Chương 106: When the Lantern Finds You (3/3)

"Information regarding the northern ridges," Shi Yan said, his voice emerging low and hoarse through the mask's vocal dampeners, like iron scraping over stone—each syllable ground flat and metallic, stripped of warmth by the layered filtration mesh. The sound carried just far enough to reach the merchant's stomach-face, but no farther, swallowed quickly by the oppressive weight of the netherworld mist.

"In particular, I seek the changes in the terrain near the Cloud-Mirror spiritual veins."

The merchant's stomach-face twisted, revealing a hideous smile of flesh and folds. Pale fluid wept from the crude stitching that bound the distended features into place, trickling down the mottled skin in glistening rivulets. The overlapping rows of needle-like teeth clacked together wetly as the thing's lips peeled back.

"Ah… so it is one who seeks the hidden veins. The Cloud-Mirror cultivators, hm? Have they not already sealed that mountain? You wish to know the ancient routes from before the Heavens shattered them?" Its voice grew thick with greed, each word dripping with hunger as viscous as the sludge festering in the nearby canal. The corpse leaned forward over the warped plank counter, and the sickly green glow of the overhead lantern cast writhing shadows across its grotesque abdomen.

"I have the records. I have the blood-maps."

As it spoke, the creature stretched forth a pale and swollen hand—fingers bloated and jointless, skin stretched taut like waterlogged parchment ready to split. The nails were black and cracked, trailing faint wisps of vapor that smelled of rancid grease and old blood.

"The price… three years of summer breath. Surrender to me the warmth of your next three summers, and the map shall be yours."

Beneath the mask, Shi Yan's expression did not shift in the slightest, as unmoving as carved stone. The filtered air hissed softly through the charcoal mesh with each controlled breath. His eyes—hidden in the shadowed depths of the Iron-Yaksha's eye slits—remained locked on the stomach-face without blinking, calculating, measuring.

He possessed no spiritual root that could be cut away, yet he still understood one truth clearly: to yield one's lifespan to such a strange and baleful being was no fair exchange, but a grievous loss to one's very foundation. The metaphysical economics of cultivation might be alien to him, but surrendering biological vitality to an unknown entity? That was a non-starter by any standard.

Will this work?

Without looking away from the stomach-face, Shi Yan sent a thought into his bio-locked spatial pouch. The subtle pulse of acknowledgment thrummed against his ribs—a sensation like warm static spreading across his armor's interior contact points. With a flash of displaced air and the faintest scent of ozone, a heavy black leather satchel appeared in his gauntleted hand. He cast it upon the beast-skin counter with a dull thud that scattered fine bone dust from the warped plank's surface.

The mouth of the satchel fell open, spilling its contents partially across the flayed hide—fifty perfectly cut, luminous medium-grade spirit stones, each one gleaming with compressed spiritual essence that cast pale white reflections across the stall's tattered canopy. The stones hummed faintly, their concentrated Qi creating minute ripples in the surrounding miasma. Roughly about fifty.

"I do not bargain with my life," Shi Yan said, his posture utterly still, shoulders squared, gauntleted hand resting flat on the counter beside the satchel. His voice carried the cold finality of a contract termination. Maintaining the cold gaze and narrowed eyes behind the mask's slits, he let the silence stretch for two deliberate heartbeats.

"Take the spirit stones. With such a sum, it would be no difficult matter for you to trade anything with the next cycle."

The stomach-face let out a cold sneer, its lips peeling back further to expose the full horror of those needle-teeth embedded in overlapping rows along the abdominal wall. Pale fluid bubbled at the corners of the stitched mouth.

"Mortal stones. Sect refuse. You dare haggle with the dead as though you were some alley peddler?" Its voice turned shrill and hungry, climbing in pitch until it scraped against the inside of Shi Yan's mask like fingernails on rusted iron. The corpse's swollen hand swept dismissively through the air, trailing vapor.

"Take back your filthy stones! We desire flesh, or we desire soul!"

A pity…

Shi Yan didn't argue. He didn't posture or threaten the entity. His gauntleted fingers simply closed around the leather satchel's mouth, pulling it back across the beast-skin mat with a soft rasp of hide on wood. The spirit stones vanished back into their container as he straightened to his full, towering height. He did not need to waste energy intimidating a local asset who refused to cooperate. The cost-benefit analysis was already complete: non-compliant vendor, inflexible terms, zero tactical value.

He simply swiped the leather satchel off the table, dropped it back into his spatial pouch with another pulse of displaced air, and walked away without another word—his iron-shod boots striking the bone pavement in measured, unhurried strides. The stomach-face cursed at his back in a language that sounded like wet tearing and grinding teeth, but Shi Yan was already calculating his next move, the invective washing over his armored frame like meaningless noise.

If wealth couldn't buy intelligence here, he would have to find it another way.

