Chương 93: The Market Eats Souls (2/3)

The flames along the blade flickered, then went out one by one.

It was not an extinguishing like a candle snuffed by a passing wind. Rather, it was a slow and dreadful devouring, suffocating and unrelenting, as though some baleful thing were patiently gnawing away at the roots of his existence. Each flicker died with a faint hiss that seemed to echo not in the air, but somewhere deeper—somewhere behind the bones of the world itself.

Within the rogue cultivator's sea of consciousness, terror surged up like black frost spreading across winter earth. The sensation clawed through his thoughts with icy fingers, dragging with it the acrid taste of spiritual corrosion—bitter as alchemical poison, cold as a blade drawn across naked bone.

Damn it! his thoughts howled, carrying a panic he had not known since the years when he had still been a ragged mortal in the Outer Wards, scrambling for scraps to preserve his wretched life. His pupils dilated wide, the dark irises trembling with barely suppressed hysteria.

What accursed thing is this?! It is only a ghost—a witless remnant, a lingering aberration! How can it suppress me so utterly?!

He frantically circulated his Qi, urging the furnace within his Dantian to blaze once more. Sweat beaded along his temples despite the frigid air, each droplet sliding down past his jaw like tears of desperation. His meridians burned as he forced spiritual energy through pathways that felt sluggish, half-frozen, as though the very essence of death had seeped into his cultivation foundation and wrapped cold fingers around his inner fire.

Yet the center of his chest felt hollow, as if an empty abyss had opened there. The pale-green hooks drawn forth from the Gatekeeper's lantern had not torn his flesh—his immaculate crimson robes remained unmarked by even a speck of blood—yet the agony they wrought was more dreadful than being disemboweled alive. It was a soul-deep violation, a sensation of something fundamental being unmade within him, piece by precious piece.

With chilling clarity, he could sense the shape of what had been taken.

It was a fragment of his foundational soul, the invisible cornerstone beneath all his cultivation. The spiritual architecture he had painstakingly built over decades trembled like a pagoda with its base stones ripped away. Worse still, he could feel with horrifying certainty the irreversible draining of his lifespan—not as an abstract concept, but as a tangible withering, like watching spring blossoms blacken and curl into autumn rot within the span of a single breath.

H-how dare—! I'm a Furnace-Core Realm cultivator! he raged inwardly, his thoughts trembling on the verge of collapse. His fists clenched until the knuckles went bone-white, nails biting crescents into his palms hard enough that blood should have welled—yet his body felt too drained, too hollow, to even produce that much vitality.

I will remember this!

His jaw tightened until the muscles along his neck stood out like cords of twisted rope, and a cold, venomous light gathered in his narrowed eyes—the smoldering embers of humiliated pride struggling to reignite into fury.

Once I cross this bridge, once I obtain the Yin-Lotus from the market and step into the Late-Stage…

In the next instant, the crimson sword dissolved into drifting motes of dimming light. They scattered like dying fireflies, each spark fading into the oppressive fog with barely a whisper, leaving only empty air where lethal intent had burned moments before.

Then he simply went left, passing Shi Yan.

Shi Yan immediately began to quantify the damage.

He did not look at the man with pity, nor with the smug superiority of a rival. He looked at him the way a mechanic inspects a vehicle that has just survived an IED blast—clinical, detached, cataloging each compromised system with the cold efficiency of someone trained to assess casualties under fire. His gaze tracked the man's movement with the precision of a spotter measuring windage and drop, noting every tremor, every faltering step.

The cultivator's posture had sagged. His shoulders rolled forward, the elegant line of his spine now bent under invisible weight. His breathing was labored, no longer following the rhythmic, controlled cycles of an internal breathing art, but the ragged, desperate panting of an exhausted mortal. Each inhale rattled wetly in his chest, and each exhale emerged as a thin vapor that hung in the frigid air like the last gasps of a dying man.

His aura—which Shi Yan had once felt as a terrifying, oppressive dome of heat, the true hallmark of the Furnace-Core Realm—had shrunk to a faint, flickering barrier barely an inch off his skin. It guttered and sputtered like a candle flame drowning in its own wax, casting barely enough warmth to ward off the bone-deep chill of the Netherworld air pressing in from all sides.

