The Wagon

“Brother Li, what’s wrong?”

Seeing his alarmingly strange reaction, Bai Lingmiao was clearly frightened. She quickly reached out to touch him, but was startled by the heat of his skin—it burned against her fingers.

“Brother Li, don’t think about it! I won’t ask, I won’t ask anymore!” Tears streaming down her face in panic, Bai Lingmiao wrapped her arms tightly around Li Huowang.

Hearing her words, Li Huowang closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and forced himself to think.

In his mind, fragments that had been deliberately hidden began to piece themselves together.

They assembled into a picture that, even just contemplated, suffocated. Things that should have been forgotten surfaced again.

That scroll was both moving and still. He intended to try to describe it in terms she might understand.

“Behind that jade pendant… in that place they might call the White Jade Capital… I saw things. Things I can’t describe. They were huge. And they were… cold!!”

Li Huowang’s voice was hoarse and heavy, his words coming in broken, disjointed fragments, the logic jumbled.

As he spoke, his body began to tremble uncontrollably again.

“That place… it’s not for people. Anyone who goes there gets taken—they take what belongs to them. People are stitched together by them! When nothing is left… just like Danyangzi… you vanish completely!”

“Then something… in the White Jade Capital! It was pulling me! I went over! I saw the whole world! I felt it! I felt what it was thinking!!”

Suddenly, another pair of hands reached around from behind him, pressing against his forehead.

Those hands tightened like a golden headband, and the pressure brought a rare moment of relief to Li Huowang’s splitting skull.

He had no time to wonder whose hands they were. He could only grit his teeth and continue.

“I could understand it! Do you understand? I could understand what it was thinking!! No one else could—only me! Only I could understand it! Because it’s mad!”

As soon as he said this, Li Huowang felt the scroll in his mind begin to slip from his control.

Things on the scroll started to peer out at him.

“I saw its past… it wasn’t… it wasn’t like this before! It was good, once! It’s crying!! It’s screaming!!”

“What is crying?” A cold female voice came from behind Li Huowang.

The blood vessels on Li Huowang’s forehead were pulsing, as if they might burst at any moment.

He forced the thing out of his mind with all his might. “The Great Nuo! Its name is the Great Nuo!”

The moment he said it, the atmosphere inside the wagon shifted, twisted. The warm blankets could not keep out the cold seeping in from outside.

Indistinct whispers filled everyone’s ears. From outside the wagon came the horses’ neighing and Mantou’s barking.

Li Huowang knew this wasn’t the Great Nuo. The Great Nuo was mad; it couldn’t be paying attention to him. What was paying attention was other things.

“Get lost!” With Li Huowang’s low shout, the oppressive presence cleared, and the noise gradually faded to silence.

Sweating profusely, Li Huowang lay on the floor, gasping for breath. Bai Lingmiao’s voice, thick with tears, sounded beside him.

“Brother Li, I was wrong. I was really wrong. Don’t think about it anymore. As long as you stay by my side, I’ll never ask again!”

Inside the dark wagon, two hands first helped him sit up. Another hand wiped his forehead with a cloth. Yet another hand brought a bowl of water, tilting it carefully into his mouth.

Under the repeated comfort of four hands, Li Huowang’s breathing gradually steadied. The buzzing in his mind and the piercing tinnitus slowly faded as well.

Weakly, Li Huowang looked at the young woman before him. “That’s… how it is…”

At some point, he drifted into a heavy, unconscious sleep.

When he woke again, it was already bright outside. His underclothes had been changed.

Staring at the wagon’s roof, he felt the empty blankets beside him. He sighed, pressed his fingers to his temples, and rubbed them in slow circles.

The things he had desperately tried to remember last night had mostly dissipated. Some knowledge that should have been in his head had become completely blurred.

But even blurred, he had understood a few things.

Zhengde Temple, which worshipped the Flesh Buddha. Anci Nunnery, with its filth, laziness, and greed. The Zuowandao, who toyed with both men and gods. The spirit-dancers, who traded in human lives.

Every power these people used carried a taint of wrongness.

And then there were the malignant spirits: Layue Shiba, the Wandering Lord, the Great Grandmother, the Xi Shen, and others.

He had thought he had simply transmigrated into a world that was supposed to be this chaotic.

But now, he realized it wasn’t like that at all. The root cause was that this world itself was broken.

It was sick, just like him. Otherwise, it shouldn’t have been like this. It should have been… more normal.

“What is wrong with this world?” Li Huowang muttered to himself.

“The Great Nuo? Is it connected to those Nuo opera dancers? According to what Lü Zhuangyuan said before, Nuo opera is extremely ancient—the ancestor of all other opera.”

“It sounds like those Nuo dancers were worshipping the Great Nuo… but…”

Li Huowang recalled the people who had attacked him after being tricked by the Zuowandao. They hadn’t been backed by any power matching their grand origins—they were barely more dangerous than bandits.

“Sigh…” Li Huowang let out a long breath. He felt too drained to bother understanding all of this anymore.

Whatever had happened to the Great Nuo, it had nothing to do with him.

He was just a mortal. He should focus on the matters that actually concerned him.

Why am I still alive? This was the new question Li Huowang had just acquired.

He had gone deep into that terrifying, bizarre White Jade Capital—a place where no human should exist. Yet instead of vanishing like Danyangzi, he had survived.

“Is this also an ability of the Heart-Element? Or was I saved by the Bashe I glimpsed?”

Li Huowang guessed wildly. He wanted answers, but answers were not easy to find.

Surviving was a good thing, of course. But he feared that this stroke of luck would be followed by trouble.

Thinking, he sat up again, pulled his clothes from the box beneath the bedding, and began to dress.

When he stepped out of the wagon, the morning breeze gently brushed Bai Lingmiao’s white hair by the distant riverbank, stirring it like ripples on water.

She was absorbed in washing clothes. Her profile, lit by the morning light, was so serene and beautiful.

Watching the young woman who had shared both hardship and comfort with him, something stirred in Li Huowang’s heart.

“No matter how I survived… since there’s someone to be with me, I still have to keep living. At least this matter has finally come to an end.”