Eighteen didn't just hack the Oil-Saw–class ship's systems to shut down its main drive and engines—he also dead-locked every hatch.
Inside, the smugglers could only hack at doors with chainsaws and fire axes, trying to break out.
Wangshan and Li Pan didn't waste words. They breached, shouted, "Hands up! Surrender and you live! Three, two, one—" then shouldered their rifles and cleared rooms one by one.
Eighteen piped every compartment's camera into their SBS. And because this Oil-Saw antique was a wartime civilian-to-military refit—outer hull in "military" alloy, inner structure all civilian materials—they barely needed proper CQB stacking. With smart assist drawing x-ray-like guide lines, they tap-fired through doors, turning it into a humanoid shooting range and wiped the crew without even opening most hatches.
They worked up to the bridge; a few pops through the hatch turned the captain into chunks. They pried his skull, pulled the chip socket, and slotted it so Eighteen could read the cargo data.
Li Pan glanced around the cockpit. "Can we fly this back?"
Wangshan smashed the captain's jaw and fished out a gold tooth. "Why bother? A single berth at LEO-PORT is 1.5 million. This rust bucket isn't worth three months of parking."
Li Pan was curious. "So where do they dock?"
Wangshan looked at the bodies. "You couldn't ask that earlier?"
Nana joined the channel. "His starmap marks an asteroid belt location that isn't registered in the traffic net. Likely a private yard or pirate port. Takama-ga-hara built lots of covert bases and depots during the war. Some fleets still use a few, but most were sold off or abandoned."
"So what exactly are they smuggling?"
PONY-18: "Manifest says imported consumer goods, but the containers have pro ICE and e-locks. They're not the owners, so they can't open them; I can't unlock them remotely either."
In other words, these smugglers are just the carriers, not the cargo owners.
Hull and crew are cheap; the locked cans coming in on a secret lane are the expensive part.
Li Pan's curiosity spiked—and they'd be opening a container later anyway, almost certainly locked. Good chance to practice. He silently recited the Heart Sutra of Severing Impurity, cast his spirit outward, eyes flaring cyan, and peered into a container.
A soul can pass walls and drift the void; a mere box shouldn't stop him.
He swung his spirit through the can and saw clearly:
Yes, real smuggling—mixed freight. Luxury imports, jewelry, all kinds of chips and electronics, data cards, rare metals, implant plug-ins—the high-turn items with fat margins that have jumped several-fold while logistics are constrained.
Big military kit has long since been swept up by the megacorps, so this ship is hauling mostly mid/small-tier civilian goods—mountains of cartons. No time to inspect each.
One surprise: live cargo.
A sterile thermostatic ecosphere module a bit larger than his apartment, fully isolated closed-loop—and nuclear-powered. The module alone is worth tens of millions.
Inside sat rows of LCL hibernation pods with eggs; inside the eggs, gene-synth beasts—fluffy, cutesy designer pets, like a cartoon mash-up of cat, rabbit, and hamster, all snoozing in their shells per the brochure.
Clearly rich-kid toys—bespoke bio-pets probably riding a hot anime trend. The wealthy order them in bulk, gift a few to friends, build a social circle from childhood.
Poor kids build circles too—street stun-ball rumbles.
Not Li Pan's market, but definitely pricey—gene coordination is big-corp territory.
Live organisms can't cross a stargate, so this batch had to be loaded from a local illegal lab.
Hence the illegal route. Regular contraband is one thing; unquarantined bio cargo gets you centuries. With money you commute, sure—but on this wreck, they can't even post bail.
So yes, valuable. The snag: the Oil-Saw may be junk, but its cans are huge. Even if they cracked them, HAYABUSA couldn't swallow the load.
And those pet modules will have layered failsafes. Force the hold and you might trigger alarms; a few local fleets jump in to seize it, and you've turned a score into a loss.
Besides, they're here to pick up something else—no time to open loot boxes.
Wangshan read the poor-man's ache in Li Pan's stare—too much to just walk away. "Set the ship on an auto course into deep space, log the coordinates, and come back later?"
