The Bashe

“A tongue turns the wheel! An eyelash spans the cosmos! The wondrous realms’ extremes cannot be spoken in words! Heaven delights in strange gods; one must let the qi inscribe them! Our Lord is supreme! How dare you disturb Him!”

The moment words left the wooden slip, spoken through a human tongue, everything around began to twist. The five senses—sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch—of everyone on the island started to bleed into one another, merging into a new form of perception that no ordinary person could comprehend.

Through this utterly bizarre sense, Li Huowang and the others broke past the limits of human awareness.

They saw deep within the sky, into an abyssal chasm of bottomless darkness. Countless darker worlds and a sun rotated within that void, and something moved inside it.

Li Huowang smelled a gaze that radiated from that thing. He tasted the terror steaming off that gaze, a shuddering dread that would not stop. He saw the strange melody that came from even its slightest movement.

Thump… thump-thump… THUMP!!

Li Huowang felt that it was very, very far away. But its melody was so mesmerizingly clear.

There was nothing in reality he could compare this melody to. The only thing that even came close was the thunder that preceded the Deity of Joy.

But this thing was far, far more powerful than the Deity of Joy. Compared to it, that weak little deity was no more than a grain of sand beside a mountain.

Li Huowang made this judgment without the slightest hesitation, even though he could not comprehend what he was perceiving. Kill myself to let Danyangzi out? No! Danyangzi is less than nothing in front of that thing! The gap is too huge!!

Li Huowang realized this with despair. Before that thing, an ordinary human had no chance of resistance whatsoever.

Just as Li Huowang had given up all hope and stood frozen, waiting for death, his twisted amalgam of senses inexplicably snapped back to normal.

“Huh?” Before Li Huowang could even piece together what had just happened, his expression hardened. He made a decision and dashed out at full speed with his sword, heading straight for Yuan Er outside.

Yuan Er, both eyes now completely blind, was barely breathing. He only made a slight turn of his head before Li Huowang swung his sword with all his strength. The head flew from the body.

As the head hit the ground, everything around returned to normal.

Panting heavily, Li Huowang stood there, sword in hand. He lifted his head, still shaken, and stared at the pitch-black sky.

There was nothing there now. As if everything before had been an illusion. But Li Huowang knew it was absolutely not an illusion. That thing had been real.

He tried to piece together what he had perceived earlier. But to his shock, he found he could no longer remember what that thing had felt like. With his current five senses, he could not comprehend the sensation of what he had touched before.

The danger had passed, but the silence on the island was absolute.

Everyone was frozen in place. Deep, naked terror was carved into their eyes. What Li Huowang had seen, they had seen too.

Their faces were pale. Their bodies began to tremble uncontrollably. They all felt a cold, a bone-piercing chill that bled from the inside out.

“That’s it? Yuan Er gave everything… just to scare us?” Li Huowang looked around at his companions, all of them unharmed, and a flicker of doubt rose in his mind.

This state of safety, paradoxically, made him feel uneasy.

Li Huowang took a deep breath. Using his blood-stained sword, he pried open the curled, red bamboo slip. The flesh and organs inside had already dried and blackened.

He crouched down on one knee, peering warily at the text on the red slip.

The black characters carved into the red bamboo were very, very small. And they were incredibly strange.

He had never seen this script before. Yet, strangely, when he focused on it, he found he could actually recognize what was written.

“White pellet… Precious dew… Swallow it into the stomach… Pry out the bones…”

This was an utterly sinister bamboo slip. The contents recorded how to use one’s own maximum pain and flesh to trade with some kind of existence.

The lightest method described how to insert a bamboo sliver crosswise under one’s fingernail and pry upward, popping the entire nail off.

A heavier one detailed how to chew a large bundle of rusty iron filings and force them down.

At its worst, it taught the reader how to sacrifice their own flesh and blood—their family—to make deals with certain things.

The further it went, the more bloody and horrific it became. It was almost beyond Li Huowang’s capacity to endure.

Finally, halfway through the text, Li Huowang couldn’t hold it in anymore. He bent over and vomited violently.

After he had emptied all the pork from earlier, his face was deathly pale. He forced himself to swallow the nausea and, gritting his teeth, kept reading.

He could not rest easy until he found out what Yuan Er had been doing. What if it was some kind of curse? That would be a serious problem.

Suppressing the nausea, he continued flipping through the slips. Finally, on the fourth and last slip, he found Yuan Er’s method.

“No. Yuan Er wasn’t trying to scare us. He was trying to summon something. But he failed.”

Bashe was the name of that thing. It was also the source of all the suffering recorded on this bamboo slip.

Yuan Er had failed because he could not pay the price required to summon it.

According to the requirements on the slip, while his body had been in excruciating pain, his heart was not pained enough. Even though he had just lost his entire family, it was still far, far from enough.

To summon Bashe, one had to reach the absolute extremes of both physical and spiritual agony.

Li Huowang turned his head and glanced again at Yuan Er’s head—a face with no eyes, no mouth.

It seemed Yuan Er had only just learned how to use this slip. He wasn’t skilled at it.

That made sense. Any single method on this slip would, if used once, basically leave you at death’s door. No one could ever live long enough to get used to it.

Even though he was safe now, Li Huowang’s heart was not at ease.

He didn’t care where these river bandits had gotten such a disgusting bamboo slip. What he cared about was: who wrote it?

Was there a sect out there, just like Zhengde Temple? Only, instead of cultivating flesh techniques like the monks, they cultivated extreme suffering?

But if anyone trained according to what was written on this slip, there wouldn’t be many left alive.

“Unless… their sect has some way to let someone survive all these injuries and still not die.”

Li Huowang stared at the slip in his hand, making wild guesses.

In that moment, he realized that even his darkest assumptions about this place had been overly optimistic.

This place was far more dangerous than he had imagined. He already knew about the Immortals, the Deity of Joy, and other special existences. But today had truly opened his eyes. Some things were far more terrifying than all of them.

“Bashe…” Li Huowang stood frozen, muttering to himself.