunder, metal shrieking against bone-paved streets as massive anchors carved furrows through the frozen ground. If they failed to escape before this pocket realm sealed itself shut, they would be trapped here forever—fuel for the market's hunger, their flesh and souls ground down to balance a ledger written in blood and memory.

Only moments ago, the Midnight Ghost Market had still looked like a sinister yet orderly place of trade. Merchants had haggled with cold politeness, their paper faces creased in false smiles. Lanterns had burned with steady green flames. The air, though thick with sulfur and rot, had possessed a certain terrible predictability. But now, as though enraged by the loss of its conceptual memory, the very laws that upheld this hidden realm began to fray.

The temperature plummeted further still, cold enough that each breath Shi Yan drew burned like shards of ice scraping down his throat. White vapor poured from the gaps in his mask with every exhale, curling upward in ghostly tendrils before dissipating into the thickening fog.

In all directions, the fragile balance between the living and the dead collapsed at once.

"The ledger weeps! A thief has defiled the Yellow Springs!" shrieked a stall owner with hollow eye sockets, its voice so shrill it seemed fit to tear through the soul. The sound cut through the air like a blade drawn across bone, high and keening, layered with an unnatural resonance that made the teeth ache and the meridians shudder. With a violent sweep of its sleeve—the paper fabric crackling like dry leaves—it sent a heap of cursed jade slips scattering across the ground.

Each slip struck the frozen stone with sharp, brittle clicks, bouncing and spinning before settling into unnatural patterns. Its jaw cracked open with a hideous snap, hinges of dried sinew stretching impossibly wide, revealing a throat that yawned into lightless void.

"Seal the gates! Reap the debt!"

The words rippled outward like a curse given form. Other merchants took up the cry, their painted faces turning in unison toward the fleeing pair. Paper hands lifted. Wooden fingers flexed. The market itself seemed to inhale, drawing in the scattered warmth of the living with ravenous intent.

Not far ahead of Shi Yan, a rogue cultivator clad in heavy chainmail suddenly let out a miserable scream. His knees gave way and he crashed onto the bone-paved street, both hands clutching desperately at a glowing wooden puzzle box—an item he had obtained only moments earlier after bartering away fifteen years of his lifespan. The box pulsed with sickly yellow light, each throb synchronized with the man's frantic heartbeat.

Intricate carvings along its surface writhed like living things, characters of an ancient script reshaping themselves before his terrified eyes.

"No! Wait! I already paid the price! I gave all that was demanded of me!" the man shrieked. Spittle flew from his lips, freezing into tiny crystals before hitting the ground. His fingers scrabbled at the box's edges, nails scraping against wood with desperate, clawing urgency.

But the hard stone beneath him had already begun to soften, dissolving in the blink of an eye into a pool of black, fetid mire. The transformation spread outward in a perfect circle, bone pavers crumbling into oily sludge that bubbled and hissed like acid eating through flesh. The stench that rose from it was overpowering—sweet rot layered over human waste, mixed with something metallic and raw that coated the back of the throat like grease.

From within the sludge, dozens of swollen, pallid arms burst forth. Their skin was bloated and gray, stretched taut over waterlogged flesh that wept dark fluid from every pore. Their fingers ended in rust-eaten iron hooks, the metal fused directly into bone where fingernails should have been. Each hook was pitted and corroded, yet wickedly sharp, curved like the talons of some underwater predator. And before the man could react, those ghastly hands seized his ankles, wrists, and waist, dragging him downward.

The hooks bit deep, tearing through chainmail links with horrible ease, puncturing leather and flesh beneath. Blood welled up in dark streams, mixing with the mire as the man thrashed and screamed.

"The price has risen."

The words drifted from the thickening fog in countless hollow voices layered atop one another, as though ten thousand resentful ghosts spoke with a single mouth. Each syllable echoed and overlapped, creating a nauseating chorus that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once—from the ground, from the air, from inside one's own skull.

"Leave your flesh. Leave your soul."

Shi Yan did not slow in the least. He merely shifted half a step aside, avoiding the widening mire of death. His boots found purchase on solid bone pavers still untouched by the corruption, weight transferring smoothly from heel to toe as he adjusted his trajectory without breaking stride. Yet his right hand tightened around the hilt of his newly forged Demonic Heavy Saber, knuckles pressing hard against the wrapped leather grip.

The hundred-and-fifty-pound iron weapon anchored both his body and his intent, its weight a tangible reminder of the physical world amidst this realm of hungry spirits and fraying law.

