Chapter 64: A Challenge Match in Ghostdark City

by cnwebnovels

Liu Tanzhuang laughed. “I knew you couldn’t sit still for long. Trouble always finds you. All right—Ghostdark City it is. It’s beneath the Heavenly Palace, about a hundred li to the east. The Jianghai Gang isn’t too far from there either. It’s a famous gambling city, built underground.

“This world has three layers: Heavenly Palaces, Mountains and Waters, and Underground Palaces. The Heavenly Palaces are not limited to our Ziyun Palace—there are dozens of them, all built above the clouds. It’s just that the Ziyun Heavenly Palace is the largest and in the best position. Mountains and Waters is much like the human world: cities, villages, mountains, rivers, and seas. No need to say much about that. Underground Palaces has dozens of cities too, and Ghostdark City is one of the larger ones. It’s a place where fish and dragons mingle, and violence runs rampant. The whole idea behind it was to carve out a space of absolute freedom, where common folk settle their own disputes—call it a zone beyond anyone’s jurisdiction. Killing, brawling, none of it’s policed there. Fewer rules means more opportunities.”

Hearing that, something stirred in me. I had always had a taste for chaos.

“You’re not coming?” I asked.

“I’m a servant boy in the Sect Master’s household,” Liu Tanzhuang said. “Can’t just wander off whenever I please. But I’ve got an avatar in Ghostdark City. Find the Dusk Bar once you’re there, and you’ll find me.”

I nodded. “All right. Ghostdark City it is, then.”

After parting from Liu Tanzhuang, I leapt from the balustrade of the Heavenly Palace and drifted slowly down toward the ground.

Everyone in the virtual world could fly—the single greatest difference between this world and the real one.

Back home, no one could fly without help. Even a floating city like Hua City needed nuclear power and other energy systems, amplifying the Casimir effect to warp the spacetime curvature around the floating structures. Personal flight required tools too—shuttle boots, flying motorcycles, that sort of thing.

The virtual world, by comparison, was pure indulgence. Here, people needed no tools at all—just will alone carried them soaring through the sky, wherever they pleased.

Perhaps that was exactly why elite people chose to live here.

And the scenery—stunning, vivid, almost dreamlike. Flying, shape-shifting, sword-riding: all the things that shattered the ordinary limits of physics and chemistry were possible here, greatly expanding people’s imaginative space for life. That feeling of total freedom, of drifting through space however I liked—it truly felt like something out of legend, like being an immortal or a sage.

I let myself get lost in it, in no hurry to land, drifting through the sky and gazing down at the vivid land below—mountains, rivers, fields, city walls.

Just as I was enjoying the view, someone behind me let out a cold laugh.

I turned and found a middle-aged man, neatly dressed, carrying himself with a certain sharp elegance. I didn’t recognize him.

“Friend,” I said, “something I can help you with?”

“I hear,” the man said, arrogance dripping from every word, “that you used to be nothing more than a lowly guard, lying low for years before making a name for yourself in one lucky match. I also hear you jumped from unranked straight to rank-eight Grandmaster just yesterday. I’d very much like to test that for myself.”

I thought it over—this had to be the Jianghai Gang’s rank-eight fighter who’d sworn to teach me a lesson. He’d just beaten Eldest Senior Brother Shi Youcheng, so his confidence was riding high.

“You’re from the Jianghai Gang,” I said. “Here to avenge your father?”

“Correct,” the man said. “Though revenge isn’t the whole of it. Name’s Gao Haipeng. Rank eight, same as you. Eight against eight—no one could call that bullying. How about a fight?”

I glanced around. We were in midair, and while there wasn’t much of a crowd, an actual fight would still draw eyes. “Fine,” I said. “But let’s find somewhere out of the way. Fighting in midair’s a bit too conspicuous.”

He sneered. “How about Ghostdark City? Not so many rules down there. Killing isn’t even against the law.”

I nodded. “Fine. Whatever you like.”

Gao Haipeng didn’t waste another word. He shot straight down toward the ground to the east.

I followed close behind.

We passed over buildings, mountains, rivers, and cities as fast as wind and lightning, until we reached the base of a great mountain—dark, thickly wooded, gloomy and dense. Inside it, the clouds hung motionless and no birds sang. The whole place felt deeply wrong.

At the heart of the mountain’s base lay a deep rift, plunging straight down into the earth. On either side stood black stone pillars, carved with the words: Underground Palace Realm and Ghostdark City.

Gao Haipeng glanced back to make sure I’d kept up, then dove straight into the rift without another word.

Since it was my first time here, I couldn’t help looking around as we descended.

The cliff walls were smooth but dark, and the deeper we flew, the darker it grew. Only near the bottom did any light appear—not sunlight, not lamplight, but a strange fluorescence: visible light coaxed out of minerals struck by light of a particular wavelength.

I couldn’t spot any actual light source nearby. I guessed there must be something luminous embedded in the rock itself.

That fluorescence was a dim, shadowy sort of light, flickering in and out—you could still see, but everything carried a gloomy cast. Fortunately, my brain’s adjustable penetrating-wave ability let me see clearly even without a proper light source. For that, strange as it sounds, I owed thanks to the old assassin back in the Pingdu City detention center—his failed attempt on my life had left me with an unexpected gift.