The dark hair at the man's temples had noticeably grayed in a matter of seconds, the lustrous black strands now streaked with ash-white like frost creeping across autumn grass. The tight, youthful skin around his eyes had permanently slackened, drawing tight against the bone with the telltale hollowness of advanced age. Fine lines that had not existed moments before now bracketed his mouth, carved deep as though decades had been compressed into heartbeats.

Clearly, as Su Yin—or rather, the Gatekeeper—had stated, this portion of his soul had been cleanly excised, taking years of his natural lifespan as another toll.

This… Shi Yan was speechless. Even though the Gatekeeper had stated it was only taking a "portion," why did it look like it had taken so much? The transformation was stark enough to make even his hardened soldier's pragmatism falter for a fraction of a second—not from sympathy, but from the sheer efficiency of the destruction. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Shi Yan briefly consulted his internal logs, the faint shimmer of system text flickering across the edge of his vision like a heads-up display overlaying reality. He recalled the system scan from mere minutes ago: Cultivation Resonance: Furnace-Core Realm / Roaring Hearth (Tier-2 Mid-Stage).

Even without the system, he could guess that the man's core had fractured. The spiritual furnace that had roared with confidence now barely smoldered, its flames choked and starved. He had likely plummeted from the Mid-Stage straight down to the Early-Stage of Kindling, or perhaps even teetered on the edge of dropping back into the mortal Ash-Marrow realm entirely—a humiliation worse than death for any true cultivator, a fall from heaven into the dust.

What a cruel toll. No wonder… Shi Yan glanced around, his masked gaze sweeping the empty stone quay and the desolate fog-shrouded bridge. No wonder there were no cultivators waiting like him or this man. The absence suddenly made perfect sense—not caution, but knowledge. Those who understood the true price simply chose other paths, no matter how circuitous.

But that was it. Shi Yan was merely curious for a brief moment.

Beyond that—setting aside this man's overbearing arrogance—an arrogant cultivator, even if helped, could perceive even a stare as an affront and cause endless trouble. The combat psychology was identical whether in Kabul or a cultivation world: wounded pride killed faster than bullets, and men clinging to shredded dignity would lash out at anything that reminded them of their weakness.

Or so he had interpreted from the cultivation novels he had read so far. An arrogant cultivator could twist even a helpful glance into an insult, sparking endless trouble.

Now, his boots struck the rotting wood, carrying him past the gasping, aged rogue and the silent, unmoving Gatekeeper. Each footfall landed with deliberate care, weight distributed to avoid the worst of the waterlogged planks that groaned and wept black moisture beneath his tread.

His crossing ended with a muffled tremor, as though some ancient, invisible gate of the Netherworld had been sealed shut directly behind him—a sensation not heard, but felt, reverberating through the soles of his boots and up into his bones like the final tumbler of a vast lock sliding into place.

Instantly, the damp, freezing chill of the Outer Wards' aqueducts disappeared without a trace. In its place surged a deathly stillness, heavy and turbid, as though the very air had long since ceased to flow. The atmosphere pressed against his skin with the weight of stagnant water, thick enough to feel like resistance against every breath.

To draw breath within it was like swallowing water from a forgotten, stagnant grave. The taste coated his tongue—earth and rot and something older, something that had no name in any living language. It slid down his throat with the viscous quality of oil, leaving a residue that clung to the back of his palate no matter how he tried to clear it.

Shi Yan stood at the end of a long white pier. When he lowered his eyes, his gaze sharpened slightly beneath the cold iron of his Yaksha mask, the narrow eye-slits focusing with predatory precision.

It was no mortal timber.

The entire pier beneath his feet had been carved from a single section of an immense spinal bone, bleached by who knows how many thousands of years into a dead and ghastly white. The surface was smooth as polished ivory in some places, rough and porous in others where age and Netherworld corrosion had eaten away at the mineral structure.

Faint grooves ran lengthwise along the bone—ancient channels where nerves and blood vessels had once threaded through living tissue, now hollowed into shallow canals that collected pools of black condensation.

Judging by the sheer curvature and the hollowed marrow cavities visible through cracks in the weathered surface, the original beast must have dwarfed the fortified walls of Skycloud City itself. Each vertebral knob was the size of a small house, the gaps between them bridged with smaller bones lashed together with cord that looked disturbingly like braided sinew—gray-brown and fibrous, still retaining enough elasticity to creak faintly when weight shifted across the joints.

