I Died 2,000 Years Ago: The Underworld Fears Me-Chapter 96 - 93 — "We Tore Her Soul Apart"

I was thirty feet away from the crater when the temperature in the arena pit inverted.

My shattered left arm hung uselessly at my side, the splintered bone grinding against torn muscle with every limping step I took. The eighteen-year-old human vessel was shutting down. Adrenaline was entirely gone, replaced by a cold, creeping numbness. I just wanted to sit in the manager’s chair at the Last Stop Factory and wait for the bones to set.

Then, the smell of ozone and burning sulfur flooded the sweltering air.

Hiss.

The sound came from the deep, dark trench where the colossal iron abacus had buried the Warlord. It sounded like water poured over hot coals.

I stopped walking.

Lingshan, clutching her bruised ribs, turned around. Red Dog’s internal furnace growled, a low, mechanical warning vibrating through his dented chest plate.

A thick, violent mass of dark Qi pulled itself over the jagged edge of the bedrock.

It was translucent. It flickered and warped, unable to maintain a solid shape. It was missing a massive chunk of its chest, mirroring the physical injury I had inflicted on the meat-suit. But the heavy, oppressive aura of a Tier-Four cultivator remained intact.

Baron Zhang’s soul had crawled out of his crushed corpse.

He was dead. His physical leverage was entirely gone. He had no bank accounts, no armor, and no heartbeat. He was simply waiting for the gravitational pull of the Reincarnation Cycle to drag him down into the River.

But stripped of his physical eyes, the Warlord was looking at me through the spiritual spectrum.

He didn’t see an eighteen-year-old kid in a dirty wool suit.

He saw the towering, two-thousand-year-old architecture of the Ivory Sky overlaying my frail human frame. He saw the golden script burning beneath my skin. He saw the absolute, crushing weight of the administrative Law radiating from my shadow.

The Warlord’s spectral jaw dropped.

The realization hit him with the force of a physical blow. The confusion, the rage, and the systemic panic he had felt during our duel instantly crystallized into absolute clarity. He finally understood why his margin calls had failed. He understood why the Ledger obeyed me.

"You," Zhang’s soul gasped. His voice was a hollow, echoing distortion, projecting directly into the minds of everyone in the pit. "The White Eye didn’t erase you. You just changed your coat."

He floated a few feet above the broken permafrost. The gravitational pull of the Reincarnation Cycle was already tugging at his legs, causing the dark Qi to flake off and drift upward like ash. He had less than two minutes before the System pulled him under.

And he decided to spend it inflicting maximum emotional damage.

Zhang threw his translucent head back and laughed. It was a hysterical, ragged sound, completely devoid of his former aristocratic dignity. It was the laugh of a ruined man who realizes he holds one final, poisoned knife.

"The Sovereign of the First Court," Zhang mocked, pointing a flickering spectral finger at my face. "The King returned to the slums! You crawled out of the dirt just to steal my pocket change!"

I didn’t speak. I turned around slowly.

The golden teardrop resting in my breast pocket began to vibrate. It wasn’t burning me anymore, but it hummed with a deep, tragic frequency. The soul fragment recognized the spiritual signature of its torturer.

"You took the battery," Zhang sneered, floating higher as the River pulled at him. "You think you saved her? You think pulling that glass out of my chest fixed anything?"

He leaned forward. The malice in his hollow eyes was toxic.

"I know what my ancestors did to her," Zhang boasted, his voice dropping into a cruel, intimate whisper that echoed in my skull. "The Eight Families didn’t just kill the Queen. We harvested her. Do you know how long she screamed, Sovereign? It wasn’t a quick execution. It was a surgical extraction."

I stood perfectly still.

The pain in my shattered left arm completely vanished. The exhaustion fading my vision instantly cleared.

The human vessel stopped complaining, overridden by an absolute, freezing void of pure Sovereign rage. The air around my boots began to crackle. The moisture in the sweltering arena didn’t freeze into ice; it completely disintegrated, unable to exist in the same physical space as my killing intent.

Zhang saw my eyes darken. He smiled.

"My ancestor, Zhang Wei, forged the glass," the Warlord gloated, feeding on my silence. "He was the one who held her down. He put his heavy iron hands around her throat and crushed her windpipe so she couldn’t summon her Law. He pinned her to the floor of the Ivory Sky while the Alchemists carved her core open with frequency blades."

He laughed again, the sound wet and jagged.

"We tore her soul apart, Ren Wu. We split her divine Law into eight pieces, boxed them in glass, and wore them like jewelry. We turned your Queen into a AAA battery to power our bank accounts! And she wept. She begged us to stop. But the Traitor Families needed the capital."

Lingshan drew a sharp breath. She looked at me, taking a slow step backward.

Even the Sword Saint, bred for violence and death, was terrified of the pressure radiating from my ruined suit.

Red Dog’s optical sensors dimmed, the First Era machine instinctively powering down its aggressive subroutines in the presence of an apex threat.

"And now?" Zhang spread his translucent arms, looking up at the bruised purple sky of Sector Eight. The gravitational pull of the Reincarnation Cycle was thickening, wrapping invisible chains around his torso to drag him away. "Now, I die. The System takes me. The ledger balances."

He looked down at me with pure, unfiltered arrogance.

"I go to the River, Sovereign. I wash my memories away. I reincarnate in Sector One as a high-tier aristocrat. I am reborn rich, powerful, and untouched by your little audit. You ruined my business today, but I am escaping. You can’t touch me now. I am already dead."

