2026-02-09 19:56:25Eduardo kicked off the muddy seabed.
BOOM!
The force of the kick created a small vortex, launching his body toward the surface like a bullet.
As Eduardo shot upward through the seawater, he read the system notifications with a faint smile.
[PASSIVE SKILL: BONE BREAKER ACTIVATED.]
[BONE DENSITY INCREASED: 200%.]
On the pier above, the rain was still falling, though not as violently as before. The bald man with the scorpion tattoo, Rico, stood beneath the leaking warehouse roof, lighting a cigarette. Beside him, two other thugs, Jojo and a skinny young man named Ben, laughed while counting several thick stacks of cash.
“Damn, Claude really is brutal,” Jojo chuckled, spitting to the side. “Eduardo was basically mush when we tossed him in. I doubt even sharks would want meat that wrecked.”
“Whatever, job’s done,” Rico replied, exhaling smoke. “Hey, I heard Eduardo’s wife, Emily, is getting taken straight to the main brothel tomorrow morning. Such a waste. We should enjoy her ourselves tonight, right?”
Ben grinned lewdly. “That’s a great idea. Boss Claude would never know if we take a little taste of the collateral. Her husband’s already a corpse down there. Who’s gonna report us?”
“Hahaha. You’re right,” Rico laughed crudely. “After this, let’s swing by their apartment. We’ll say we’re there to ‘secure’ the assets.”
BYUURR!
The explosive sound of water erupting at the edge of the pier cut their laughter short. All three turned toward the noise. Through the rain mist and darkness, a shadow crawled up from the wooden edge.
“What the hell is that? A seal?” Ben squinted, trying to see.
The shadow stood upright. The figure was drenched, clothes torn to shreds, skin pale like a corpse soaked for days. Its head hung low, rainwater streaming from tangled hair.
“Who the hell are you?” Rico shouted, reaching for his waistband, searching for his gun. “Hey. If you’re a bum, get lost now before I put a hole in your head.”
The figure lifted its face. Under the flickering pier lights, Rico staggered back, the cigarette dropping from his mouth.
“E… Eduardo?”
“That’s impossible,” Jojo whispered, trembling, his face turning white. “I threw him in myself. He wasn’t breathing.”
Eduardo stepped forward. Each step was heavy, leaving wet footprints mixed with dark red blood. He said nothing. His crimson eyes stared at them with terrifying emptiness.
“Y… you’re a ghost, you bastard?” Rico finally drew his pistol. “Die again!”
TAKK!
He pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. Or maybe his hands were shaking too badly, and he forgot to disengage the safety.
In the blink of an eye, Eduardo moved. He did not run. He lunged. His speed surpassed anything Rico had ever seen. Before Rico could react, Eduardo’s hand clamped around the wrist holding the gun.
KRAAAKK!
The sound was sickeningly crisp in the pier’s silence. Rico’s wrist bones shattered into pieces. Not just broken, but pulverized, like they had been run over by a truck.
“AAAAARRGGHHH. MY HAND. MY HAAAAND!” Rico screamed hysterically, dropping to his knees and clutching his mangled arm.
“You said you wanted to ‘taste’ my wife,” Eduardo said in a low, hoarse voice, as if it rose from the bottom of a deep well. “Did you really say that, Rico?”
Jojo and Ben, panicking, tried to attack Eduardo from behind. Jojo stabbed a folding knife toward Eduardo’s back.
TINGG!
The blade struck Eduardo’s shoulder blade, but instead of piercing skin, the metal snapped clean in half. Jojo’s eyes bulged.
“What the fuck. What are you made of, demon?”
Eduardo turned slowly. He looked at Jojo like a predator eyeing prey. With one hand, he grabbed Jojo by the throat and lifted him off the ground, his legs kicking helplessly in the air.
“Please… Eduardo… spare me…” Jojo whimpered, his face turning blue.
Eduardo did not answer. He tightened his grip. He felt monstrous power flowing through his fingers. Bone Breaker. He wanted to know how strong a human neck really was now.
KRETEK.
The sound of a neck shifting. Jojo stopped struggling. His eyes bulged, his head slumped at an unnatural angle. Eduardo tossed the corpse aside like a sack of rice.
