The shadow congealed into a face—a palimpsest of forgotten women. Her skin stretched taut as funeral silk, lips torn like sacrificial joss paper, jaw crusted with cinnabar-dark blood. She stared through him, nailed to the night by invisible sutures.
Zhang Xiaonian's muscles petrified. Those void-cradled eyes drilled into his spine, frost blooming in his marrow. His mind screamed run, but his limbs hung like salted meat in a shrine.
The voice kissed his ear canal—cold as a bronze coin on a corpse's eyelid:
"Did you think Heaven would forget its ledger?"
*Crack!*
Static burst like a popped vein in his headset. He ripped it off. The plastic shell shattered against concrete, spilling mercury-bright wires that squirmed like beheaded serpents.
No one turned.
The café patrons sat entranced, screens reflecting the hanging woman's face on every monitor—their pupils swallowed by static snow.
He fled into the street. Night air slapped his cheeks with tomb-damp fingers. Bent double, he gasped—vomiting threads of silver mist that vanished before hitting pavement.
Then he saw it.
Coiled around his wrist: five bruise-fingers, glowing like charcoal embers under skin. At its center, a crimson ideograph pulsed:
"债"
Debt.
He traced the mark. Flesh sizzled where his fingertip passed, releasing the stench of burnt mulberry paper and rotting lychees.
The tumor between his shoulder blades thrummed in sync.
This was no bruise.
The Reckoning Seal had been stamped—and his body was now collateral for a cosmic loan.