At two in the morning, Qingcheng City resembled a colossal beast illuminated by neon lights.
Yanfu was sitting at workstation number 04 in the call centre. The monitor in front of him emitted a cold, eerie light that was reflected on his bloodless face. This was the 'City Emergency Assistance Hotline', but it was more like the city's cesspool — all the filth, despair and sin concealed by daylight converged at midnight along the telephone lines into this confined space, filled with the smell of cheap tobacco and crackling electricity.
His long, slender fingers tapped rhythmically on the table; the frequency was as precise as a tireless precision instrument.
First call:
[A Misplaced Good Ending]
The phone rang abruptly, ripping open the deathly silence.
'Hello… I… I gave them all my savings.' A frail, broken voice came from the other end of the phone. 'But it's still not enough for my grandson's surgery. They said it was 'management fees'. Operator, I can't go on living. I'm standing on the rooftop. I just want to know why."
Yanfu listened. Through the earpiece, he could hear not only the old man's pleas, but also an imperceptible vibration — the grating sound of a causal chain snapping.
To ordinary people, the world is material, but Yanfu could see a wisp of pure, thin white thread coiled around the old man's head. Several fat, black tentacles were frantically devouring the other end of the thread — the 'karma' transferred from the powerful.
"Because your good deeds have been priced." Yanfu's voice was calm and utterly emotionless; so cold, in fact, that the old man on the other end of the line was instantly rendered speechless. 'In this age of stagnant logic, your sacrifice is fuel for others to escape retribution.'
"You… what are you saying?"
"Jump." Yanfu hung up the phone.
He offered no comfort and chose not to call the police because, in his subconscious, which was still unawakened, human compassion was meaningless. He simply stared into the void, a faint, dark golden light flickering deep within his left eye.
The Second Phone Call:
The Bitter Consequences of Revelry
Immediately afterwards, a second channel lit up. The background music was a mix of frenzied heavy metal rock and the sound of champagne corks popping.
"Hello? Hahahaha! I just ran over a delivery guy!' a young man exclaimed excitedly. 'Listen, my dad owns the Lin Group. I'll give you 100,000 yuan to delete this call recording and influence the traffic police. That poor bastard's life isn't worth this bottle of wine, do you understand?"
Yanfu silently watched the screen. A crimson glow swirled around the arrogant young man — the consequence of his violent, inevitable death. However, a strange purple light suddenly appeared, descending from the void like a lightning rod and forcibly diverting the red light towards the family of the recently deceased delivery driver.
"This is the alchemy of the modern city: the transfer of cause and effect."
'Your debt has been transferred.' Yanfu spoke slowly, his tone carrying a deadly judgement.
'You're smart! I'll transfer the money to you in a bit..."
'But you forgot.' Yanfu interrupted him. His eyes grew increasingly profound. "Cause and effect can be transferred, but the 'weight' doesn't disappear. You've carried too much luck that doesn't belong to you. Your soul has already cracked."
The laughter on the other end of the phone abruptly stopped, replaced by a strange grinding sound.
The Third Phone Call: The Critical Point of Collapse
The third phone call was silent, except for heavy breathing and the slippery sound of a blade slicing through skin.
This was a silent sacrifice. Somewhere in the city, a superhuman, twisted by the weight of life, was attempting to curse the world through self-harm.
Yanfu stood up and pushed open the window. The black fog outside was thick and impenetrable — a miasma woven from the wronged souls of countless beings and the chaotic interplay of cause and effect.
He felt his heart, dormant for countless lifetimes, suddenly beat violently in his chest.
Thump.
The entire control room instantly overloaded, all the light bulbs exploding simultaneously, the previously cramped space seemingly stretching infinitely. The cement walls began to fade and peel, revealing ancient, dark red stone pillars inscribed with Sanskrit.
This was the projection of the Incessant Realm into the mortal world.
'Order has collapsed to this point; even the dust weeps.'
Yanfu slowly opened his eyes.
At that moment, his left eye was an abyssal black, revealing the Vision of Cause, while his right eye blazed with a dark red like magma, revealing the Vision of Effect.
The 'Eye of Reincarnation' had officially awakened.
He was no longer the humble switchboard operator, but a being standing atop the ruins where light and darkness met. In the void, a chillingly cold 'Soul-Binding Noose' silently coiled around his fingertips, emitting a crisp metallic clang.
'Cause and effect are no longer self-disciplined; I shall decide.'
