[HOST INTEGRITY: 25%]
[LOCATION: THE LAST STOP FACTORY - MAIN FLOOR]
[TIME: 03:45 AM]
The factory didn't smell right.
To a normal human, it smelled of rust, ozone, and the sour tang of spirit ectoplasm. But to Ren Wu, who had just spent fourteen hours drowning in a memory of the Ninth Era, it smelled of... mediocrity.
He stood on the rusted metal catwalk, looking down at his kingdom.
The Soul Grinders were chugging along, chewing through the scrap metal Old Man Gu had delivered. The conveyor belts were spitting out the standard "Black Label" incense sticks. It was efficient. It was profitable.
It was garbage.
Ren gripped the railing. His knuckles were white. The phantom pain of a missing left arm—a wound from two thousand years ago—throbbed in his shoulder. He closed his eyes and saw the Imperial Capital burning. He saw the White Eye deleting his existence.
"Sir?"
The voice broke his trance.
Ye Lingshan stood three steps behind him.
She wasn't wearing her usual stiff, corporate bodyguard suit. She was dressed for war, clad in a tactical bodysuit that clung to her frame like a second skin. It was efficient armor, but it did nothing to hide the lethal grace of her movements. She looked like a weapon sheathed in silk—beautiful, dangerous, and entirely distracting. Her hair was pulled back in a severe knot, exposing the sharp, pale line of her neck.
Her hand rested on the hilt of her sword, her posture relaxed but coiled. She looked ready to kill a ghost or a god, depending on which one annoyed her boss first.
"You are leaking," Lingshan said softly, her eyes tracking the golden sparks jumping from his fingers.
Ren looked down. The iron railing was glowing red where he touched it.
"I'm fine," Ren lied. The taste of rusted pennies flooded his mouth—the first warning sign of magical backlash. He pushed off the railing. "Where is the team?"
"Assembled. As you ordered."
Ren walked down the metal stairs. His footsteps rang out like hammer strikes. Clang. Clang.
Below, on the main production floor, his inner circle was waiting.
Lian, the High Priestess of Production, stood with her arms crossed. She looked exhausted, her workman's jumpsuit stained with ectoplasm.
Dr. Zhu Weiming hovered near the main mixing vat, his spectral form flickering. He was clutching a datapad like a shield, muttering about OSHA violations.
And Jian.
The boy was sitting on a crate, typing furiously on a modified laptop that was duct-taped to a spirit-battery. He didn't look like a master hacker. He looked like a teenager who was terrified of being grounded.
"Ren," Jian looked up, pushing his glasses up his nose. He looked nauseous. "My mom thinks I'm at a study group. If I die here, she's going to kill me again. And the energy readings... this isn't normal. The localized reality index is dropping. Are we opening a Hell Gate? Because I have a math midterm tomorrow."
Ren walked past him. He stopped in front of the massive steel mixing vat.
"No," Ren said, his voice raspy. "A Hell Gate is a door. We are building a Key."
He turned to look at them.
"Clear the floor," Ren ordered. "Send the workers away. Lock the gates. Cut the external sensors."
Lian hesitated. "Boss? If we cut the sensors, the Nether-Core satellites at Headquarters will flag us. They'll think we're running an illegal ritual."
Ren smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of a man who had stared into the sun and decided to spit in its eye.
"Let them flag it. By the time Headquarters sends a squad, the ritual will be done."
The Trance
Five minutes later, the factory was sealed. The heavy blast doors groaned shut. The lights were dimmed, leaving the vast space illuminated only by the sickly green glow of the vat's control panel and the blue light of Lingshan's sword.
Ren stood before the steel wall of the vat.
He didn't have a plan. He didn't have a blueprint.
He had a memory.
[SYNC RATE: 12% -> RISING]
The air pressure in the room dropped.
Thrum.
A low vibration started in the floor. It wasn't the machines. It was the ley lines beneath the concrete, waking up in response to the Sovereign's presence.
Ren raised his right hand. He didn't hold a pen. He didn't hold a brush. He extended his index finger.
"Dr. Zhu," Ren whispered. "Record this."
"Record what?" Zhu stammered, floating frantically. "There's no input! You aren't putting anything in the hopper! I can't record vibes, Boss!"
"The input," Ren said, his eyes beginning to glow with a terrifying, molten gold light, "is History."
Ren touched the steel.
SCREEECH.
The sound was agonizing. It sounded like a train braking on rusted tracks. It sounded like a bone snapping.
Ren didn't scratch the surface. His finger sank into the industrial steel as if it were wet clay. He began to carve.
Stroke one. A horizontal slash.
Stroke two. A vertical drop.
Stroke three. The hook of the Dragon.
He wasn't writing Chinese. He wasn't writing English. He wasn't even writing Sanskrit.
He was carving the High-Script of the First Court—the primordial language etched into the pillars of the Underworld before the first ghost was born.
"Warning!" Jian yelled, staring at his laptop screen, his face pale. "Ren! The atomic lattice is shattering! The metal... it's aging! You're aging the steel by ten thousand years in a second!"
"It is evolving," Ren corrected. He didn't stop.
He carved faster. The golden light from his finger burned into the metal, leaving glowing scars that pulsed with heat. The characters twisted and writhed, moving across the curved surface of the vat like living snakes.
Formula of the Yellow Springs.
Ingredient One: The Rust of a Thousand Years.
Ingredient Two: The Sorrow of the Forgotten.
"Jian!" Ren barked, not turning around. "Read the code!"
"I can't!" Jian screamed, his fingers flying across the keys. "It's gibberish! It's just static! I'm just a kid, Ren! I don't know how to code in 'Ancient Demon'!"
"Stop thinking like a student!" Ren roared. The force of his voice shattered the glass of the pressure gauge. "Think like a Reaper! Your ancestors cataloged millions of souls! Access the Archive in your veins!"
Jian froze.
He looked at the burning golden runes on the vat. He looked at Ren's back.
Something clicked in the boy's DNA. The dormant blood of the Reaper family—the lineage that had served the Underworld for generations—woke up. It bypassed his fear of his mother. It bypassed his math test.
Jian's eyes rolled back. The whites of his eyes turned pitch black.
He didn't type. He slammed his hands onto the keyboard.
"Frequency 999," Jian whispered, his voice sounding hollow, layered with a double-tone. "It demands a Tithe. It is hungry... for the Old Iron."
"Feed it!" Ren commanded.
Lian, terrified but obedient, pulled the lever.
The hopper opened. Tons of Old Man Gu's rusted scrap metal—the spikes from the Iron Tree Hell—crashed into the vat.
CRASH. GRIND.
The vat shook. The gears screamed. This wasn't normal iron. This was torture-iron, soaked in the blood of sinners for centuries. Usually, it would jam the grinders.
But the Golden Runes on the outside of the vat flared.
[EDICT: CONSUME]
The vat didn't jam. It chewed. It sounded like a beast cracking marrow bones.
The Intrusion
"Hostiles," Lingshan said.
She didn't shout. She didn't panic. She simply stated a fact.
The shadows in the corners of the factory were stretching. The light from the golden runes was too bright; it was casting deep, unnatural shadows. And from those shadows, things were crawling out.
Rust Revenants.
They were formless masses of oil, soot, and jagged metal. Parasites that lived in the machinery, born from centuries of industrial neglect. Drawn by the massive surge of Authority, they peeled themselves off the walls.
They craved the warmth of the Sovereign's light. They wanted to eat the Divinity.
A massive shape, like a wolf made of razor wire and grease, lunged at Ren's exposed back.
SHING.
A line of blue light dissected the air.
The grease-wolf split in two. It dissolved into a harmless black puddle.
Ye Lingshan stood between Ren and the darkness. Her sword, 'Winter's Edge,' hummed. She shifted her stance, placing herself firmly in the path of the monsters. Her eyes narrowed, a flash of fierce possessiveness burning in her gaze before she masked it with professional coldness.
"Do not stop, Sir," Lingshan said, her voice tight as she flicked black oil off her blade. "I will burn this world down before I let them touch you."
Three more spirits surged forward—twisted shapes with gear-teeth for mouths.
Lingshan moved. She didn't run; she flowed. She was a blur of lethal grace.
Parry. Step. Slash.
Duck. Thrust. Sever.
She was the perfect counterpoint to Ren's chaotic creation. He was the fire; she was the ice. He was the storm; she was the wall.
"Zhu!" Ren shouted. "The Catalyst!"
Dr. Zhu was cowering behind a stack of crates, waving his datapad frantically. "We don't have a Catalyst! Look at this inventory! We are a factory, not a temple! I can't synthesize 'Sovereign's Essence' from double-A batteries and hope!"
Ren stopped carving.
He stood before the glowing, screaming vat. The heat was intense enough to blister skin. His suit jacket was smoking.
