Apricot Island

Uttering those guilt-ridden words to Yang Na, the taut thread of Li Huowang’s mind finally snapped, and he sank into unconsciousness.

The sounds around him—footsteps, shouts, Yang Na’s weeping—all faded into a distant murmur, and then everything was quiet.

He didn’t know how long it had been when he drifted back to awareness, roused by the acrid sting of incense smoke.

The first thing he saw was a vast expanse of blue. It took him a moment to gather his wits before he realized he was staring up at the sky, his head tilted back.

The slap of waves against the hull and the feel of a wooden deck beneath him told him he was back on the boat.

When Li Huowang lowered his head, the sight before him made his pupils contract in shock.

Directly in front of him were offerings and an incense burner, and behind the burner was a row of people kowtowing. What made his skin crawl even more was that seated among the offerings were a young boy and a girl, their foreheads dotted with red marks. They were treating him exactly like a Bodhisattva, setting him up as an object of worship.

Seeing this, a fierce rage boiled up inside Li Huowang. He stood up and kicked the incense burner over with a single violent motion.

“Are you all idiots? Why do you always put your hopes on someone else? And you’re even offering me children as sacrifices!” He grabbed the two children by the arm and yanked them out of the offering trays.

His sudden outburst terrified everyone. They scrambled backward, and the boat owner kowtowed frantically, begging for mercy. “Dragon King, please calm your anger! Please, calm your anger!”

“Dragon King?” Li Huowang looked down and saw writhing black tentacles extending from all over his body. His severed arm, in particular, was entirely formed from five twisted tentacles.

It dawned on him. These people on the boat had taken one look at his skinless body covered in black tentacles and decided he was possessed by some evil spirit.

“Li Sui. Pull back. You’re scaring them.” At his command, all the tentacles on his body vanished instantly.

Li Huowang glanced at the wet deck, then up at the cloudless sky. He had no time for explanations. He pointed at the boat owner and barked, “Get up! Set sail for Apricot Island! Now!”

“Aye! Yes, sir! We’re going!” The boat owner dared not refuse. Even if this man wasn’t the Dragon King, he was someone he had no business crossing.

Li Huowang pushed through the crowd and found a quiet corner in the cabin. He let out a slow breath, then looked up at the monk. “How did I get back on the boat?”

“Priest, you crawled right out of that thing’s belly. It was too dark underwater—I couldn’t see what it looked like. Oh, I think I remember—there was still a living person in its gut. Don’t know if he made it out or not. And, uh, its back was covered in eyes…”

Listening to the monk’s account, Li Huowang mentally reconstructed everything that had just happened.

It was exactly as he had predicted. Smashing through the window and jumping out meant he had torn his way out of the monster’s belly. Scaling the electrified razor-wire fence meant he had broken free of whatever was dragging him down underwater. And climbing the watchtower was the same as hauling himself back up onto the deck.

By moving through his hallucination, he had ultimately saved his own life. It was a valuable lesson. If he ever ran into a similar situation, he could use the same method to escape.

It shouldn’t have been this hard, but whatever was in the water had used some trick to cancel out the abilities of the Black Tai Sui in his belly. Still, despite the trouble, the outcome was acceptable.

“Priest, that Li Sui in your belly helped you out plenty. If it weren’t for him, you never would have made it back onto the boat.”

Li Huowang touched his stomach, replaying everything he’d just been through, and felt a slight measure of relief.

Then a piercing, high-pitched screech stabbed into his ears, like tinnitus turned savage. Li Huowang instinctively clamped his hands over his ears.

It was Yang Na’s voice. He would never mistake it. The memory of her desperate face twisted his heart like a knife.

His expression contorted with pain, he pressed his hands over his ears and muttered frantically to himself, “That side was a hallucination. There were too many coincidences over there. It was a hallucination! I don’t need to care about what happened over there. It’s just a hallucination!”

He went on for a long time, forcing Yang Na’s image out of his mind. When he finally lowered his hands from his ears and felt no more ringing, he let out a breath of lingering fear.

This auditory hallucination seemed to be an aftereffect of what he’d just been through. He would have to be more careful around unfamiliar supernatural entities from now on. Some of them might have ways to nullify the Black Tai Sui’s effects.

“Heh… Look at the state you’re in. Living like this is worse than being dead.”

Ignoring Red Center’s taunt, Li Huowang pulled out the True Sutra of the Fire Vestments and silently began treating his wounds.

“No matter how much suffering I endure, there will always be an end. There’s still hope for me to escape this life worse than death. As long as I can force the secret of breaking free from these hallucinations out of North Wind…”

“Three coppers.” “An empty tally.” “Half a chipped coin. I win.”

The three other men at the gambling game slapped their cards down in frustration and glared at the spread of tiles in Li Huowang’s hand. “How do you keep winning, master? You sure you’re not swapping cards with some divine power?”

“If I were using divine power, I’d just rob you outright. Why bother with this roundabout nonsense? Enough talk. A bet’s a bet. Pay up.”

A few tarnished bits of silver and a handful of old and new copper coins were pushed across the table toward Li Huowang.

He was shuffling the cards for another round when a heavy stomping sound came from the deck above. “We’re docking! Apricot Island’s in sight!”

At that, everyone—players and onlookers alike—pushed toward the ladder leading out of the hold.

When Li Huowang’s feet touched the dock of Apricot Island, he let out a long breath. Finally, he had arrived.

But then he hit a wall. Zhuge Yuan had told him to come find him, but according to the boat owner, Apricot Island was as big as half a province of Jiangnan. How was he supposed to find one man on a land this vast?

He thought it over for a while, then pulled a sheet of yellow turmeric paper from his robe. When it came down to it, finding someone still required a divination using a talisman.

But for a divination, he needed human bone. That was the tricky part. He didn’t carry anything like that on him.

It was no easy fix, but after racking his brains for a while, he found a workaround.

He took out a knife and cut into his still-healing severed arm. Clenching his jaw, Li Huowang shoved his hand into the bloody flesh, grasped the bone of his upper arm, and pulled hard.

With a sickening wrench of pain and a hollow sense of emptiness, a ragged, blood-soaked length of bone came free in his hand, like pulling a root from mud.