Chapter 85: Chapter 82 — They Bet Billions Against Scrap Metal

Capital possesses a gravity entirely its own.

The moment the latches popped, pure light spilled across the black leather of the booth. It wasn’t just bright. It possessed physical weight. One hundred million spiritual silver bars, condensed into liquid capital, smelled of sharp ozone and freshly split atoms. The scent completely overpowered the synthetic jasmine and chilled champagne circulating through the Skybox vents.

The aristocrats who had scrambled away from my dirty boots stopped retreating.

They turned. The reflection of the blinding white wealth caught in their pupils. Disgust died instantly. Greed replaced it, sharp and ravenous.

A group of high-tier brokers detached from Baron Zhang’s velvet lounge. They drifted toward my table like sharks drawn to a fresh hemorrhage in the water. They didn’t care that my ruined suit smelled of the acid river. They didn’t care about the black blood flaking off my collar. They only cared about the open corporate luggage sitting between my hands.

The lead broker stepped forward. He wore a tailored suit woven from shimmering emerald silk. A polished jade monocle sat over his right eye, clicking softly as it actively measured the ambient Qi in the room.

He looked at the silver. Then he looked at the cracked, spider-webbed screen of my smartphone resting on the leather table.

“An impressive prop,” the man said. His voice was smooth, cultured, and coated in thick condescension. He didn’t offer his name. I didn’t ask for it. “But carrying raw capital into the Skybox doesn’t make you a player. To sit at the terminal, you need an active asset in the pit. Unless you plan on jumping down there yourself to bleed for our entertainment?”

The sycophants standing behind him chuckled. They held their crystal flutes tight against their chests.

I didn’t look at the man in the emerald suit.

I kept my eyes on the glowing glass of the betting terminal embedded in the table.

“Registration,” I said.

The dark wood of the table chimed. A sleek, holographic interface projected upward, painting my face in a pale green glow.

[ASSET REGISTRATION: GLADIATOR CLASS. PLEASE PRESENT ASSET FOR SCANNING.]

I raised my right hand. I pointed a single finger over my shoulder.

Red Dog stepped forward.

Thud.

The heavy iron boot hit the crimson carpet. The sheer kinetic impact rattled the crystal chandeliers hanging fifty feet above our heads. He stood next to the booth, a towering monument of matte-black and rusted First Era iron. The structural gears inside his massive chest clicked in a slow, idle rhythm.

Lingshan stood rigid at my left shoulder. Her hand rested naturally on the freezing hilt of Winter’s Edge. She didn’t flinch at the insults. She didn’t care about the market mechanics. She only cared about the physical threat radius in the room. Her dark eyes continuously scanned the elite guards stationed by the velvet lounge, measuring the distance, calculating the angles required to sever their heads if they drew weapons.

The man in the emerald suit raised an eyebrow. He tapped the side of his jade monocle. A thin beam of green light shot out, sweeping rapidly up and down Red Dog’s heavy chassis.

The monocle whirred. It clicked. It emitted a flat, disappointing tone.

The man pulled the monocle away from his eye. He burst out laughing.

“Zero!” he choked out, spilling a few drops of his glowing blue champagne onto the carpet. “Zero spiritual output! The metal isn’t even Qi-conductive. It has no meridians. No core. No defensive arrays. It’s just… heavy.”

The crowd of elites erupted into genuine, howling laughter.

“He brought a rusted tractor to a bloodsport!” a woman in a diamond choker sneered. She fanned her flushed face with a stack of physical betting slips.

“I didn’t think the Undermarket still used mechanical golems,” another broker wiped a tear of mirth from his cheek. “It looks like a stiff breeze would knock the rust right off its joints. Are you trying to insult the Market Maker with this garbage?”

Across the long expanse of the VIP suite, Baron Zhang watched in silence. The heavy glass cylinder embedded in his chest plate—the cage holding the Queen’s soul—was still glowing a furious, erratic gold. He kept his massive arms crossed. He let his sycophants test the waters.

Beneath my ruined jacket, the Black Lotus brand seared into my chest throbbed. The proximity to the Queen’s shattered soul made my human heart beat in a heavy, erratic rhythm. I forced my breathing to slow. I buried the raw, bleeding grief under a glacier of pure administrative logic. I could not kill Zhang right now. The System clock demanded a legal acquisition.

I kept my face perfectly blank. I pressed my blood-stained thumb against the terminal screen.

“Asset name: Red Dog,” I stated.

The terminal registered the vocal input.

[ASSET ACCEPTED. TICKER SYMBOL GENERATED: RD-DG.]

[AWAITING INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING.]

I reached into the sleek silver briefcase. I grabbed a solid brick of condensed spiritual silver. Exactly ten million coins worth of liquid capital. I dropped it directly onto the terminal’s physical deposit tray.

Clank.

The heavy metal tray sank under the massive weight. The machine hummed, scanning the pure karma.

“Initial valuation,” I said, leaning back against the dark leather booth. “Ten million.”

The laughter in the Skybox died instantly.

The neon tickers built into the reinforced armor-glass of the outer wall flashed violently. A new line of text scrolled across the massive displays for the entire arena to see.

NEW LISTING: RD-DG. IPO: 10,000,000 SILVER.

The elites stared at the massive screens. The sheer arrogance of the valuation stunned them. Ten million silver for a combatant that didn’t even possess a spiritual core. It was financial suicide. It was the equivalent of putting a mountain of gold on the table and lighting a match.

