Volume 2, Chapter 59: Shadow Bloodlines and Hollow Roads
The office in the Central Branch of the Anito Academy had a very specific smell. It was a mix of old parchment, floor wax, and the faint ozone-heavy scent of soul-tool cooling fans. I sat in a chair that was designed for "ergonomic support," which is just a fancy way of saying it was uncomfortable in three different places at once.
I was currently trying to see how far I could tilt the chair back before the laws of physics decided to dump me on the floor. It was a delicate balance. A game of inches.
"Professor Lakas," a voice said from the doorway.
It wasn't a soft voice. It was the kind of voice that sounded like a blade being drawn from a scabbard. I let the chair snap back forward and adjusted my glasses.
"That's me," I said, offering a confident grin. "Though, usually, people lead with 'Hello' or 'Nice weather we're having.' It's a bit of a classic for a reason."
The woman standing in the doorway didn't care about the weather. She was tall—nearly as tall as my Lakas shell—and she filled the frame in a way that made the air in the room feel heavier. She wore the black-and-silver uniform of the Hall of Execution, tailored with a precision that bordered on aggressive.
The fabric was skin-tight, leaving very little to the imagination. She had a small waist that looked almost fragile, but it opened up into wide, powerful hips and a chest that clearly tested the structural integrity of the Arbiter's silver buttons. She was, quite frankly, a biological masterpiece.
But I didn't look at her figure. I looked at her soul.
Inside her, I felt a resonance that made my heart skip a beat. It was a familiar frequency. It was the howling speed of the Gale Magic Wolf mixed with the intense, stubborn heat of the Blazing Sun. Ten thousand years had passed, but the blood of Feng Xiaotian and Huo Wu was still screaming through her veins. It had mutated, turned into something darker and more elusive, but the core was there.
"Arbitrator Vane," she said, stepping into the room. She didn't sit. She just stood there, looking down at me like I was a particularly confusing bug. "Hall of Execution. Internal Affairs Division."
"Vane. Nice name," I said, leaning my chin on my palm. "Sounds like something that moves with the wind. Or maybe something that stays steady while the wind blows? Which one are you?"
She didn't blink. She reached into a folder and pulled out a series of grainy images taken from the Sector Seven surveillance feeds.
"Three hours ago, multiple Level 99 energy signatures were detected in the Northern Tundra," Vane said. Her voice was flat, professional. "At the same time, four students from this Academy and one faculty member—you—were reported missing from the local Phoenix-Rail manifest. Care to explain the coincidence?"
"Well, you know how it is," I said, my grin widening. "The kids wanted to see the snow. And I'm a very supportive teacher. We went for a walk, got a bit lost. It turns out the North is actually quite big. Who knew?"
Vane leaned forward, placing her hands on my desk. I could smell her perfume—charcoal and cold rain.
"Four Level 99 Abyssal Generals were erased from existence, Professor," she hissed. "They weren't defeated. They didn't retreat. They were turned into ash. The energy readings we picked up suggest a frequency so high it shouldn't be possible for a human vessel to maintain. And yet, here you are, sitting in a squeaky chair, talking about a walk in the snow."
"Maybe the Generals had heart attacks?" I suggested. "Stress is a silent killer, Vane. Even for monsters."
I saw her eyes flicker. For a split second, she lost her professional cool. Her shadow began to move. It wasn't just a lack of light; it was alive. Two heads emerged from the darkness behind her, the spectral muzzles of a Two-Headed Shadow Wolf sniffing the air near my neck.
She was an Innate Full Soul Power genius. Rank 10 start. I could feel the raw talent radiating off her. She was a thoroughbred, a direct result of the world I had built.
"Don't play with me, Lakas," she whispered. "I know a lie when I hear one. You have no martial soul on record beyond a basic bird spirit. You have no rank higher than a standard teacher. But your resonance… it's too quiet. It's the silence of a deep well."
I reached out and tapped the nose of one of the shadow wolves. It recoiled as if it had been poked with a hot iron.
"You have your ancestor's eyes," I said, my voice dropping an octave. The humor was still there, but I let a sliver of the Origin peek through the cracks. "And your maternal ancestor's temper. It's a volatile mix, Vane. If I were you, I'd focus less on the Deep Well and more on the report you have to file. Just write: 'The trash took itself out.' It's cleaner that way."
Vane froze. Her wolves dissolved back into the floor. She stared at me, her chest heaving slightly under that tight uniform. She didn't know why she was afraid, but her blood knew. The legacy of Xiaotian and Huo Wu was bowing to its master, even if she didn't realize it.
"I'll be watching you," she said, straightening her jacket and turning toward the door. "The Hall of Execution doesn't like mysteries, Professor. We solve them. Eventually."
"I look forward to it," I called out as she walked away. "And Vane? Get a larger size for that jacket. You're going to pop a button, and that's a safety hazard in a school environment!"
She didn't look back, but the way she slammed the door told me I'd won the round.
But as I sat there, the confident grin faded. The world was getting complicated. If the Hall of Execution was already sniffing around, it meant my museum was being threatened by more than just Abyssal monsters.
••••
Slaughter City
While I was busy teasing the law, the real problem was making its own plans.
Slaughter City was no longer the nightmare it had been when I was young. Back then, it was a place of red mist and the iron smell of fresh blood. Now, it was just a ruin. Tang San had broken its heart ten thousand years ago, and time had done the rest. The stone towers were hollowed out, covered in grey moss that looked like dead skin.
But deep beneath the ruins, where the air grew heavy and the light died, sat the Hell Road.
