I Died 2,000 Years Ago: The Underworld Fears Me-Chapter 78 - 75: The New King

[HOST INTEGRITY: 35%]

[LOCATION: THE LAST STOP FACTORY - MAIN HALL]

[TIME: 05:45 AM]

The smelting furnace roared.

Waves of blistering, orange heat washed across the factory floor, baking the damp air until it tasted of scorched copper and dry ash. Inside the massive iron belly of the forge, scrap metal boiled into a glowing, liquid sun.

Ren Wu stood a foot away from the open heavy iron door. The heat singed the edges of his black suit jacket.

He held a rusted metal dustpan. Inside sat a pile of splintered white bone—the crushed remains of the Alchemist Consortium’s Corporate Seal. It was the physical manifestation of a billion-coin monopoly. A century of extortion, starvation, and corporate violence, reduced to fragments.

He didn’t keep it as a trophy. Trophies gathered dust.

Ren tilted the pan.

The white bone fragments slid off the rusted metal and plummeted into the boiling iron.

Hiss. CRACK.

The bone didn’t just melt. It detonated. A violent burst of white sparks shot out of the furnace, raining against the concrete. The factory shudders.

Beneath Ren’s feet, the stolen golden Ley Line reacted. The massive, pulsing copper cable running through the center of the hall flared with blinding light. The energy surged downward. It expanded its roots, physically weaving into the rebar, the concrete, and the deep dirt foundations of the entire Sector.

[ SYSTEM ALERT ]

[ TERRITORY ASSIMILATED: SECTOR 9. ]

The shift was instantaneous.

Ren closed his eyes. The golden threads of Karma tying him to the fifty thousand citizens of the Undermarket changed. They lost their fragile, string-like tension. They thickened. They turned into solid, heavy spiritual rebar, anchoring him directly to the population.

[ HOST INTEGRITY: 35% - CRITICAL STABILIZATION ACHIEVED. ]

Ren opened his mouth. He exhaled.

A long, thick cloud of pitch-black, necrotic smoke poured from his lungs. It smelled of rotting flowers and old graves. It hit the superheated air of the forge and burned away into nothing.

The final traces of his "dying ghost" status purged from his system.

The cold numbness that had gripped his fingers since he woke up in this broken world vanished. His pale skin flushed. Heavy, hot human warmth flooded his veins.

Thump.

Ren grabbed the edge of a nearby workbench. His chest jerked.

Thump. Thump.

It was a slow, deafening rhythm. A real heartbeat. The sound was so heavy Jian actually looked up from his screens across the room. Ren wasn’t just surviving off borrowed time and stolen Ash anymore.

He was anchored to reality. He was a Sovereign.

The Oath of Iron

[LOCATION: THE COURTYARD]

The acidic rain stopped.

For the first time in a decade, the constant, hissing downpour over Sector 9 ceased. The thick green smog hanging over the slums thinned out, burned away by the ambient heat of the golden streetlights stretching across the district.

Dawn broke, bleeding a dull, bruised purple across the horizon.

Ren walked out the heavy factory doors. He didn’t carry his black umbrella. He let the cool, damp morning air hit his face.

Ye Lingshan stood in the center of the mud courtyard. The frost from her Qi had melted, leaving her tactical suit soaked. She watched Ren approach. She didn’t offer a corporate bow. She didn’t salute like a hired bodyguard.

She drew Winter’s Edge. She reversed her grip, driving the freezing steel blade deep into the mud.

She dropped to one knee. She bowed her head.

Behind her, Red Dog stepped forward. The seven-foot iron giant raised his massive, matte-black fist.

Four hundred and ninety-nine Iron-Husked Myrmidons mirrored the movement.

CLANG.

Five hundred heavy iron fists slammed against five hundred iron chests in perfect, terrifying synchronization. The metallic shockwave physically pushed the air out of the courtyard. It echoed over the high walls, rolling across the silent, waiting slums of Sector 9.

An oath of absolute, unbreakable density.

Off to the side, sitting under the rusted awning, Jian let out a long, shuddering breath. He collapsed backward into a cheap, plastic lawn chair he had dragged out of the office.

He held a punctured box of synthetic apple juice.

"Ren," Jian gasped, taking a long, loud slurp from the plastic straw. "We did it. We actually did it. We own a zip code. The Consortium is bankrupt. Zhao is sweeping the floors." Jian pointed his juice box at the sky. "Do we get dental insurance now? Because my molars ache from all the stress-grinding."

Ren looked at the kneeling army. He looked at the golden lights illuminating the endless rows of rotting tenement buildings.

The war was over. The territory was secure.

The celebration lasted exactly thirty seconds.

The Bedrock Rejection

SCREECH.

Jian dropped his juice box. The plastic ruptured on the concrete, spilling sticky yellow fluid.

The sound didn’t come from the sky. It came from beneath their boots. It sounded like a massive, industrial drill bit hitting a solid wall of titanium.

The ground violently shook.

"Boss!" Dr. Zhu shrieked, floating straight through the factory wall, his mechanical eyes spinning in opposite directions.

The golden Ley Line humming beneath the courtyard sputtered. The warm light flickered, turning a sickly, dying yellow.

CRACK.

A massive fissure tore through the center of the courtyard. The mud split open. The concrete foundations of the factory groaned, snapping under immense, sudden pressure. It wasn’t an attack from the Ivory Tower. It was a violent, physical rejection from the earth itself. Ren’s golden roots had tried to claim the deep bedrock of the Sector, and they had hit a wall.

