Zhuge Yuan

Li Huowang watched Zhuge Yuan fighting for his life. If he continued to wallow in confusion about his own identity now, he would be letting him down.

Whoever he was, he owed Zhuge Yuan his life. He couldn’t run away before that debt was paid.

Clenching his teeth, Li Huowang scanned his surroundings. When he spotted the Great Liang Emperor locked in a scuffle with the dice alongside the Supervisory Heavenly Office officials, he pushed off the ground and leaped toward them.

Every time the sole of his shoe was about to touch the liquid ground, with a flick of his wrist, he sent a tile card flying out. It landed like a lotus leaf on the water surface, providing him a foothold.

He skimmed across the battlefield like a dragonfly touching water, closing in fast.

The dice weren't fighting to the death; they were merely toying with their opponents. It seemed they were waiting for Doumu to be free and deal with everyone at once.

Landing at the edge of the fray, Li Huowang shouted to those inside, “Is there a living Heart-Turbid inside the formation core of this array?”

He didn't expect an answer. But when he caught the faintest shift in expression from one of the Supervisory Heavenly Office officials, he immediately drew on years of experience as a fraud and analyzed the wariness behind that look.

He was wary of his question, not confused or baffled. There had to be a living Heart-Turbid in the formation core!

That made sense. Yin and Yang overcome each other. If they used a dead Heart-Turbid for the core, there was no way they wouldn't place a living one as well.

Without another word, Li Huowang turned and charged in a different direction. The Zuowandao naturally noticed.

One of the dice glanced over, somewhat surprised to see Li Huowang leaping away. He turned to the die beside him. “Hey, what did you send that Hong Zhong off to do?”

“How should I know? That's clearly a Great Liang Hong Zhong. He's one of yours. You tell me.”

“Bullshit! Don’t you have eyes on your ass? That’s your Great Qi Hong Zhong!”

While they were bickering, Li Huowang had already arrived at a side hall on the eastern side.

A golden temple should have stood here once. But all the gold had been stripped away, shaped into the God of Wealth Ghost Face masks. Now only the empty framework remained, floating on the surface of the liquid.

Li Huowang rushed to the center of the hall. At the core of the formation, he saw only the corpse of a crystalline white fox. The array eye here was clearly something he couldn’t understand.

He launched himself into the air. With a sharp twist, he flung handfuls of mahjong tiles in all directions. They skipped across the surface like stones across water. The eyes painted on those one-bamboo tiles blinked rapidly, as if alive.

Everything those one-bamboo tiles saw was instantly transmitted into Li Huowang's mind. In turn, he quickly learned what formation eyes were in the other side halls.

Half an incense stick later, Li Huowang stood on a floating log, staring down at an old man in the mud, as withered as dead wood. Like the Heart-Turbid from before, his seven orifices were sewn shut with gold thread. The only difference was a single swastika symbol pasted over the center of his chest.

Glancing up at Zhuge Yuan, who was still falling through the air, Li Huowang took a deep breath. He twisted his body, displacing himself, and hauled the living Heart-Turbid up.

Once he had it in hand, he wasted no time. With a flick of his right hand, he pulled out four blank tiles and slammed them down hard on the creature’s back. “Kong!”

The blank tiles sank into the Heart-Turbid’s body. A tremendous force propelled it upward at breakneck speed.

But he wasn’t done yet. As the living Heart-Turbid shot toward Doumu in the sky, Li Huowang swiftly found the dead Heart-Turbid he’d seen earlier when he first entered the Imperial City.

This was the same Heart-Turbid that he, the Chief Recorder, and the others had found back then.

Slapping a pair of domino tiles into its body, Li Huowang executed a swift upside-down hook kick, slamming his foot into the dead Heart-Turbid’s back.

The dead Heart-Turbid shot upward with an afterimage trailing behind it, hurtling directly toward the living one in midair.

Having witnessed the overwhelming power of the Living-and-Dead Heart-Turbid collision, Li Huowang immediately thought of using it against Doumu. At this point, aside from Zhuge Yuan, this was the only thing that could damage Doumu’s incarnation.

“Brother Zhuge! Move out of the way! The Living-and-Dead Heart-Turbid is about to collide!” Li Huowang yelled at the sky.

At that moment, Zhuge Yuan, his veins bulging across his entire body, let out a breath of relief. Using the last of his strength, he hurled his Judgment Brush into the air, then fell backward, collapsing limply to the ground.

Just as a frantic Li Huowang caught the falling Zhuge Yuan, a flash of light, blacker than anything imaginable, erupted in the sky. The Living-and-Dead Heart-Turbid had struck.

The light appeared as quickly as it vanished.

When it faded, Li Huowang looked up. A massive gaping hole had been torn in Doumu’s body.

Not just Doumu’s body. It was as if everything inside an enormous sphere in the middle of the sky had been scooped out entirely.

With such a huge chunk missing, Doumu’s body began to destabilize, flickering between solid and translucent.

Li Huowang could feel it staring at him. But this time, it couldn’t pull him back up.

With one final, deep gaze, Doumu, which had covered the entire sky, slowly faded away.

Seeing this, Li Huowang laughed. He couldn’t help but cry out in excitement. “Brother Zhuge! Brother Zhuge, we did it! We d—”

When Li Huowang looked down and saw what Zhuge Yuan had become, his triumphant voice died in his throat.

Zhuge Yuan had aged drastically. His entire body seemed to have cracked open, as if it were on the verge of shattering.

It wasn’t just his body. Using his Zuowandao abilities, Li Huowang could also see the Ten Emotions and Eight Sufferings within him. They were in a terrible state—clinging to each other, turning a dead, ashen gray.

Confronted with this sight, Li Huowang was at a complete loss. He frantically searched through both Hong Zhong’s memories and Li Huowang’s own, desperately seeking any chance to save him.

But reason, which he fiercely resisted, told him that Zhuge Yuan was beyond saving.

Zhuge Yuan’s body was like a bowl with a hole in its bottom, leaking everything within him out into the void.

He had held out against Doumu’s incarnation for so long entirely on his own strength, and it had already drained every last bit of him.

As Li Huowang frantically searched for turmeric paper, planning to try talismans as a last-ditch, desperate measure, Zhuge Yuan called out to him.

“Brother Li, don’t waste your strength. I am not afraid of death. And don’t blame yourself. I didn’t do this just for you. I did it for all the living beings under heaven.”

Watching Zhuge Yuan’s irreversible slide toward death, tears streamed from Li Huowang’s eyes. He gasped for breath, furious and desperate. “This rotten place is already a wreck! What use is there for being so noble?! If you’d just run, who could have said a damn thing?! Did I ask you to save me?! I’m a Zuowandao! What were you saving me for?!”

Zhuge Yuan let out a magnanimous laugh. “It’s not nobility. It’s just that I have read a few more books of the sages than most people. I know that some things are right to do, and some things are wrong. I dare not presume to call myself a gentleman, but when a friend is in danger… running away alone is something I simply could never do.”