Chapter 64: A Challenge Match in Ghostdark City

Chapter 64: A Challenge Match in Ghostdark City

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…