Chương 89: A Malfunction in Hell (1/3)

As the entity raised the lantern to eye level—the motion languid, deliberate, as though time itself held less meaning beneath the earth—Shi Yan became incredibly wary. The tendons along his unarmored right hand flexed beneath the skin, each finger drifting a fraction of an inch closer to the spatial pouch on his hip. The leather was slick with condensation, cold enough to sting against his palm even through the dampness.

But before he could even decide whether to draw his jian, Shi Yan felt a sudden, terrifying pressure manifest in the air.

What the— It wasn't the blunt, crushing physical force of a body cultivator, nor was it the skin-scorching heat of a destructive Qi technique. It was a cold, invasive suction—a hollow, gnawing pull that seemed to reach past his armor, past his flesh, sinking hooks into something deeper.

If he had been a normal man, he might have just felt a chill. But because Shi Yan's biology was augmented by the [Acoustic-Blood Tracker], his nervous system was hyper-sensitive. He didn't just feel the changes in the Qi and the chilling; he felt the physiological response to it in excruciating, clinical detail.

The iron in his blood seemed to freeze in his veins, attempting to pull violently toward his chest—a magnetic drag that made his ribs ache from the inside out. His pores constricted so hard it was painful, each follicle seizing shut like a thousand tiny fists clenching across his skin. A metaphysical vacuum had settled over his body, clinging like wet silk, and his very cells were screaming in sheer, primal panic, signaling that they were being conceptually "eaten."

His jaw locked. The muscles along his neck corded tight beneath the damp gambeson.

Shi Yan gritted his teeth, forcibly clamping down on his body's frantic fight-or-flight response. His pulse hammered against his eardrums—loud, insistent, desperate—but he strangled the instinct to move.

He didn't lash out, nor did he step backward. He forced his breathing to remain even—four counts in through his nose, the air biting and sulfurous, then six counts out through clenched teeth—while simultaneously cataloging the horrific sensation and forcing his mind to calm down. Sweat prickled along his spine despite the freezing air, absorbed instantly by the quilted padding beneath his armor.

I—Is this the toll she mentioned? His eyebrows furrowed beneath the iron mask, the metal pressing harder against his forehead as his expression tightened.

Based on the intelligence Shi Yan had extracted from Su Yin, the reality of the Ghost Market was brutal.

For ordinary cultivators, stepping into the Midnight Ghost Market was a terrible gamble with their own karma. Because it was fundamentally impossible for the living to casually walk into the Yellow Spring—the domain of the dead—the natural laws of the realm demanded a tax.

The physical spirit stone was just a formality. To cross the boundary between the mortal realm and the Netherworld, cultivators unknowingly offered fragments of their Divine Soul, or shaved days off their natural lifespan, as the true toll.

It was an unavoidable cosmic tax exacted by the ancient laws of Heavenly Court—woven into the fabric of existence itself, immutable as the turning of the stars.

But… Shi Yan was not an ordinary cultivator.

And of course, he would not just stand still and wait.

Shi Yan bit down hard, forcefully clenching his diaphragm. The muscles of his core contracted with brutal precision. He restricted his own cardiovascular flow, essentially choking off his own veins, and deliberately suppressed the microscopic nerve firings across his skin to kill his internal heat. It was a sensation like drowning from the inside—suffocating, controlled, agonizing. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

[System Notation: Biological Output Adjusted.] [Phantom-Ash Veil (Physiological Toggle: Lv 2) -> Intensity Reduced to Absolute Zero.] The reason was simple.

He had waited, yet the [Anomaly] stat hadn't triggered, which meant his lifespan would actually be siphoned if this kept going. So he made a choice.

The next moment, his already slow heart rate dropped further, settling into a barely perceptible murmur—perhaps one beat every twelve seconds. His body temperature plummeted, matching the freezing ambient air of the cavern entirely. The frost that had been forming on his left pauldron ceased spreading. The moisture along his forearm guards no longer melted against his skin.

He completely sealed off the pores across his skin, aggressively killing any potential for the [Combat Sieve] to leak his kinetic energy. The raging, furnace-like Yang vitality he had been emitting—a faint, invisible corona of living warmth—vanished completely, snuffed out like a candle dropped into black water.

For the first time in an entire week, a strange, freezing relief washed over his muscles.

Ahh… he moaned inwardly.

Maintaining the false Marrow-Rot aura had required Shi Yan to run his metabolism perpetually hot, keeping his blood near a low boil just to fool the casual senses of passing city guards.

