[HOST INTEGRITY: 25%]
[LOCATION: THE LAST STOP FACTORY - COURTYARD]
[TIME: 08:00 AM]
The morning air in Sector 9 tasted of wet rust and exhausted spirit-batteries.
It was raining again, a thin, acidic drizzle that hissed against the concrete. But the sound of the rain was entirely drowned out by the rhythm.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
Five hundred heavy iron boots struck the mud in perfect synchronization. The impact sent a vibration traveling straight up the shins of anyone standing nearby.
In the center of the courtyard, the Iron-Ash Legion drilled. They didn't punch the air like street brawlers. They executed a rigid, brutal martial sequence. Step. Pivot. Strike. Every movement was identical. Five hundred massive, matte-black iron bodies moving as a single, terrifying machine. Their eyes—solid, burning gold—cut through the morning smog like laser sights.
Ye Lingshan walked between the ranks.
She wore her tactical suit, her black hair pulled into a severe knot. She didn't shout. She didn't need to. She carried her unsheathed sword, Winter's Edge.
A Myrmidon in the third row let his guard drop by an inch.
Smack. Lingshan tapped the flat of her blade against his iron shoulder. Sparks flew.
"Too slow," Lingshan said, her voice cold and even. "The Consortium will not wait for you to find your balance. Adjust."
The massive iron soldier immediately corrected his stance. He didn't complain. He didn't feel the sting. He just obeyed. Lingshan smiled a fraction of an inch. She had found a pack that didn't complain when she bit them.
Off to the side, sitting on a stack of wooden crates beneath a tarp, Jian let out a long, miserable groan.
"They don't sleep, Ren," Jian complained, nursing his fourth can of synthetic energy drink. He had dark circles under his eyes resembling bruised plums. "They don't eat. And they don't stop stepping on my power cables. Look at this." He held up a crushed, sparking extension cord. "I hate military life. I miss my gaming chair. My back hurts, and I have a history essay due on Thursday."
Ren Wu stood on the elevated metal catwalk overlooking the courtyard.
He rested his hands on the rusted railing. He felt hollow. The drop to 25% Integrity meant his limbs felt heavy, like they were filled with cold water instead of blood. He couldn't afford to fight the Consortium's army hand-to-hand. The Heavy Hand had bought them time, but time was a depreciating asset.
He needed a force multiplier. He needed the Sector to fight for him.
"Jian," Ren said, turning away from the railing. "Access the Sector 9 Public Address System."
Jian choked on his energy drink.
He wiped his chin, staring at Ren through his thick glasses. "The PA system? You mean the emergency sirens and the holographic billboards? Ren, those are hardwired into the Alchemist Consortium's primary mainframe."
"Yes. Hack it."
Jian threw his hands up. "With what?! I am using a modified laptop duct-taped to a stolen spirit-battery! That is military-grade encryption! If the Cyber-Div traces my IP, they won't just kill me. They'll tell my mom I'm a cyber-terrorist, she'll kill me again, and then my school will expel my ghost!"
Ren didn't argue. He walked down the metal stairs, his leather shoes clicking against the grating. He approached Jian's makeshift workstation.
"Step aside."
"Ren, you can't just type 'override' into a—"
Ren didn't touch the keyboard. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the heavy, cold block of black jade. The Tiger Seal.
He pressed the jade block directly against the glowing screen of Jian's laptop.
Hiss.
The screen cracked. The liquid crystals bled, but instead of going dark, the display erupted into blinding, golden calligraphy. The High-Script of the First Court crawled across the monitor, physically chewing through the Consortium's firewalls like acid eating through paper. Smoke poured from the laptop's ventilation vents.
Jian stared, his jaw hanging open.
"Okay," Jian muttered, typing frantically around the glowing golden stamp burning into his screen. "Sure. We are bypassing a billion-coin quantum firewall using... ancient tax law. That makes total sense. I'm not even going to question the physics anymore."
A green light flashed on the battered keyboard.
"You're in," Jian said, sweating. "You have every speaker, siren, and screen in Sector 9. But you only have about sixty seconds before their core AI physically severs the connection."
Ren picked up the cheap, plastic microphone attached to the factory's internal intercom. Jian had spliced the wires directly into the laptop.
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[ACTIVATE: VOICE OF THE SOVEREIGN]
[COST: 2% INTEGRITY]
Ren pressed the button.
The Edict
He didn't yell. He didn't threaten.
