I Owe the Underworld Eight Hundred Billion

Zhang Yichang, who had only just graduated from college, woke up to discover that he had inherited 800 trillion Netherworld Virtue Coins in debt from his grandfather. His creditor was King Chujiang, the Yama of the Netherworld’s Second Hall. In exchange, he received a weekly ability boost and a Netherworld work System, beginning a life of paying off his debt in the narrow space between the mortal world and the underworld. Starting with “Top Scholar Possession,” which let him channel the Eastern Han astronomer Zhang Heng, and later gaining “Fortune Insight,” Zhang Yichang completed all kinds of supernatural missions assigned by the Netherworld. Along the way, he discovered that the debt was far more than a simple case of “Grandpa’s investment going bust.” The karma system left behind when the old dynasty fell, the century-long schemes of the Five Surnames Gatekeepers, the layers of seals left by Chen Shouren, a clerk of the old dynasty four hundred years ago, and the final faceless watchman, codenamed “Zero Seven,” together formed a vast network spanning 420 years. The debt’s true nature was a navigation map leading to the core of the old dynasty’s karma system. From King Chujiang’s arrival on the seventh night after Zhang Jixiang’s death, to an old-dynasty wooden plaque at an underground loan shark’s den in Tairan Community; from the karma-routing diagram in the Longyang Fengshui Studio, to an addendum scroll sealed inside the brick wall of Liu Xiaoxi’s villa, and finally the karma gate deep in Nightcry Ridge, which could only be opened by touching five objects in sequence: in fifteen days, Zhang Yichang walked a road that eleven generations had waited 420 years to travel. He shut down the old dynasty’s karma system and ended the debt curse borne by eleven generations of the Zhang family. But just as he thought it was all over, in the place seven steps east of the third utility pole underground in the urban village, twelve feet below the surface, a cicada-wing-thin jade tablet hidden in the layers of an official seal fragment pointed toward...