I Died 2,000 Years Ago: The Underworld Fears Me-Chapter 81 - 78 — The River Was Made of Acid and Bones
The river cutting through the center of Sector Eight was not made of water.
It was a churning, neon-green artery of boiling acid, thick with the dissolved bone and wasted karma of a million bankrupt souls. It moved sluggishly through a deep canyon of black volcanic rock, hissing against the jagged banks and sending thick plumes of toxic, sulfur-scented steam into the bruised purple sky.
In the Upper Layers, pollution was a byproduct of industry. Down here, suffering was the currency.
We descended the narrow, winding switchbacks leading down from the Sector Nine border. The heat radiating from the canyon below was entirely unreasonable. It wasn’t just hot; it was actively corrosive.
Lingshan walked a half-step behind me, her hand resting on the pommel of her sword. With every step she took, a thin layer of freezing Qi expanded from the soles of her combat boots, flash-freezing the blistering rock just long enough for her to transfer her weight. Without the ice, the latent heat of the stone would have melted the thick rubber treads to her feet.
To my right, Red Dog simply absorbed the punishment. The seven-foot Myrmidon carried the sleek silver briefcase in his massive claw. The matte-black iron of his heavy boots popped and hissed violently against the superheated stone, tiny fractures spider-webbing across his armor as the temperature tested the limits of his First Era metallurgy.
I walked untouched.
I didn’t use Qi to shield myself. I simply walked within a localized pocket of Sovereign Authority. The toxic smog parted around my ruined black suit. The corrosive heat stopped exactly one inch from my skin, hitting an invisible wall of absolute, administrative Law. The environment did not burn me because I did not grant it the legal jurisdiction to do so.
We reached the canyon floor. The deafening roar of industrial machinery drowned out the bubbling of the acid river.
Lining the banks of the toxic green sludge were hundreds of massive, towering blast furnaces. They were crude, ugly things, belching thick black smoke and raining ash down onto the broken basalt.
But it wasn’t the machines that made Lingshan stop walking. It was the fuel source.
Thousands of translucent, starving ghosts were chained to the heavy iron conveyer belts feeding the open crucibles. They weren’t shoveling coal or processing raw ore.
I stopped walking, my eyes locking onto a specific worker twenty yards away.
The ghost was a man missing half his face, his spectral body flickering dangerously close to total dissolution. He wore a heavy iron collar stamped with a bleeding coin—the crest of the Traitor Zhang Clan.
As the conveyer belt lurched forward, the ghost didn’t load rocks into the fire. He raised his right arm, grabbed a rusted meat cleaver chained to the workstation, and hacked cleanly through his own translucent forearm.
The ghost didn’t scream. He just stared with dead, hollow eyes as his severed spectral limb dropped onto the conveyor belt and rolled into the roaring crucible.
The furnace flared a brilliant, sickening violet.
A heavy mechanical clank echoed from a brass dispenser bolted to the side of the machine. A single, half-melted copper coin dropped into a rusted tin tray. The ghost picked it up with his remaining hand, his overall form noticeably dimmer, smaller, and closer to fading completely.
He was literally feeding his own soul to the corporate grid to earn enough change to buy a scrap of fake food, just to survive another day to do it again.
"Gods above," Lingshan whispered, her knuckles turning white around the hilt of her sword. The sheer cruelty of it offended the martial honor of the Sword Saint bloodline. "They are eating them alive. Piece by piece."
I didn’t feel pity. I felt the cold, turning gears of the Ledger.
The Zhang Clan wasn’t just running a sweatshop. This was systematic, unregulated spiritual embezzlement. They were harvesting the population to print off-the-books currency, bypassing the natural Reincarnation Cycle entirely.
"Don’t look at them, Miss Ye," I ordered, my voice cutting through the roar of the furnaces. "Keep your eyes forward. We aren’t here to audit the factory floor today."
We continued down the shoreline until the black stone path dead-ended at the edge of the boiling river.
Spanning the two-hundred-foot gap across the toxic green acid was a rusted iron suspension bridge. The metal cables creaked and groaned under the strain of their own weight, coated in decades of corrosive buildup.
Blocking the entrance to the bridge was a makeshift toll booth constructed from welded scrap metal. Five men lounged around it.
They were low-level syndicate thugs, wearing the blood-red armbands of the Zhang Clan. The environment had mutated them. Their skin was thick and grey, resembling the hide of a rhinoceros, and their eyes were protected by heavy, polarized goggles to block the toxic steam.
The lead thug, a massive brute carrying a motorized drill-spear, stood up. He looked at Lingshan’s clean armor, glanced at Red Dog’s rusted iron plating, and finally sneered at my ruined, blood-stained wool suit.
He stepped directly into my path, tapping the motorized tip of his spear against the stone.
"Well, well. Look what washed down the drain from the slums," the thug mocked, his voice a wet, gravelly rasp. He spat a wad of black phlegm onto the ground inches from my polished shoes. "The bridge is closed to refugees, suit. Unless you can pay the maintenance fee."
I stopped. I didn’t reach for my umbrella. I didn’t raise my hands.
"What is the fee?" I asked quietly.
The thug grinned, revealing rows of filed, metal-capped teeth. "For you? A hundred copper coins. Each. Pay up, or my boys will check your pockets after we kick you into the green."
The other four thugs laughed, raising their heavy, rusted pipe-rifles and leveling them at my chest.
A hundred copper coins was a fortune to a slum ghost. It was the equivalent of a hundred severed arms thrown into those blast furnaces.
I didn’t blink. I didn’t even look at the man’s face. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖
I raised my right hand and casually tapped my index finger against Red Dog’s rusted iron chest plate.