It had been a ceaseless, grinding drain on his stamina—like marching for days with a fifty-pound rucksack strapped to his shoulders, the weight digging into his spine with every step, every breath.

Dropping the Veil to absolute zero stripped that crushing burden away in an instant. The exhaustion that had been building in his bones—settling into his joints like fine sediment—stopped accumulating. His shoulders sagged a fraction of an inch beneath the spiked pauldron.

By now, he became a void. A man with no Qi. A vessel with no Spiritual Root. A body carrying a soul that belonged to an entirely different universe, utterly devoid of the heavenly karma that governed this world.

But before he could relax, a split-second later, the Gatekeeper swung the green lantern forward with deceptive, aggressive speed to harvest the toll.

The motion was sudden—fluid and sharp, like a heron striking at fish beneath still water.

The pale, ghostly light washed over Shi Yan's armor, casting sickly jade shadows across the black spikes of his pauldron. The flames flared violently, leaping toward him with an audible whoosh, hungry and searching for the vibrant, burning aura of a living cultivator to latch onto. Searching for karmic threads to rip out and drag into the rusted bowl. The air around the lantern shimmered with unnatural cold, distorting the mist.

But… the flames found absolute nothingness.

They licked against his iron mask, his shoulder guard, the damp surface of his gambeson—and recoiled, hissing faintly, as though repelled by something fundamentally wrong.

The Gatekeeper physically froze mid-swing.

The elongated, bone-white fingers gripping the lantern cord twitched. The pale knuckles jutted sharply beneath translucent skin.

The gray void beneath its straw hat tilted slightly to the side, the motion slow and deliberate, like a bird examining an insect it could not identify.

The green fire in its lantern sputtered, shrinking back toward the wick with a faint crackling sound, deeply confused. The flame flickered erratically, casting jagged shadows across the rotting planks. The rusted hook grasped in its other hand twitched—once, twice—the corroded iron scraping faintly against the wooden pole.

For a long, suffocating moment, the only sound on the floating bridge was the soft lapping of the black water against the rotten wood—a rhythmic, hollow slap that echoed faintly in the fog-choked silence.

Then, the entity spoke.

Its voice did not pass through lips or tongue. It rose from the deathly mist itself, low and abrasive, like ancient grave-steles scraping together beneath the Yellow Springs. The sound resonated in Shi Yan's chest, vibrating against his ribs, bypassing his ears entirely.

"A petty deception of flesh..." the Gatekeeper said, each word dragging through the air like rusted nails scraped across stone. The pale lantern in its hand drifted forward until it hung just before Shi Yan's Yaksha mask, close enough that the cold green glow reflected off the iron surface in wavering patterns.

"Borrowing the semblance of one beyond life. Sealing the breath within the shell. Yet before the laws of the Nether Crossing, such tricks are but rotten leaves cast before a storm. The Yellow Spring does not mistake one whose heart merely lies still."

Beneath the bamboo hat, Shi Yan's gaze remained cold and unmoved. Only the muscles beneath his robes tightened, drawn taut like a bowstring. The weight in his core shifted lower, settling into his thighs. His fingers curled slightly inside his gauntlet, ready to move. He did not answer.

The Gatekeeper drew nearer. Its straw raincoat rustled faintly, shedding black droplets that struck the planks with wet, heavy plops. A chill reek of drowned mud, corpse-soaked earth, and extinguished incense pressed in from all sides, fouling even the mist around them. The stench coated the back of Shi Yan's throat, thick and cloying, like breathing through wet grave soil.

"You carry the stillness of a mortal body," it murmured, the void beneath its hat leaning closer, nearly brushing the edge of his mask.

"The shallow emptiness of a creature born to dust. Yet mortals do not pass through the Sump, strange one. Do you know why?"

I don't. And back the hell away from me.

The words rose to Shi Yan's throat, sharp and immediate, but he swallowed them down. His jaw ached from the pressure of keeping his mouth shut. His pulse remained steady—one beat, then another, separated by the slow eternity of controlled suppression.

At such a moment, a single word or a single movement might invite an entirely different outcome. Thus, he merely stood in silence and met the Gatekeeper's stare—or the empty void where a stare should have been—with indifferent eyes narrowed to slits beneath the mask's eye-holes.

"Because even the lowliest mortal possesses a soul," the Gatekeeper said, answering itself. Its voice was deep and heavy, the vibration striking faintly against Shi Yan's iron pauldron, resonating through the metal and into his collarbone.

"However weak, however turbid, the three hun and seven po remain within the flesh."