The Evil Spirits

The murderous purple-tasseled sword was slowly drawn from its scabbard with a sharp clang, the tip fixed steadily on the thing in the corner.

Evil spirits. Since arriving in Great Liang, Li Huowang had rarely encountered them anymore. He never expected to run into one under circumstances like these.

His brow furrowed deeply. His voice was low as he spoke. “Brother Zhuge, it seems this Heavenly Calamity isn’t just about the sky going dark. Are these evil spirits tied to it?”

Zhuge Yuan, his expression grave, clasped his hands behind his back and looked up at the sky, as if searching his memory. He gave no answer, but the thing in the corner began to move.

As it slowly turned around, Li Huowang saw a pale, enormous face topped with two bloody hollows where its eyes should have been.

The blood-red maw opened slowly. Inside the mouth, there were no teeth. In their place were tiny, infantile hands covered in corpse-spots. The upper and lower rows of these little hands clasped together, forming a chillingly grotesque smile.

Confronted with such a horrifying spectacle, a fierce scowl twisted Li Huowang’s face. With a powerful stomp from the wall, he shot straight toward it.

In this utterly insane world, he had already endured too much. Facing something like this no longer stirred even a ripple within him.

He arrived before his sword did. The suddenly lengthened copper-coin sword whistled through the air as it slashed down fiercely at the thing’s skull.

Seeing this, the evil spirit thrust both of its arms—several times longer than its body—toward Li Huowang from left and right, as if attempting to counterattack in order to force a retreat.

But with a rapid flick and pull of Li Huowang’s right hand, the airborne copper coins spun and twisted. A flash of sword-light and shadow cut through the air. Accompanied by a piercing shriek, both arms were sliced cleanly into three segments.

Deprived of its arms, the evil spirit’s oversized head shrank rapidly and retracted inward. By the time all its clothes had fallen to the ground, a black shadow darted out from within the silk garments and fled into the darkness.

Li Huowang glanced at the strange, bamboo-joint-like broken arms on the ground. To avoid being lured away from his position, he did not give chase. With a sharp flick, he cleared the black blood from his sword, turned, and prepared to head back inside the Bai family compound.

But he had only taken two steps when, at the end of the pitch-black road, a paper window suddenly lit up.

An eerie green light seeped out through the wooden lattice. The source flickered, dim and bright by turns, suggesting something was moving back and forth inside. But one thing was certain—it was not a person. Everyone from Cow Heart Village was already inside the Bai family compound.

At first, it was just one house. But gradually, two, then three appeared. As these windows lit up one after another, the entire Cow Heart Village took on the sinister atmosphere of the Fengdu underworld.

Li Huowang’s face began to darken as he watched the windows glow. A single evil spirit was nothing to worry about, but this many—that was a problem.

And more importantly, he couldn’t be sure whether this situation was just the beginning of something far worse.

Bam! Li Huowang slammed the Bai family’s main gate shut. He pulled out a sheet of orpiment paper, quickly wrote out a warding talisman with his own blood, and pasted it directly onto the wooden bolt.

Turning to face the crowd of faces in the courtyard, he spoke. “None of you need to worry about the trouble outside. All of you stay put inside the yard! No one leaves until the Calamity is over!”

Having said that, Li Huowang leaped back onto the wall, sword in hand, his gaze locked onto those windows glowing with sinister green light.

“On an ordinary day, spotting even a single evil spirit is rare. Now they’re popping up like they cost nothing. Is it just Cow Heart Village, or is it like this everywhere? If it’s the latter… then I’m afraid…” Li Huowang’s heart sank lower and lower.

“If it truly is as Brother Li suspects, then I fear this Heavenly Calamity will be worthy of its name after all.” Zhuge Yuan’s expression was just as grave as Li Huowang’s.

He raised his right hand slightly, his thumb dancing rapidly across the joints of his other fingers, as if making some continuous calculation.

“Ah, what a shame. Such interesting times, and I had to die before I could join in.” The faceless Hong Zhong drifted beside him, his tone laced with regret.

“Daoist, what the hell is going on? Is this going to kill a lot of people?” the monk asked, his voice thick with worry.

Li Huowang paid no attention to the various ramblings of his hallucinations. He stared silently outward. If there was one good thing about the situation, it was that while the windows had lit up, none of them were projecting any hostile intent toward him.

Whether he had intimidated them or not, those things showed no sign of leaving their windows.

“Dear gods! What… what is that?! Master, look behind you!!”

The panicked shout from Lü Xiucai made Li Huowang whip his head around. He saw, on the second floor, one of the windows had also turned green. They had gotten inside!

What made Li Huowang’s heart race with dread was the fact that that window was Bai Lingmiao’s bedchamber!

Clenching his jaw, Li Huowang quickly drew two more talismans and slapped them onto his knees.

With a sudden surge of force, he kicked off the wall. His agile body launched into the air, flying like a thrown spear straight toward the green-lit window.

Crack! The wooden window frame shattered. As Li Huowang tumbled into the room, sword in hand, he saw two figures—one in white, one in red—kneeling on the bed, gnawing at something.

From their attire, he could tell they were Bai Lingmiao and the Second Spirit!

“Miaomiao?!” His heart clenched as he cautiously approached them. He placed his hand on Bai Lingmiao’s shoulder and turned her around.

The Bai Lingmiao of before—with her delicate, feminine features—was gone. What Li Huowang saw now was a truly horrifying face.

Her mouth was filled with hooked, jagged fangs. Her face was covered in spikes and green scales, all smeared with foul-smelling black blood. There was not a trace of humanity left in Bai Lingmiao’s appearance. She looked like something stitched together from a dozen different beasts.

And yet, in this state, Bai Lingmiao was still laughing. That grotesque, gaping maw was stretched almost to her ears. “Hahaha~ hahaha~!!”

“Li Huowang! Hahaha! I don’t want to laugh either! But I can’t help it! The Immortals are just too happy! They’re affecting me! And now, I’m so hungry!!”

With that, Bai Lingmiao lunged back onto the bed, tearing into the mangled corpse of some unknown evil spirit with savage bites.

With a sharp crack, the Second Spirit bit a marrow-rich bone in half and swallowed it whole without even chewing.

Watching Bai Lingmiao, who seemed to have degenerated into a wild beast, Li Huowang understood that this couldn’t go on. He had to calm them down.

He quickly made a chopping motion with his right hand, and a domino tile appeared in his palm.

Then, forming a Vajra hand seal, he pressed the domino against his own forehead. “Sever attachments! Gather the heart!”

When he pulled the domino away, his own face came off with it, like a mask.

Li Huowang raised his face—his own face—and pressed it directly onto Bai Lingmiao’s. “Calm stillness! Attain the Dao!”

When his own face, still marked with the domino on its forehead, was placed onto Bai Lingmiao’s, she stopped moving. She stopped laughing.