Treatment

Li Huowang lay sprawled on the soft grass, gasping for breath, and watched the distant Black Tai Sui writhe. A grin spread across his face.

Ever since Yang Na had given him that piece of chocolate, he hadn’t felt this happy in a long time.

His whole body ached like hell. He was exhausted, completely drained. But after everything he’d gone through underground—the endless dangers—he had finally achieved his goal.

With the Black Tai Sui, he could finally say goodbye to the hallucinations. No more swinging back and forth between reality and illusion. He could escape the bewilderment of being a Heart-Element.

They all say that if you eat the Black Tai Sui, it’ll keep growing inside you. It’ll last forever.

I don’t believe it! If worst comes to worst, when it’s about to become a problem, I’ll just cut open my belly, dig it out, and swallow it again!

As Li Huowang was still calculating the odds of that working, he noticed something wrong with everyone’s expressions.

They had all escaped alive, so why were they standing there looking like they’d seen a ghost? And he was injured this badly—why was no one coming to help him up?

“Don’t just stand there. Pull the chain. Han Fu’s tied to the other end. The little bastard’s still alive, so haul him up. I need to pry some information out of him,” Li Huowang ordered. But no one moved. No one listened.

“What’s wrong with you?” Li Huowang braced one deformed palm on the soft grass and crawled toward them. Instinctively, everyone took a step back.

“Senior Brother Li... are you really... Senior Brother Li?” Bai Lingmiao’s hands clutched her chest as tears streamed down her face. She stared at the thing before her in terror.

She didn’t need to say anything else. Li Huowang could already feel that something was wrong with his own body. He raised his hands and stared, horrified, at the single eye that had grown beneath his ear.

As he wiggled his fingers, he saw two fused fingers near his elbow twitch slightly in response.

“How is this possible?! What the hell—” Li Huowang braced his deformed hands against the grass and flipped over violently.

Under the moonlight, when he finally saw the shape of his own body, he nearly screamed.

He could hardly believe that this chaotic mass of flesh was him!

Compared to this, Sun Baolu’s body was nothing. His own body now was a mess of flipped organs, reversed positions, with pale white panicles embedded among them, swaying gently. There was nothing human about it at all.

It’s the ability of those white panicles! It was after it dragged me down that I became like this. Li Huowang grabbed a handful of the panicles sprouting from his body and watched in horror as his own fingers twisted slowly.

Am I even human anymore? The question surfaced in Li Huowang’s wildly chaotic mind. His hand trembled as he reached for his own face—a face completely unrecognizable. His features were all misplaced, none of them where they should be.

“How is this possible?! This is way too absurd! This... is this really a normal world?” Li Huowang shuddered violently.

“No. Li Huowang, calm down. This is nothing. Yeah, nothing at all.”

He turned to face the others, forcing a confident expression onto his hideously mangled face. “It’s fine. Don’t panic. We can fix this.”

With that, Li Huowang hooked a dagger with his twisted right hand and drove the blade straight into his own face.

Under everyone’s disbelieving stares, he carved a wound into himself.

Grabbing the edge of the gash where his ear dangled, he let out a roar and yanked the ear upward, forcing it back to where it was supposed to be.

But the moment he let go, the ear fell limply to the ground.

Li Huowang stared at his ear on the grass, and his grin grew even wider. “Right, that works too. My body’s regeneration is strong. I just need to cut off everything that’s grown wrong and let it grow back properly.”

“Being a human stump for a few days—what’s the big deal?”

As Li Huowang started aiming the dagger at his own eye, Gouwa shuffled forward, trembling, waving his hands frantically from a distance.

“Senior Brother Li, don’t do this! It’s better to live in misery than to die in glory. Besides, you’ve still got your hands and feet...”

Halfway through, Gouwa didn’t know how to continue. Senior Brother Li’s condition was too tragic. He couldn’t bear to look anymore.

If I ended up like that, I’d rather just die.

Li Huowang’s blade paused. He stared blankly at his own twisted pinky. A sudden thought surfaced in his mind.

Wait! If these panicles could make me look like this, doesn’t that mean they could turn me back, too?

His eyes lit up. He looked at the panicles fused to his hand, grabbed a bundle, and pressed them directly against his own eye.

The panicles were moving. They were twisting Li Huowang’s fingers.

“You, shut the fuck up and move!” Li Huowang slammed the panicles against the ground, then pressed them back against his face.

Slowly, he felt his vision start to shift. Under the panicles’ influence, it began to slide downward.

With three fingers, Li Huowang hooked his own eyeball and dragged it, millimeter by millimeter, toward where it belonged. But no matter how he moved it, it never returned to its original position.

Shk! A deep gash split open from the corner of his eye. Li Huowang grabbed his bloodshot eye again and yanked it further.

“Close enough?” he gasped, asking the others.

When everyone gave a unified answer, he moved on to rearrange the other parts.

After barely managing to set his facial features into some semblance of order, Li Huowang—nearly passing out from pain—looked around and rasped, “What are you all standing around for? Get over here and help!”

That snapped everyone out of it. They all rushed forward and began helping Li Huowang put his other organs back where they belonged.

It was not an easy process. The panicles could help shift things around, but they were never precise enough.

When that happened, they had to rely on the knife to carve the corrections.

Gouwa, carefully moving Li Huowang’s left ear, had his hand twitch. The ear plopped onto the ground.

Panicked, he picked it up, glanced around, spat on it, and tremblingly pressed it back against Li Huowang’s head.

A hand landed on his shoulder, sending a shudder through him. He spun around to see Bai Lingmiao, holding a needle and thread. “Give it to me. I’ll sew it back on.”

Gouwa let out a huge sigh of relief and quickly handed it over.

The torture was almost comparable to an execution. Maybe it was the joy of obtaining the Black Tai Sui that sustained him, or maybe Li Huowang had simply gotten used to pain.

By the time his mangled body had been roughly pieced back together into a human form, dawn had broken. But Li Huowang’s screams of agony still carried a stubborn strength.