The Eternal Sin-Chapter 50: Black Market.

’A thousand schemes cannot match a single strike of absolute power,’ Jiang Chen thought as he sat cross legged on the cold earth.

He felt a familiar razor sharp gaze resting upon him. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

Blood Sword Gu Tianhao was staring intensely at him. A twisted, manic grin stretching across his face. It was the look of a man who had found a particularly interesting toy.

Jiang Chen scoffed and did not give him the satisfaction of a response. He simply closed his eyes and began to circulate his qi, the spiritual essence humming in his meridians like a well oiled machine.

Seeing this, Gu Tianhao let out a raspy chuckle that made the nearby cultivators’ skin crawl. He also sat down, mimicking Jiang Chen’s meditative posture.

Even though both of them were cultivating in the open, seemingly defenseless, this only made them more unfathomable in the eyes of the other cultivators.

There was not an iota of desire in their hearts to attack the two of them. They simply maintained vigilance and waited for the Black Market to open.

The valley grew quiet once more.

Time slipped away like blood from a shallow wound.

Suddenly, the earth trembled. From the cracked bed of the dry river, black viscous water began to seep upward.

At first, it was a meager trickle. Then it surged like a reversed waterfall, defying gravity. The dark liquid coiled and twisted in midair like the tentacles of some primordial beast. It gathered and rose higher and higher until it formed a colossal door at least one hundred meters tall.

Upon its surface, a malevolent asura face manifested, its eyes overflowing with violence and its mouth hanging open to reveal a swirling vortex of purple void. Faint screams seemed to echo from within that mouth, or perhaps it was only the imagination of those watching.

The Black Market had opened.

Jiang Chen stood up, his robes fluttering in the cold wind generated by the portal.

’Hopefully, this does not disappoint,’ Jiang Chen thought as he gripped his Blood Token and walked into the portal along with the other cultivators.

The moment his body crossed the asura’s threshold, the world dissolved.

The transition was a violent flaying of the senses. He felt his frame being stretched like a rubber band and simultaneously compressed into a single point.

He was falling through a vacuum and swimming through a sea of lead. His bones seemed to dissolve into threads of light. Colors exploded across his vision in crimson, indigo, and gold against a backdrop of absolute darkness.

For a fleeting second, his mind went pitch black, void of thought, as if he had just died.

When clarity returned, his feet were firmly planted upon solid ground.

Jiang Chen opened his eyes, which widened fully in pure shock. Even with prior information, the sight was a blow to his composure.

He was standing within the hollowed out belly of a titanic human corpse. The ceiling, if it could be called that, was a ribbed vault rising tens of thousands of meters like white mountains, forming a dome in a hazy blood red atmosphere.

The ground beneath his feet was hardened flesh turned brick like. Tendons thicker than ancient oak trees connected floor to ceiling, forming natural pillars that supported the giant’s belly.

Fragments of organs the size of hills lay embedded within the cavern, some hollowed into chambers of trade or brothels, others carved into terraces. Platforms jutted out from slabs of flesh where stronger cultivators set up shops. Some were even built upon curved ribs, hanging like bats. This was no ordinary city, but a devilish civilization built within the anatomy of a godlike being.

Tens of thousands of people moved through the landscape, looking like mere mites upon a vast human hide.

’How can a person be this big?’ Jiang Chen wondered, a sense of insignificance washing over him.

’What kind of cultivation base did this being possess in life? And what kind of power was able to hollow it out and turn its remains into a marketplace?’

For a moment, all his struggles, his schemes, and his unwavering pursuit of power felt like dust, like comparing the light of a candle to the blazing sun.

Yet this realization did not breed dejection.

Instead, it ignited a fierce, burning determination. A sapling today may become a towering tree tomorrow.

He glanced at those who had appeared beside him. It seemed the Sunken Moon Valley entry point had scattered the arrivals into different nodes within the corpse’s sprawling anatomy.

’I shall survey this place first to understand the flow of the market before I set up a stall to sell my herbs,’ Jiang Chen decided.

He began to stroll through the makeshift streets, which were carved into layers of ancient, calcified muscle and hardened human fat.

The sights he encountered were a masterclass in depravity. He passed a stall where an old man with a face like a dried prune was arranging jars of glowing nutrient fluid.

"Freshly harvested," the old man wheezed as Jiang Chen passed. "The lung of an eight year old cultivator child, only fifty spirit stones. Or perhaps you want the heart of a seventeen year old pure yin virgin? It was still warm when I bottled it. I swear on my ancestors’ graves."

Jiang Chen simply walked away.

Farther down, he saw the slave pits. Men and women were being auctioned off like cattle, their eyes hollow with despair. Some slaves were specifically displayed for their physical endowments, their bodies barely covered. Unbeknownst to most, a thin trail of scentless aphrodisiac incense drifted through the air, discreetly released by the merchants to inflame desire and loosen purses.

The slaves were branded with crude restriction talismans that suppressed cultivation and even dulled the will. Now and then, a buyer stepped forward to inspect teeth, bones, or meridians, prodding flesh with clinical indifference, while other types of buyers came to pinch and probe the softest parts of the slaves’ bodies, checking the "elasticity" of their flesh as if they were choosing a cut of prime steak for the evening meal.

In another corner, a corpse puppet cultivator draped in robes made of stitched human ears offered a peculiar service. For a handful of spirit stones, he would take the corpse of an enemy and refine it into a mindless Zombie Puppet, a silent porter destined to carry the luggage of its killer for eternity.

Jiang Chen merely glanced once before moving on.

Not far from that stall, he encountered a sickly female scholar with ink stained fingers and a brush made from what appeared to be human hair. Before her lay strips of tanned human skin, each inscribed with writhing crimson characters that pulsed faintly with eerie spiritual light.

"Blood oath envelope," the woman said calmly, not looking up. "Each party signs with a drop of their essence blood. Whoever betrays the terms will have their heart burst within three breaths, and their body will be refined into a blood pill that the other party may use as a healing pill."

Jiang Chen thought about it but did not feel the need.

Suddenly, a woman’s piercing scream echoed through the air.

This woman had a sweet floral aura about her, most likely a Cauldron Physique precious for dual cultivation, and she had tried to flee. Now she was being dragged back by a heavy iron spirit chain that bit into her neck, held by a man with yellowed teeth and a cruel sneer.

"Run again, you ungrateful bitch," the slave owner snarled, his voice terrifying her. He began to beat her with a spiked lash, each strike ripping skin and leaving strips of torn flesh hanging from her back, his other hand moving to loosen his pants. "I have had enough! Today I will show you what happens to property that forgets its place!"

No one stepped forward to help. No one even looked at her with pity. Some even laughed at her misery. Jiang Chen merely spared a fleeting glance before continuing his walk.

This was the norm here.

After nearly two hours of wandering, Jiang Chen had grasped the unspoken rules of this place.

He raised his head, looking at a hill sized eyeball floating high in the red haze of the sky. It was a terrifying spiritual construct, pulsing with a power that could likely annihilate hundreds of Fifteenth Layer Qi Condensation cultivators in a single blink.

It was the overseeing spirit of this market.

One might think such a presence would enforce absolute law, but Jiang Chen had already witnessed a dozen fights and three open murders in the bone alleys. The eyeball remained indifferent.

’I see,’ Jiang Chen thought, his eyes narrowing. ’The spirit eye cares only for the grand order. As long as the market itself is not threatened and the flow of business is not halted, it allows the devils to be devils. A little lawlessness is the seasoning of this place. This is a den of evil after all. How can people here cannot be expected to behave as if they are in a monastery.’