Ben, the youngest, collapsed to the ground. He crawled backward, urine soaking his pants.
“Don’t kill me… please… it was Rico’s idea. I just went along with it.”
Eduardo walked toward Ben. Every step forced Ben to crawl back until his spine slammed into a pillar.
“You’re all the same,” Eduardo whispered. “Brave only when someone else is helpless.”
Eduardo raised his foot and stomped down on Ben’s thigh.
BRAKK!
The femur shattered instantly. Ben could not even scream. The pain was so intense his nervous system shut down. He passed out, his leg now bent like rubber instead of bone.
Finally, Eduardo turned back to Rico, who was still whimpering on the pier floor, trying to crawl away with his remaining arm.
“Where is Claude?” Eduardo asked, stepping on Rico’s back and pressing him into the wooden planks until they began to crack.
“I… I don’t know,” Rico sobbed, tears streaming down his face. “He usually goes to a bar called The Red Cage around this time. Please, Eduardo… don’t kill me. I have a kid…”
“You have a kid?” Eduardo tilted his head slightly. “Funny. You didn’t think about my kid when you talked about dragging Emily to a brothel.”
Eduardo bent down, his hand gripping Rico’s jaw, the same jaw that had laughed at him earlier.
“Tell the devils in hell… Eduardo sends his regards.”
With one violent twist, Eduardo snapped Rico’s neck. The crack was the last sound on the old pier that night, aside from the rain, which was finally easing.
Eduardo stood amid the pile of bodies, breathing hard. He stared at his blood-soaked hands. A flicker of disgust surfaced, then quickly vanished, replaced by cold calm. The system had truly changed him.
Suddenly, it felt as if his head had been struck by a sledgehammer.
“AAAKKKH!”
Eduardo dropped to his knees, clutching his throbbing head. His vision spun. In the darkness of his mind, an image was being forcibly erased. He saw a small child running through a park, chasing a brown-furred dog barking happily.
What was the dog’s name? Eduardo tried to remember. I loved him so much. Come on, remember. His name… his name…
ZING!
The memory vanished. Gone. He remembered having a dog, but the name, the sound of its bark, and the feeling of holding it were completely erased.
[PAYMENT RECEIVED: MEMORY OF ‘MAX’ (PET DOG) HAS BEEN DELETED.]
[USER LEVEL INCREASED: LEVEL 2.]
Eduardo panted, cold sweat mixing with rainwater on his face. He looked at the corpses before him with eyes colder than before.
“The price…” Eduardo muttered hoarsely. “I’m starting to lose myself.”
He searched Rico’s lifeless pockets, taking the phone and car keys. He had no time to mourn the lost memory. He had less than twenty minutes before Claude’s other men reached his home.
“I don’t need memories,” Eduardo whispered to the night. “I only need Claude’s blood.”
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Ch 150. The Price of a Memory
The evening breeze drifted gently through Rome, sweeping across the square once known as Piazza della Mafia, now renamed Piazza del Fantasma, Ghost Square.At its center stood a monument that defied time itself.The ten-meter-tall statue, cast in black bronze, had no distinguishable face. It was only the silhouette of a man in a suit, his left hand missing one finger, gripping a grim reaper's scythe pointed toward the earth.At the foot of the monument, thousands of tiny candles lit by the citizens flickered beneath the wind, creating a sight that resembled a galaxy scattered across the asphalt that had once been soaked in blood.The golden plaque beneath it still gleamed.THE PRICE OF A MEMORY: PAID IN FULL.A young tourist turned to his guide."Why doesn't he have a face?""Because he traded it away," the guide answered with almost sacred reverence. "He gave up his face and his name so we would never have to look into the face of fear every time the sun went down."Far from the worl
Ch 149. Requiem (Song of Death)
Twenty years.Long enough to turn a pile of rubble into a monument, and vengeance into history that was almost forgotten. Yet in Rome, time seemed to revolve around a single axis, a white marble gravestone atop Crystal Heights. The cemetery was no longer merely a burial ground. It had become a cathedral for those who worshiped shadows.That morning, the Roman air was remarkably clear, as though the sky had been washed clean by the night's rain. A convoy of armored black limousines climbed the hill at a measured pace, passing rows of tactical security personnel standing at attention every ten meters along the private road.Vito Eduardo stepped out of the lead vehicle.At twenty-one years old, he was no longer the little boy who played with pebbles around a gravestone. He stood nearly six foot three, dressed in a custom-tailored charcoal gray three-piece suit crafted in Milan. His hair was jet black, sharply contrasting with his pale complexion.But the most striking feature was his eye
