Dawn clawed through the window like a bruised fingernail. Zhang Xiaonian jolted awake—lungs seared by tomb-rot.
The stench was no phantom.
It coiled in his trachea—a corpse-finger probing deeper with each gasp.
He staggered to the window. Gray light sluiced over his skin, yet the chill in his bones only thickened. Three desperate breaths. Three failures.
The air itself had curdled into necrotic jelly.
His hand crept toward the spine.
The tumor pulsed—a living sarcophagus.
Under pallid light, the mass revealed its truth: Flesh-threaded runes glowed like phosphorescent maggots, veins branching into obsidian tributaries that mapped his back into a forbidden atlas. This was no mere growth.
The Qiankun Sack had hatched.
A memory tore through him—Grandma's talisman burning to ash, the debt-counter on his wrist flickering: 002:23:16. The tumor drummed in vicious sync, as if counting down Heaven's collections.
Cold crystallized in his chest. Today, he must walk into school wearing Death's ledger on his spine.
Every step would drip with the stench of unsettled cosmic debts.