"We have it," Ren rasped.
He raised his hand to his mouth.
He bit down on his thumb. Hard.
Pain sharp and bright. The taste of copper and power.
He held his hand over the open hatch of the vat.
[WARNING: VESSEL INTEGRITY CRITICAL]
[INTEGRITY: 25% -> 22%]
[BLOOD LOSS DETECTED]
Ren squeezed.
A single drop of blood fell.
It wasn't red. It was Gold. Heavy, viscous, glowing like molten sunlight.
The drop hit the churning mass of rusted iron and industrial waste.
Silence.
For one second, the factory went dead silent. The grinding stopped. The shadows froze. Even Lingshan stopped mid-swing.
Then, the vat inhaled.
The Birth
BOOM.
The explosion didn't blow the vat apart. It blew the impurities out.
A shockwave of spiritual pressure blasted outward. Windows shattered. The lights exploded.
The chimney of the factory erupted.
It didn't spew grey smoke. It vomited a thick, coiling column of Black-Gold Fog. It rose into the sky, twisting into shapes that looked disturbingly like dragons, claws hooking into the smog of Sector 9.
Inside the factory, the conveyor belt whirred to life.
Click. Whirr. Thud.
The first product rolled out.
Ren walked over to the belt. He picked it up.
It wasn't a stick of incense. Not anymore.
It was a jagged, black shard. It looked like a piece of charcoal that had been crystallized under the pressure of a dying star. It was warm to the touch. Veins of faint gold pulsed inside the black material.
[ITEM CREATED: DRAGON-TOOTH ASH (PROTOTYPE)]
[GRADE: FORBIDDEN]
[EFFECT: EVOLUTIONARY CATALYST]
[SIDE EFFECT: RECOGNITION OF ABSOLUTE AUTHORITY]
Ren held it up to the dim emergency lights. A wave of dizziness hit him, the world tilting on its axis as his integrity screamed at him.
"Beautiful," Dr. Zhu whispered, floating closer. His sensor eye was spinning wildly, his sarcasm forgotten. "The molecular structure... it's fused the iron with the ectoplasm. It's solid spirit-matter. Sir, if a ghost smokes this, they won't just get full. Their soul will harden. They will grow armor... and they will recognize the Seal as their King."
Jian slumped over his laptop, panting. His eyes were normal again, but he looked terrified.
"I... I saw it," Jian whispered, rubbing his temples. "I saw the archive. It wasn't numbers. It was names. Ren... did we just weaponize a prayer?"
Ren didn't answer. He turned to Lingshan.
"How many shadows?"
Lingshan sheathed her sword. "Twelve. All neutralized. But the noise... the Consortium heard that. The whole sector heard that."
"Good," Ren said.
He tossed the Dragon-Tooth Ash to Lian. She caught it, her hands trembling.
"Boss," Lian said, her voice shaking. "This... this radiates power. If we sell this... the Alchemist Consortium won't just sue us. They won't send inspectors. They will send an army."
Ren walked to the edge of the catwalk. He looked out the broken windows at the skyline of Sector 9.
In the distance, the pristine white tower of the Alchemist Consortium loomed over the slums. It looked untouchable. Clean. Arrogant.
Ren wiped the golden blood from his thumb.
"I don't want a lawsuit, Lian," Ren said, his voice dropping to a terrifying, hollow whisper. "I want a Siege."
He turned back to them. His eyes were fading from gold back to green, but the Authority in the room was suffocating.
"Package it," Ren ordered. "Crates of fifty. Brand it with the Ministry Seal."
"What's the price?" Jian asked, adjusting his glasses. "It costs ten times more to make than the old stuff. Do we charge 500 coins?"
Ren smiled.
"No."
He looked at the black shard in Lian's hand.
"The first batch is free."
[THE LEDGER OBSERVES]
[MANDATE UPDATED: THE TRADE WAR]
[OBJECTIVE: FLOOD THE MARKET]
[NEW ASSET UNLOCKED: THE IRON-ASH LEGION]
Ren walked toward his office. He needed to sit down. His legs were shaking violently now. His integrity was at 22%. A high-pitched ringing filled his ears, drowning out the hum of the machines.
But as he closed the door, he didn't collapse. He sat in his rusted chair.
He didn't reach for a gun.
He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a heavy block of cold, black jade.
The Tiger Seal.
He slammed it onto the desk with a heavy, resonant THUD.
The Minister was back.
And the Audit had just begun.
[END OF CHAPTER 64]