Chương 94: The Market Eats Souls (3/3)

So… what now?

Now that Shi Yan had arrived at this market, unfortunately, Su Yin hadn't told him the name of a blacksmith or provided any guidance like she had when she instructed him to enter the Ghost Market.

She had offered him clear, explicitly detailed parameters for surviving the Gatekeeper and navigating the boundary of the Netherworld—her voice steady and clinical as she'd traced the crossing protocol with her pale fingers against the silk maps. Yet when it came to the actual logistics of acquiring a weapon within this forsaken dimension, she had remained perfectly, intentionally vague. Her instructions had simply… stopped. As if the knowledge itself had been scraped from her tongue by something older than words.

Well, it looked like either she wouldn't share it—maintaining the Silk & Ash Chamber's strict plausible deniability by refusing to leave a verbal paper trail connecting Shi Yan to a specific netherworld asset—or she simply didn't have enough information herself.

But he believed it was the latter. It was unlikely to be the first, now that he was officially her inner retainer or whatever she called it. The Ghost Market was a shifting, chaotic ecosystem, its stalls and bridges rearranging themselves according to the whims of dead merchants and hungry dimensions, and perhaps even the Chamber's reach was limited here. Even intelligence networks had their borders, and this place reeked of something beyond mortal jurisdiction.

So… the first thing to do, as a soldier in this unknown terrain, was obvious.

Intelligence.

In a hostile, unmapped Area of Operations, a soldier did not simply sprint toward an assumed objective. That was how amateurs died—bleeding out in ditches they never saw coming, their final thoughts a confused tangle of why and how.

The first protocol upon infiltrating behind enemy lines was to establish a perimeter baseline. He needed to understand the threat density, the rules of engagement, and the ambient hostility of his immediate surroundings before he started blindly asking questions that could get his soul dragged into a rusty lantern.

The market sprawled before him in dizzying, impossible layers—pavilions suspended upside-down from stalactite ribs, bridges woven from what looked disturbingly like braided intestines, and stalls carved directly into the fossilized vertebrae of creatures that had died when the sky was still whole.

And to minimize risk as much as possible, he also remembered the excruciating cranial pressure he had suffered at the border—or rather, before entering this Ghost Market world.

When the dimensional shift had occurred upon the floating bridge, the sheer weight of the broken Heavenly laws had nearly ruptured his cerebral cortex. It had felt like iron nails being hammered through his temples from the inside out, each pulse of reality-distortion sending fresh fractures spidering through his skull. His vision had whited out. His equilibrium had collapsed. He'd tasted bile and copper, felt something warm trickling from his nose.

The System had forcibly intervened, engaging its [Quarantine Protocol] to artificially suppress the [Acoustic-Blood Tracker]. It had forcefully powered the biological radar down into a dormant, passive state—just enough sensory input to keep him balanced on his feet, but entirely useless for active surveillance. The faint hum of distant heartbeats had cut off like severed strings, leaving him deaf to the living symphony he'd grown accustomed to reading.

To map this chaotic environment, he had to manually reignite the hardware.

Let's see…

Pressing his armored thumb against the flesh just below his jaw—where the mutation had rooted itself deepest into the carotid cluster—he consciously willed a massive surge of blood volume directly into that specific bundle. The pressure was immediate and uncomfortable, a hot throbbing that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. He flexed the newly mutated tangle of vascular nerves, activating his [Acoustic-Blood Tracker (Physiological Toggle)].

The sensation was immediate and nauseating. A sharp, icy needle seemed to plunge straight through the base of his brain, accompanied by the distinct, metallic taste of copper flooding his salivary glands—thick and cloying, coating his tongue like old coins left in stagnant water. His physical heartbeat forcefully skipped a rhythm, stuttering as his mortal hardware aggressively booted up to process data it was never naturally designed to handle.

