Soul Lock: The Ghost City Tycoon

The last sound Alex remembered was bone snapping.

Not the pain. Not the hate. Just the clean, horrible crack that had marked the end.

He came back with a gasp, air burning in his lungs like someone had lit a match inside him. His hand went to his chest—no wound, no blood. A cheap sofa. A dead fluorescent bulb buzzing overhead. Instant noodles crusted in a bowl on the floor. He was in a small rental that smelled faintly of oil and damp cardboard.

His phone lit the room: October 21, 2025. 11:03 a.m.

A date. A time. Realer than anything else in the bleary blur of waking.

He counted in his head. Ten days.

Ten days before the veil slit, before the Underworld slipped its fingers through the world and started taking names. Ten days before streets hollowed and towers learned to cough up ghosts. Ten days to act, and every memory he’d bled for in the other life sat behind his eyes like a map.

He had been a survivor once. He’d seen the rules from the inside.

Rule one: walls were paper to what came. Ghosts walked through brick like wind. Only a Soul Lock could hold them back.

Rule two: Soul Locks didn’t run on cash. They ran on joss paper—real, sanctified joss, folded by hands that meant something. Not the mass-printed trash you burned without a second thought. The Golden Joss—handmade, blessed—was the difference between barricade and coffin.

No lock. No safety.

Alex pushed himself up. He didn’t have ceremony to spare. The cheap rental had $1,420 in his bank. A ring of scar tissue on his palm that still felt hot in the cold. Knowledge that screamed usefulness and danger in the same breath.

He ran.

The city was stupidly ordinary. Cars purred. Coffee shops spilled people. The whole place hummed like it didn’t know the end was scheduled. That ignorance was both mercy and menace.

Antiquity Street was two blocks from where he had slept. The little shop at the corner sold old things—paper, incense, lacquer boxes. He’d seen it in a memory once, three years from now, when it would be a chain of whispers and precedent. He slid inside under the bell.

Sandalwood and dust. Shelves crowded with old paper bundles and red ribbons. Behind the counter an old man read the paper like it could hide him from the world.

“All of it,” Alex said before he could talk himself out of it. “All the Golden Joss you have. Cash.”

The old man lowered his newspaper slowly. “That’s a lot to claim,” he said, flat.

Alex held steady. “Prices rise fast when people remember what keeps them breathing.”

A soft shuffle, the scrape of cloth. A woman appeared from the back room like she had been born out of the shop itself—sharp jaw, colder eyes. Her hands held a neat stack of golden bundles. She put them on the counter with the sort of casual authority that made people step back.

Mei Lin.

He knew the face because he’d seen it carved into stone—her portrait in Sanctuary One—three years before the timelines he remembered. He knew the name because rumor made it a brand: the Mistress of the Gilded Coin, the woman who bought silence and sold safety.

She looked at him like she was cataloguing his odds and found them wanting. “You’re early,” she said.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he answered before he could stop himself. The words fell heavier than he’d meant. Recognition sharpened into something like a trap.

Her smile was small. “Strange thing to say to a customer.”

He chewed the panic away. “We’re—both—reborn,” he said. Plain. Direct. No melodrama. If the other life gave you anything, it was an economy of truth.

For a second, the shop held its breath. The old man’s knuckles cracked the paper. Mei Lin’s eyes didn’t blink.

“You remember Sanctuary?” she asked, softer now. Not surprised. Not afraid.

“I remember what comes,” Alex said. “Ten days. Golden Joss is going to matter more than money.”

She set her jaw, thinking, not answering. Then, like a person measuring weight, she tapped the bundles at her palm. “I’ve reserved this supply,” she said. “Already paid.”

Alex’s chest tightened. Five hundred bundles would be a start—but not a fortress. He needed leverage, not scraps.

“Then you won’t sell?” he asked.

She looked at the old man, then back at Alex. Her voice was level. “Not to you. Not yet.”

Alex felt the deadline like an animal at the back of his throat. He could walk away and survive another day—maybe—but survival alone wasn’t enough. He wanted control. He wanted options.

“Listen,” he said, and this time he kept his voice cold and clean. “I’m not asking for a favor. I’m offering a partnership. You have capital. I have the things that keep people alive.”

She let the silence sit. Then, amusement or appraisal—he couldn’t tell—tinted her tone. “Bold.”

“You don’t get to be Mistress of the Gilded Coin without bold,” Alex said.

Her hand hovered over the stack of Golden Joss. The old man shuffled his feet.

“This city will change in ten days,” Alex said. “People will kill for what you hold. Even your money won’t buy tomorrow if you’re dead tonight.”

Mei Lin’s eyes narrowed, and for the first time a tiny crack of calculation crossed her face. “What do you propose?”

He named figures he didn’t have; he promised protection he hadn’t yet guaranteed. He offered knowledge from a life he’d already lived, and the willingness to take risks she couldn’t afford to burn. He saw the flicker in her. She could see the math—dead men couldn’t run businesses.

When Alex finished, Mei Lin’s mouth curved into a small, pragmatic smile. “Interesting,” she said. “You come with lived experience and zero capital. I come with capital and limited hands. If we work together, we both last longer than we would alone.”

He pushed a card across the counter—$1,420, not enough to buy the stock, but a symbol. “I know where the first Soul Lock is. I can get it. I can secure supply routes. You supply the capital. We split. I keep survival control; you keep asset control.”

She studied him like a ledger. The shop clock ticked. The bell above the door chimed faintly when a customer wandered by and left without glancing at them.

Mei Lin lifted one eyebrow. “What split do you want?”

Alex didn’t flinch. “Seventy-thirty. I take the risks. I keep operations. You keep title. That’s fair.”

She let the number hang, then laughed—soft, sharp. “Seventy-thirty? You’re asking for godhood without a throne.”

He met her without apology. “I’m asking for survival. What’s more valuable in a ghost city: paper ownership or living hands?”

She looked at the Golden Joss, then at him, then down at the thin line of cash he offered. For a long breath she didn’t answer.

Finally: “Fine. Seventy-thirty. But I control the assets. You control security. If either of us betrays the other, we lose everything.”

“Deal.”

They shook hands. The old man’s eyes went wide like he’d just watched a contract seal a fate he couldn’t undo.

Alex should have felt triumph. Instead he felt hollow-fierce, like a man who’d traded everything for one more day.

Mei Lin picked up the bundles, counting them with the clinical precision of someone who knew numbers could be weapons.

“Get out,” she said. “And don’t come back empty-handed.”

He left the shop with the echo of her instruction beating in his ears. Ten days. One artifact to find. A city to outplay.

He ran into the sunlit street like a man with a grenade tied to his waist—because, in a few days, that’s what it would amount to.

End of Chapter 1