He moved deeper into the labyrinth of crooked stalls and leaning pagoda-style structures. The condensation on his armor thickened as he walked, tiny droplets joining together and running in cold trails down the plates. To compensate for the visual obscurity of the dense Yin-fog that reduced visibility to perhaps ten feet in any direction, Shi Yan mentally accessed the System. The command was wordless, instinctive—a flex of intent against the foreign architecture grafted into his nervous system.

It began as a dull, throbbing ache at the base of his skull, right where the physical mutation of the nerve clusters had integrated into his brain stem like invasive roots. The sensation spread rapidly, crawling down his spine in prickling waves. Within seconds, his auditory perception violently expanded, the world suddenly loud with information his conscious mind had been filtering out.

Acoustic-Blood Tracker Active!

[Output restricted to 15%. Spatial Radius: 30 feet.] The world of the Ghost Market transformed from a visual blur of green fog and flickering corpse-oil lanterns into a highly detailed, 3D topographical map constructed entirely of sound, vibration, and blood-flow. Every heartbeat within range became a beacon. Every footfall registered as a pressure wave.

The rustling of cloth, the scrape of bone on bone, the hiss of steam venting from underground—all of it layered together into a living acoustic sculpture that his mind could navigate with surgical precision.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. To his right, he heard the erratic, terrified thump-thump-thump of a human heart—beating far too fast, over 140 beats per minute, adrenaline-spiked and ragged. He turned his head slightly, the motion smooth and controlled. A figure cloaked in ragged beggar's robes was huddled in an alleyway between two crooked stalls, pressed against a stack of rotting crates that stank of pickled offal.

Through the tracker, Shi Yan could hear the rush of blood through the man's adrenal glands—the arterial surge distinct and unmistakable—the friction of sweat soaking into cheap cloth with a soft, continuous sssss, and the frantic, rapid cycling of Qi through a meridian pathway that produced a faint, whistling vibration in the cultivator's chest cavity. The man was on the edge of full panic, probably in debt, probably desperate. Irrelevant.

To his left, walking among the crowd with graceful, gliding steps, Shi Yan detected an entity shaped like a beautiful woman in a pristine white dress that seemed untouched by the filth and moisture saturating everything else in this cursed market. Her silhouette was elegant, willowy, hands folded demurely before her. But the tracker fed him the acoustic reality: she had no heartbeat. No pulse. No blood-flow whatsoever.

Instead of the wet, rhythmic percussion of a living cardiovascular system, he heard the subtle, hollow rustle of dried leaves shifting inside an empty cavity, and the faint, rhythmic grinding of canine teeth—long, sharp, carnivore teeth—scraping together somewhere inside that porcelain-beautiful face. The sound repeated every three seconds like a timer. Predator. Ghost. Avoid.

So many strange creatures here…

Ignoring them, Shi Yan navigated the crowd flawlessly, his heavy frame moving with unexpected efficiency through the press of living cultivators and inhuman entities. He utilized the acoustic radar to step around spiritual hazards—a pool of something that screamed faintly when stepped in, a merchant whose chest cavity echoed like a hollow drum—and identify the hidden living cultivators mingling among the ghosts. Their heartbeats were unmistakable, bright and warm against the cold absence of the dead.

Suddenly, the ambient temperature of the market plummeted. The drop was sharp—a ten-degree fall in the span of three heartbeats. Shi Yan's breath misted thicker inside his mask, condensation flash-freezing on the interior mesh. The bustling, whispered bartering of the dead and the living fell utterly silent. No haggling. No footsteps. No scraping of goods across counters. Even the corpse-oil lanterns seemed to dim, their sickly green glow receding as if the flames themselves recoiled.

Through the [Acoustic-Blood Tracker], Shi Yan heard a sound that made the hairs on his arms stand on edge, despite his overwhelming physical stats and years of battlefield conditioning. It was a high, shrill, discordant note—the wailing of a Suona, a traditional Chinese funeral flute, cutting through the fog like a jagged rusted knife dragged slowly across metal. The sound was wrong. It bypassed his ears entirely and seemed to vibrate directly against his teeth and the bones of his skull.

Accompanied by the flute was the sound of weeping. Dozens of voices, sobbing in horrific, synchronized grief—men, women, children, all wailing in perfect unison, their cries rising and falling in a rhythm that felt deliberately orchestrated, artificial, like a music box wound too tight.

What… is this?

From the dense fog ahead, a procession emerged. It was a line of two dozen figures, utterly devoid of color—cut from stark white funeral paper, their flat, two-dimensional forms somehow moving with volume and weight. Their edges flickered and curled slightly in the sourceless breeze. They walked with a stiff, floating gait, feet never quite touching the bone pavement, leaving no sound of footsteps despite their approach.

Each figure bore weeping paper-lanterns that glowed with a sick, bruised purple light—a color that hurt to look at, that seemed to stain the surrounding fog and linger in the corners of vision. In the center of the procession, they carried a massive, lacquered blood-red coffin on thick wooden poles that creaked under impossible weight.