A dull ache throbbed behind his eyes, protesting the sudden influx of sensory data. His vision blurred momentarily, the corpse-lamps smearing into streaks of wan green and ghost-blue.

Only then did the familiar, pristine blue text of the interface burn itself into the upper corner of his vision, sharp and crisp against the gloom.

[System Notation: Acoustic-Blood Tracker engaged. Output restricted to 15% to prevent cognitive rupture.] Next, rather than projecting a map of the entire abyss—which would have undoubtedly gathered the unholy frequencies of tens of thousands of ghosts and instantly cooked his grey matter into steaming soup—Shi Yan localized his biological sonar to a tight, focused sphere of roughly thirty feet. A manageable bubble of awareness. Enough to catch threats before they reached arm's length.

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Instantly, the muffled drone of the market sharpened into crisp, distinct audio channels. What had been an indistinct wash of sound—scraping, hissing, the wet shuffle of things that shouldn't walk—now resolved into individual threads he could pluck and examine. He filtered out the ambient scraping of bone against bone and the distant, maddening bubbling of the upside-down river crossing the violet sky, tuning in strictly to the vibrations of vocal cords and the rhythmic thud of living hearts.

To his left, beneath a canopy of stretched skin—yellowed and semi-translucent, veins still faintly visible like a macabre map—a huddled figure wrapped in gray rags was feverishly bartering with an unseen vendor. The skin canopy shuddered gently in the dead air, as if breathing.

"... three drops of maiden's blood for the Array-Piercing Awl. That was the agreed price!" the gray-ragged man hissed, his heartbeat erratic, spiking with terror. The rhythm was all wrong—too fast, too irregular. Prey realizing the trap had already closed.

"The resonance of the blood is stale," replied a voice that sounded like dry leaves scraping across a tombstone—brittle, ancient, and utterly devoid of mercy.

"The maiden felt fear before the blade took her. Fear sours the Yang essence. The price has changed. The Awl requires the blood, and the index finger of your dominant hand."

Shi Yan listened closely, his face an immovable mask of iron beneath the cold Yaksha features. His breathing remained steady, clinical. Detached. A split second later, the tracker picked up the wet, sickening pop of bone shears snapping shut, accompanied by a pathetic, choked gasp that ended in a thin, wheezing sob.

The unseen vendor let out a wet, sloshing rattle of approval—something between a laugh and the sound of fluid draining from a corpse. Beside the booth, several glass jars rattled softly—vessels meant to contain the harvest, their contents sloshing with thick, dark liquid. Their mournful cries, if they had any, were swallowed by the dead air before they could spread.

It was a localized tragedy. A brutal transaction of flesh and karma, playing out in the shadow of a skin-tent while the market continued its indifferent crawl around them.

Not this one.

He cataloged the vendor as a high-risk entity—potential threat if approached carelessly, but not immediately hostile unless provoked—and immediately tuned the frequency out. He needed operational intelligence, not the desperate haggling of doomed scavengers trading their bodies piece by piece for tools they'd likely never live to use.

He shifted his auditory focus toward a trio of slow-walking, steady heartbeats pacing along a suspended bone-bridge above him. Their footsteps were measured, cautious. The creak of the bridge beneath their weight echoed faintly through the hollow marrow channels.

"... Iron-Blood Prefecture has doubled the checkpoint levies in the Outer Wards," a low, gruff voice murmured. The speaker's heartbeat was steady, controlled—a professional, not a panicked scavenger.

"They're using the Black-Ash Marsh incident as an excuse to lock down the northern quadrant."

"It's not just an excuse," a second voice whispered, the speaker's vocal cords strained, indicative of an old throat injury—probably a blade that had missed the kill by inches. His words rasped like silk dragged over broken glass.

"I passed by the southern bogs yesterday. The entire swamp smells like rendered fat and ozone. Someone completely wiped out a Cloud-Mirror Sect retrieval squad. Slaughtered an Inner Elder, too. Left them in the mud like butchered pigs." There was a pause, a wet swallow.