In my time, this was a pocket dimension of pure killing intent. If you entered, you either became a God or you died screaming. But with the death of the old Gods, the dimension had stabilized. The killing intent had leaked out, leaving behind a cold, hollow space that the Federation's sensors couldn't penetrate.
It was the perfect place for a rat to hide.
Chen Feng sat on a stone altar that had once been stained with the blood of thousands. He looked miserable. He was covered in grime, his eyes bloodshot, and his hands were shaking as he stared at the glowing blue screen in front of him.
[Error: Interpretation Failure.]
[Local Marking "ᜐ" (Sa) is grounded in Spiritual Resonance.]
[Outside Knowledge "Binary Rules" cannot calculate the emotional weight of the 'Silakbo'.]
"Shut up," Chen Feng hissed at the air. "Just shut up and work."
He had been trying for weeks to force his way through the Baybayin markings. On Earth, he had been a programmer. He understood rules. He understood that 1 + 1 equals 2. But in this world, 1 + 1 sometimes equaled something living and emotional, and it was driving him insane.
The Sovereign's protection wasn't a wall of numbers. It was a wall of meaning and philosophy.
"Having trouble, little traveler?"
Chen Feng jumped, nearly knocking over his canteen.
Out of the shadows of the Hell Road stepped a figure wrapped in robes of deep, bruised purple. The man's face was hidden, but his hands were visible—long, pale fingers that looked like they were made of bone. This was a Bishop of the Holy Ghost Church.
"I told you I'd have the breakthrough," Chen Feng said, his voice cracking. "I just need more time. The protection is… it's not normal. It keeps looping back on itself."
"Time is a luxury the Federation is currently taking away from us," the Bishop said. He circled Chen Feng like a shark circling a wounded fish. "We gave you sanctuary in the Slaughter City. We gave you the Soul Spirits you needed to fuel your little machine. And in return, you promised us a way to break the Sovereign's Law."
"I can do it!" Chen Feng shouted. He stood up, gesturing to the ruins around them. "Look, your power is just energy. My world… the place I come from… we mastered energy without souls. I can teach you how to build things that don't need the Martial Soul Hall's permission. I can show you how to bypass their resonance using pure, raw calculation."
The Bishop stopped. He reached out, but instead of touching the glowing blue screen, his pale fingers hovered just above Chen Feng's chest — over the heart, where the soul sat.
For a moment, the air grew heavier. Something deeper than the Bishop's own consciousness stirred behind those shadowed robes. A colder, older presence looked out through him.
Higher-dimensional beings did not see the world the same way 3D mortals did.
A true 4D entity could look past flesh and surface memory and notice the peculiarities of a soul — the strange weight, the foreign attachments, the things that did not belong. But it could not freely read the past.
Only 5D beings and above could see the full picture: past, present, future, and the infinite parallel timelines that branched from a single soul. Gods at that level had done the same to Ji Dong long ago. Even while he was still a mortal, they had looked into his origin and known he was a transmigrator, a man who had arrived from another place and another life.
The Abyssal world sat at the edge of the 4th Dimension. Its strongest beings could sense that something was wrong with Chen Feng's soul, but they should not have been able to know the details of his past. The reason they could was the Abyss's long relationship with the Universe Will.
The Universe Will could not watch every corner of existence at once, so it used tools — Law Enforcers and Destroyers. The Abyss was one of those tools. When a world grew too stable, too protected, or too resistant to change, the Abyss was often the force sent to tear it open and reset the balance. Because the same Will that sometimes directed the Abyss had also planted the System inside Chen Feng, the connection between them allowed higher Abyssal consciousnesses to recognize the foreign cage clinging to his soul and understand where it came from.
"Your way feels cold," the Bishop whispered, though the voice now carried a deeper echo. "It feels like a grave. I like it. But that cage of outside rules clinging to your soul is still a prisoner of this world's laws. You are trying to use a hammer to open a door that requires a key made of wind."
Chen Feng froze. He had never spoken about the System. He had never shown the screen to anyone. Yet this man — or whatever was speaking through him — was looking straight at it.
"Then give me the wind!" Chen Feng pleaded. "Give me the forbidden markings. Give me the blood-souls you've been hoarding. If I can inject enough corruption into the Federation's Phoenix-Rail network, I can crash their entire society in a day. No more Baybayin. No more Resonance. Just… noise."
The Bishop laughed — a dry, rattling sound that echoed through the hollow tunnels of the Hell Road.
"We have lived in the shadows for ten millennia, waiting for a crack in the Sovereign's armor," the Bishop said. "You are a very interesting crack, Chen Feng. You are corruption given a human face."
The Bishop leaned in close, the smell of rot and old incense filling Chen Feng's lungs.
"We will help you," the Bishop said. "We will give you the Abyssal Anchors. We will allow you to infect the Awakening Pagodas. But know this, traveler… if you fail to break the Sovereign's markings, we will not kill you. We will simply leave you here, in the Slaughter City, until you become just another shadow on the wall."
Chen Feng shivered. He looked at his System screen. A new quest had appeared.
[New Quest: The Great Corruption.]
[Goal: Inject Outside Knowledge into the Central Awakening Pagoda.]
[Reward: Access to the Chaos Soul Core.]
"I won't fail," Chen Feng said, a desperate, cynical light returning to his eyes. "I'm the Protagonist. This is my story."
He didn't see the Bishop's smile. It was the smile of someone who had just found a very useful, very disposable tool.
End of Volume 2, Chapter 59