Volume 2, Chapter 54: The Professor's Errand
I finally took those cursed shoes off.
I sat on the edge of the narrow bed in my dorm room and rubbed my right heel. A thick blister was forming right on the bone. Ten thousand years alive, and a piece of stiff cowhide still wins the fight. I tossed the brown leather shoes into the corner of the room. They hit the wall with a dull thud.
The medical wing was quiet when I checked on the kids earlier. Tang Ya looked like a ghost wrapped in a thick wool blanket. Her face was entirely drained of color. Do you know how hard it is to wash the ash of dead people out of a kid's hair? It takes a long time. The water runs gray for hours. But they were breathing, and their heartbeats were steady. That was enough for tonight.
I stood up and stripped off the cheap suit I wore for my Professor Lakas disguise. I needed something different for where I was going. I pulled on a heavy, faded canvas jacket and a pair of worn-out work boots. Real boots. The kind that don't pinch your toes. I tied a dark gray scarf around my neck to cover my jawline and pulled a flat cap down over my eyes.
I wasn't going to be Professor Lakas tonight. And I wasn't going to be the Immortal Emperor, either. I was just going to be a man looking for a receipt.
••••••
The Capital is clean on top. It has sweeping white stone arches, tall glass windows, and wide streets swept by automated street sweepers. But if you walk down the maintenance stairs near the old eastern aqueduct, the clean air disappears.
The underground black market doesn't have a clever name. People just call it the Drains. It smells like damp earth, burnt motor oil, and cheap rice liquor. Water drips constantly from the rusted pipes overhead, creating a slow, maddening rhythm against the stone floor. Stalls made of corrugated metal and rotten wood line the narrow tunnels. You can buy anything down here. Stolen soul bones, illegal combat drugs, forged travel papers.
I wasn't looking for any of that. I was looking for lead.
Chen Feng built a massive battery out of compressed souls. But souls are volatile. They leak. If you want to hold thousands of angry spirits in one place, you need high-grade, spirit-sealing lead to bind the physical anchor. And you don't just buy two tons of military-grade sealing metal at a local shop. You need a smuggler who moves heavy freight.
I kept my hands in my pockets and walked past a stall selling bootleg spirit rings. The vendor tried to catch my eye, but I ignored him. I followed the smell of melting metal and ozone.
Deep in the third sector of the Drains, the tunnel opened up into a wide, cavernous room. This was Jin's scrap yard.
Jin was a big man. He was a seven-ring Soul Sage who made his living cutting up stolen mechas and selling the parts back to the military. He thought he owned the underground. Right now, he was sitting on a wooden crate under a flickering yellow light bulb, eating a bowl of spicy noodles. Four of his guards stood around him, holding heavy, custom-built soul rifles.
I walked straight toward him.
"Hey," the closest guard barked, stepping in my path. He shoved the barrel of his rifle against my chest. "Shop's closed, old man. Get lost."
I didn't stop. I didn't even look at his face. I just kept walking.
When my chest pressed against the rifle barrel, I let out a tiny fraction of my spiritual pressure. I didn't use a flashy aura. I didn't summon a weapon. I just dropped the pure, unadulterated weight of my existence directly onto his shoulders.
The guard didn't scream. He simply collapsed. His eyes rolled back into his head, and he hit the dirt floor like a sack of wet cement. He was gasping for air, but his lungs wouldn't work. To his mind, he was suddenly buried under a mountain.
The other three guards panicked. They raised their rifles.
I snapped my fingers.
The sound wasn't loud, but it carried a blunt force. The air in the room rippled. The three guards dropped to their knees instantly, clutching their chests. Their rifles clattered to the ground. They couldn't move a single muscle. The pressure pinned them to the dirt like bugs on a display board.
Jin dropped his bowl of noodles. The ceramic shattered, spilling hot broth and noodles over his boots. He jumped up, his face turning pale. Seven spirit rings flashed into existence around his body — three yellow, two purple, two black. A massive, phantom iron bear roared to life behind him.
"Who the hell are you?" Jin yelled. He tried to take a step forward, but his knees buckled slightly. Even as a Soul Sage, he could feel the unnatural weight in the room.
I walked over to the wooden crate he had been sitting on. I sat down and crossed my legs.
"I am someone who hates bad coffee and wasting time," I said. My voice was calm, barely echoing in the damp room. "Sit down, Jin."
"I don't know you!" he shouted. The iron bear roared again, swinging a massive, spectral paw right at my head.
I didn't flinch. I just looked at the bear.
The phantom beast froze in mid-air. Its glowing eyes widened in sheer, primitive terror. It let out a pathetic whimper and shattered into a million pieces of harmless light. Jin choked, staggering backward as his martial soul forcibly unsummoned itself to hide.
He stared at me, trembling. The arrogance was completely gone.
"I said sit down," I repeated.
Jin slowly lowered himself onto a rusted metal barrel across from me. He was sweating heavily. The damp air suddenly felt freezing cold to him.
"What do you want?" he whispered.
"Three weeks ago, a man in a crisp white uniform came to see you," I said. I pulled a small, silver coin from my pocket and started rolling it across my knuckles. "He smiled a lot. He paid in pure gold. And he bought two tons of military-grade spirit-sealing lead."
Jin swallowed hard. "I… I sell a lot of scrap. I don't ask names."
"I don't care about his name," I said. "I already know his name. I care about where you got the lead. That kind of metal is heavily regulated. It comes from the deep mines in the west, and the military tracks every pound of it. So how did a scrap dealer in the Drains get two tons of it without triggering an alarm?"
Jin looked away, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Look, man. If I tell you that, I am dead. The people who supplied that metal… they own half the city above us."
I stopped rolling the coin. I leaned forward slightly.
"Jin," I said softly. "Look at me."
He slowly brought his eyes back to mine.
"You are worried about the people above you," I said. "But you should be worried about the person sitting in front of you. Because if you do not tell me exactly what I want to know, I am going to erase you. I will not kill you. I will just erase the part of your brain that remembers how to speak, how to walk, and how to eat. You will spend the rest of your life as a drooling lump on this dirt floor."
It was a bluff, mostly. I wouldn't actually do that to a mortal. But he didn't know that. And the sheer, heavy conviction in my voice made it real to him.
Jin started shaking. He looked at his paralyzed guards, then back at me.
"House Lin," he choked out. The words tumbled out of his mouth like spilled water. "It was House Lin. Lord Lin oversees the western supply lines for the military. He writes off thousands of pounds of lead and steel as 'defective' or 'lost in transit.' Then he smuggles it down here to sell off the books."
House Lin. One of the oldest noble families in the Capital. They had seats on the inner council.
"And the man in white?" I asked. "Chen Feng. How did he move the metal out of the Capital?"
"Trains," Jin said, talking faster now. "House Lin has private cargo trains that bypass military checkpoints. They loaded the lead onto a train heading north. Sector Seven. There's an old, abandoned rail yard out there in the ice fields. That is where all the shipments go."
Sector Seven. That was deep in the frozen wasteland, far beyond the official borders. It made perfect sense. You can't build a massive hub for an Abyssal invasion in someone's backyard. You build it where no one wants to look.
"How often do these trains run?" I asked.
"Every five days," Jin said. "The next one leaves tomorrow night. Midnight. From the private freight depot on the edge of the city."
I nodded slowly. I stood up and put the silver coin back in my pocket.
"Thank you, Jin," I said.
I turned and started walking away. The heavy pressure in the room vanished instantly. The three guards on the floor gasped loudly, sucking in air as if they had just broken the surface of a deep lake. Jin slumped forward off his barrel, holding his chest and shaking violently.
"Who… what are you?" Jin wheezed as I reached the edge of the light.
I didn't look back. "Just a teacher running an errand."
I walked back through the damp tunnels of the Drains. The dripping water sounded like a metronome ticking down the hours. House Lin was selling military resources for profit, right under the noses of the High Arbitrators. They were funding the end of the world just to line their own pockets. It was a very human kind of greed. It was stupid, short-sighted, and entirely predictable.
I walked up the maintenance stairs and back into the clean, cold air of the Capital. The sky was dark, and a light rain was starting to fall.
I stopped at a small street cart near the edge of the district. The vendor was half-asleep, reading a cheap novel under a canvas awning.
"Two skewers of grilled meat," I said, fishing a few copper coins from my pocket. "Extra spicy."
He handed me the hot skewers wrapped in a piece of brown paper. I took a bite. The meat was tough, and the spice burned my tongue. It was perfect.
I ate as I walked back toward the military compound. The kids were sleeping now. They needed the rest. But tomorrow, the Ghost Hunters had their first official job. We weren't going into the Abyssal smog to fight monsters. Not yet.
We are going to rob a train, yeah babeh.
End of Volume 2, Chapter 54