I Died 2,000 Years Ago: The Underworld Fears Me-Chapter 89 - 86 — Half the Room Went Bankrupt in 12 Seconds
Gravity was a suggestion the Skybox no longer enforced.
Broker Chen lay flat on the crimson silk carpet, digging his manicured fingernails into the fabric. His body, completely stripped of its Tier-3 cultivation just two minutes ago, lacked the strength to grip the bolted mahogany table. The wind howling through the massive, shattered hole in the armor-glass sucked loose betting slips, silk napkins, and empty champagne flutes out into the sweltering, toxic air of the coliseum.
Chen coughed, his throat dry and ragged. He looked up at the glowing holographic terminal above his head.
He had taken Baron Zhang’s margin loan. He had borrowed against his family’s ancestral estate in Sector 2 to buy shares of the Tier-Four Chimera, desperate to win back his lost cultivation. The green numbers had promised salvation.
Then, the girl in the black tactical armor jumped out the window.
Chen watched her fall. She didn’t scream. She plummeted toward the blood-soaked sand like a dropped knife.
Chen looked back at the terminal. The green numbers tracking the Chimera’s stock price stalled. They flickered.
Then, they turned a violent, terminal red.
The short volume spiked to one hundred percent. The single, unknown entity holding the umbrella had just dumped two and a half billion silver against the house.
Chen’s heart stopped. He pressed his face into the carpet and began to weep.
[POV: REN WU]
I stood at the edge of the shattered window.
The hot, sulfur-scented wind of the arena whipped my ruined tie against my collar. I leaned heavily against the curved handle of my black umbrella, looking down into the pit.
Lingshan fell for exactly four seconds.
She did not use her Qi to slow her descent. She used it to accelerate.
The Sword Saint pointed the tip of Winter’s Edge straight down, tucking her body into a perfectly aerodynamic dive. A massive, spinning drill of pale blue, freezing Qi condensed around the steel.
Down in the pit, the Tier-Four Chimera was busy trying to melt Red Dog’s chest plate. The beast sensed the massive atmospheric pressure dropping from above. The goat-skull head snapped upward, its artificial blue soul-fire eyes flaring.
It unhinged its jaw to fire a blast of necrotic plasma.
It was too late.
Lingshan hit the packed sand directly behind the beast.
BOOM.
The kinetic impact sounded like an artillery shell detonating. A shockwave of pure, absolute zero exploded outward from her landing point.
The sweltering, two-hundred-degree ambient heat of the coliseum vanished instantly. The packed, blood-soaked sand flash-froze into solid permafrost in a fifty-foot radius. The iron grates lining the arena floor groaned, contracting violently under the sudden temperature drop.
The Chimera whipped its heavy, uranium-plated body around, dragging its serpent tail.
Lingshan didn’t rise from the crater. She exploded out of it.
She moved faster than the human eye could track, leaving a trail of frozen mist in the air. The Chimera lunged, swiping a massive paw the size of a carriage.
Lingshan slid underneath the strike, her knees skimming the frosted sand. She dragged Winter’s Edge cleanly across the beast’s exposed right ankle.
The high-tier, debt-bound flesh parted like wet paper.
She didn’t just cut the muscle. The freezing Qi coating her blade injected directly into the Chimera’s bloodstream. The highly corrosive, black venom pumping through the beast’s veins instantly crystallized.
The Chimera shrieked, a horrifying, multi-layered sound of three different apex predators dying at once. Its right leg locked entirely, frozen solid from the inside out.
The beast stumbled, its massive bulk crashing onto the permafrost.
It tried to whip its serpent tail to crush her.
Lingshan spun, planting her boot on the beast’s frozen kneecap. She vaulted into the air, flipping over the descending tail. She landed perfectly balanced on the Chimera’s broad, armored back.
She reversed her grip on the katana. She drove the freezing steel straight down, bypassing the uranium armor plates, sinking the blade to the hilt directly into the beast’s artificial core.
Crack.
A massive pulse of pale blue ice erupted outward from the wound.
The Chimera’s roaring cut off instantly. The blue soul-fire burning in its goat-skull eyes snuffed out. The beast’s entire body, from its heavy mane to the tip of its serpent tail, flash-froze into a solid block of dark, necrotic ice.
It was dead. But Lingshan wasn’t finished.
She ripped her sword out of the frozen spine, backflipped off the massive ice sculpture, and landed softly on the frosted sand. She sheathed her blade.
Click.
The moment the steel locked into the scabbard, Red Dog moved.
The First Era Myrmidon stepped forward. His matte-black iron chassis smoked in the freezing air. He raised his heavy right fist high above his head. The massive structural gears inside his chest roared, locking into maximum overdrive.
Red Dog brought his fist down like a hydraulic piledriver directly onto the top of the Chimera’s frozen goat-skull.
CRASH.
The impact shattered the frozen, Tier-Four beast into a million pieces of bloody, necrotic ice.
Chunks of frozen flesh and shattered uranium armor scattered across the arena floor, bouncing uselessly against Red Dog’s heavy boots.
Twelve seconds.
That was exactly how long it took the Sword Saint and the Myrmidon to liquidate the Market Maker’s premium asset.
The heavy iron bell bolted to the arena wall rang out. The automated sensors detected zero life signs from the Chimera. The bout was over.
The general admission bleachers were dead silent. Millions of ghosts stared down into the pit, their spectral jaws hanging open. They had just watched a god-tier monster get turned into a snow cone.
Up in the VIP Skybox, the silence lasted exactly one second.
Then, the machines began to scream.
Every single holographic terminal in the suite turned a violent, flashing red. The automated voice of the Zhang Central Bank blared from the hidden speakers, the volume cranking to maximum to cut through the howling wind.
CHIM-4 ASSET DESTROYED. VALUE: ZERO.