The matter was plain.

The market's rising toll and these sudden slaughters—he had brought them about. By bypassing the toll and duplicating the Stele's data, he had disturbed the hidden laws of this place. To the Ghost Market, such an act was no different from grave theft, and now it sought to draw repayment from every living being within its bounds to set its ledger aright. The logic was simple, brutal, and entirely predictable. A system detecting intrusion. Countermeasures deploying. Collateral damage irrelevant.

What wretched fortune.

A faint click of his tongue sounded behind the iron mask as he cast a brief glance at the scarred woman running beside him. Her expression remained grimly focused, jaw set, eyes fixed straight ahead. She had not yet blamed him aloud, but the tension in her shoulders spoke clearly enough. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Did he feel regret?

He knew well enough what danger he had stirred up. Yet compared with the gain of obtaining the complete World Map and the dungeon coordinates, the price was still worth paying. Strategic advantage acquired. Mission parameters fulfilled. Acceptable losses. To him, regret was a thing for the dead and the defeated—an emotion that served no tactical purpose, a weight that slowed the hand when decisiveness was required.

As he passed the mire, his gaze swept across the doomed cultivator and took in the man's end with the cold assessment of a soldier cataloging enemy capabilities.

In no more than three breaths, the armored rogue cultivator aged fifty years. His dark hair turned dry and white as frost, strands losing their luster and body until they hung limp and brittle as dried straw. His once-sturdy flesh withered at a visible pace, shrinking tightly over bone as muscle and fat were consumed from within. His skin wrinkled into brittle folds like dead parchment clinging to a corpse, liver spots blooming across his hands and face in dark clusters.

His eyes sank deep into their sockets, becoming dull and rheumy, the whites yellowing like old ivory. Then, after one final convulsion of despair—spine arching, mouth gaping in a silent scream—he was dragged whole beneath the foul mire. His scream broke off midway, replaced by a wet, choking crunch that made the heart shudder. Bones snapped with muffled pops. Chainmail rings scraped against stone, then sank beneath the surface with a series of thick, sucking gurgles.

Within moments, the mire stilled, its surface becoming glassy and smooth as black ice. Only the wooden puzzle box remained, floating serenely atop the filth, still pulsing with that sickly yellow glow.

Nor did those who had earlier traded blood or lifespan fare any better.

All throughout the market, the shadows lurking in the alleyways peeled themselves from the walls like living things. They moved with sinuous, serpentine grace, darkness given weight and hunger, flowing across the bone-paved ground without sound or substance. They swept soundlessly forward, coiling around the throats of fleeing cultivators before forcibly drawing the Yang vitality from their very pores.

Victims collapsed mid-stride, their life force siphoned away in ghostly streams of pale golden light that the shadows drank down with obscene greed. Flesh turned ashen. Eyes rolled back to show only whites. Bodies crumpled like puppets with severed strings.

In the span of mere moments, the Ghost Market cast aside every last pretense of order.

As Shi Yan and the woman sped along the white-bone streets, the green corpse-oil lanterns hanging above the stalls began bursting apart one after another, their flames snuffing out with sharp, violent pops. Each detonation sent showers of burning oil raining down, droplets hissing as they struck the frozen ground. Darkness rushed in to fill the void, pressing close and suffocating, broken only by the fading crimson glow that still clung to certain stalls like dying embers.

The Paper-Doll merchants, who only moments before had been intent on bargaining, suddenly went still. Their painted faces froze mid-expression, smiles locked in place with unnatural rigidity. Bodies that had moved with uncanny fluidity now stood rigid as corpses in rigor mortis.

Then, as the two rushed past, the painted smiles on their paper faces did not change, yet their heads twisted around with jerking, unnatural stiffness, following the two living humans with dreadful precision. Necks rotated in increments—thirty degrees, sixty, ninety—crackling like dry bamboo with each stuttering movement. Some turned completely backward, spines bending in ways no living thing should bend, painted eyes tracking Shi Yan and the woman with unblinking focus even as their bodies remained facing forward.

"Do not meet their eyes!" the woman hissed. Her breathing remained measured and steady despite the exertion, every breath carefully governed so as not to throw her steps into disorder—a sign of disciplined cultivation and hard-won experience. Her broadsword was already drawn, the blade catching the dim light in a thin line of cold steel. A frigid Yin aura flowed from its edge, visible as pale wisps of frost that coiled along the fuller, freezing back the clammy malice pressing in from every side.