"That's all we can do…"
Tch. Another see-but-can't-touch day. Maybe time to throw a luck hexagram…
He had the other shuttle load the bodies. PONY-18 planted encrypted tags and a locator homunculus, set the Oil-Saw on straight-line PPE burn toward the deep, derived a plausible track from remaining solid propellant to fake normal traffic, and turned her into a moving treasure chest—a ghost ship.
Those synth critters will be fine in a nuclear greenhouse for centuries. They'll come back when fortune turns.
After the short detour, they brought the rail online and HAYABUSA jumped for deep space.
This time there was only a coordinate, no lane—so Nana had to navigate on spice.
She's drilled for this: into the LCL tank, brain to eleven, sketch the FTL path. Only seconds, but that power spike scars. Long-term spice leaves worse. Nana's "bullying/surgery-induced split" might well be pharmacology too.
Li Pan offered to hire an outside navigator; Nana accepted the mission eagerly. Spice is addictive; plotting in hyper-sensation brings a tide of indescribable euphoria.
In war, many who live in LCL eventually can't quit; their bodies bloat, they refuse to leave the tank, and rot into hippo-like tumors on high-energy nutrition.
But one person's ruin beats a ship's.
That's the price of pushing into the unknown.
Then they were there.
At WARP-12, it's a daydream long.
PONY-18 threw up the scan. "Target found. Closing and preparing to winch aboard."
So smooth? Li Pan felt oddly blank.
Three-and-a-half million credits… what is it?
In cash terms, maybe less than a single can on that smuggler. But this one is on the Company's list. By now he doesn't second-guess the managers' eyes.
"Taisui" was only 3.5 million and 0113 sent a dreadnought. Monsters aren't priced in money—more like a silver key, or a manager's three years of salary—and life.
He reached the bay as the crew worked the arms to pull the container in and hard-lock it.
Since TheM specifically wanted it, it might be a biter. To avoid popping a chaos god by accident, he cleared the deck, sat up straight, laid out handkerchief, blade-ball, and silver key, and again pushed spirit-sight into the box.
A blink of black. He blinked back, stunned.
Didn't get in? No way.
Again!
Again!
I'll—!
VMMM.
A spike through his skull—blood from the seven apertures; stars and spin—like smashing into a bronze wall. Well… he did smash into it. Duang. Legs to jelly.
Now that's a piece!
Li Pan burst out laughing. "Hahaha!"
Not for nothing!
The box has a barrier—aimed exactly at spirit peeking!
A monster—the real kind!
PONY-18 on PA: "Boss, did you lose it…?"
"I'm fine! Don't mind me! Hahaha!"
On the feed, the boss was head-butting the crate bloody and grinning. The crew traded looks.
"Anyway, since we've got it, we should settle payment."
"We can't let him just keep head-butting. Pony, can you unlock it?"
"This container seems to have no door, no keypad."
"Then plasma cutter it."
"Uh… where'd the boss go?"
Li Pan was gone—he'd already used the silver key to go inside.
As expected, the interior was packed with sutras and seals—neither onmyō nor elven, but ancient xiuzhen seal-script.
And the space was unnaturally vast—a mustard-seed Sumeru twist. Overhead, a field of deep sky, like another world without end.
Seals and bindings covered the walls and ran outward into endless dark—like the mouth of the abyss.
Just as he'd suspected.
The last Company used zombies to bind a tangled mara; Duan Kecheng had spun three local lives; the Demon-Cavern lineage traffics with both the Immortal World and the Company. If these scripts resist his spirit, then—
He's not alone.
The previous Company had cultivators.
They'd just been erased.
He looked back at the sigil-stamped iron wall.
And yet a silver key slips through…
If he can enter and exit, two keys in hand, he'd better get paid. Otherwise—what a loss.
That thought's sting even outbit his abyss-terror. He gripped blade-ball and handkerchief and strode inward.
A few steps later, regret.
Even the fury of being scammed out of five hundred billion couldn't drown the fear flooding back.
Nothing.
Metal boots clanged on alloy, the sound crawling into the depths and dying—no echo.
Like leaving the noisy world step by step for dead, black stillness.
