The Death of Danyangzi

Chapter 131: Death

Li Huowang swayed as he stared at the distant “six people.” In his eyes, they had changed drastically now.

Their bodies were still the same, but their facial features had completely twisted and elongated, then rearranged themselves into a set of different flesh mahjong tiles.

“Stop! We’re going to help you cleanse Danyangzi right now!”

Hearing this, Li Huowang, on the verge of collapse, let out a laugh. The laugh was purely instinct; there was no joy in his heart.

At a time like this, he should have been happy, but Li Huowang was being tortured by extreme, dual-layered agony, completely stripped of his ability to feel joy.

All his strength was spent resisting the overwhelming urge to kill himself.

In a daze, Li Huowang saw one of them—the Three Bamboo—speak.

“Xuan Yang! Cross your legs! Hands on your dantian, form the Sleeping Dragon Seal, and guard your heart!”

Li Huowang did his best to comply. The blood talismans around him trembled with the movement of his body.

Then he watched the six elders approach. They stopped three zhang away and sat down with their legs crossed, forming a circle around him.

As all six spoke at once, what came out was not some obscure Daoist decree or strange incantation, but a rhetorical question heavy with echoes.

“What is Zuowangdao?”

“Forget the limbs, expel the senses, leave form and knowledge behind, unite with the Great Dao—this is Zuowang!”

At their self-proclaimed answer, the clothes of the six began to billow in the wind, and they started to levitate. All the colors in their surroundings began to shift and misalign.

“NO!”

A voice, seemingly from nowhere, instantly seized every heart. Everything around them was plunged into shadow.

“NO!”

The six elders repeated the word in unison, and the sound multiplied countless times.

The split-open sky began to be covered by some kind of dark cloud. Li Huowang’s fused senses gradually returned, but they felt different from before.

“To sit is to move. To forget is to think. If not for sitting, one cannot stop the toil. If not for forgetting, one cannot rest the thoughts. If the toil does not stop, the spirit becomes still. If the thoughts do not rest, the heart becomes calm!”

As these words left the mouths of the six elders, Li Huowang seemed to sense something. He lifted his head abruptly, and then he saw Danyangzi hidden within the black clouds.

Danyangzi looked different from the last time. A semi-transparent umbilical cord emerged from his abdomen, connecting to Li Huowang’s body.

Danyangzi’s three heads all turned to look at Li Huowang. Six eyes glared at him with utter hatred.

“Worthless disciple! Finding others to deal with your master again? Hmph! You think you can escape? Your master is already an immortal!”

“Immortal… immortal… hehehe…” Li Huowang, on the edge of collapse, stared at the sickening tentacles and organs on Danyangzi’s body.

He took a deep breath and shouted at Danyangzi. “Someone like you can become an immortal? What right do you have to be an immortal? Is there no justice in this place?!”

“Hmph! The people you’ve killed are no fewer than I. What right do you have to say that?!”

Danyangzi’s right, child-like head twitched slightly. A bloody copper-coin sword was wrapped in three of his tentacles.

With his deformed body, he dove from the black clouds toward the six elders below, like a hunting falcon.

Ignoring Danyangzi above them entirely, the six elders simultaneously formed hand seals and pointed at Li Huowang in the center.

“The Three Flowers Crowning the Summit is but an illusion. Treading clouds beneath one’s feet is not the truth. A great dream must end in awakening. Rootless and boundless, all returns to dust.”

The moment these words were spoken, Danyangzi in the air was struck as if by a massive mountain. He fell straight to the ground, trailing afterimages.

Then, Li Huowang, his body ablaze with fire, began to feel a strange sensation in his stomach. Something seemed to be churning inside him.

It might have been painful, but Li Huowang could no longer feel it.

He only saw the “umbilical cord” connecting him to Danyangzi grow thicker and darker, as if he could almost grasp it.

He tentatively reached out. To his surprise, he found he could actually touch it. The fire on his hands made the “cord” sizzle as it burned.

“This… this is impossible!! I am an immortal now! Who dares to stop me?!” Danyangzi, thrown heavily to the ground, struggled to get up.

The six elders let out a synchronized sigh and began to recite.

“Thus form and vessel arise, and the heart is confused; principle and matter stir, and emotions are overlooked. How much more when the ultimate Dao surpasses color and taste, and true nature is separated by desire? One who can hear the subtle yet trust in the distant, who can listen to the formless and not be confused—such a person has heard the method of Zuowang…”

As this voice swelled and faded, Li Huowang suddenly realized that everything around him had shifted out of place.

He had just been sitting cross-legged in the center of the circle, but now he was wedged sideways in the air.

He wasn’t the only one. The others were the same, and one person was stuck half-in and half-out of the earth.

Danyangzi’s transformation was even more drastic. Surrounded by the chanting, everything about him began to melt. The ethereal immortal sash fell weakly to the ground, stained with earthly mud.

“Within the ultimate Dao, silence and nothingness abide. The spirit’s function is without direction, and the mind’s essence is the same. Tracing the source of the mind’s essence…”

As the chanting continued, Li Huowang saw a stream of white smoke rise from the mahjong-tile heads of the six elders. The streams intertwined into a rope and burrowed into the ground below.

“This… is impossible… This… is impossible! I am an immortal…!” These were Danyangzi’s last words.

As he spoke the final word, Danyangzi’s entire being collapsed.

Everything that had been his body turned into clumps of black cloud that drifted upward. Before they had even risen halfway, they dissipated completely.

At almost the same moment, Li Huowang began to vomit violently. “Ugh!”—he spat out half a face tangled with tentacles.

It was Danyangzi’s half-face. The face was pale and putrid, clearly dead.

Li Huowang stared at the half-face before him, as if he were in a dream.

He held it in his trembling hands, watching helplessly as Danyangzi’s half-face burned to ash in his palms.

Danyangzi was gone. The thing that had been plotting to assimilate him at every moment was finally gone.

If you were to ask him how happy he was, Li Huowang didn’t feel it. He only felt a hollow emptiness in his heart.

The excruciating pain in his body and mind prevented him from processing any other complex emotions.

The six elders exchanged glances. Once more, they recited their incantation and pointed at Li Huowang.

The hooked blood talismans around him slowly receded, returning to the ground.

The black clouds in the sky parted. The extremely distant and impossibly high Bashe, like a sun, shone down on everyone once again.

Li Huowang stood frozen in place, ignoring everything around him. He didn’t notice what the six elders were doing, nor did he want to know.

Just holding on without seeking death was already more than he could manage.

He didn’t know when he passed out. The last thing Li Huowang saw was the scorched ash of Danyangzi on the ground.