I Died 2,000 Years Ago: The Underworld Fears Me-Chapter 94 - 91 — Gravity Began Obeying the Wrong Man
The holographic terminal in the Skybox flashed a blinding green. The system registered the kill.
Then, the screen stuttered.
The green pixels warped, turning a violent, sickly yellow. The automated voice of the Zhang Central Bank choked on its own audio file, emitting a loud, grinding burst of static.
ERROR. DEBTOR RESUSCITATED. UNAUTHORIZED ASSET DETECTED.
I looked down at the floorboards.
Baron Zhang’s massive, dead body twitched.
The Warlord’s human heart had stopped, but the First Era iron plating bolted to his skeleton had not. The armor was deeply saturated with two centuries of the Queen’s stolen Law. The metal recognized the sudden loss of its power source. It acted as a brutal, mechanical defibrillator.
THUMP.
A massive shockwave of dark Qi exploded from the corpse.
The kinetic force hit me like a swinging girder. It threw me backward across the ruined VIP suite. I crashed through the splintered remains of a mahogany table, sliding across the blood-soaked carpet until my shoulders slammed against the steel wall.
My vision blurred. A hot streak of blood ran down my chin.
By the time I forced my lungs to draw breath, Zhang was already on his feet.
He didn’t look human anymore. The blood vessels in his eyes had entirely ruptured, turning his sclera a solid, terrifying crimson. The flesh around his sternum was charred black. He lunged forward, his heavy iron boot crushing the floorboards, and snatched the heavy glass cylinder right off the carpet.
He didn’t bother reattaching the brass clamps. He simply slammed the glowing battery directly against the raw, burned meat of his chest.
The Queen’s soul fragment shrieked.
Thick, jagged tendrils of pure gold light erupted from the glass cage, violently piercing Zhang’s skin and anchoring themselves directly into his ribs. He roared, throwing his head back as the stolen, divine Law flooded his dead veins.
He didn’t stay to fight me in the locked room.
Zhang turned toward the shattered armor-glass window overlooking the arena pit. He charged, a two-ton locomotive of superheated iron and stolen karma.
He hit the edge and threw himself into the open air.
BOOM.
He fell a hundred feet like a meteor. He didn’t use Qi to slow down. He used it to accelerate.
Down in the pit, Lingshan barely had time to look up.
Zhang slammed into the packed, frozen sand with the force of an orbital strike. The kinetic impact completely shattered the permafrost Lingshan had created. A massive crater opened in the center of the arena, blowing jagged chunks of ice and rusted iron grates fifty feet into the sweltering air.
I pulled myself off the floor of the Skybox.
I grabbed my black umbrella, stepped up to the shattered window frame, and jumped.
The hot, toxic wind tore at my ruined suit. I pressed the silver button on the handle.
Thwump.
The heavy silk canopy snapped open. The bureaucratic friction of the material violently arrested my descent. My dislocated shoulder screamed in protest as I glided the last thirty feet, landing on the edge of the newly formed crater.
The dust cleared.
Baron Zhang stood in the center of the pit.
His First Era armor was glowing a blinding, volatile orange. The glass cylinder pressed into his chest pulsed with a frantic, terrifying rhythm.
"You think a technicality kills a Sector Lord?" Zhang laughed. His voice wasn’t just a mechanical echo anymore; it was layered with the heavy, crushing distortion of a hijacked Authority. "I built this arena. I own the ground you stand on. I own the air you breathe!"
He wrapped both of his massive, iron-plated hands around the glowing glass cylinder.
He didn’t just siphon the energy. He forced the fragment to open its core.
"Kneel!" Zhang roared.
He activated the First Soul Fragment.
The Queen’s Domain expanded.
It wasn’t a blast of fire or a wave of freezing ice. It was the fundamental alteration of physics. She had been the Sovereign of the First Court. Her Law was Gravity.
The air inside the colossal, fossilized ribcage instantly turned solid.
The localized gravity in Sector Eight multiplied by a factor of one hundred.
It hit the millions of screaming ghosts in the general admission bleachers first.
The sheer, invisible weight slammed down onto the concrete tiers like a falling continent. Three million starving, rioting souls were instantly pressed flat against their seats. The rusted iron railings surrounding the stands buckled and snapped.
Crunch. Snap.
The sound of millions of spectral and physical bodies being violently compressed echoed through the massive stadium. Blood, ectoplasm, and shattered bone sprayed across the concrete. They couldn’t scream. The gravity was so intense it crushed the air out of their lungs and flattened their vocal cords against their spines.
Down in the pit, the Sword Saint fell.
Lingshan gasped, her knees slamming into the sand. The immense pressure forced her torso down. She desperately drove the steel of Winter’s Edge into the dirt, using the freezing blade as a crutch just to keep her chest from being crushed flat. Blood began to leak from her nose and the corners of her dark eyes.
Even the Iron Legion bowed.
Red Dog’s massive, matte-black chassis groaned. The First Era gears inside his chest shrieked, grinding against each other as the extreme gravity pulled his thousands of pounds of density directly downward. The ground beneath him liquefied. He sank up to his knees in the super-dense sand, forced to brace both of his massive iron hands against the dirt to keep from snapping in half.
