Counter

Sparks fell onto Li Huowang’s skin as the fire striker scraped against the flint.

WHOOSH.

The excruciating pain, almost enough to make him black out, was followed by his entire body igniting in a violent blaze.

The air around him warped from the extreme heat. His flesh blackened at a terrifying speed.

But when he saw the nine-colored stag covered in rising black smoke, Li Huowang grinned a lipless grin and charged toward it.

When his burning body slammed into that mass of flesh, it instantly ignited, engulfed in roaring flames.

Watching the flesh twist and blacken under the intense fire, Li Huowang felt a slight easing of tension. Choosing not to make a life-saving talisman out of his skin before coming here had been the right call.

But gradually, as the writhing flesh stopped moving, Li Huowang sensed something was wrong.

He rushed into the fire and raised his Purple-Tasseled Sword, chopping down heavily on the charred lump. He turned it over, inside and out, but couldn’t find the Spirit-Blight he was looking for.

“It got away!” Li Huowang’s face turned very ugly. This Spirit-Blight was far more cunning than he had imagined.

“Let’s see how far you can run!” Scanning his surroundings, Li Huowang crouched down and pressed his hand against the grass and dead wood on the ground. Soon, a ring of fire spread outward from him, climbing onto the surrounding peach trees like a living thing.

Like a contagious plague, one peach tree after another caught fire, and in no time, the entire area became a sea of flames.

Standing in the fire, Li Huowang scanned the area for anything unusual. But nothing happened. The Spirit-Blight wasn’t forced out by the massive blaze. This thing was even harder to deal with than he had expected.

“What now? If it runs, finding it again will be a real problem.” After a moment’s thought, he decided to perform a divination on it.

But just as he was about to cut a wound on himself with his sword, he saw a flame on the back of his hand suddenly come to life and burrow straight into the gash.

“Damn it! That Spirit-Blight possessed the fire!” Li Huowang realized what was happening, but it already seemed too late.

The fire on his body and the flames on the surrounding peach trees died out instantly. His body began to fall apart, just like the nine-colored stag before. Flesh, bones, skin, hair—all separated, melting into a puddle.

He felt the tearing pain of every inch of his flesh, the sensation of being melted and ripped apart. It was a torment that could make a person wish for death.

But at this moment, Li Huowang couldn’t even die, because his body was almost completely under the Spirit-Blight’s control!

He could feel its malice. A pure, absolute malice, from the inside out, a hatred and disgust for everything in the world, constantly assimilating his consciousness.

The Spirit-Blight didn’t seem to be some kind of living creature—it was more like the embodiment of a sin! Even the worst person in the world couldn’t have a heart without a single shred of goodness!

Feeling half of his face slide to the ground, Li Huowang clenched his fists and gritted his teeth. “There’s nothing wrong with me! There’s no Spirit-Blight inside me!”

His focus wavered for a moment, and his liquefied body suddenly returned to normal. Even the skin he had sacrificed to Bashe grew back.

But Li Huowang understood that this was just an illusion. He couldn’t pull off faking reality well enough!

Using this brief opening, Li Huowang sprinted out of the peach forest.

The moment he caught sight of the carriage again, his body collapsed like it was made of tofu. Just as his head was about to separate, he shouted toward the carriage, “Li Sui! There’s something inside me! Help me drive it out!”

The moment the words left his mouth, Li Huowang’s body instantly turned into a writhing mound of flesh, crawling deeper into the peach grove.

Rapid footsteps sounded. The Spirit-Blight, controlling Li Huowang’s two eyeballs, turned to look and saw a large, skinless bloody dog charging toward them on all fours.

“Dad, I’m coming!” In midair, Li Sui’s body instantly came apart. Her flesh and tentacles rapidly coalesced into a single mass and smashed heavily into Li Huowang’s mushy remains.

The two clumps of flesh began to intertwine, twisting into a huge, tentacle-covered ball of tissue that rolled violently through the burning peach grove.

Li Huowang’s face and Li Sui’s face would occasionally emerge from the ball of flesh, then quickly disappear again. The mass would sometimes gather into a vaguely human shape, then collapse back into a puddle of gore—it was extremely unstable.

The Spirit-Blight seemed to want to take over Li Sui’s body as well, but it wasn’t that easy. After all, a Black Tai Sui parasitic entity was itself born for body-possession. And on top of that, Li Huowang, who had fought his way back to partial control, was actively obstructing it.

Facing a two-on-one situation, the Spirit-Blight was ultimately defeated. When Li Huowang’s body reassembled into a huge, bloated form, his stomach split open, and something crawled out.

Li Huowang tried to see what it was, but he couldn’t see anything at all. He could only track the bizarre footprints in the ash and dead grass on the ground as they quickly disappeared around a corner in the distance.

That was the Spirit-Blight. It could never be seen by anyone who carried the Ten Emotions and Eight Sufferings.

“Dad, are you okay?” By the time Li Sui crawled out of Li Huowang’s abdomen, his bloated body had finally returned to normal.

His internal organs were all jumbled up, and some things were even connected in the wrong places, but at least this time, the body was completely his own.

Staring at the strange two-fingered footprints pressed into the ash on the ground, Li Huowang clutched the wound on his stomach, hatred flickering in his eyes. He had been through so much, and he’d almost been ambushed by this thing here.

He then endured the pain all over his skin and followed the footprints deeper into the woods.

“Li Sui, wait outside. If I call for you, come running in! Any other time, stay by Miao Miao’s side!”

This time, Li Huowang slowed his pace, moving carefully through the burning forest.

He was completely on high alert, listening to every sound around him. If he couldn’t see it, then he’d use his ears!

This thing was far more cunning than he had imagined. He had to take it down in one single, decisive move.

Suddenly, Li Huowang heard a faint rustling sound. It was coming from behind him.

Li Huowang didn’t act immediately. He kept walking forward slowly. When he spotted a tree hollow that went all the way through, he bent down and crawled inside, pretending to search for something.

Behind him, two strange footprints appeared in the ash on the ground. The thing moved quickly, creeping toward Li Huowang’s feet, preparing to burrow in through a crack in his flesh.

But the moment it slipped inside, the Spirit-Blight immediately realized something was wrong. This person’s body was only the lower half. The upper half, with the head, was gone.

“Heh… I finally caught you, didn’t I? You didn’t think I’d use my own lower body as bait, did you?”