Chapter 87: Chapter 84 — Their Fortunes Began to Bleed

Bankruptcy in the Hell Sectors did not sound like a crash. It sounded like a metronome.

Click. Click. Click.

The high-frequency betting terminals built into the mahogany tables of the Skybox began to cycle. The soft, synthetic piano music playing from the hidden speakers was completely drowned out by the relentless, synchronized chiming of automated margin calls.

WARNING: INSUFFICIENT LIQUIDITY.

INITIATING ASSET SEIZURE.

The crimson holographic UI on my table reflected in my eyes. The red graph tracking the short volume had completely inverted. It was now a sheer, vertical green wall. Red Dog’s stock price was compounding by the second.

I didn’t move. I sat back against the dark leather booth, resting both hands on the curved handle of my black umbrella.

Across the VIP suite, the aristocrats stopped laughing.

The man in the tailored emerald suit, the one who had mocked Red Dog’s rusted chassis, was the first to break.

He was leaning heavily against his booth, his manicured fingers gripping the edge of the table so tightly his knuckles turned white. He stared at his personal terminal. He had leveraged his entire portfolio against my ten million silver. He had borrowed shares he didn’t own, expecting the Myrmidon to die.

Now, the system demanded he buy those shares back. From me. At a markup of two thousand percent.

“Cancel the order!” the man screamed, slamming his fist against the glowing glass. “I said cancel it! System override!”

The terminal chirped a flat, automated denial.

Click.

The polished jade monocle covering his right eye—a high-tier spiritual artifact worth a small fortune—suddenly shattered. The green glass cracked into powder. The silver frame warped and dissolved into raw spiritual energy.

The terminal had auto-liquidated the artifact right off his face to cover a fraction of his deficit.

The man gasped, clutching his eye. “My scanner! That was First Era jade!”

Click.

The emerald silk suit he wore lost its shimmer. The defensive arrays woven into the fabric violently unstitched themselves, sucked directly into the terminal’s biometric uplink. The expensive fabric turned into dull, frayed burlap in three seconds.

The man fell to his knees on the crimson carpet. He clawed at his chest.

“No,” he choked, his voice dropping into a ragged wheeze. “Not my core. Please. Leave the core.”

The Iron Bank’s algorithm did not negotiate. When liquid capital and physical assets were exhausted, the system automatically foreclosed on the debtor’s spiritual cultivation.

A thick, pulsing stream of blue Qi ripped itself out of the man’s chest. It flowed through the air, completely bypassing the physical space, and sank directly into the glowing deposit tray of my terminal.

The man aged forty years in ten seconds.

His dark, slicked-back hair turned a brittle, dry white. His skin sagged, losing the aggressive moisture and elasticity of his expensive gene-mods. His muscles atrophied. He collapsed onto the floor, curling into a fetal position, vomiting a thin stream of bile onto the silk carpet.

He was alive, but his cultivation base was permanently shattered. He had been reduced to a mortal.

The green numbers on my terminal ticked upward.

PORTFOLIO VALUE: 2,610,000,000 SILVER.

It wasn’t just him.

The entire VIP suite turned into a slaughterhouse of automated finance.

The woman in the diamond choker shrieked as her jewelry disintegrated into raw silver light. The defensive aura protecting her skin vanished, leaving her looking hollow and sick. Minor aristocrats scrambled toward the obsidian elevator doors, screaming at the guards to let them out, trying to physically run from the digital debt.

The doors remained locked shut. You could not outrun the Ledger.

A thick, intoxicating scent of pure, condensed karma filled my booth. The massive influx of wealth carried a physical gravity. It pressed against the walls of the Skybox. It made the chilled champagne sitting on the abandoned tables vibrate and fizz.

Lingshan stood at my shoulder. She watched the elite mercenaries and wealthy brokers drop to their knees, weeping over their zeroed accounts.

“They bleed just like the thugs in the slums,” she murmured, her hand resting loosely on the hilt of Winter’s Edge. “They just make less noise.”

“Debt is the great equalizer, Miss Ye,” I said, keeping my eyes on the terminal. “The knife just looks different.”

My cracked smartphone, resting next to the terminal, suddenly vibrated. The jagged glass buzzed against the dark wood.

The screen flared to life, projecting a grainy, low-resolution holographic video feed.

Jian’s face appeared.

He wasn’t hyperventilating from fear. He was vibrating with a manic, unhinged joy.

He was sitting at the heavy wooden desk in the manager’s office back at the Last Stop Factory. In the background, rows of matte-black Myrmidons stood guard. Jian was wearing the dead Alchemist Consortium CEO’s oversized fur coat.

In his left hand, he held a massive, glowing bottle of Château Alchemist ’84—a vintage Qi-infused champagne that cost more than a small neighborhood.

“Boss!” Jian screamed through the static of the encrypted comms link. He took a massive swig directly from the bottle. Blue liquid spilled down his chin. “Boss, the terminal! Look at the terminal!”

“I am looking at it, Jian.”

“We just bought a zip code!” Jian howled, slamming the heavy bottle onto the desk. He spun his own cracked tablet around to show the camera. The green line on his screen was completely vertical. “We are up two billion! My blood pressure is cured! I’m looking at beachfront property in Sector Two! I’m going to buy a solid gold dental plan!”

“Secure the capital,” I ordered, cutting through his manic high. “Route the liquid silver through a dozen shell accounts. Wash it through the Undermarket logistics network, then anchor it to the factory’s primary vault. Do not let the Zhang Central Bank freeze the transfer.”