Jian scrambled out of his lawn chair, grabbing his cracked laptop.

The screen flared a violent, angry purple.

"Ren!" Jian yelled over the grinding of the earth. "The readings! It’s not Qi! The Consortium wasn’t drilling for energy down there. They built their grid on top of something!"

A blast of air erupted from the cracked earth.

It wasn’t hot. It was absolutely, unnaturally freezing.

The temperature in the courtyard plummeted well below zero in a fraction of a second. The puddles of rainwater flash-froze into solid ice. Frost violently bloomed across the matte-black armor of the Iron Legion. Red Dog stumbled backward, the joints of his iron knees screaming as rapid, aggressive rust began to eat at his metal shell.

"Fall back!" Lingshan ordered, struggling to pull her sword from the frozen mud. Her breath plumed in thick white clouds.

Ren didn’t step back. He walked toward the fissure.

The Foundation of Chains

The ground tore completely open, creating a crater thirty feet wide.

Through the dust and the freezing fog, a shape emerged from the deep bedrock.

It was a chain.

Forged from pitch-black iron, every single link was as thick as a redwood trunk. The metal was pitted, ancient, and radiated a necrotic cold that made the air itself heavy.

Attached to the chain, half-buried in the shattered bedrock, sat a colossal steel lock. It was the size of a transport truck.

It was not corporate property. There were no barcodes, no serial numbers, no Alchemist Consortium warnings.

Carved deeply into the rusted face of the massive lock were eight distinct crests.

A coiled serpent. A bleeding moon. A shattered crown.

Eight ancient family seals.

The moment the lock was exposed to the open air, a physical weight slammed down on the courtyard. It was a crushing, suffocating gravity. It was a Tier-5 Authority, old and merciless.

Lingshan gasped. Her knees buckled. She hit the frozen mud, unable to hold her head up against the pressure. The Myrmidons sank into the earth, their heavy boots cracking the ice as they were forced downward.

The Lover’s Pin

[ SYSTEM ALERT ]

[ HAZARD DETECTED... ]

The blue text in Ren’s vision flickered. And then, it died.

The System went completely silent, overridden by something much older and much deeper.

[ ANCESTRAL RESONANCE DETECTED ]

Ren didn’t feel a mechanical warning. He felt a violent, physical ache in the center of his chest. His heart, which had just started beating with human warmth, hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.

His blood burned. The freezing pressure pushing his army into the dirt didn’t push him down. It pulled him forward. It felt like a magnetic drag on the iron in his veins.

The cold, calculating mask of the Sovereign cracked.

Ren’s breathing hitched. The bureaucratic detachment evaporated. He stood at the edge of the shattered earth, staring down into the freezing abyss.

He looked directly at the crest carved into the dead center of the massive lock.

A burning black lotus.

Ren reached inside his suit jacket. His fingers bypassed the Tiger Seal. They brushed against cold, cheap metal.

He remembered the smell of cheap incense burning in a cramped, rotting apartment. He remembered the quiet, sad way his grandmother used to trace the edge of the kitchen table when she talked about the man she left behind in her past life. The man who couldn’t follow her.

Ren pulled his hand out of his pocket.

He held a rusted, cheap hairpin. The paint was chipping off the metal.

He held it up against the backdrop of the colossal, terrifying iron lock.

The crude, scratched etching on the head of the cheap hairpin perfectly, flawlessly matched the apocalyptic black lotus crest carved into the First Era prison seal.

A wave of pure, unfiltered shock hit Ren like a physical blow.

She wasn’t just a sweet old woman telling folktales to a sick boy. She hadn’t just stumbled into Sector 9 to hide. She knew. She knew exactly what was buried under the concrete of this exact district.

She had been carrying the crest of an Ancient Traitor Family—or the mark of their eternal prisoner—in her hair for fifty years.

The air around Ren began to vibrate.

He closed his fist. He squeezed the cheap metal so hard the sharp edge of the rusted hairpin cut directly into his palm.

A single drop of hot, red human blood welled up. It dripped from his hand. It fell thirty feet down into the crater.

The blood hit the massive iron lock.

RATTLE.

The black iron chain shifted. The colossal links ground against each other in the dark, responding to the bloodline. Something deep in the earth shifted its weight.

Jian crawled to the edge of the crater, his teeth chattering uncontrollably from the freezing air. "Ren... what is that?"

Ren stared into the dark. His golden eyes lost their coldness. They burned like a chemical fire.

"Jian."

Ren’s voice wasn’t flat. It was heavy, laced with a terrifying, absolute fury.

"Cancel the celebration. We need to dig deeper."

[AUTHOR NOTE]

[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: ARC COMPLETED]

Sector 9: Secured. The Ivory Tower: Looted and Bankrupted. The True Enemy: Unearthed.

End of the "Return of the Sovereign" Arc!

If you thought the Alchemist Consortium was the final boss, you were wrong. They were just the middle-management property developers who paved a parking lot over a graveyard.

The corporate war is over. The Bloodline War begins now.

Who was Ren’s grandmother really hiding from for fifty years? What is the Black Lotus? And what exactly is locked inside that First Era prison beneath the factory? Ren thought he was just reclaiming his life—but he just stumbled into a war that has been raging in Hell for a millennia. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

Next up: We dive straight into a high-stakes mini-arc uncovering the darkest secrets of Ren’s lineage and the 8 Traitor Families.

The scale of the world just broke wide open. Drop those Power Stones and Golden Tickets to fund the excavation! Let’s break the seal! ⛏️🔥