He gazed at the distant Lin family mansion, a cruel yet sacred smile curving his lips. The first act of stripping away was about to begin.
In the control room, the fragments of the shattered light bulb hadn't yet hit the ground. Time seemed to have frozen in a viscous stillness.
'Ding—'
Although the alarm lights remained unlit, a piercing scream echoed in Yanfu's mind — the mournful cry of causality being violently dismantled.
'Help... help... they're not human... they're eating my life...'
The voice on the other end of the line was childish yet filled with terror. Along with the girl's cries for help, the sound of something heavy slamming against a security door echoed in the background, followed by the chilling sound of some kind of viscous liquid scraping across the floor.
Yanfu slowly closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, the entire city of Qingcheng had disintegrated before his eyes.
It was a dimension unimaginable to mortals. The once vibrant, bustling and filthy metropolis had instantly faded, transforming into a black-and-white photograph composed of ink and shadow. Buildings lost their realism, becoming translucent geometric shapes.
In this deathly grey world, only cause and effect possess colour.
The left eye (cause) saw dense, translucent white lines emerging from the chests of every living being and connecting to every choice they had made in the past. The right eye (effect) saw red lines like blood-soaked veins hanging from the void and tightly locking around everyone's throat.
At this moment, a thick, twisted, dark red 'effect line' spans half the city. Like a bloodthirsty serpent, it starts from the headquarters of the 'Longevity Society' in the city centre, convulsing and writhing as it makes its way to the rooftop of a dilapidated apartment building on the outskirts of the city.
That is where the girl is located.
Attached to this red line are several twisted black shadows — the 'Longevity Society's' superhumans. They are devouring the girl's originally transparent and pure life essence, transforming it into what they call 'longevity' nourishment.
'Those who disrupt the order shall be subjected to slow slicing.' Yanfu's voice echoed in the empty switchboard room, carrying overlapping electronic notes. Suburbs, fifth floor of a tenement building.
Su Xiaoxiao, a young girl, huddles in the closet, clutching her disconnected phone tightly. The banging outside the door stopped, replaced by deathly silence.
A man in a custom-made suit stood outside the door. His face was withered and he grinned sinisterly. 'Little sister, don't hide anymore. Your 'fate' is rare. If you can offer it to the chairman, it will be your blessing. We will help you transfer all the suffering of this life onto those lowly people. Wouldn't that be better?"
He was a deacon of the Longevity Society and his superpower was called 'Life Stealing'.
The moment he reached out to touch the door, the air suddenly froze.
Buzz—
An indescribable pressure from a higher being pierced the spatial barrier and countless golden Sanskrit characters suddenly appeared in the previously dark corridor. These Sanskrit characters, like chains, sealed off the entire floor.
"Who?!" The deacon's expression changed drastically; he felt as if an invisible hand was gripping his heart tightly.
Far away in the control centre, Yanfu slowly extended his right hand, grasping at the air with his five fingers, and the black and white causal lines in the void began to tremble violently.
'Soul-Binding Noose, arise.'
In the deacon's vision, countless black chains shot out suddenly from the floor, ceiling and air, piercing his physical body directly and locking his soul nodes.
It was Yanfu's projection across space.
'The karma of the Longevity Society is to be judged by me.'
Yanfu's phantom appeared at the end of the corridor. Although he wasn't physically present, the solemn yet sacred aura he exuded caused the laws of physics to crumble. With each step he took, a charred lotus mark appeared on the concrete.
"You... who are you?" The deacon was horrified to discover that his prized 'life-stealing' ability had been extinguished instantly by these chains, rendering it as ineffective as a firefly in the blazing sun.
'Me?'
Yanfu raised his right hand, palm down.
'I am the end you have been evading for millennia, the final fate you must face.' Yanfu gently manipulated the red thread of fate connecting the deacon and the girl.
'Since you enjoy stealing the karma of others, swallow their deserved consequences as well.'
With a slight movement of his fingertips, Yanfu reversed the flow of life energy towards the deacon. Furthermore, the 'illness', 'pain' and 'despair' of the tens of thousands of people illegally transferred by the Longevity Society over the years surged into the deacon's body through this red thread like a flood bursting its banks.
"No!"
The butler let out a piercing scream as his skin withered and rotted before his eyes. Countless distorted faces writhed and howled beneath his skin; the immortality he had sought had become eternal torment.
He had sown the seed of 'theft', only to reap the fruit of 'entanglement by countless sins'.