"The flies were still feasting when I crossed."

"Quiet your tongue," a third voice snapped, his heartbeat spiking with nervous discipline—fear wrapped in training. A younger cultivator, perhaps, still learning when silence meant survival.

"Cloud-Mirror has eyes everywhere tonight. They are desperate. Their Patriarch is burning through his lifespan at the Shattered-Halo realm. If they don't secure the Celestial Marrow from their back-mountain Secret Realm by the next full moon, the Flesh-Forge Pavilion will launch a proxy war to swallow their territory."

Another Cloud-Mirror Sect information drop.

At this, Shi Yan stopped and focused on this conversation, his eyes narrowing to slits beneath his iron mask. His breathing slowed further, almost stopping entirely as he tuned everything else out. The corpse-lamps flickered around him, their wan light casting his shadow long and distorted across the bone pier.

Celestial Marrow.

The pieces of the puzzle clicked together with mechanical perfection, each fragment slotting into place with the satisfying precision of a well-maintained rifle being reassembled. Su Yin's intelligence had been deadly accurate.

The blood-array in the swamp had indeed been a primer to forge a key—a spiritual lockpick designed to pry open something ancient and jealously guarded.

Cloud-Mirror was attempting to breach a localized Shattered Realm right in their own backyard to secure a Tier-3 or Tier-4 evolutionary resource. A desperate gamble, the kind of operation that left corpses stacked high whether it succeeded or failed.

The Patriarch of the sect was essentially suffocating at the peak of the Shattered-Halo realm; without the Celestial Marrow to force a physical and spiritual breakthrough into the Soul-Eclipse realm, he would die of old age, leaving his entire sect vulnerable to being devoured by their corporate rivals. His meridians were probably already calcifying, his Qi circulation growing sluggish and brittle like frost creeping across a dying tree.

And because Shi Yan had massacred their vanguard—turned their elite retrieval squad into meat scattered across the mud—they were now disorganized, delayed, and bleeding capital. The elite enforcers were likely flooding this very market tonight in a desperate bid to purchase replacement talismans, arrays, or hired muscle to recover their lost momentum. Throwing spirit stones at the problem like drowning men grasping for driftwood.

But it was useless intel for his current objective. It just confirmed Su Yin's capability at acquiring accurate information—her network was as sharp as advertised—but now it had become public knowledge, whispered openly on bone-bridges and traded like currency. The intelligence advantage had evaporated. The window had closed.

Now, he severed the audio connection with a mental flex, letting the [Acoustic-Blood Tracker] fade back to a low, passive hum. The sharp clarity of individual heartbeats dissolved back into a muted background thrum. He had the geopolitical layout. The board was exactly as chaotic as he needed it to be—factions scrambling, attention divided, enforcers distracted by their own crumbling empire.

His initial scan of the LZ was complete.

He had confirmed that the thirty-foot area immediately around him was a stabilized commercial zone, not an active combat arena. The entities here were focused on twisted bartering, not random acts of slaughter. No immediate ambush. No spiritual predators circling for easy prey. Just merchants of meat and desperation, trading fragments of themselves for fragments of power.

With the baseline threat level established, he could shift his tactical priorities from pure perimeter defense to executing his original, critical objective.

Which was… I need to secure my weapon.

With that, he stepped off the spinal pier—his boots leaving faint impressions in the black condensation pooling in the bone's grooves—and fully merged into the crowded thoroughfare of the market. The heavy, stagnant air pressed against him like invisible water, each step requiring conscious effort.

Around him, figures drifted past—robed cultivators with hollow eyes, merchants whose faces were hidden behind veils of shadow, and things that might once have been human but had bargained away too many pieces of themselves to still qualify.

Because his blood tracker was suppressed to prevent a similar incident from happening again—another cerebral rupture would leave him drooling and blind—he needed to move location by location, listening as he went.