He began to fade. The System was executing its final, automated script to recycle the Warlord’s spiritual energy.

I looked at the fading, laughing ghost.

I raised my right hand.

I did not summon the black umbrella. I did not pull the cracked smartphone from my pocket.

"Reincarnation," I said quietly, my voice slicing through his hysterical laughter like a scalpel, "is a corporate loophole designed to protect bankrupt assets."

The golden script beneath my skin erupted.

It didn’t just crawl up my arm. It exploded across my neck, mapping the ancient, bureaucratic geometry of the Ivory Sky directly onto my face. The sheer output of administrative Law caused the capillaries in my nose to burst. A thin line of blood ran down my upper lip.

The air in the coliseum violently compressed.

"And I am closing it."

A massive, burning projection tore its way into the physical space directly above my bleeding hand. The Golden Ledger manifested. It didn’t just float; it slammed open, the heavy pages grinding with the sound of tectonic plates colliding.

Zhang stopped laughing.

He felt the pull of the Reincarnation Cycle suddenly stall. The invisible chains dragging him upward snapped.

"What are you doing?" Zhang choked, his spectral form thrashing. "You can’t intercept the River! That is System Law!"

"I wrote the System," I said.

I manifested the heavy golden calligraphy brush. I didn’t write on the page. I grabbed the burning book with my right hand and slammed it directly into the dirt.

I projected the Ledger’s authority across the entire arena pit.

The rules of physics, death, and the afterlife temporarily suspended within a five-hundred-foot radius.

"Baron Zhang," I declared, my voice echoing with a heavy, unnatural harmonic that rattled the fossilized bones of the arena. "You have defaulted on your physical existence. You have attempted to abscond with stolen capital. I am issuing a final writ of foreclosure on your spiritual essence."

"No!" Zhang screamed. He clawed at the empty air, trying to swim upward, trying to force himself into the Reincarnation Cycle. "Let me go! I paid the toll!"

"Your toll is insufficient."

I closed my fist.

The Golden Ledger snapped shut.

The massive, Tier-Four soul of the Warlord was violently yanked downward. He hit the packed sand, completely pinned by the crushing gravity of pure bureaucracy.

I didn’t crush him out of existence. Oblivion was too kind. Oblivion was a release.

I began to compress him.

The massive, ten-foot spectral form of the Warlord shrieked in absolute agony. The spiritual density of his soul folded inward. The dark Qi condensed, hardening under the extreme pressure of my grip.

"My ancestor held her down!" Zhang screamed, trying to use his gloat as a shield, trying to invoke the trauma to make me stop. "We tore her apart!"

"I know," I said, my voice deadpan, entirely devoid of mercy. "And I am going to find every single piece."

I tightened my fist.

The soul compressed from ten feet to five. From five to a single foot. The Warlord’s screaming reached a pitch that shattered the remaining intact glass in the VIP Skybox above us.

CRUNCH.

The spiritual energy finalized its physical transition.

The screaming cut off instantly.

The dark Qi solidified, dropping into the bloody sand with a tiny, metallic clink.

I walked over to the spot where the Warlord had been pinned.

I crouched down, ignoring the sharp spike of pain from my broken arm, and picked up the object with my right hand.

It was a coin.

A single, dull copper coin. The absolute lowest denomination of currency in the Underworld.

Baron Zhang’s face was perfectly stamped into the cheap, oxidized metal. His mouth was frozen in a silent, eternal scream. He was completely conscious inside the coin, permanently trapped in a state of suspended, agonizing claustrophobia. He could not cultivate. He could not reincarnate. He could only exist as petty cash.

I brushed the dirt off his screaming face with my thumb.

"You aren’t going to Sector One," I told the copper coin.

I walked over to Lingshan. She stood perfectly straight, hiding the pain of her bruised ribs. She looked at the copper coin in my hand, then at the golden script slowly fading from my face.

I tossed the coin to her.

She caught it with her left hand.

"Buy yourself a cup of coffee on the way back to the factory, Miss Ye," I said, adjusting the lapels of my ruined suit jacket. "The Warlord is buying."

Lingshan looked down at the screaming face stamped into the metal. A slow, dark smile touched the corners of her lips. She slipped the Warlord into her tactical pouch.

"Thank you, Sovereign. I take mine black."

I turned away from the crater.

The Sector was mine. The first Soul Fragment was safe. The Market Maker was currently sitting in my Vanguard’s pocket, waiting to be traded for a cheap beverage.

I looked at my cracked smartphone. The battery was at two percent.

The 72-hour clock had exactly fourteen minutes remaining.

"Red Dog," I ordered.

The giant Myrmidon lumbered forward, his heavy iron boots crunching over the bedrock.

"Carry me," I said. "We have an appointment with a Judge."

[AUTHOR NOTE]

The Warlord talked too much. 🗣️🪙

Zhang thought he could drop a lore bomb and escape to the upper layers. Ren just hit him with the ultimate face-slapping UNO reverse card: turning a Tier-4 Cultivator into literal pocket change.

The backstory of the Queen’s death is out, and the revenge tour is officially on the books. But first, Ren has to survive the final audit.

If you loved Zhang getting turned into a coffee token, drop those Power Stones and Golden Tickets! The 72-hour deadline expires in the next Chapter! ☕⚖️