Yanfu watched him coldly dissolve into a pool of foul-smelling black liquid and collapse to the ground. His eyes held no pity, only the indifference of someone who had made a precise calculation.
He turned and looked through the wooden panel of the wardrobe at the trembling girl.
'The cause and effect are clear. Live on. Don't let those outside the Order catch you again.'
As soon as he had finished speaking, the projection vanished. In the switchboard room, Yanfu slowly withdrew his hand and the faint red light in his right eye gradually faded.
The three phone records on the table were silently erased by an unknown force and reduced to dust.
That night, the laws of causality in Qingcheng City trembled slightly. In this decaying city, a will named Yama-Deva was fully awakening.
He pushed open the heavy, dilapidated iron door of the call centre. As expected, the rain had arrived in Qingcheng City.
To Yanfu, the rain was no longer transparent; each drop appeared a murky, leaden grey, carrying the city's stale air and resentment. He didn't use an umbrella, letting the rain soak his cheap, dark trench coat as he walked with an almost mechanical steadiness.
At the end of the alley, three figures appeared silently, like a persistent leech. They were the cleaners of the 'Longevity Society', emanating a pungent stench of blood and chaotic energy fluctuations.
'The deacon's life lamp is shattered,' said the leading man, his face half-covered in bluish scales and his voice hoarse. 'Kid, you have an unpleasant smell about you. Whoever you are, if you ruin the chairman's plans, you will have to clean up the mess.'
Yanfu stopped in the middle of the alley, a small puddle forming at his feet.
"There's no 'game' here." Yanfu slowly raised his head, his expression gloomy and cold. 'Only a pile of program garbage generated by logical errors.' The scaly-faced man sneered as he drew a specially made revolver engraved with forbidden runes from his waistband. This gun wasn't for firing bullets, but rather "karmic fire bullets", which were capable of tearing apart souls.
"Die."
He pulled the trigger.
However, the expected gunshot didn't ring out. In Yanfu's 'Visions of Samsara', the instant the man's index finger exerted force, countless white lines of cause and effect pulsed violently in the void, automatically forming a closed loop of death.
[Chain One: Stray Cat] On the alley wall, a startled black cat suddenly leapt down, scattering the iron cans piled in the corner.
[Chain 2: Slippery Surface] The screeching sound of the rolling metal can caused the scaly-faced man to instinctively shift his centre of gravity by 0.5 millimetres, his steady leather boots landing on a slippery, moss-covered pebble.
[Chain 3: Falling Sign] The shift in his centre of gravity caused the first bullet he fired to go out of control due to recoil, striking the precarious neon sign support above him.
'Bang!'
The heavy sign crashed down. The scaly-faced man tried to retreat in terror, only to find that the illusory 'Soul-Binding Noose' had somehow appeared and firmly hooked his ankle.
'Logically flawed,' said Yanfu calmly, as if commenting on a poorly executed silent film.
The instant the sign struck, a piece of metal bounced off and precisely severed the second ability user's carotid artery. Meanwhile, the karmic bullet originally aimed at Yanfu reflected off the sign and traced a bizarre arc before piercing the scaly-faced man's own heart.
Three elite superhumans died in a series of coincidental accidents before they could touch Yanfu's clothes.
This is the power of dimensional reduction: when Yanfu stands at the pinnacle of cause and effect, everything in the world becomes his weapon. He doesn't need to fight; he only needs to allow the outcome to happen. With the deaths of the three, three streams of dark karma were absorbed by Yanfu like black smoke.
A searing pain, like being burned by magma, shot through his spine — a forced leap in his life level.
Boom!
A terrifying aura erupted from Yanfu, instantly evaporating the rainwater within a three-metre radius into a white mist. Behind him, a faint, indistinct figure appeared: a terrifying deity with blue-green skin who was wielding a magic staff and riding a giant black water buffalo.
This was Yama-Deva's true form.
'Heaven's way is impartial, obeying only cause and effect.'
A grand divine oracle exploded in his mind. At that moment, Yanfu sensed a change in his connection to the earth beneath his feet. He was no longer just passing through this world; he had become its master, the final resting place for all the dead and sins.
'So that's how it is.'
He looked down at his hands, which were shimmering with a dark golden light at the fingertips. His frame seemed unchanged, yet the oppressive, mountain-like aura emanating from him made the air around him feel thick and viscous.
He raised his head and gazed at the brightly lit tower on top of the city's highest point — the headquarters of the Longevity Society and the heart of the distorted cause and effect.