He spoke with the flat, bored, utterly final tone of an auditor reading a foreclosure notice.
"Citizens of Sector 9."
The sound didn't just travel through the electronic speakers. It traveled through the concrete. It traveled through the rusted pipes, the puddles of acidic rain, and the Ley Lines buried deep beneath the asphalt.
Everywhere in the district, the smog cleared for a fraction of a second. The barometric pressure dropped so violently that ears popped and breath compressed painfully in the lungs. A heavy, localized gravity settled over the slums, pressing deep into the bones of every ghost and cultivator in the zip code.
"The Alchemist Consortium is operating without a permit," Ren's voice echoed from ten thousand speakers, bouncing off the slum high-rises. "They are hereby designated a Hostile Entity. Their lease is terminated. Evict them."
Ren paused, his golden eyes narrowing.
"Remove the brand. Leave the walls."
Ren released the button.
The Street-Level Purge
[LOCATION: THE UNDERMARKET - CONSORTIUM RETAIL BRANCH #44]
Manager Liu was having a terrible morning.
His store, a pristine white-and-chrome pharmacy selling overpriced Spirit Pills, was surrounded by trash. Dozens of low-tier, starving ghosts were huddled in the alleyway outside, shivering in the rain.
Liu stood in the doorway, tapping a shock-baton against his palm.
"Get out of here, you vermin!" Liu spat, adjusting his silk tie. "If you block the entrance, paying customers can't get in! Move, or I'll call the Enforcers and have you ground into fertilizer!"
The ghosts didn't move. They just stared at the ground.
Then, the emergency siren speakers on the street corner crackled to life. The immense, crushing pressure of a Sovereign Edict washed over the street.
"...Their lease is terminated. Evict them. Remove the brand. Leave the walls."
Manager Liu blinked. The sudden pressure made his nose bleed, but his arrogance won out over his instincts. He laughed. A sharp, ugly bark of amusement.
"Who is this clown on the radio?" Liu sneered, pointing his baton at the speakers. "Some anarchist thinking he can take on the Consortium? Idiots. The Enforcers will have his head on a spike by noon."
He turned back to the huddled ghosts.
"Alright, show's over! Clear out!"
The ghost closest to Liu—a skinny, translucent man wearing a rotting grey sweater—stood up.
He didn't cower. He didn't flinch away from the shock-baton.
Liu noticed something wrong. The ghost wasn't fading anymore. The translucent edges of his body had hardened into a dull, grey density.
The Dragon-Tooth Ash burned in their cores, awaiting instruction.
The ghost looked up.
His eyes weren't the hollow, hungry black of a starving spirit. They were Solid Gold.
Behind him, thirty other ghosts stood up in unison. Thirty pairs of burning golden eyes locked onto Manager Liu.
"Hey," Liu said, his voice losing its arrogant edge. He took a step back into the store. "Back off. I'm warning you."
The ghosts didn't riot. A mob yells. A mob throws rocks. A mob is chaotic.
These ghosts moved like a synchronized demolition crew.
The addicts had become antibodies, purging an infection from the concrete veins of the city. As they moved, a faint, pulsing golden thread of karmic energy extended from the chest of each awakened spirit, stretching through the smog all the way back to the Last Stop Factory.
The man in the grey sweater stepped forward. He didn't swing his fists. He simply reached out, grabbed the heavy steel security gate of the pharmacy, and ripped it completely off its reinforced hinges.
Metal shrieked. Concrete dusted the air. He tossed the two-ton gate into the street like a piece of cardboard.
"Security!" Liu screamed, fumbling for his alarm button.
Two ghosts walked past the broken gate. One grabbed Liu by the collar of his silk shirt. The other grabbed his belt. They didn't say a word. They lifted the screaming manager into the air and threw him through the store's massive glass display window.
Crash.
Liu hit the pavement outside, bleeding and gasping for air.
He watched in absolute horror as the thirty golden-eyed ghosts systematically dismantled his store. They didn't steal the expensive Spirit Pills. They pulled the display cases down, crushing the glass and the inventory under their heavy boots. They ripped the wiring out of the walls. They snapped the shelves in half.
They left the structural walls intact, exactly as ordered. They were just erasing the brand from existence.
And as Liu looked down the street, he saw the same thing happening at the Consortium supply depot on the corner. Delivery trucks were being flipped over by silent, golden-eyed crowds. Neon billboards bearing the Alchemist logo were being torn down by bare hands.
It wasn't a riot. It was a localized apocalypse.
