Face to Face With the Spirit-Blight

When Li Huowang saw the look of profound grief on Zhuge Yuan’s face, he understood that this friend must have meant a great deal to him.

Zhuge Yuan was a man of deep loyalty, someone who would gladly take a knife for his friends. To have to kill one of them with his own hands… Li Huowang could only imagine the weight crushing his heart in this moment.

Zhuge Yuan spoke again. “After my good friend was taken by the Spirit-Blight, it could not only use all the techniques and supernatural abilities he had learned in life, but the Spirit-Blight had also sharpened them—made them more lethal.”

“Brother Li, the Supervisory Heavenly Office always goes on about how strong a Spirit-Blight is, but you must be careful. This thing doesn’t follow any set rules. One second you’re fighting it, the next you’re not.”

“It can always swap to a new body to possess—that’s what makes the Spirit-Blight so dangerous. You have to cut it down before it has time to react.”

“If you ever run into a Spirit-Blight, do not strike unless you have absolute certainty. If it captures you alive, you will suffer a fate worse than death. Spirit-Blight, Spirit-Blight… the weight is on ‘Blight,’ not ‘Spirit.’”

The moment he finished, Zhuge Yuan stopped. At his feet lay a mummified monkey, its mouth gaping wide, all four limbs twisted at unnatural angles, its belly torn open—rotting viscera spread across the ground like a burst blossom.

“Brother Zhuge, going by what you’ve said… have we found the real culprit?” Zhuge Yuan nodded gravely.

Li Huowang’s senses sharpened to their limit as he slowly advanced deeper into the peach grove. The twisted, mutilated corpses on the ground grew more numerous. They were no longer just animals—there were people now, people who had died in every kind of agony.

“Shh! Quiet! I think I hear something.” At Li Huowang’s words, the monk’s chanting ceased.

He dropped to the ground, pressing his ear against the earth, listening with absolute focus. “Is that… breathing?”

“Huuh… huuh…” A rhythmic flow of air reached his ear through the soil.

Li Huowang gripped his sword hilt and crept toward the source.

As the sound grew louder, he pushed aside a branch. The sight before him made his eyes tremble.

In a clearing not far ahead lay a sprawling mass of flesh, bone, and internal organs—spread across the ground like a small lake.

“Huuh… huuh…” With each breath, the pile of flesh swelled and contracted. Wisps of red light sifted down from the sky and burrowed into the gaps between the meat.

Li Huowang followed the red upward—and only then realized it was the dusk glow of the setting sun. This thing… was eating the twilight.

“Is this… the Spirit-Blight?” The thought had barely formed when a rat scurried across the flesh-mass, dashed over to a desiccated corpse nearby, and began to gnaw.

Suddenly, the pile began to shudder. The flesh rapidly reassembled itself, forcibly re-knitting into a doe the size of a small house.

It had six legs. Its antlers were massive—shaped like two peach trees. Its coat shimmered like a rotted rainbow: dull, yet riotously colored.

The reason Li Huowang could tell it was a doe: a dead fawn dangled beneath its belly. It seemed frozen in the exact moment of a stillbirth.

“Brother Zhuge, what is this Spirit-Blight possessing?” Li Huowang asked in a low voice, watching the great deer.

“Yingzhao. Most commoners call it the Nine-Colored Deer.”

The Nine-Colored Deer? Li Huowang studied the rotting, rainbow-hued fur on the enormous beast.

Suddenly, the Spirit-Blight moved. It shot toward the corpse where the rat was feeding, its body leaving afterimages.

It could have crushed the rat with one stamp—but it didn’t. Instead, it pinned the rat’s tail under its antler-shaped hoof, then raised another hoof and brought it down hard on the rat’s hind leg, grinding it back and forth.

The rat shrieked in agony, but the Nine-Colored Deer showed no sign of stopping. It threw back its head and cried out—a sound brimming with pleasure.

Only when the rat’s limbs had been ground completely into pulp did the deer lift a hoof and press it slowly down onto the rat’s chest, pushing…

It held pressure until the rat vomited all its internal organs onto the ground. Only then did the Nine-Colored Deer, satisfied, dissolve back into a heap of flesh.

Li Huowang’s brows were knitted tight. He forced down a swallow, then asked in the quietest voice he could manage: “Brother Zhuge… is this thing driven mad, or does it naturally enjoy torture this much?”

“A Spirit-Blight is heaven and earth’s own atrocity,” Zhuge Yuan said. “When the Dao is without mercy, it treats all things as straw dogs. The very fact that it was born is a sin.” His face darkened as if some old wound had been opened.

“Then, Brother Zhuge, what tricks does this Nine-Colored Deer have?” Whatever it was, Li Huowang had already steeled himself to fight.

“It devours rosy clouds, and it uses them. Watch the glow on its body—that’s where the rays come from.”

“Mm.” Li Huowang’s body coiled like a hunting leopard, his jaw clenched tight.

The Spirit-Blight in the distance seemed to sense something. Bones and flesh reknitted into a deer’s head, twisting to scan the grove.

Then, a mahjong tile—a Red Center—tumbled through the air and landed squarely on a peach tree. The Spirit-Blight turned toward the sound. In that instant, Li Huowang burst out from behind another tree, the Bronze Coin Sword whipping through the air like a flail.

A sharp crack rang out. The flesh struck by the coin sword hissed with black smoke, withering like blasted petals.

It had an effect—but clearly, this demon-slaying weapon wasn’t lethal enough to take the thing down in one blow.

The ambushed Spirit-Blight shrieked. This time, it didn’t re-form into a deer. Instead, it rose like a tidal wave of meat, crashing down toward Li Huowang.

The wave engulfed him instantly—but his body passed right through the flesh without a scratch. It was only a phasing afterimage he had swapped in.

“Die!” The razor-sharp Purple-Tasseled Sword slammed into the Nine-Colored Deer, carving a deep gash across it.

When Li Huowang saw the wound seal itself almost immediately, Zhuge Yuan called out from the side.

“Brother Li, that won’t work! This flesh-and-blood is only its shell. You need to find the Spirit-Blight inside it to do real damage!”

Just then, a beam of red sunset-light shot out from the Nine-Colored Deer. Li Huowang deflected it with his sword; it refracted midair and sheared through a wide swath of peach trees.

“What does the Spirit-Blight itself look like?” Li Huowang retreated, putting distance between them.

“You cannot see it,” Zhuge Yuan replied. “Any living person carrying the Ten Emotions and Eight Sufferings cannot see its true form.”

“If I can’t see it, then I won’t bother looking!”

Li Huowang’s expression hardened. He tore off his red Daoist robe, whipped out a steel striker, and dragged it across his own body.