Nothing to see, hear, or touch.
"Come out, you monster—show yourself!"
He roared at the dark; even his echo didn't return.
"Hey, Fagui, Fagui—give me a click!"
No answer—
Clonk. Fagui slipped from his fingertip, tapped the deck, then bounced back into his palm: still here.
Not alone—his mood steadied. Reason returned.
Fagui existed, but couldn't speak. Artifact talk is spirit-to-spirit; his xinfa was suppressed, no projection; Fagui stayed mute.
If spirit arts are capped, imperial-weapon arts are too: the flying-head trick is sealed.
So this array targets cultivators.
But Li Pan isn't purely a cultivator—he's also a Company manager with tech cheats.
Spirit can't pass; the silver key let his body in.
And while the blade was spirit-isolated, it could still move. The ward wasn't strong enough to crush two Refine-Qi/Manifest-Spirit-tier beings.
So it's doable.
He pulled another silver key. "You're fast and range far. Go scout—find where it is."
Fagui twitched in his palm.
He palmed blade-ball and key together and flicked. Ting—the sphere hopped, snipped the air, and became a gold line that speared the void.
Li Pan sat, tapping the deck so Fagui could home.
He counted 3,600 taps, about an hour. A golden ray cut back through the dark, circled overhead, quenched, and thunked down.
The black sphere was now red-gold, hissing smoke, even aflame. How far had it flown to get that hot?
He swallowed.
Right—no point walking. If even Fagui can't break through, Mach-5 legs are pointless.
He patted himself down: handkerchief? Jade token? Useless. From the cultivate-side, this seal won't yield.
So do we back out with a key?
No—the science side has no defense to spirit. And this trap counters spirit, so it's xiuzhen by make.
Which means he must have studied, heard, or seen something relevant. There must be a clue.
He stilled himself in the dark, dredging his Shangzhenguan lessons: the canons, classics, secret transmissions—
Smack.
A heavy rap on his forehead.
He blinked. Master Xian stood there.
"Skipping morning lessons to nap, are we?"
W…what…
He looked around: dawn-lit study, curling smoke, a faint ink scent.
No—he wasn't Li Pan. He was Li Qingyun…
"M-Master… I had a dream…"
The master rolled his eyes. "I saw. Not a single character written! Flunk the year-end again and shame me—I'll fix you."
Li Qingyun shivered awake. "Guilty! I'll study! I just hit a question, thought till I nodded off…"
"Oh? A problem? Speak."
That look meant say it or get smacked. He grabbed paper, dipped the brush, and sketched the array's sigils in bold strokes.
He peeked; the master's face softened a hair. He ventured, "I… had an inspiration, dreamed this array, found myself trapped—how do I break it, Master?"
"Dreamed again? Your fate's not bad…"
The master stared, then waved, and the half-finished diagram vanished.
"Don't overthink. With your current cultivation, you're not ready to parse matrix topology."
"Topo… what?"
Sighing at his dopey face, the master explained, "It's from the School of the Void Star—top-tier array-dao, work of the Refine-Void, Join-the-Dao stage.
From the corner you drew, it's of the Great Luo method: 'The Way of Returning Home from Nowhere', also called the 'Great Art of Flying Beyond the Heavens.'
'Heaven's net without roads, heavens without form, nine skies without moon, long sky without trace, void with no ferry, true vacuum with no return.'
It isn't a mere formation, but a gate between non-being and being, void and real—a passage to roam the cosmos and cross beyond. Lacking the method, you're lost with nowhere to go; with a guide and a road-warrant, you go straight to the True-Vacuum Homeland."
"Wooow…" Li Qingyun soaked it in and beamed. "Master, you really do know everything…"
"Hmph. Otherwise how would I teach? Enough wool-gathering—finish your drill sets."
A snort, a sleeve-flick, and Master Xian was gone.
.
.
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⚠️ 30 CHAPTERS AHEAD — I'm Not a Cyberpsycho ⚠️
The system says: Kill.Mercs obey. Corporates obey. Monsters obey.One man didn't.
🧠💀 "I'm not a cyberpsycho. I just think... differently."
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