'So-called longevity is nothing but an illusion built on overwhelming debt.'
He took a step forward, the phantom of Yama-Deva gradually shrinking behind him and merging into his spinal cord. This time, he was not fighting for survival, but for retribution.
Three corpses lay scattered in the rain. The previously menacing aura of supernatural power had completely disappeared, and while the rain washed away the bloodstains, it could not erase the chilling coldness etched into the cracks in the pavement.
Yanfu stood at the entrance to the alleyway, feeling a wave of weariness wash over him as his divine powers faded. Yama-Deva's initial awakening, though powerful, was still placing a tremendous strain on his current mortal body. He lit a cigarette, half-soaked by the rain; the pungent tobacco filled his lungs as he suppressed the tremors caused by his divine leap.
At that moment, his vision gradually returned from the black-and-white causal realm to reality.
At the end of the street, a black sedan sat silently under a street lamp. Its headlights were off, like a black panther lurking in the shadows. The window slowly rolled down to reveal an elderly man wearing a monocle. His elegant, almost austere demeanour contrasted starkly with the dilapidated alley.
'In a world where the "laws of causality" have collapsed, to still witness such a perfect logical loop,' the old man said, his voice magnetic and composed. 'Without firing a single shot, the bullet returns to the shooter and malice dies by coincidence. Young man, who exactly are you?"
Yanfu exhaled a smoke ring, his eyes as cold as ice.
"An accountant settling old scores."
The old man paused slightly, then let out a low laugh. 'Accountant? That's an easy description, but do you know that you just killed the Longevity Society's 'cleaner'? In Qingcheng City, meddling with the Longevity Society is akin to messing with the city's 'insurance cornerstone'. They maintain a façade of prosperity by transferring sins, and you've disrupted that balance.'
'A misaligned balance is worse than collapse.' Yanfu flicked away his cigarette ash, his gaze fixed on the old man's pupils. 'And you, carrying the dust of the Vajra Throne, are you an inspector?'
The old man's expression finally changed because the 'Vajra Throne' was a legendary, reclusive organisation that had long since vanished into the dustbin of history, protecting the world's physical constants.
'It seems this is no ordinary awakening of supernatural abilities.' The old man opened the car door and bowed slightly to Yanfu. 'Since you know about the Vajra Throne, I can no longer remain uninvolved in the rest of the game.' "Lin Cangye, the president of the Longevity Society, has already prepared a seat for you in his 'Longevity Domain.'" Yanfu ignored the old man, turned his back on him and walked into the darkness.
"Tell Lin Cangye."
His voice echoed in the wind and rain, carrying an undeniable, chilling intensity.
'I will retrieve the "life" he misappropriated, and he will pay double for every single second. In this city, the true 'Boundless Realm' has only just begun.'
The rain poured down harder, as if trying to drown the city's sins. Yanfu's figure disappeared around the corner of the alley, leaving only the signboard, pierced by the karmic fireball, creaking and groaning on the ground as if weeping for the coming era.
Although the rain had subsided, the leaden-grey shadows hanging over Qingcheng City grew ever heavier.
Yanfu stood by the empty window of the control room, holding a black copper core peeled from 'The Cleaner' between his fingers. Beneath the gaze of 'Visions of Samsara', the copper core emitted an overwhelmingly sweet odour — the strange fragrance produced by the forced compression and purification of the lifetimes of thousands of living beings.
A private duel between a few superhumans could not have produced this scale of karmic flow.
His gaze pierced through layers of mist to see countless dark red causal conduits pulsating like blood vessels deep beneath the city. These conduits were draining the city's 'good karma' and converging it at the dark origin called 'Deci'.
There, sin was no longer retribution, but rather merchandise laid out on shelves for the powerful to choose and sell wholesale at will.
'It's not just about murder...'
Yanfu slowly closed his eyes, the purple-gold light in his left eye flickering uncertainly in the darkness. His voice was low and deep, like a crack in the earth.
'They're actually wholesaling karma.'
From the depths of the abyss of malice, he could hear a girl's piercing cry for help. It didn't exist in the physical dimension, yet it pierced his newly awakened divinity like a steel needle.
It was Su Xiaoxiao, the only person in this game of immortality to escape the logical dead end.
Yanfu put on the blood-stained trench coat, pushed open the door and stepped into the deepest darkness before dawn.
Chapter Two Preview: 'The Wholesale Market for Evil Karma' — 'When you think you've bought immortality, you've only signed a debt collection slip from the underworld.'