Ch 148. The Legacy of the System
Dust that had accumulated for nearly two decades swirled through the air as the soundproof steel door deep beneath Sark Tower groaned open with a piercing screech.This room did not exist on the building's official blueprints.Even Belerik, the keeper of the numbers, only dared enter once a year to make sure the ventilation system was still functioning.This was Sector Zero, the place where the Ghost's darkest secret had been sealed away behind walls lined with solid lead.Vito stood at the entrance.He had just turned twenty years old.He was taller than the average Italian man, broad-shouldered, with the solid posture forged through relentless training alongside the remnants of the Iron Guard. He wore a black suit without a tie. Thin leather gloves covered his hands, a habit he had copied from his father. His arms rested calmly at his sides.His pitch-black eyes, devoid of warmth yet as sharp as an eagle's, swept across the room.There was only a steel table.And resting in the cent
Ch 147. The Right Hand
Ten years had passed since the dust settled over the Commissioner's headquarters in Rome. Yet at the top of Sark Tower, time itself seemed frozen within the endless circuitry and the glow of monitors that never went dark.The main control room had become much quieter. There were no more explosions or pounding against reinforced steel doors. Only the steady hum of server cooling systems running twenty-four hours a day to keep trillions of dollars flowing smoothly across the world.Belerik sat in his advanced electric wheelchair, now equipped with sophisticated life-support sensors attached to his increasingly frail body.His hair had turned completely white.His skin was wrinkled like aged parchment.His carbon-fiber prosthetic leg rested stiffly against the wheelchair's foot support."Look at that number blinking in red, Vito. What does it mean?" Belerik asked in a raspy voice, interrupted by heavy breaths.Beside him stood a twelve-year-old boy with perfect posture.Vito.He wore a f
Ch 146. The Golden Cage
Snow fell relentlessly over Zermatt, Switzerland, until the majestic peak of the Matterhorn seemed to vanish beneath an endless sea of white fog. Atop the most isolated hill stood an ancient Gothic villa, completely renovated yet still imposing in its timeless grandeur. A thirteen-foot steel fence, charged with electricity, surrounded the estate, sealing it off from the outside world.The villa had everything: a heated swimming pool, an underground wine cellar stocked with vintage bottles from the 1940s, and furniture expensive enough to support an entire village in Italy. Yet inside the eight-hundred-square-meter mansion, the only sound was the soft clink of ice against crystal.Emily Eduardo sat before her vanity, surrounded by luxury cosmetics from Paris and bottles of Scotch whisky from Scotland. She wore a silk robe worth more than a teacher's annual salary, yet the radiant confidence of the once-proud "Parasite Queen" had long since disappeared.The face staring back at her had
Ch 145. A Conversation with a Ghost
The Roman sun slowly sank beneath the western horizon, leaving behind streaks of orange that looked like burn scars across the cooling evening sky. Within the grand private mausoleum, the last traces of Emily and Chloe's hypocrisy had vanished with the dust drifting across the pavement.Now, only silence remained.The kind of silence so dense that Freya could hear the slow rhythm of her own heartbeat, as if it were dying alongside the memories buried beneath this white marble.Freya knelt beside Eduardo's headstone, a simple monument with no carved portrait. Her expensive black dress was stained with dried mud and scattered gravel, but she didn't care. Beside her, two-year-old Vito sat with his chubby little legs stretched out, happily picking up white pebbles around the grave and stacking them into uneven little piles."Easy, Vito. Don't throw them," Freya whispered.Her voice was hoarse, still raw from the fury she had unleashed on Emily earlier.Vito glanced at his mother for only
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