The coffin's surface gleamed wetly, as if freshly painted, and Shi Yan could see intricate gold-leaf script crawling across its sides—characters he couldn't read, twisting and reforming like living things. As they walked, the paper figures tossed handfuls of yellow and white Hell Money (Mingbi) into the air with mechanical, repetitive gestures.

The paper coins caught fire the moment they left the figures' hands, burning with cold blue flames before they hit the bone-paved streets, where they disintegrated into ash that smelled of incense and rotting lotus.

At the same time, a transparent screen flashed before his eyes, overlaying his vision with cold, clinical text: [Entity Recognized: Weeping Funeral Procession (Wandering Hazard)] [Cultivation Resonance: Null (Concept/Karmic Anomaly)] [Threat to Current Vessel: EXTREME (Avoidance Mandated)] Chaos erupted among the living cultivators around Shi Yan.

"Flee! Don't let the lanterns cast your shadow!" a masked cultivator screamed, his voice cracking with terror as he dove headfirst into an open sewage canal to escape the purple light. The splash echoed wetly, followed by frantic thrashing.

Living cultivators scrambled, their previous composure shattered completely. They broke the market's unspoken laws of etiquette—the careful distance, the ritual politeness that kept the dead from turning hostile—as they crashed through stalls and kicked over corpse-oil lamps in their desperation, toppling bamboo racks and scattering jade slips across the bone pavement. Merchants shrieked curses.

A rogue cultivator with a scarred face shoved an old woman to the ground, trampling over her as he sprinted toward a side alley. Desperate to put solid matter between themselves and the procession, cultivators wedged themselves into gaps between buildings, flattened themselves behind stacks of crates, even pressed their bodies against the cold, slick surfaces of the dragon ribs overhead.

What the hell is this? Shi Yan thought, his eyes narrowing behind the mask's slits as he tracked the stiff, floating gait of the paper figures. His pulse remained steady—45 beats per minute, suppressed by [Phantom-Ash Veil]—but his mind raced. He rapidly sifted through the fragmented memories of his body's previous owner, searching for a match, pulling up half-remembered bedtime stories and Outer Wards ghost tales told around guttering candles.

He found only pieces of childhood folklore and Outer Wards ghost stories, images blurred by the fear of a child who had never truly understood what he was being warned against. Weeping paper dolls... a blood-red coffin. If the lantern light touches your shadow, or if they smell your breath, your soul is chained and dragged to the Yellow Spring?

The memory fragment played out in disjointed flashes: an old woman's wrinkled face leaning close, her breath reeking of cheap rice wine, her gnarled finger pointing at a child's shadow on the wall.

"Never let the dead see you, boy. Never let them smell you."

The memory was maddeningly vague, clouded by mortal superstition and the unreliable perception of a frightened child rather than providing any concrete tactical data. Unclear, too vague, useless. The mechanics were absent. The threat parameters undefined. Yet, despite this, he calmly looked around, his head turning slowly, letting environmental cues fill in the gaps. Observation. Pattern recognition.

The fundamentals never changed, whether the battlefield was an urban warzone or a supernatural market balanced over an abyss.

He watched a burly cultivator—Foundation Establishment at minimum, judging by the faint shimmer of protective Qi around his frame—brutally shove a ghost-merchant's stall owner aside just to cower beneath a rotting wooden table, his massive shoulders hunched, arms wrapped around his head. A cultivator... afraid. Someone with spiritual power, with techniques designed to ward off malevolent entities, reduced to hiding like a cornered animal. Meaning brute force and Qi barriers were useless here.

The entity operated on different rules. Concept-based. Karmic. Something that bypassed conventional defenses entirely.

Shi Yan rapidly analyzed, his thoughts moving through the tactical assessment with mechanical efficiency.

"Smell your breath." That meant the entities tracked respiratory exhaust—expelled body heat, moisture, and carbon dioxide. Biological signatures. Thermal bloom. Chemical markers.

"If the lantern touches your shadow." That meant they required a geometric line of sight against a solid surface to register a target. Visual confirmation through projected silhouette. The purple light wasn't just illumination—it was a detection mechanism.

He watched the fleeing crowd, his gaze sweeping across their panicked movements with cold, dispassionate focus. The rogue cultivators were screaming and hyperventilating, their mouths open wide, venting massive plumes of terrified breath and body heat into the freezing Yin-fog—visible as thick white clouds that hung in the air for seconds before dissipating.

As they sprinted, flailing their arms wildly, their silhouettes stretched and danced erratically across the alley walls and stall canopies, creating massive, exaggerated shadows for the purple light to easily catch. Some were so panicked they were literally painting multiple shadows as they passed between light sources, maximizing their exposure.

So in conclusion, panicking was the worst possible response. By running, they were maximizing their biological exhaust and their visual footprint. They were literally painting themselves as targets—increasing their detectability across both threat vectors simultaneously.

It was a completely unacceptable risk.

So what should I do now?