Soul Lock: The Ghost City Tycoon

​Chapter 7—The Paper Demon

The sound was a dry shhh, like leaves dragged across stone.

Or like claws scratching at a coffin wall from the inside.

Mei Lin froze. Her pulse had barely begun to slow after the Soul Lock activated, and now it stumbled again. The word safe shriveled in her throat.

“You said this place was safe,” she whispered.

“I said nothing could get in,” Alex muttered. His voice was sharp, focused. “I didn’t say it was empty.”

The bronze bell felt small in his grip, but it was the only thing he had. He’d made a mistake — he sealed the boundaries, but never cleared the interior.

They weren’t protected from what was out there.

They were trapped with what was already inside.

“Mei,” Alex ordered, voice snapping like a whip. “Phone. Light.”

Her mind, normally a machine of cold profit and logic, stuttered in the dark.

“Alex, I—”

“Now. Upward.”

The urgency broke through her paralysis. Her shaking hands fumbled with the phone, and the LED beam sliced into the rafters.

“I don’t see anything—”

“Hold it steady.”

The air smelled wrong. Beneath the sandalwood and dust, something sour lingered — wet pulp, old glue, ink left to rot.

“There,” Alex said. “Pan left.”

Her hand trembled. The light drifted.

And found the thing.

Mei Lin’s breath hitched — the beginning of a scream she swallowed too late.

Perched on a crossbeam was a creature the size of a dog but shaped like a man folded by someone who didn’t understand humans. Its “skin” was newspaper fused into flesh. Bones made of cardboard. Tendons of dripping, black ink-tar.

It had no face — only pages fluttering where a head should be.

“A Paper Demon,” Alex whispered. Old memory spoke through him. “A tsukumogami. Not ghost. Not ghoul. Just trash given life by the leak.”

As if insulted, the creature screeched — a sound of a thousand pages ripping.

Then it leapt.

“Move!”

Alex shoved Mei Lin aside. The bell came up too slow.

Paper didn’t weigh much.

But paper cuts.

The demon hit him like a whisper — slicing instead of striking. Arms of folded pages whipped around him, opening thin, stinging lines across his skin. Sticky black tar smeared across his jacket, burning where it touched.

The creature wrapped around him, shrieking with rustling fury.

Alex staggered back into a shelf, gasping. The demon clung harder, slicing at his throat, his arms, his ribs.

“Alex!” Mei Lin’s voice cracked.

“Fire!” he shouted. “It’s paper — burn it!”

“Fire? The whole warehouse—!”

“Then the hose!” Alex growled through clenched teeth. “Red cabinet — corner!”

Fifty feet away. Too far.

His knees buckled as the demon clawed deeper. Tar dripped across his neck like acid. Paper tendrils tightened around his ribs.

Mei Lin spun, desperate.

Then her eyes locked onto the fire extinguisher beside her.

She grabbed it.

“Alex, don’t move!”

“What—?”

She swung.

The extinguisher crashed down with a wet, bone-shaking WHUMP.

Black tar splattered across her face. The creature convulsed, its newspaper body ripping down the middle. Pages soaked. Glue snapped. Ink bled.

Its final shriek dissolved into a sound like static.

Then it fell apart — collapsing into a pile of shredded pulp and tar-coated confetti.

Alex dropped forward onto his hands and knees, breathing in ragged gulps. Blood trickled from a dozen shallow cuts. He peeled a soggy page off his cheek.

“That’s… one way to manage inventory,” he rasped.

Mei Lin didn’t laugh. She didn’t speak. She just pointed her phone’s light upward again, her breath shaking.

The beam swept across the rafters.

Paper shifted.

Pages rustled where nothing moved.

Bundles trembled.

The whispering grew.

Soft.

Everywhere.

A warehouse full of paper.

Breathing.

“Alex,” Mei Lin said, voice barely a whisper. “That wasn’t the only one.”

The whispering rose like a tide.

An entire sea of demons waking above them.

Alex lifted the bell, blood slipping down his arm.

“Stay behind me,” he said.

The rafters answered with a single unified noise — a thousand pages folding in unison.

The warehouse exhaled.

End of Chapter 7