MARGIN CALL INITIATED. INSUFFICIENT ACCOUNT BALANCE.
COMMENCING FORCED LIQUIDATION.
It was a financial massacre.
The aristocrats had doubled down. They had taken Zhang’s high-interest margin loans to buy the Chimera, leveraging their businesses, their homes, and their future reincarnations on a sure thing.
When the stock hit absolute zero, the Iron Bank came to collect.
The woman in the torn silk dress, who had just watched her diamond choker dissolve, shrieked as her terminal flashed.
Click.
Her tailored dress unstitched itself, turning into coarse brown rags.
Click.
Her aggressive, high-tier dental implants—financed on credit—violently evicted themselves from her gums. She collapsed onto the carpet, spitting blood and perfect white teeth onto the silk, sobbing uncontrollably.
A heavy-set broker near the bar grabbed his chest.
Click.
The artificial, Qi-infused lung he had bought to replace the one he lost to lung cancer was repossessed. He hit the floor, suffocating on the dry, conditioned air, his skin turning a sickly blue.
People were literally fainting.
Men and women who had spent centuries stepping on the throats of the poor in Sector 9 were suddenly reduced to starving, mortal beggars in the span of twelve seconds. The sheer, concentrated misery in the room was suffocating.
I turned my back to the shattered window.
I walked over to my dark leather booth. The holographic terminal was glowing a blinding, beautiful green. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂
The massive short position I had taken against the Chimera had paid out at maximum yield. Because I had used two point six billion silver as my collateral, the return on the short squeeze was astronomical.
PORTFOLIO VALUE: 12,850,000,000 SILVER.
Twelve billion. Eight hundred and fifty million.
I had mathematically conquered the entire gross domestic product of Sector Eight. I owned the zip code, the air rights, the concrete, and the debts of every single person weeping on the floor.
I pulled my cracked smartphone from the table.
"Jian," I said.
The broken screen flared. Jian’s face appeared. He wasn’t cheering anymore. He was staring at his own monitor, his pale face reflecting the massive string of zeroes on his ledger. He looked completely numb.
"Boss," Jian whispered, his voice trembling. "Did you... did you just buy the bank?"
"Route it," I ordered. "Lock the funds in the Last Stop vault. Seal the network."
"Done," Jian swallowed hard. "Ren, the market algorithm is having a stroke. It’s trying to calculate your tax bracket and it just keeps crashing."
I tapped the screen, cutting the feed.
I slipped the phone back into my pocket.
Across the suite, the Market Maker was entirely motionless.
Baron Zhang stood in front of his velvet lounge. The glass of champagne he had been holding was a frozen, shattered mess on the carpet. His heavy, First Era iron chest plate heaved.
His Warlord aura flared, bleeding out into the room. It was thick, oppressive, and smelled of oxidized iron and murder.
But a physical aura could not stop a digital foreclosure.
Zhang looked at the glowing terminal bolted to his lounge.
He was the underwriter for all those margin loans. He had guaranteed the liquidity. When his elites defaulted on their debt, the central bank automatically pulled the remaining deficit directly from the Market Maker’s personal accounts.
His wealth was draining. Fast.
The heavy glass cylinder embedded over his sternum sparked violently.
The Queen’s soul fragment recognized the shift in power. The Warlord’s absolute control over his territory was cracking, and the battery fought back. The swirling gold light inside the glass cage spiked, burning so bright it cast long, sharp shadows against the back wall of the suite.
Zhang grunted in pain, slamming his massive hand over the cylinder. Thick smoke hissed from his iron fingers as the heated glass burned his skin.
He looked up at me.
His blood-red eyes were wide, filled with a primal, terrifying mixture of absolute hatred and total disbelief.
"You," Zhang growled, his voice vibrating through the floorboards. "You crashed my sector."
I stood at the edge of the booth, resting both hands on the handle of my black umbrella. I did not smile. I did not gloat. I looked at the Warlord with the cold, detached expression of a man reading a grocery list.
"Your sector was fundamentally overvalued," I said.
I reached into my breast pocket. I pulled out the heavy platinum VIP card I had looted from the dead broker at the elevator.
I tossed it onto the dark mahogany table. The platinum clattered loudly against the wood.
"I am cashing out, Baron," I said, my voice carrying the absolute, unnatural harmonic of the Sovereign. "I am liquidating my twelve billion silver. If your bank cannot provide the physical capital to honor my withdrawal, I will file a formal writ of foreclosure against the Flesh Exchange."
Zhang’s face twisted into a snarl.
"I will tear your spine out," the Warlord roared, his heavy iron boots cracking the floorboards as he took a massive step forward.
"If you touch me," I said, not moving a single inch, "you trigger an unauthorized assault clause against a primary creditor. Judge Mortis will drop the Ivory Sky on your head before your fist reaches my face."
Zhang stopped.
His heavy chest heaved. The gears in his armor ground against each other. He knew the law. He was a Traitor, a thief, and a murderer, but he survived by manipulating the System. He knew I had him perfectly cornered.
"You don’t have the capital to pay me," I stated the obvious.
Zhang stared at me, his eyes burning.
"So," I said, picking up the platinum card and slipping it back into my pocket. "Let’s talk about a wager."
[AUTHOR NOTE]
The Market Maker is broke. 📉💀
Ren just turned 100 million into 12.8 Billion in under thirty minutes. The elites are literally coughing up their teeth. The face-slapping has reached terminal velocity.
But a Warlord backed into a corner is the most dangerous thing in the Hell Sectors. Zhang can’t pay the bill, which means he only has one option left: Double down on his own life.
Next up: He Wagered an Entire Sector. The paperwork comes out, and the real death match begins. Drop those Power Stones and Golden Tickets! 💼🔥
