The Shadow Puppet

Chapter 200: The Change

His own body had moved. The phrase was easy enough to understand, but when it was about Li Huowang, the meaning became grotesquely elusive.

Li Huowang straightened his back and stared at the red-clad back in front of him that had straightened up at the same moment.

He raised his right hand above his head. The red-clad figure in front of him made the same motion.

That was his body. No doubt about it.

Li Huowang looked down at himself again. There was nothing there—an empty void—yet he could still feel himself, his own body beneath his hands.

He touched his own arm and then the bronze coin mask on his face. The phantom Li Huowang in front of him did the same.

He felt like he was working a shadow-puppet, and that distant thing was the puppet in his hands.

More than what the thing was, Li Huowang now wanted to understand how it had come to be and how to fix it.

"Right. I remember now. Right before, when my hand was nailed to the ground and that woman swung her halberd at me—my body shifted out of alignment!"

He also recalled that during that fight, the woman had been attacking somewhere else the entire time, which was why she had left such an obvious opening.

At the time, he hadn't had a chance to think it through. In hindsight, she had been attacking his phantom.

"What the hell is this? How do I have a power like this? It's like the world has a bug. Is this world fake or something?!"

As this thought took hold, a look of terror began to creep across Li Huowang's face, and it deepened by the second.

He looked at his own body beside him. The more he looked at it, the more it felt impossibly, terrifyingly false.

His breathing quickened. He clutched his head and started talking to himself, layering on psychological pressure to steady his wavering mind.

"No. This world is real. It can't be a hallucination in my head!! I must have awakened some special ability of the Heart-Element!"

"Right! That's it! I've been unlucky for so long, I was due for some good luck! This is normal, Li Huowang! Stop doubting everything! That other world is fake. This world is the real one!!"

Seeing Li Huowang's anguish, Bai Lingmiao walked over and reached out to hold him.

But her hand caught nothing. It passed right through the phantom.

"I'm fine. I'm fine," Li Huowang said, taking a step back as he steadied his breathing.

Lü Zhuangyuan spoke cautiously, his face full of fear. "You call that fine? Your body can't even be touched. That's a ghost! Little Daoist, when exactly did you forget that you died?"

No one could help Li Huowang with this. He had to digest it on his own.

After the time it took for two incense sticks to burn, Li Huowang gradually calmed down.

"I'm not dead. I've just gained some new abilities."

While everyone was resting, he gave them a simple account of what had happened.

"Oh~, I see. So this is the little Daoist's divine power," Lü Zhuangyuan said, nodding with an expression of understanding.

Bai Lingmiao felt around and touched the unseen body that was Li Huowang. A worried look crossed her face.

"Brother Li... will you be like this forever now?"

"Hang on. Let me try something." Li Huowang tried to recall the feeling from before. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and focused.

"Move back. Get back where you belong! Overlap again!"

He racked his brains for a long time. When he suddenly snapped his eyes open, he was stunned to find his body was back!

But before he could celebrate, he noticed another problem.

His sensations and his body were now overlapping again, but the position was off. The lower half of his body was stuck in the dirt.

Even though his body was buried in the soil, his feet felt like they were stepping on solid ground.

His body was still misaligned with the time and space of this world.

"Oh, I get it! I've heard of this! Brother Li, that's the art of earth-walking!" Gouwa announced with delight, sharing his discovery.

Li Huowang couldn't be bothered with him. He closed his eyes and kept trying.

When he opened them again, his body was indeed out of the ground, but his perspective had shifted into the air. Suddenly, he had gone from a first-person view to a third-person view.

Watching the red-robed Daoist below him move and raise its head under his control, Li Huowang felt like he was playing a game.

"No. Again. I refuse to believe I can't go back!"

Li Huowang started another round of attempts, trying to re-position his body.

Moving it wasn't a simple matter of thinking about it. It required a powerful sensation of motion—a feeling that was like looking at something through fog, incredibly difficult to grasp.

After working at it for two hours, Li Huowang finally managed to get himself more or less back in place.

He said "more or less" because his visual perspective was still a little too high, sitting just above his forehead.

A little off was fine. Li Huowang didn't want to try anymore. They were still on the run.

"We've rested enough. Let's move. We need to get out of Hou Shu as fast as we can. The longer we stay here, the more dangerous it gets."

Hearing this, everyone nodded and picked up the few belongings they had left.

"I can't run anymore, husband. I'm carrying the baby," Luo Juan's whisper was perfectly clear to Li Huowang.

He looked up and saw Lü Juren, without a word, bend down and lift his wife into his arms.

—

The once-smoldering town was completely ruined. Crumbling walls were everywhere, and some houses were burning with no one to put them out.

The dead, stripped as clean as white pigs, were piled into random mounds.

In the midst of it all, groups of convict-soldiers sat around campfires made of burning roof beams, drinking and eating meat.

A plump, soft-looking man in a hat, holding a handkerchief to his nose, squeezed and dodged his way through the carnage.

Suddenly, his foot slipped. He looked down and saw a loop of intestine. "Aiya! My god!"

Seeing the man's startled reaction, the surrounding convict-soldiers burst into laughter.

"Hey, Supervisor Cao! Want a bite? Fresh off the fire."

A yellowed thigh, streaked with blood, appeared right in front of Cao Hai's face without warning.

"Ugh—" Cao Hai couldn't hold it in anymore. He leaned against a broken wall and vomited.

"Look at you, you coward. Relax, it's pork, not 'human meat.' Can't you see the hoof?"

Hearing this, Cao Hai felt a little better. He carefully extended two fingers and pushed the pork leg away from him.

"I need to speak with General Peng about a pressing matter. Do you know where she is? I just checked the main camp, but she wasn't there."

"If you, the supervisor, don't know, how would I? I've been too busy fighting those bastards for money and women."

Just as Cao Hai was looking troubled, a hairy hand suddenly reached out from beside him and groped toward his waist.

Startled, Cao Hai scrambled backward several steps. He saw that the owner of the hand was a young man with sharp, sword-like eyebrows, who was looking at his own hand with a feigned expression of surprise.

"Aiyaya~ It seems I touched something just now. Supervisor Cao, did the knife miss a spot? Did you leave a little bit behind to carry on the family line?"

Cao Hai saw who it was and, ignoring the teasing, quickly asked, "Hou Wen, you're the general's short-sword. You must know where she is right now!"

"Hehehe~ You want to know?"

Hou Wen sidled over with a malicious grin. He lightly slapped Cao Hai's rear, and when Cao Hai covered it in a panic, Hou Wen quickly slapped his front.

"Oh, stop teasing me! I really do need to see General Peng! This involves her future!!"

"The general's wounded. She's recuperating over there. Be careful—she's in a bad mood right now."

Cao Hai didn't bother to say anything else. He followed the direction Hou Wen had pointed and headed toward the few intact houses.