The Backlash
[LOCATION: THE LAST STOP FACTORY - REN'S OFFICE]
Cough.
Ren dropped the plastic microphone. He doubled over, bracing his hands on Jian's desk. He coughed hard, spitting a thick splatter of black, viscous blood onto the floor.
The copper taste in his mouth was overpowering. His vision flickered, static washing over the edges of his sight.
"Boss!" Dr. Zhu floated through the floorboards, his mechanical eye spinning wildly. "Your vitals are crashing! Integrity is at 23%! You just pushed your Authority through an entire city grid! If you hit 15%, your soul will start to unspool! You will permanently degrade!"
Ren grabbed a rag from the desk and wiped his mouth. His hands were shaking violently, but his golden eyes were cold and locked on the laptop screen.
"The cost is acceptable," Ren rasped, his voice sounding like grinding stones. "Look at the ledger."
Jian was staring at a secondary monitor, completely ignoring his smoking laptop.
"Ren..." Jian swallowed hard. "The stock market. The Consortium's Sector 9 branch. It... it's in freefall."
Numbers cascaded down the screen in rapid red lines.
"Their retail network just went dark," Jian read the data, his voice full of terrified awe. "Supply chains halted. Depots breached. The automated trading algorithms are panicking. Their branch value just dropped 40% in ten minutes. Ren, you didn't just hit them. You bankrupted the Sector."
Ren straightened up. He tossed the bloody rag into the trash.
"Good. Now Zhao has no money. Which means he cannot afford to hire mercenaries. He has to use what he has in his basement."
The Escalation
[LOCATION: ALCHEMIST CONSORTIUM HQ - VAULT 4]
Section Chief Zhao stood in the dark.
The holographic map of Sector 9 projected from his wrist comm was entirely red. Thousands of retail nodes, supply lines, and outposts had vanished in less than an hour. His phone hadn't stopped ringing. The Upper Layer was demanding answers. Shareholders were screaming.
Zhao ignored the phone. He stared at the massive, blast-proof steel doors of Vault 4.
Human assassins hadn't worked. Riot police wouldn't work against a district full of fanatic, iron-skinned cultists. A surgical strike was no longer an option.
Zhao felt, for the first time, that Sector 9 no longer belonged to the Consortium. The sovereignty of the district had shifted, stolen by a ghost in a rusted factory.
He needed a sledgehammer. He needed a monster.
"Open it," Zhao ordered.
The technician next to him hesitated, his hand hovering over the console. "Sir. The inhibitor chips aren't fully integrated. If we let it out into the slums, it won't just kill Ren Wu. It will eat the civilians. It will eat the infrastructure."
"I don't care if it eats the pavement," Zhao snarled, grabbing the technician by the throat and slamming his hand onto the activation panel. "Open the damn door!"
Warning klaxons blared. Red strobe lights cut through the dim hallway.
The heavy blast doors groaned, hydraulic locks disengaging with a hiss of pressurized gas.
The smell hit them first. It was foul—a suffocating wave of rotting meat, sulfur, and concentrated stomach acid.
Heavy, wet footsteps echoed from the pitch-black interior of the vault.
Squish. Thud. Squish. Thud.
A massive silhouette stepped into the red emergency lighting.
It wasn't human. It barely looked like a spirit. It was the Chem-Mutant. A Level 40 abomination bred in the darkest vats of the R&D department. It was a grotesque mountain of fused flesh, bolted black iron plating, and thick, translucent tubes pumping glowing green alchemical acid directly into an exposed, beating mechanical heart. It had no eyes, only a jagged, vertical maw filled with grinding, metallic teeth.
Acid dripped from its jaw, burning through the steel floor grating with a hiss.
"Target the Last Stop Factory," Zhao pointed a trembling finger toward the surface elevator.
The beast turned its featureless head toward him. It breathed, a wet, rattling sound.
"Eat everything."
[AUTHOR NOTE]
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
> Consortium Retail: "You can't just evict us! We have a billion-coin lease!"
> Ren Wu: "I don't read leases. I read eulogies."
> Sector 9 Citizens: Starts tearing down the building with bare hands.
>
Next Chapter: The Alchemist's Wrath.
The Consortium doesn't send soldiers. They send the Chem-Mutant. Pure Chaos meets Pure Order. The Nine-Pillars of Punishment awaken!
The Eviction has begun! Drop a Power Stone to serve your notice to the Consortium! 📜🔥
[END OF CHAPTER 68]