Cling.
The seven-foot Myrmidon didn’t hesitate. He raised his massive left claw. He pressed his thumb against the biometric lock of the sleek silver briefcase.
The heavy latches popped.
Red Dog opened the lid exactly one inch.
The effect was instantaneous and absolutely devastating.
A blinding, holy light erupted from the narrow crack in the briefcase. The concentrated, liquid aura of one hundred million spiritual silver bars sliced through the toxic yellow smog like a laser beam. The sheer karmic density pouring out of that one-inch gap hit the thugs with the physical force of a localized hurricane.
The lead thug screamed, dropping his drill-spear. He threw both hands over his polarized goggles, blinded by the sheer radiance of unimaginable wealth.
The other four men collapsed to their knees, weeping uncontrollably as the gravity of the capital forced their weak cultivation bases to submit. Their pipe-rifles clattered uselessly against the rusted bridge.
Red Dog snapped the briefcase shut.
The blinding light vanished, leaving the thugs gasping for air in the dim, purple gloom, rubbing their scorched retinas in pure terror.
I stepped forward. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a single, solid bar of pure spiritual silver, and held it out over the lead thug’s heavy work boot.
I let go.
CRUNCH.
The heavy silver bar plummeted, smashing directly into the center of the man’s instep. The bones in his foot shattered with a sickening crack.
The thug howled, falling onto his back and clutching his crushed foot, his metallic teeth grinding in agony.
I stepped over his writhing body and set foot onto the rusted iron bridge.
"Keep the change," I said.
We crossed the acid river without looking back. Lingshan kept her hand on her sword, but the remaining thugs were too busy staring at the single silver bar embedded in the rock to even point a weapon at our backs.
As we reached the far side of the canyon, the toxic smog began to clear, blown back by massive, artificial ventilation fans built into the cliff walls.
The Flesh Exchange finally came into full view.
The sheer scale of it forced me to stop walking.
It was a coliseum built inside the fossilized ribcage of a First Era behemoth. The ancient, ivory-white bones curved hundreds of feet into the bruised sky, creating a massive, domed cage that spanned miles in diameter. The dead god had been so large that entire city blocks could fit comfortably between two of its ribs.
But it was the desecration of the bone that made the air turn cold in my lungs.
The Traitor Zhang Clan hadn’t just built an arena inside the corpse; they had parasitized it. Thick bundles of black fiber-optic cables, each as wide as a redwood trunk, were bolted directly into the ancient ivory with massive iron spikes.
Wrapped around the exterior of the colossal ribcage were thousands of blinding neon screens. They flashed in frantic sequences of blood-red and sickly green, reflecting off the pools of acid below.
ZHANG CORP: +4.2%
BLOOD YIELD: HIGH
CURRENT BOUT WAGER POOL: 4.8 MILLION SILVER
It was a stock market bolted to a slaughterhouse.
Inside my jacket pocket, the rusted hairpin burned.
It grew so hot it singed the inner lining of my wool suit, pressing a brand of phantom heat directly against my ribcage. The resonance wasn’t a warning. It was a scream.
I could feel her.
Deep inside that arena, buried under miles of neon wiring and corporate greed, a fragment of the Queen’s soul was chained to the grid. Every time the massive stock tickers updated, every time a neon advertisement flared across the ancient bone, it fed off her agony. They were running their financial empire on the burning spiritual marrow of my past-life lover.
I adjusted my tie. The fabric felt rough against my throat.
"Come," I ordered, my voice devoid of any human inflection.
We walked toward the base of the ribcage. The environment around the entrance sharply divided, creating a brutal visual representation of the Underworld’s economy.
To the left, a massive, muddy trench stretched for miles. Millions of starving ghosts, mutants, and low-level mercenaries pressed against each other in the toxic heat, fighting for the chance to enter the rusted iron gates of the general admission "Bleachers." Enforcers beat them back with electrified batons, treating the crowd like stray dogs.
To the right, the world was sterile.
A wide promenade of polished white marble led up to a towering, pristine golden elevator. The air around the elevator was artificially cooled and scented with synthetic jasmine. Hovering palanquins, driven by bound spirits, dropped off members of the Upper Layer elite. Men in spotless silk suits and women draped in high-tier defensive jewelry stepped onto the marble, completely ignoring the screaming masses a hundred yards away.
I didn’t even glance at the general admission line.
I opened my black umbrella to block a sudden drift of toxic, grey ash falling from the exhaust vents above. I adjusted my grip on the curved handle and walked directly up the center of the white marble promenade, my ruined black boots leaving faint, dirty footprints on the pristine stone.
Lingshan and Red Dog flanked me, an odd vanguard of blood-stained tactical gear and rusted iron.
We reached the golden velvet rope blocking the entrance to the VIP elevator.
A Traitor Zhang broker stepped directly into my path.
He wore a tailored, immaculate white suit. His hair was slicked back, his skin clear of the ash and grime that coated the rest of the sector. He looked at my umbrella, his eyes dropping to the dried black blood flaking off my collar. His lip curled in an expression of profound, aristocratic disgust.
He raised a manicured hand, pressing his palm flat against my chest to stop me from taking another step.
"Lost your way, slum rat?" the broker sneered, snapping his fingers. Two heavily armed, elite guards in polished silver armor stepped out from behind the elevator doors, resting their hands on their holstered weapons. "The gutter entrance is two miles down. Turn around before I have security execute you for dirtying the marble."
I didn’t look at his hand on my chest. I looked directly into his eyes.
"We didn’t come to sit in the bleachers."
