The brain-deposit area!
Night was as cool as water, and stars were sparse.
Several figures dressed in black raced across the tightly packed rooftops, moving like ghosts.
"Sir, that remnant soul is too fast! We're about to lose it!"
Li Mingyue, the one addressed as "Sir," had a cool, clear voice. She glanced at the subordinate panting beside her, her tone utterly devoid of warmth.
"Don't state the obvious."
"Do you think anything that can escape the Demon Suppression Tower of the Demon Suppression Division is ordinary?"
"If we can't catch it, both of us will lose our heads. Shut up and keep up!"
Wannian County, Yihong Pavilion, Heavenly Chamber.
Fang Mo's eyes were bloodshot as he stared blankly at the bed curtains overhead.
"Eighteen years."
"Do you know how I've spent these eighteen years?"
He muttered to himself, his voice steeped in absurd despair.
"After tonight, I'll be eighteen by my real age, nineteen by the traditional count, going on twenty, almost twenty-one. I'm staring thirty in the face without having made it in life."
"My Golden Finger, if you don't show up soon, you'll have to wait until my next life!"
That's right. This handsome young man was Fang Mo, a Transmigrator chosen by fate and sent to this place.
He'd been here for eighteen years.
When he learned that this world had martial arts, he'd already begun dreaming of holding the sun and moon in his hands and plucking stars from the sky.
But fate had other plans. After eighteen years, he still hadn't even entered the first martial realm, the Qi and Blood Realm. He was a pure martial arts failure.
As the old saying went, when God shut one door in your face, He'd still try to open a skylight for you.
If martial arts weren't an option, I could always pursue the civil service!
He'd been an orphan in his previous life. In this one, he'd wound up with a father who was a Heavenly Prison guard.
When he learned what his father did for a living, he felt like the sky had fallen.
The Great Gan Law was strict. Minor clerks and the like were all of base status, and their descendants were barred from taking the imperial examinations for three generations.
His road to becoming a superior person was closed.
Unwilling to give up, he'd tried to go into business, only for his father to hang him up and beat him for three days and nights.
As Fang Mo put it, "Three blows smashed the capitalist soul to pieces. After that, I resolved to be a good person."
Merchant status was the lowest of the low.
Fang Mo had been dumbfounded. If he couldn't practice martial arts, take the examinations, or go into business, what could he do?
His father had spat out the blade of grass in his mouth and patted Fang Mo's shoulder with a smug grin.
"Kid, this is what you call a secure job! Don't think about anything. Just eat, wait, and die! When you're grown, I'll hand the position over to you, find you a wife, get you three or four concubines, buy you five or six bedroom maids, and have you father seven or eight chubby boys. Then your life's work will be done!"
Fang Mo had stubbornly asked, "What about my son?"
Wisdom gleamed in his father's eyes, the wisdom of inheritance. "Of course he'll eat, wait, and die, take over from you, and then find himself a wife..."
Generation after generation, an endless line.
Thinking of the grand family legacy his father had planned for the Fang Family, Fang Mo's mouth twitched despite himself.
But the next moment, every expression vanished from his face, leaving only a frozen gloom.
Not long ago, the old man who'd nagged him every day about finding him a wife had died.
He'd died at his post in the Heavenly Prison.
Uncle Wang, one of his father's colleagues, had said it was overwork: his heart meridians had ruptured.
Fang Mo didn't believe a word of it.
Who'd ever heard of someone dying from ruptured heart meridians and ending up a desiccated mummy?
And who had two chopstick-thick holes in their neck? Were those for breathing?
Did they think he'd never watched a zombie movie?
But what could he do? He was insignificant, powerless, and alone.
He could only silently accept the condolence money, whittled down through layer after layer of skimming from three hundred taels to one hundred, along with an appointment letter stating that he would inherit his father's position.
The appointment letter read: "Report on time in eight days."
By his reckoning, that would be just after the seventh-day memorial for his father.
How considerate.
The Heavenly Prison held great horrors. His father's death was proof enough.
Go, and he'd die.
Don't go, and he'd become a Black Household. He couldn't run, either, and his fate might be worse than death.
A dead end.
So Fang Mo had stuffed the hundred taels of silver into his pocket and kicked open the doors of Yihong Pavilion.
Before dying, he might as well hear a little noise.
But once the passion faded, the icy fear of death clamped around his throat again.
"Sir, you're hurting me~"
A woman's coquettish complaint came from beside him, pulling Fang Mo's thoughts back to reality.
Deep in Fang Mo's eyes, a flicker of madness was burning.
Damn it, if I'm going to die, I might as well get my money's worth!
He was just about to roll over and claim his last right as a paying customer when a wisp of faint black Qi drifted into the room without warning.
A chilling thought rang directly in his mind:
"Boy, do you want to become stronger?"
Fang Mo froze.
"Who's there?"
"Sir, what nonsense are you talking about? There's no one else here. Come on..."
Fang Mo had no intention of paying attention to the commonplace beauty beside him. His gaze was fixed on the corner of the room.
The air there was twisting. Black Qi roiled and gathered into a hideous ghost face more than three feet wide.
"Boy, I am an ancient grand cultivator. I met with a great calamity and am left with only a remnant soul."
"Now, open your mind and let me merge with you!"
"I can slaughter nine-tenths of the living on this street and forge you an unparalleled demonic body!"
Fang Mo was silent for a moment.
Frowning, he asked earnestly, "Only nine-tenths? Could leaving the remaining tenth make my foundation unstable?"
Before you continue