Chương 107: Turning His Back (1/3)

Without other choices, Shi Yan's gaze swept across the chaos and locked onto the only viable exit route behind him—a narrow alley mouth already choked with bodies. The stampeding cultivators bottlenecked there like animals driven into a killing pen, shoving with wild abandon, their curses ripping through the frigid air in jagged bursts of panic. Elbows cracked against noses with wet, sickening thuds. Boots came down on outstretched fingers, grinding knuckles into the bone pavement with audible pops and snaps.

The desperation was palpable—thick as congealed blood, reeking of sweat turned sour by adrenaline, the acrid stench of terror leaking from pores. Men and women alike clawed at each other's backs, tearing robes, ripping talismans from belts, trampling the fallen without a single backward glance.

If that bruised purple lantern light swept over the bottleneck, it would be a mass execution. A fatal funnel where shadows overlapped and merged into one writhing, vulnerable target.

A soldier caught in the open against an inescapable, sweeping anomaly does not try to outrun the blast radius by joining a panicked herd.

They find hard cover, break line of sight, and drop their thermal signature to zero.

Fleeing would only generate friction, heat, and adrenal spikes—the exact biological markers these things hunted. The more you ran, the brighter you burned. The hotter your blood pumped, the louder your heart screamed into the void.

Furthermore, he had already gathered empirical data since stepping onto the docks: to the monstrous entities of this market, without his heat and pulse, he barely existed. Merchants had looked past him. Predators had circled but never struck. His Daoless body—a vessel stripped of karmic threads, devoid of Heaven's recognition—registered to their senses as little more than background noise.

Let's count this as my ultimate advantage.

His Daoless nature was his strongest shield.

Shi Yan did not run.

Instead, he smoothly stepped backward out of the main thoroughfare, his iron-shod boots scraping softly against slick bone as he angled his towering, armored frame into the deep, structural shadow of a ruined shrine pillar. The rotting timber groaned under his weight—a low, creaking protest that sent splinters of decayed wood flaking down onto his pauldrons. He locked his joints immediately, bracing his spine flat against the mildewed surface, turning himself into a statue.

His gauntleted hands pressed firm against the pillar's rough bark, fingers splayed wide to distribute pressure. Condensation from his armor bled into the porous wood, darkening it further.

He slowed his breathing to a near halt, each inhalation stretched thin and shallow, barely stirring the air inside his mask's filtration mesh. The damp interior fogged once, twice—then went still.

Mentally reaching into the System interface, he dialed the [Phantom-Ash Veil] all the way down to absolute zero.

He aggressively suppressed his pulse, his body heat, and his respiratory output until he was nothing more than a cold, iron-clad shadow blending into the damp wood. His heart rate dropped to a terrifying single beat every two minutes—a sluggish, dragging thump that echoed dully inside his ribcage like a hammer striking a coffin lid from within.

The Weeping Funeral Procession drifted closer.

The wail of the Suona pierced the market like a blade dragged across bone—a high-pitched, reedy squeal that didn't just fill the air but violated it, forcing the moisture-laden atmosphere to shudder and ripple with oppressive sorrow. The sound clawed at the edges of sanity, scraping against the inside of Shi Yan's skull despite his suppressed state. The fog seemed to part for the procession, rolling away in thick, frightened waves that curled back on themselves, reluctant to touch the figures within.

The paper dolls drifted past him in rigid, floating steps. They had no joints, no knees to bend—just stiff, white paper legs sliding over the bone-paved street in unnatural glides, their feet never quite making contact. Each step left no print, no disturbance, as if the ground itself recoiled from acknowledging their presence. Their faces were painted with permanent, weeping red tears that glistened wetly despite being mere pigment, and hollow, perfectly circular black mouths frozen in expressions of eternal grief.

As they moved, a breathless, synchronized chant drifted from those painted mouths—not sung, not spoken, but rustled, like dry autumn leaves scraping against a tombstone, each syllable crackling with the texture of desiccated paper.

"The Heavens died in the third watch… The Emperor choked on white ash…"

The words carried no melody, only cadence—flat, rhythmic, inescapable.

They tossed handfuls of yellow and white Hell Money into the air with jerky, mechanical motions. The paper bills tumbled through the cold air, edges fluttering, before igniting mid-flight into brief, sickly green flames that hissed and popped. The fire gave off no warmth. It consumed without heat, and the bills disintegrated into ash that dissolved before hitting the ground, leaving only the faint scent of burnt incense and something fouler underneath—rotten lotus and old grave dirt.

"We burn the yellow paper to pave the road… The Bride wears red, the Groom wears bone…"

For a terrifying second, the procession halted.

