The old man stared blankly at Henry Clark. After a long while, he pointed gloomily at the black threads beside him and said, “This is the karma from stealing sweet potatoes from the neighbor’s house when I was a child, which made the neighbor hold a grudge. This is the karma from participating in the struggle against ‘bull demons and snake spirits’ and beating up those teachers. This is the karma from fighting with others. This is the karma from owing a friend money and not paying it back for a long time. This is the karma from my eldest son being jealous of how I favored my younger son. This is…” The old man began to mutter on and on, pointing at the wisps of black air beside him and mumbling. As he spoke, those black streams grew thicker and stronger, as if they were being nourished by his memories.

When the old man finished, he suddenly looked deeply at Henry Clark and said, “Young man, what method did you use to free yourself from karma? Everyone should be entangled by karma. It’s the things we experience while alive—so long as you interact with others, whether good or bad, there will be consequences, and karma will be produced. These are all the gratitude and resentment others feel toward you. It’s impossible to live for decades without anything ever happening, right?”

Hearing this, Henry Clark was both shocked and frightened. He hurriedly looked around, and sure enough, he saw that all the souls in his field of vision had black streams of air floating around them, winding around their bodies like threads. But on the surface of his own body, there was nothing at all—not a single black thread that all the other souls had. This both amazed and bewildered him.

But the old man continued, “Young man, come a bit closer to talk. Don’t worry, these karmic threads only entangle the person who has accumulated the karma. Even if I wanted to pass them on to you, I couldn’t. Because as soon as I touch these karmic threads, I can clearly feel the thoughts preserved within them—all things that are already blurry in my memory, all my memories…”

Looking at the souls nearby, all wrapped in black threads of air, Henry Clark felt even more anxious and afraid, as if goosebumps were rising all over his body. He immediately checked himself carefully, and sure enough, there wasn’t the slightest trace of a black thread. Only then did he relax a little. He floated to about three meters from the old man, not daring to get too close, and asked, “Sir, how do you know these things are called karma? And why haven’t you gone to the underworld?”

The old man shook his head and said, “I don’t really know what these things are, but they’re all things I did in the past, all kinds of memories. So I call them karma. Doesn’t Buddhism say, ‘You reap what you sow; it’s not that there’s no retribution, just that the time hasn’t come yet’? Now that I’m dead, all the wrongs I did in the past naturally cling to me. I think this is karma… As for the underworld, I haven’t seen it. It’s been more than ten hours since I died, but I haven’t seen the black and white impermanence officers come to take me away.”

Henry Clark was stunned. He had thought that going to the underworld was simple, something every soul instinctively knew, or that one would automatically go there within a few hours after death. Who would have thought that this person had been dead for over ten hours and was still trapped here? He looked through the glass window into the room and saw that someone was setting up a mourning hall inside. It seemed the person had only died today.

“Could it be that you have to wait until midnight to enter the underworld? Otherwise, if souls accumulated day after day, there should be a lot more souls in Shanghai. But there are only a little over a hundred here, which looks like the number of people who died today.” Henry Clark said in surprise, glancing around.

Just then, about several hundred meters up in the sky, where those black streams of air floated and drifted, the space there began to blur and twist, like a whirlpool forming on the surface of water, spinning and distorting as if the very fabric of space was being torn apart. Finally, the space was completely ripped open, revealing a pitch-black, unknown world beyond.

At the same time, all the souls bound by the black threads began to howl in pain. The black threads that had only wrapped around them now started to invade their bodies, merging into them strand by strand until they were completely absorbed. Then, these souls began to float upward, being sucked into the giant black vortex in the sky.

The old man beside Henry Clark also howled in pain. As the black threads merged into his body, faint, blurry fragments of scales began to appear on his skin. Not only that, but his body started to swell rapidly. In just a few seconds, he grew to nearly two meters tall. In his extreme agony, he instinctively grabbed Henry Clark's shoulder, his long fingernails digging into Henry Clark's flesh.

Henry Clark felt a soul-tearing pain shoot from his shoulder and immediately cried out, turning to pull the old man's arm away. But what he saw shocked him even more—the old man's body was swelling and changing, not only growing taller and larger, but his facial expression was also twisting, becoming ferocious and hideous at a glance.