Zhang stood in the center of the crushing field, completely unaffected.
The stolen battery shielded him from the effect. He looked like a dark god standing amidst a massacre of his own making.
He turned his blood-red eyes toward me.
"I will flatten you into a bloody stain," Zhang sneered, taking a heavy, thudding step forward. "I will scrape your corpse off my floor and sell your umbrella for scrap."
He took another step.
Then, he stopped.
His heavy brow furrowed.
I was not on my knees.
I stood perfectly straight on the edge of the crater. The massive, hundred-fold gravity pressing three million people into paste did not touch me. My ruined black wool suit didn’t even flutter. The dust settling in the pit simply drifted around my boots, repelled by an invisible, absolute barrier.
"How?" Zhang choked, the arrogance suddenly draining from his scarred face. He slammed his hand against the glass cylinder, trying to force more power into the gravity field. "Kneel! I command the weight of the sky!"
"You command a stolen battery," I corrected.
I raised my right hand.
I reached into the inner breast pocket of my ruined jacket. I pulled out the cheap, rusted hairpin.
The moment the rusted metal touched the sweltering air of the pit, the glass cylinder embedded in Zhang’s chest stopped pulsing.
The frantic, agonizing gold light inside the cage froze.
Zhang gasped. The dark Qi flowing through his veins stuttered. He looked down at his chest in absolute panic. He hit the glass with his heavy iron fist. "Work! Crush him!"
I held the hairpin loosely between my fingers.
"The Law of Gravity does not obey the man holding the cage," I said, my voice cold, devoid of any human emotion. It resonated perfectly with the silent, frozen light inside his chest. "It obeys the Sovereign who wrote it."
I took a step forward.
The gravity in the arena did not just dissipate. It inverted.
Zhang’s heavy iron boots suddenly left the sand.
"No!" the Warlord screamed, his massive arms flailing wildly as his two-ton body was violently yanked upward.
He floated three feet off the ground, completely stripped of his leverage. The First Era armor that made him invincible on the ground was now just a heavy anchor dragging him into the air.
I walked down into the crater.
The crushing pressure holding Lingshan and Red Dog vanished. Lingshan sucked in a ragged, desperate breath, pulling herself up using her sword. Red Dog’s internal furnace roared as he pulled his heavy legs free from the liquefied sand.
I stopped directly beneath the hovering Market Maker.
Zhang kicked his massive legs, swinging his iron fists at the empty air, completely helpless in the zero-gravity vacuum I had isolated him inside.
"Put me down!" Zhang roared, spit flying from his bloody lips. "I am a Sector Lord!"
"You are bankrupt," I said.
I looked at the glowing glass cylinder pressed into his raw, burned chest.
"And you are wearing my property."
I didn’t reach for the glass this time. I raised the rusted hairpin.
I pointed the sharp, oxidized tip directly at the Warlord’s heart.
"Return," I ordered.
The reinforced spiritual glass of the cylinder shattered from the inside out.
A blinding, pure pillar of golden light erupted from Zhang’s chest. The sheer, divine density of the Soul Fragment tore straight through the Warlord’s First Era iron plating as it freed itself.
Zhang’s final scream was instantly silenced.
Without the battery keeping his dead heart pumping, and with his chest cavity completely obliterated by the exiting fragment, the Warlord’s body went entirely limp.
I snapped my fingers.
The zero-gravity vacuum collapsed.
Baron Zhang’s ruined, lifeless corpse plummeted three feet and hit the sand with a heavy, wet thud. He didn’t twitch again.
The pillar of golden light contracted, shrinking rapidly until it formed a single, perfect teardrop of pure, liquid karma. It floated gently down through the sweltering air, humming with a soft, mournful frequency.
I held out the rusted hairpin.
The golden teardrop touched the oxidized metal. It sank into the rust, completely absorbed. The dull brown metal of the pin instantly shifted, turning into a flawless, brilliant gold.
The heat faded. The pain in my chest vanished.
I closed my fist around the golden pin.
The entire coliseum was dead silent. Millions of ghosts peeled themselves off the concrete bleachers, bruised, bleeding, and utterly terrified. They stared down at the man in the black suit standing over the broken corpse of their Warlord.
I looked up at the black stock tickers wrapping the arena.
PROPERTY OF REN WU.
I slipped the golden hairpin securely into my pocket.
"Miss Ye," I said quietly.
Lingshan sheathed her sword and walked down into the crater, stopping at my left shoulder. Red Dog took up his position on my right, his matte-black armor smoking.
"Yes, Boss."
"Leave the corpse for the scavengers," I said, turning my back on Baron Zhang. "We have a factory to run."
[AUTHOR NOTE]
The Queen’s Law answers only to the King. 👑⚖️
Zhang thought he could weaponize a piece of a god to crush an Auditor. He found out the hard way that gravity is just another ledger, and Ren holds the master password.
The first Soul Fragment is secured. The Warlord is permanently liquidated. Sector 8 is officially under new management.
If you loved that absolute Sovereign flex, smash those Power Stones and Golden Tickets! The 72-hour audit is almost complete. Now we wait for Judge Mortis to review the paperwork. 💼🔥