One of the paper figures stopped exactly adjacent to the wooden pillar, its stiff form coming to an abrupt, unnatural stillness. Slowly—agonizingly slowly—it turned its blank, hollow face directly toward Shi Yan's hiding spot. The movement was wrong, too smooth for something made of folded paper, as if the head rotated on an invisible axis that defied the fragility of its material form.

The bruised purple light of its weeping lantern washed over his Iron-Yaksha mask, painting the black iron in sickly violet hues. Shadows twisted and deepened in the eye slits. The ambient temperature around Shi Yan plummeted so drastically that a layer of hoarfrost instantly crystallized over the black-iron plating of his armor, spreading outward in delicate, fractal patterns.

Ice crackled along the edges of his pauldrons, creeping down his vambraces, sealing the joints in thin sheets of rime that caught the purple glow and refracted it into a thousand tiny, malevolent glints. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The entity paused.

The eerie chanting ceased.

Silence crashed down like a falling guillotine blade.

Shi Yan stared back through the narrow slits of his mask, his pupils fixed and unmoving. His breathing was stopped. His eyes did not blink—he forced his lids wide, ignoring the burning dryness spreading across his sclera. His right hand hovered millimeters from his bio-locked pouch, gauntleted fingers curved and ready, fully prepared to draw the hundred-and-fifty-pound Heavy Saber and test whether raw, brute-force kinetic energy could shatter a karmic anomaly.

He mathematically calculated the arc of his swing in the frozen instant—if he aimed for the lantern first, a horizontal cut from right hip to left shoulder, he could extinguish the light source and blind the entity before the paper body had time to react. The follow-through would bisect the torso. Wind resistance negligible. Structural integrity of paper: unknown but likely catastrophic under edged trauma.

But the paper ghost simply blinked its painted eyes.

The motion was impossible—the eyes were painted on, flat black circles against white pulp—and yet the lids that shouldn't exist closed and opened with a soft rustle, like pages turning in an ancient book.

Its soulless gaze swept over his towering form as if passing over a particularly dense, uninteresting pile of rocks. It smelled no Yang-vitality—no warmth of living breath, no flicker of a beating heart throwing heat into the surrounding air. It sensed no Qi cycling between the meridians and storing into Dantians, no spiritual energy humming through acupoints in rhythmic cultivation.

It saw no thread of karma tying this armored figure to the Heavenly Dao's structure of fate, no luminous cord connecting past, present, and destiny.

To the ghost's perception, Shi Yan was merely a void in the shape of a man—a hollow space where something should be, but wasn't.

The ghost turned its head away with another dry rustle, the motion smooth and dismissive. It tossed another handful of Hell Money into the air, the bills spiraling upward before igniting, and continued weeping—tears of painted red pigment somehow glistening anew as if freshly wept.

"The river drinks the living… the earth spits out the dead…"

It drifted past him without incident, its purple lantern light sliding away from his frozen form and continuing down the street.

A moment later, the centerpiece of the procession arrived.

The massive, lacquered blood-red coffin glided by, carried on thick wooden poles by eight oversized paper dolls whose frames were twice the size of the others, their shoulders grotesquely broadened to bear the weight. The wood of the coffin gleamed wetly under the dim light, lacquer so deep and rich it seemed to absorb all illumination that touched it.

The surface seemed to bleed—not metaphorically, but literally—secreting a thick, black fluid that oozed from invisible seams and dripped onto the cobblestones below in heavy, syrupy drops. Each droplet struck the bone pavement and instantly evaporated into hissing steam, the vapor coiling upward in serpentine wisps that smelled of charred flesh and bitter herbs.

Gold-leaf script covered the coffin's sides in flowing, archaic characters that Shi Yan couldn't read but instinctively understood were names—long lists of names, inscribed in a language older than the sects, older than the dynasties, older than the cultivation world itself.

The dreadful chill radiating from the casket washed over Shi Yan in a wave of bone-deep cold that would have stopped a lesser man's heart. But it merely crashed harmlessly against his [55 Physique], his dense musculature and recalibrated nervous system absorbing the supernatural cold without a single shiver. His skin didn't prickle. His breath didn't mist. The hoarfrost on his armor thickened slightly, but his core temperature remained locked, unyielding.

From his vantage point pressed flat against the pillar, Shi Yan watched the inevitable conclusion of the panicked crowd's mistake.

A cultivator who had been trapped at the back of the alleyway bottleneck—a thin man in mud-stained gray robes, his hair wild and unbound—lost his nerve. Screaming, the man broke from the pack and tried to sprint across a nearby rooftop, his boots scrabbling against cracked tiles.

"No! Don't chase me!" His voice cracked, high and shrill, echoing off the surrounding structures.

The paper dolls stopped chanting.

