Chapter 6：Echoes from the Grave: Booting the Black Book

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The pungent smell of cheap tobacco was like a rusty nail driven straight into my frontal lobe.

Looking at that face twisting under the flickering red glow of the cigarette ember, my stomach violently churned. That was indeed my grandpa—the same emaciated old man who bled from all seven orifices and died in the basement on New Year's Eve fifteen years ago after I personally pulled the plug on his life support. But I knew better than anyone that the cheap plywood coffin in the basement had rotted away in the groundwater years ago. There was absolutely no way his corpse could be standing here perfectly intact.

"What? Don't you even recognize your own family?"

He spoke again, his voice laced with teeth-setting electronic microphone feedback. With every word he spat out, the thin red wires connecting his jawbone flashed like breathing LED lights. Those weren't blood vessels at all; they were some kind of microscopic, nano-scale optical fibers. Like a puppeteer manipulating a marionette, they were forcibly yanking on this rotting corpse to produce sound.

"Don't look at his eyes! It's a visual deception Trojan!"

Old Chen's hoarse roar exploded from behind me. He viciously bit down on his left middle finger, spitting a mouthful of pure Yang energy mixed with blood right onto the chipped blade of his bronze sword.

Zheng——!

The blood-stained bronze sword let out an ear-piercing hum. Without hesitation, Old Chen slammed the blade violently into the mud right between me and the corpse.

In that fraction of a second, it felt like an invisible pane of glass shattered in the air. My vision violently blackened, and the gaze I had dead-locked onto my grandpa's face was forcibly severed. Only then did I realize that, at some point, I had been walking like a zombie straight toward that bone door, my hands offering up the black book Hell's Eye. Half a step more, and my toes would have crossed into that absolute darkness swarming with endless black cables.

Cold sweat instantly soaked my back. I had just been "hacked." Not my computer, but my brain's limbic system had been directly overwritten by some low-frequency magnetic field emitting from that corpse.

"You dog, ruining my work..."

The "Grandpa" standing before the bone door slowly turned his head, his hollow eye sockets locking onto Old Chen. He bent his index finger, which was nothing but bare bone, and casually flicked the still-burning cigarette butt into the green, muddy water at his feet.

Sizzle!

The moment the cigarette hit the water, the puddles across the entire abandoned site seemed to boil like ignited gasoline! Countless streams of eerie blue data-light dashed frantically beneath the mud, darting toward Old Chen like thousands of vipers in heat.

"Back!" Old Chen roared, pulling his bronze sword and retreating rapidly. But the subterranean blue arcs were insanely fast, instantly wrapping around his ankles. Old Chen let out a muffled groan and dropped to one knee, the veins on his right arm bulging as he gripped the sword, clearly enduring immense pain.

"Yunfeng, since you won't hand the item over nicely, Grandpa will just have to take it himself."

The corpse in the military coat let out a glitchy, cassette-tape-like cackle. It slowly raised its right hand, where the flesh had entirely sloughed off, and aimed it across the space straight at my chest.

A tidal wave of invisible gravity violently seized Hell's Eye in my arms. The force was terrifyingly strong, like an industrial-grade electromagnetic crane forcibly pulling at me. I hugged the book desperately, being dragged forward through the mud, my boots plowing two deep trenches in the ground.

"In your dreams..." I ground my teeth, digging my fingernails fiercely into the black book's cover.

Right at that moment, the black book in my embrace suddenly mutated.

The words "Welcome home," written in thick blood on the cover, abruptly became scalding hot. The blood actually behaved like living leeches, sliding through the gaps of my fingers and drilling straight into my skin!

There was no agonizing pain as I expected. Instead, an indescribably freezing wave of computing power rushed up my veins directly into my brain.

Rows of frenzied, blood-red code uncontrollably refreshed across my retinas. It wasn't standard binary, but a bizarre logic gate stitched together from ancient runes and modern assembly language.

[Biometrics Confirmed.]
[Soul Firewall: Activated.]

BOOM!

A visible, blood-red halo detonated outward with me at the epicenter. That massive telekinetic pull collapsed instantly. The outstretched right skeletal hand of "Grandpa" let out a harsh crack, and the red optical fibers connected at the wrist snapped simultaneously, spraying a massive amount of sickly green fluid.

He staggered half a step back. Inside his hollow eye sockets, the red light flickered frantically; clearly, his core logic had suffered a severe disruption.

"Go! Run for the underground garage! The node here is about to overload!" Taking advantage of the dissipating electrical arcs, Old Chen grabbed the back of my collar, hauling me into a mad sprint toward the deep darkness in the opposite direction of the bone door.

Clutching the black book that was now bound to my bloodline, I couldn't help but look back mid-sprint.

The Yin Gate, composed of white bones and optical cables, was trembling violently. Countless black wires had completely lost control, whipping wildly in the air like frenzied tentacles. And that marionette in the military coat stood before the collapsing bone door, staring fixedly in the direction of our escape with that half-smiling dead face.

"Yunfeng..." The synthesized electric voice echoed over the ruins. "You can't escape this server..."

We plunged headfirst into the gaping maw of the abandoned underground parking garage, completely swallowed by the darkness. And the black book in my arms was now beating against my chest, thump, thump, exactly like a living heart.

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Author's Note: This serial novel is 100% original content written by me. It was initially drafted in Chinese and then manually translated into English. I strictly stay away from AI-generated creative writing. Thank you for supporting genuine human creators!