The bone pier stretched outward over a bottomless abyss, where gray dust whirled in vast, silent eddies below, behaving as though ten thousand resentful souls had been ground to ash and cast forever into the void. The dust moved with unnatural coordination, spiraling in patterns that suggested not wind, but intent—slow, mournful rotations like the turning of a cosmic millstone grinding existence itself into powder.

Occasionally, a face would seem to surface from the swirling gray—mouth open in a silent scream, eyes hollow as wind-scoured skulls—before dissolving back into the formless mass.

He then lifted his head, beholding the forbidden land in full.

The Midnight Ghost Market. A localized, shattered dimension.

This was no place beneath the rightful dominion of Heaven.

But… where is that?

Shi Yan's eyes narrowed behind the mask, the iron edges of the eye-slits framing his focused stare. Just moments ago, while standing on the threshold of the Gatekeeper's bridge, his retinas had bled as he hallucinated a massive, bleeding black sun hanging upside down in an ash-choked sky. The memory still throbbed behind his eyes—a phantom ache where blood vessels had burst under impossible strain.

He had seen celestial immortals, their pure white robes stained black with corruption, falling from the clouds like dying flies, their bodies tumbling end over end with the lifeless tumble of broken dolls. He had seen palace-sized chains cracking open the void, each link forged from metal that screamed when it moved, trailing sparks of unlight that burned cold and left afterimages seared into his vision.

Yet here, standing physically inside the market, none of that apocalyptic warfare existed.

There was no sun, no moon, no vault of stars. Overhead, the "sky" was a churning wilderness of dark violet clouds and jagged black stone teeth hanging like stalactites, each one the size of a mountain peak, dripping with slow condensation that fell upward instead of down—black droplets ascending into the roiling cloudscape above like rain fleeing the earth in horror.

From between those hanging crags flowed a river of pitch-black mire, drifting upside down across the firmament in utter defiance of worldly reason, as if the filth of the Nine Nether Realms had risen to drown the heavens themselves. The river moved with sluggish purpose, its surface rippling with oily iridescence—purples and greens that shifted nauseatingly when viewed too long.

Occasionally, something pale would surface from the black current—a hand, a face, the curve of a spine—before sinking back beneath the lightless flow.

So… where is that?

The discrepancy gnawed at him—two contradictory visions, both impossibly real. One glimpsed, one inhabited. The soldier in him cataloged it as actionable intelligence with unknown reliability, filed under "unresolved threat vectors."

Whatever. Let's just focus on this. That was only a brief curiosity. For now, he turned his attention to the market itself, forcing his tactical mind to prioritize immediate terrain assessment over metaphysical paradoxes.

The market spread across the inner walls of a vast, impossibly deep crater, descending layer upon layer into the darkness like the interior of a termite mound carved by mad architects with no concept of Euclidean geometry. Countless pavilions, crooked corridors, suspended bridges, and sinister halls clung to the abyss like a colony of ghouls feeding upon a massive, hollowed-out corpse. Structures jutted at impossible angles, defying gravity with the casual arrogance of places where natural law held no dominion.

Nothing here had been fashioned from proper earthly materials.

Some stalls were draped in pallid hides, stitched together so finely they fluttered like expensive silk at first glance, catching what little light existed and reflecting it with an unnatural sheen.

Yet any man with eyes—or, in Shi Yan's case, heightened 55-point physical perception—could see the faint pores, the stretch marks, and the distinct variations in pigmentation clustered around what had once been joints and pressure points. They had once belonged to human flesh. The stitching was precise, almost reverent, as though the flayer had considered their work a form of sacred craftsmanship.

Here and there, a faded tattoo was still visible—a character for "longevity," a lover's name, a protective ward that had failed its wearer utterly.

Lofty auction towers rose in tiers from the petrified ribs of ancient leviathans, their bony arches looming like the remains of primordial fiends whose deaths had occurred in epochs so distant that even their names had been erased from mortal record.

Entire buildings nested within rib cages large enough to house temples, the curved bones serving as both foundation and framework, their surfaces carved with ten thousand symbols that pulsed with a dim, rhythmic luminescence—like the slow heartbeat of something that refused to acknowledge its own extinction.

Everywhere, corpse-lamps floated in the dead air—some burning with wan green fire, others with a dim, sorrowful ghost-blue flame that flickered in time with no earthly rhythm. They cast wavering shadows that twisted and crept along the uneven ground like living things seeking warmth, stretching long and thin before suddenly contracting into tight knots of darkness that seemed to crouch and watch.