Ghostdark City itself was crowded and chaotic, thick with what looked like ghostly shadows everywhere. The strange part was that the people walking around were clearly human, yet they’d shape-shifted themselves into the forms of ghosts, bulls, or octopuses. It reminded me a little of Halloween back in the Mundane World, or the flashy Shamate look young people liked to affect. But with Halloween or Shamate, you could tell at a glance it was just costume. Here, the transformation was real. Fortunately, I had penetrating-wave ability, so I could at least distinguish human from ghost. Otherwise, the sight alone would have shaken me badly.

No wonder they called this place Ghostdark City.

The city was divided into districts: a gambling district, a commercial district, and a dedicated dispute-resolution district.

Gao Haipeng skipped the dispute-resolution district entirely and led me straight into a fight hall in the gambling district. He went off alone to find the hall’s owner, and the two of them spoke in low voices.

Though I stood some distance away, I could still make out every word. Gao Haipeng was booking a wagered match.

The owner then called me over, sized me up, and said, “You’re sure you want a wagered fight with Grandmaster Gao? Starting pay is ten points per match. Whether you live or die, the points go straight to your account. The winner also takes five percent of the house’s cut, depending on the total wagers. Here’s the contract—sign if you’re satisfied. Match starts in half an hour.”

I glanced at Gao Haipeng, wondering where he’d found the confidence to insist on settling things here. Maybe he just wanted to make some money too.

But once I skimmed the contract, his intentions became clear. To keep the fight watchable for spectators and bettors, the hall banned invisibility during matches entirely.

So Gao Haipeng had figured out my hardest skill to counter: shielding my brainwaves while invisible. That, apparently, he had no way to break.

Noticing that I’d caught on, and worried I might back out, he tried to needle me instead. “If you’ve got the nerve, don’t chicken out. Fight me here with real skill. The matches here are the fairest around—every spectator’s a bettor, and cheating’s strictly forbidden. So if you’ve got something to show, go ahead and show it.”

I smiled to myself. As if high-level invisibility wasn’t real skill. Not worth arguing over. Fine—I’d let him see what I could do.

I bent down and signed my name: Song Chenfeng.

Once I’d signed, I ignored him and found a quiet spot to sit.

He ignored me right back, changing into a white fight uniform and climbing into one of the rings to warm up with a few grunts.

I sat quietly in a row of chairs, thinking through how to counter Gao Haipeng’s skills without relying on invisibility.

Truth was, I knew nothing about his fighting style. Know yourself but not your enemy, and the odds are even. My own confidence came from having replicated a wide range of Sweeper martial techniques—that was exactly what had tripped up Min Long. But Gao Haipeng wouldn’t fall for the same trick. He’d clearly taken this match seriously, asking around about me beforehand.

Without invisibility, what I had left were: first, a direct clash using various Sweeper techniques; second, my consciousness force, strong enough to squeeze and disrupt an opponent; and third, my same-frequency sensing and penetrating-wave abilities, both sharper than most. But sensing and penetrating waves were detection tools, not weapons—they couldn’t actually hurt anyone. So with just the first two, I might win, but it certainly wouldn’t come easy.

For some reason, my thoughts drifted to Yuan Lingliang just then. She had tormented me with mind arts for quite a while, and even now, the memory left me faintly rattled.

And yet her own force of consciousness hadn’t struck me as especially strong. So how had she made her waves so fine, so fluid—water rather than ordinary consciousness waves? That was a method for condensing something intangible into something with real force.

How exactly had she done it?

I remembered Uncle once saying that the greatest gift of the virtual world was its freedom from the constraints of physics and chemistry. Did that mean consciousness waves, too, could shed those same limits—turning something formless into something solid?

Years ago, I’d used my unusually strong same-frequency sensing to steal Zhu Zhaojie’s thoughts and cheat on the gaokao. So what would happen if I combined consciousness waves with same-frequency sensing? What if I used the sensing ability to tune into my own waves, then pushed them straight into someone else’s brain?

With that thought, I turned my gaze toward the registrar bustling about the fight hall—a middle-aged man, clearly a trained fighter himself, busy exchanging chips for the bettors.

Through same-frequency sensing, I slowly kneaded my consciousness waves into the consciousness body inside his brain. He noticed at once and froze, though he had no idea who was touching his brain—I stood more than ten meters off, and his attention stayed fixed on the people nearby.

I kept tuning my consciousness waves deeper into the consciousness body inside his brain. Sure enough, his own force of consciousness buckled under the pressure, unable to withstand even my first wave. He froze in place, unmoving.

I’d all but taken over his consciousness.

This wasn’t parasitizing. It was intrusion—a cuckoo seizing the magpie’s nest.

I made him look east, and he looked east. I made him spit at the man across from him, and he actually did it. The gambler on the receiving end, furious, slapped him hard across the face.

I withdrew at once.

My apologies. I’d only wanted to test the effect.

And it had worked.

Was this the same principle behind mind arts?

For now, I’d call my own version pseudo–mind arts.

Noticing me sitting there lost in thought, Gao Haipeng called out, sounding puzzled, “Why haven’t you changed yet? The casino doesn’t allow fighters to compete in their own clothes!”

I checked the time—ten minutes left—and quietly tested the technique on two more fierce-looking passersby, both trained fighters. Both times, it worked.

Only then did I head off to change, my confidence a little steadier.

I picked out a red uniform, because it stood out. Since invisibility was off the table anyway, I figured I might as well let everyone see, plainly and openly, exactly how I meant to fight Gao Haipeng.