At once, every painted face snapped upward in perfect unison, necks rotating with the same impossible smoothness. Two dozen pairs of hollow black eyes locked onto the fleeing figure. The purple light of their lanterns stretched and bent, reaching across the distance like grasping fingers, catching the sprinting cultivator's shadow perfectly against the side of a tall, leaning pagoda.

The moment the purple light touched the shadow—just the shadow, not the man himself—the cultivator froze in mid-air as if he had run headfirst into an invisible brick wall. His momentum halted instantly, legs still extended mid-stride, arms thrown forward, mouth open in a scream that never finished leaving his throat.

He didn't even have time to complete the scream.

The shadow on the wall—a flat, dark silhouette cast in sharp relief by the lantern light—violently detached itself from his physical body. It peeled away like wet paper torn from stone, writhing and twisting as if alive, and was dragged downward into the purple lanterns with a horrible, wet sucking sound.

The cultivator's physical body instantly withered. His skin turned gray and papery, flaking away in thick sheets that crumbled to ash mid-fall. His eyes sank into their sockets, lips pulling back from yellowed teeth in a rictus grin. Muscle and fat evaporated, leaving only a desiccated husk that weighed nothing.

The hollow shell plummeted off the roof and shattered into dust on the street below, scattering across the bone pavement in a fine gray cloud that was immediately trampled into the muck by the boots of other returning, terrified cultivators who didn't even look down.

So that's the meaning of don't let them touch your shadow.

Shi Yan's expression hardened behind the mask, jaw tightening, molars grinding briefly together.

Too bizarre. Everything in this place too abnormal.

Rules that made no sense. Physics that bent around spiritual law. Death delivered not by blade or poison, but by light touching a reflection.

Thus, after the dust settled and the trailing edge of the procession vanished into the deep fog ahead—the last paper figure disappearing into the gray murk with a final rustle of Hell Money igniting and falling—he waited.

He counted.

One. Two. Three.

He forced himself to remain motionless, spine pressed to the rotting pillar, armor creaking softly as frost melted and dripped down the plates in thin rivulets.

A full count of three hundred seconds.

Five minutes.

Only when the suffocating, freezing pressure of the Weeping Funeral Procession had completely dissipated—when the unnatural cold receded and the ambient temperature of the Ghost Market crept back up to its usual clammy chill—did he finally release the hard lock on his [Phantom-Ash Veil].

He dialed the camouflage suppression back up from Absolute Zero, mentally dragging the system interface sliders upward with deliberate care.

The physiological reboot was agonizing.

His heart, which had been hovering in a state of suspended, near-death paralysis—one beat every one hundred twenty seconds—kicked violently against his sternum like a struck anvil. The sudden acceleration from dormancy to functional rhythm sent a shockwave of pain radiating outward through his chest cavity. His ribs ached. His lungs spasmed, pulling in air too fast, the sudden intake burning the delicate alveoli that had been starved of oxygen.

A sharp, coppery taste flooded his mouth as blood surged back into capillaries that had collapsed under the suppression. His tongue felt thick and numb. His gums throbbed. Oxygen and forcibly heated blood rushed back into his extremities—fingers, toes, the tips of his ears—bringing with them the sensation of a thousand heated needles stabbing into flesh. His hands trembled for half a second before he clenched them into fists, forcing control back into the nerves.

He opened the filtered vents of his Iron-Yaksha mask with a soft metallic click, the release mechanism hissing as pressure equalized. He dragged in a slow, controlled breath of the sulfur-laced, corpse-ash polluted air. It tasted foul—like burnt hair and rotting incense—and it burned his lungs on the way down, scraping against the raw interior of his throat. But the sensation of a functioning cardiovascular system grounding him in reality was a necessary discomfort. Pain meant alive. Pain meant operational.

He glanced briefly down the alleyway where the fleeing cultivator had been caught.

The man's physical form had been reduced to a smear of gray ash upon the bone-paved street, already being trampled into the mud by the boots of other returning, terrified cultivators who stumbled back into the market proper, gasping and weeping. No one stopped to mourn. No one even paused. The ash blended into the filth, indistinguishable from the rest of the market's decay.

I survived a warzone on Earth to end up playing deadly hide-and-seek with paper dolls in this cursed world. Tsk, tsk!

He shook his head slightly, the motion barely perceptible, then leaned the back of his neck against the rotting wood of the pillar. Splinters pressed into the gap between his gorget and the base of his skull. He closed his eyes, the lids falling shut with relief, and filtered out the chaotic noise of the recovering market—the resumed haggling, the nervous laughter, the scrape of overturned crates being righted.

He brought up his internal clock, the mental interface flickering to life behind his eyelids.

So, how much time do I have left?