Jian saluted clumsily, wiping the expensive champagne from his mouth. “Already on it, Boss. The firewalls are up. The silver is swimming. They can’t touch it. But what about the Warlord? You just emptied his friends’ pockets. He’s going to notice.”

“He already has.”

I tapped the screen, cutting the comms feed. Jian’s holographic face vanished.

I looked up.

The crowd of weeping, bankrupt elites violently parted. They scrambled backward on their hands and knees, dragging their ruined silks across the floor to get out of the way.

Baron Zhang walked across the suite.

Thud. Thud.

He didn’t wear fine silk. He wore dull grey First Era iron plating. His shoulders were impossibly broad, his scarred face twisted into a mask of cold, predatory rage.

But it was the center of his chest that commanded the room.

The heavy glass cylinder bolted to his sternum was glowing with blinding intensity. The Queen’s soul fragment inside the glass cage swirled in frantic, agonizing loops of pure gold. Thick, glowing veins of liquid Qi pumped out of the top and bottom of the cylinder, feeding the stolen, divine Law directly into the Warlord’s flesh.

With every step Zhang took, the rusted hairpin in my breast pocket burned hotter.

It seared through the wool of my jacket. It scorched my white dress shirt. The brand of the Black Lotus pressed against my skin, transmitting the raw, suffocating pain of the trapped fragment directly into my own nervous system.

My human heart stuttered. The pain was sharp, physical, and blinding.

I locked my jaw. I did not break eye contact. I forced the Sovereign’s cold authority to override the human body’s panic.

Baron Zhang stopped five feet from my booth.

The ambient temperature in the Skybox spiked. The artificial cooling system whined in protest as the sheer spiritual pressure radiating from the Warlord’s stolen battery warped the air.

He looked at Lingshan. He looked at the empty deployment chute where Red Dog had dropped. Finally, his blood-red eyes locked onto me.

“You rigged the pit,” Zhang rumbled. His voice was incredibly deep, carrying a slight mechanical echo from the heavy iron plating on his chest.

“I bought a dip,” I corrected, my voice perfectly flat. I didn’t stand up. I remained seated in the leather booth. “Your brokers leveraged capital they did not possess against an asset they did not understand. They initiated a naked short. I simply held the line and allowed the market to correct their arrogance. It was a lawful transaction.”

Zhang sneered. The scars on his face pulled tight.

“Lawful,” he spat the word like it was poison. “You walk into my Skybox wearing a suit dipped in garbage, dump a hundred million silver on a physical terminal, and claim you are playing the market? You are a rat who found a loaded gun.”

“I am the Creditor,” I said. I gestured toward the massive pile of liquid capital sitting on the deposit tray, now supplemented by the glowing blue streams of seized Qi. “And I have two point six billion silver that says I own this booth. If you have a grievance with my trading strategy, Baron Zhang, take it up with the Iron Bank.”

Zhang’s heavy iron fists clenched. The brass clamps holding the glass cylinder sparked violently.

The Queen’s soul flared. A spike of pure, burning agony shot through my chest.

Zhang felt the recoil. He winced slightly, pressing a massive hand against the side of the cylinder. He didn’t know why his battery was fighting him, but he used his brutal cultivation base to suppress the light, forcing the fragment back into a steady, enslaved rhythm.

“You think this is a bank?” Zhang laughed. It was a cruel, bloodthirsty sound. He leaned forward, placing both of his heavy iron hands flat on the mahogany table. The wood cracked under his immense physical weight. “This is a slaughterhouse. And I am the butcher. You don’t get to walk out of here with my syndicate’s money just because you found a heavy piece of scrap metal.”

He looked through the reinforced glass wall, down into the arena pit.

Red Dog was still standing in the center of the blood-soaked sand. The massive Myrmidon was completely still, the severed arm of the mutant lying at his feet. The crowd in the bleachers was screaming in a frenzy of terrified excitement.

“Your rusted toy survived the warm-up,” Zhang said, turning his blood-red eyes back to me. “But the market is looking entirely too volatile right now. As the Market Maker, it is my legal responsibility to correct the imbalance.”

He reached to his heavy belt and pulled off a thick, black iron token.

It was a deployment seal.

“Let’s see how your scrap metal handles a Tier-Four asset,” Zhang sneered. He crushed the iron token in his massive fist.

Down in the pit, the ground violently shook.

A massive set of heavy steel doors, located at the very bottom of the fossilized ribcage, began to grind open. A foul, suffocating stench of rotten meat and dark Qi poured out of the tunnel.

A shadow moved in the dark.

“Enjoy your billions for the next two minutes,” Zhang said, stepping back from the table. “Because when your metal dog dies, your portfolio zeroes out. And then I am going to have my guards strip you naked and throw you into the acid river.”

I didn’t look at the tunnel. I looked at the Warlord.

I reached forward and tapped the holographic terminal.

PREPARING TO OPEN NEW POSITION.

“Miss Ye,” I said quietly, my finger hovering over the glass.

Lingshan stepped forward. The freezing air around Winter’s Edge cracked the mahogany table.

“Yes, Sovereign.”

“Get ready to drop.”

[AUTHOR NOTE]

The Warlord is cheating. 🐉📉

Baron Zhang can’t handle losing, so he’s releasing the boss monster to wipe Red Dog out and crash the stock. But Ren isn’t just going to sit there and watch. It’s time to short the house.

Next up: The Monster They Deployed to Save Their Money. Lingshan enters the pit. Ice meets Iron.

If you want to see the Sword Saint freeze a Tier-4 nightmare, smash those Power Stones and Golden Tickets! The market is about to crash again! ❄️⚔️

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep