A Penance of Raw Skin

“Rrrrip.” A massive tongue lashed across Li Huowang’s reddened cheek, tearing off a large patch of his newly grown skin.

The pain was like having his face scoured with a wire brush, and it forced his eyes open again.

He looked around in a daze. He was still in Dead Town, though more of the houses had collapsed than he remembered. It seemed a lot had happened after he passed out yesterday.

It was now fully light out. Judging from the sun’s position in the west, he had been lying here for an entire day.

“Mmph… mmph…” Mantou circled him, whining. The dog seemed to want to come closer but was too afraid.

Only then did the full extent of his physical state sink in.

Last night he had been burned from the inside out by that flame. By all rights, he should be dead.

But he wasn’t. The charred crust had flaked away, and his body was covered with a thin layer of new skin.

“Looks like my recovery ability increased again. No… not just recovery. Everything is amplified.”

Li Huowang looked down at his own body. It was bright red, like he had been scalded.

His clothes had all been burned off.

Fortunately, neither the Thousand Greats Record, the longsword, nor the iron torture implements had been damaged by the fire.

He staggered to his feet. The breeze stung his raw skin.

Naked and bare, Li Huowang wandered through Dead Town with his dog.

After circling a few times, he found new clothes in a dusty old shop, a used-clothing store.

Stepping past the headless skeleton behind the counter, Li Huowang found a blue Daoist robe and put it on. Then he tore off a large strip of fabric to bundle everything he was carrying.

His fresh, delicate skin was easily scraped open by the rough cloth. Little red dots spread across the robe.

Flesh stuck to the fabric. Every movement felt like being sliced with a knife. Each step was a form of torture.

He found a long bench in the shop and sat down, trembling. He waited in silence for his skin to fully grow back.

He waited as the shop grew darker around him.

In the dimness, the old clothes hanging from the beams looked like rows of hanged ghosts swinging there.

A breeze came from somewhere, rattling the clothes. The whole room felt especially eerie.

“Woof! Woof woof!” Mantou barked at the swaying clothes, then shrank back, cowering under Li Huowang’s bench.

“Shh. Don’t bark. There are no ghosts in this world. When people die, there’s nothing left. If there were, they’d have come for me long ago,” Li Huowang murmured, stroking Mantou’s head.

The dog slowly calmed down and licked his palm.

When it accidentally ripped his skin open again, it immediately stopped, looking at him with guilt in its eyes.

Li Huowang ignored the wound. He carefully pressed a hand against Mantou’s belly, checking for injuries from the kick.

The blood on its muzzle proved the dog was hurt. But judging by the fact that it had run all the way down the mountain to town, the injury wasn’t serious.

If Jiang Yingzi had really wanted to kill a dog, she could have done it easily. There was only one reason Mantou was still alive.

Because she was still kind at heart. She didn’t want to kill the dog—even if the dog saw its master’s enemy as its owner.

“Yingzi…” Li Huowang stared blankly at the clothes swaying in the breeze inside the dim shop.

For that moment, he thought of many things.

Suddenly, he stood up, ignoring the fiery pain of his abraded skin.

He walked over to the headless shopkeeper, picked up the body, and carried it outside.

Once again, the sword that could slice through iron was used as a shovel to dig a grave.

A large pit quickly took shape. Li Huowang arranged the shopkeeper’s skull and headless skeleton properly, then covered them with dirt.

He pried a door off its hinges to use as a marker. He wanted to carve words on it, but realized he had forgotten how to write them.

In the end, he simply used the tip of his sword to scratch a pattern of a robe into the wood and planted it in the mound.

Then he turned and walked into another house. He carried out the bodies of a mother and daughter.

One skeleton after another was buried. One gravestone after another, each carved with a pattern, was set up.

His skin hadn’t finished healing. Every time his clothes rubbed against him, the flesh tore open again. The heightened sensitivity to pain turned each movement into something close to lingchi.

But he didn’t stop. The more his body hurt, the more his heart felt a little less terrible.

As he kept working, the Daoist robe gradually turned a dark crimson.

When he walked into another single-story house, he froze. Inside was a bamboo cradle.

Seeing it, he was afraid to go near it.

“Heh heh… Compared to you, doesn’t that make me a saint?” A familiar voice cracked like thunder in his ear.

He whirled around. There was Danyangzi, with his three heads, standing on the rubble of the house across the street, watching him.

The three heads wore a sardonic, almost-smile. Li Huowang felt as if he had plunged into an icy pit.

The next second, he moved. He ignored Danyangzi on the roof and instead turned around, walking slowly toward the distant mountains.

He started at a slow walk, then a jog, and then he was gritting his teeth and running, a trail of blood dripping behind him.

“Someone explain this to me! What the hell is going on? Why is Danyangzi still here?!”

Inside the bright cave, surrounded by Ao-Jing Sect followers, a panting, blood-smeared Li Huowang shouted at the dark openings in the stone wall.

An old voice came from one of the holes. “Young friend, the matter between us is settled. Your master has long since scattered, his soul destroyed. We see not a trace of him on you.”

Li Huowang’s pupils shrank to pinpricks. He raised a trembling finger and pointed at a different opening.

“Then what is that? What is that?! Are you all blind? Scattered soul my ass! His influence on me is bigger than ever! He can show up whenever he wants! That thing was never gotten rid of!”

Then he seemed to see something else and gasped sharply. “No! Jiang Yingzi is there too! She’s standing right next to Danyangzi!”

The Ao-Jing Sect followers looked at each other in surprise. Even Li Huowang realized something was wrong.

Danyangzi could exist because he had cultivated immortality. But what about Jiang Yingzi? She hadn’t cultivated anything!

Li Huowang stared at the distant figure—a woman with broken limbs, her body a mass of blood and mangled flesh. His mind was buzzing.

Even now, she was staring at him with a look of pure, bottomless hatred.

“Young friend, we warned you before,” the old voice said. “We were only responsible for driving out your master. As for the bizarre visions that come with being a Heart-Element… that is not our concern.”