The man in the emerald suit stared at me. His eyes widened. The condescension vanished, replaced entirely by the rabid, violent frenzy of a day-trader looking at free money.

“You’re serious,” he whispered.

He slammed his hand against his own wrist-mounted terminal.

“Short it!” he screamed to the room. “Short the rusted garbage to zero! Buy the opposing lines! Leverage everything against the metal!”

The Skybox exploded into absolute chaos.

Men and women in tailored silks scrambled for the betting terminals located around the room. Fingers flew across holographic keyboards. They weren’t just betting that Red Dog would lose. They were aggressively shorting his stock.

In the Underworld, shorting was a brutal mechanic. They borrowed shares of Red Dog’s life, sold them at my high initial price, and bet that he would die in the first thirty seconds. When his value inevitably crashed to zero, they would buy the worthless shares back and pocket the massive difference.

If Red Dog died, they absorbed my ten million silver.

If Red Dog survived… their short positions would liquidate directly into my account.

I watched the holographic display on my table.

The numbers spun fast enough to blur. The sheer volume of the trades generated physical heat from the terminal. The holographic UI shifted from green to a violent, flashing crimson.

RD-DG SHORT VOLUME: 42% RD-DG SHORT VOLUME: 68% RD-DG SHORT VOLUME: 89%

WARNING: MARGIN CALL RISK DETECTED.

The automated voice of the Zhang Central Bank echoed softly from the table’s speakers. The system itself tried to warn the elites that they were over-leveraged. They ignored it. Arrogance always deafens the ear to risk.

In less than two minutes, the collective wealth of the Skybox elites leveraged over two billion phantom silver against the rusted First Era Myrmidon. The neon graph tracking Red Dog’s projected value plummeted like a stone, drawing a steep, jagged red line straight down the glass.

I didn’t blink. I didn’t stop them. I let them dig the hole exactly as deep as their greed allowed.

“Enter the pit,” I ordered quietly.

Red Dog didn’t acknowledge the crowd screaming insults at him. He didn’t look at the flashing red numbers predicting his imminent destruction.

He turned around and walked toward the heavy iron deployment chute located at the back of the VIP suite.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Every step left a permanent, heavy dent in the crimson silk carpet. He stepped into the cylindrical glass deployment tube. The reinforced pneumatic doors hissed shut, sealing him inside.

The drop to the arena floor took exactly twelve seconds. The glass deployment tube shot Red Dog downward through the fossilized ivory ribs of the Flesh Exchange.

I looked through the glass wall, down into the slaughter pit hundreds of feet below.

The massive iron grates of the arena floor retracted. A fighting surface made of packed, blood-soaked sand rose to take its place. The crowd of starving ghosts in the general admission bleachers roared. The sound hit the thick glass of the Skybox like a physical wave.

When the pneumatic doors opened, the smell of the pit rushed up through the ventilation grates. It smelled of oxidized iron, old urine, and fear. The air in the coliseum was twenty degrees hotter than the Skybox, baking under the artificial glare of the neon stock tickers.

On the far side of the pit, the opposing gladiators deployed.

There were three of them. A coordinated team sponsored by a coalition of Zhang syndicate brokers.

The first was a massive, heavily gene-modded mutant with four arms. Its thick grey skin wept a highly corrosive yellow acid that hissed as it hit the sand.

The second was a cybernetic swordsman. Its organic limbs had been completely replaced with high-frequency vibrating steel. The metal glowed with the bright blue aura of a Tier-3 cultivator.

The third was a Beast Tamer. He rode the back of a starving, rabid Manticore. The beast whipped its scorpion tail, injecting venom directly into the air.

They were flashy. They were terrifying. They were completely saturated with expensive, refined Qi.

The crowd in the bleachers screamed their names, throwing physical copper betting slips toward the sand.

Then, the deployment chute on our side of the arena opened.

Red Dog stepped out onto the sand.

He didn’t roar. He didn’t flex. He didn’t emit a blinding aura of spiritual pressure.

He just walked forward.

His sheer physical mass was so immense that the packed, blood-soaked sand literally turned to glass under his heavy iron boots. The sudden, localized pressure superheated the silica. He stopped in the dead center of the arena, his heavy arms hanging loosely at his sides.

He looked like a forgotten statue dragged out of a ruined temple.

Up in the Skybox, the man in the emerald suit laughed loudly. He raised his freshly refilled champagne glass toward the glass wall.

“Thirty seconds!” he shouted to the room. “I give the scrap metal thirty seconds before the acid-spitter melts its central processor! Get ready to collect, ladies and gentlemen!”

The elites cheered. They clinked their glasses together. They looked at me, waiting for the panic to set in on my face as my ten million silver vanished.

I adjusted my cuffs.

I looked down at the terminal.

Red Dog’s stock price had been artificially driven down to pennies by the massive volume of short selling. His projected value was technically at rock bottom. The red line had hit the floor.

I reached into the silver briefcase. I grabbed the remaining ninety million in condensed capital.

I pushed the entire stack onto the physical deposit tray.

Clank.

The terminal choked for a microsecond as it registered the sheer, absurd volume of liquid wealth.

“Buy the dip,” I muttered.

I hit the glowing green button on the terminal. I purchased every single available share of my own heavily shorted stock at the absolute lowest possible price.

Down in the pit, the heavy iron bell rang.

The slaughter began.

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