Where the aura touched the encroaching shadows, they recoiled with hissing whispers, retreating just far enough to keep beyond the blade's reach.

"The market seeks a karmic bond to mend what has been lost. Once your gaze locks with theirs, this place will seize your body and nail you where you stand!"

"I understand," Shi Yan said.

His voice was calm and level, without the slightest ripple. Each word emerged clipped and precise, filtered through the narrow slits of his iron mask with mechanical evenness.

The scarred woman shot him a strange glance from the side, her dark eyes flicking toward him for just an instant before snapping back to the path ahead. Her brow furrowed slightly, a crease forming between her brows that deepened the shadows cast by the failing light.

At such a moment, most cultivators would already be cursing the heavens, invoking their ancestors, or breaking into a cold sweat. She had seen it countless times—brave men reduced to gibbering wrecks when the Yellow Springs turned its full attention upon them. Yet this masked young master beside her merely gave a plain reply, as though they were discussing some trifling matter—the weather, perhaps, or the quality of tea.

Ignoring her gaze, Shi Yan immediately adjusted his senses.

He could no longer trust his eyes. In a place that sought to ensnare the living through sight, relying upon vision was no different from stepping willingly into a snare. The Paper-Dolls' unchanging smiles, the way the fog seemed to writhe with hidden faces, the glowing puzzle box still floating on the mire—all of it was bait. Traps laid for the unwary.

Gritting his teeth behind the mask, he directed a heavy surge of blood and vitality up the back of his neck, forcing it toward the mutated cluster of nerves at the base of his skull. The sensation was intensely unpleasant—heat building beneath the skin, pressure mounting like a fist pressing against the inside of his skull, veins pulsing in his temples with each heartbeat.

A dull, pounding ache struck against his brainstem, sharp enough to make his vision blur and his balance waver for a single dangerous step. But the moment he pushed the [Acoustic-Blood Tracker] past its usual limit, the world before him was instantly redrawn into a layered map of sound, tremor, and living motion.

The darkness ceased to matter. The fog became irrelevant.

Heartbeats. Shifting air. Footsteps. The quiver of walls.

Everything within reach was laid bare. He could hear the woman's pulse, strong and rapid at her throat. The faint wheeze of wind through broken stalls. The scrape of distant chains growing ever closer. The soft patter of something crawling along the rooftops—claws on tile, too many legs, moving in skittering bursts.

Even the vibrations of living qi moving through meridians registered as faint electrical tingles at the edge of his perception, mapping out the positions of every cultivator still fleeing through the market's twisting lanes.

Thirty figures ahead.

They were moving to cut off the bridge.

A group of masked rogue cultivators, panic filling their every movement, had already flooded the main thoroughfare, charging blindly toward the exit. Their footsteps crashed against bone pavers in chaotic rhythm, no coordination, only desperate flight. Voices cried out in raw terror. Someone sobbed. Another cursed with savage desperation. Yet before Shi Yan could use them to judge the path ahead, the fog surged and thickened, condensing into a solid wall of gray that swallowed sound and sight alike.

The temperature within that churning mass dropped even further, cold radiating from it in waves that chilled exposed skin and made armor frost over with rime.

Through the extension of his tracker, Shi Yan sensed the very layout of the streets twisting upon itself. The screaming cultivators rushed straight ahead—he could hear their voices, track their footfalls—only for the sound of their footsteps to curl away toward the left, circling back in endless winding loops. The acoustics bent wrong. Echoes returned from directions that should have been solid walls. Space itself had become untrustworthy, folding in on itself like a trick of mirrors and geometry gone mad.

So this was a spatial array?

Shi Yan's mind stirred at once. He recalled the novels he had once read—of maze-like formations that led cultivators round and round until they died of exhaustion, and of those rare few who managed to return alive, only to discover that years had already passed outside. Stories of men who entered young and emerged with white beards and withered limbs, their entire lives stolen by a single wrong turn.

But...

He could see it.

Or rather, he could perceive its distortions. The way sound bent told him where space folded. The echo patterns revealed false walls. The tremors in the ground mapped the true path beneath the illusion. His tracker, designed to hunt targets through concrete and steel, adapted to this new environment with ruthless efficiency. What should have been invisible became readable. What should have been impossible became merely... difficult.

Though startled by the realization, Shi Yan soon let out a faint smile beneath his mask. The corner of his mouth twitched upward, a brief flicker of dark satisfaction. An advantage. Unexpected. Exploitable.

Yet in the very next instant, that smile froze.

Wait...

Would the Gatekeeper even allow him to pass?