The Eight Immortals

Inside the dim, cavernous cargo hold, dark-brown root-carved figures of the Eight Immortals surrounded Li Huowang. Their twisted, knotted wooden bodies glowed an eerie phosphorescent green, making them look even more nightmarish.

Compared to Iron Crutch Li and Lü Dongbin, the others presented an even more grotesque sight—each one maintained the basic human shape while twisting it into its own particular horror. He Xiangu’s neck was wound tight like hempen rope. Han Zhongli’s bare chest had breasts of drastically different sizes, and the numbers didn’t match either; the flesh bulged outward like rotting fat, making him nauseating to look at.

The dark hold was silent. Facing these things, Li Huowang could hear nothing but his own breathing.

He studied the wooden Eight Immortals arrayed around him and knew that in this utterly mad world, anything with the word “immortal” in it was pure poison.

“Li Sui, let’s go! Find the Heart-Pan of Doumu and be done with it fast.” As he spoke, Li Huowang shifted his posture into invisibility once more, threading quickly through the cluster of root carvings and heading deeper into the ship.

But just as he cleared the last of them, the sound of wood grinding against wood—hair-raisingly close—came from behind.

He spun around. The eight root-carved immortals stood lined up in a row, their bizarre, mismatched eyes fixed on him. They could move.

Crack. Li Huowang threw a phosphorescent stone to the ground; it flared once and dimmed. This was only the beginning. One by one, the glow-stones went out, plunging the space around him back into a churning darkness. Even with his keen eyesight, he could only see a few feet.

From the dark, accompanied by Han Xiangzi’s flute, came a strange voice—now male, now female:

“The superior scholar has no quarrel; the inferior scholar loves contention. Superior virtue is not virtuous; inferior virtue clings to virtue. He who clings is not called virtuous.”

After the words, low laughter—male, female, old, young—layered over each other from all directions.

Hearing that laughter, Li Huowang clenched his jaw. He swung the spine sword in his right hand toward where the immortals had stood, sending a rift toward the Great Qi flying in that direction.

Just as he sidestepped left to avoid a possible attack, Lü Dongbin’s wood carving appeared without warning on his left side. As Li Huowang moved, the gaping hole in Lü’s chest opened like a blood-red maw, waiting for him to fall into it. At the last moment, a sucker-tipped tentacle shot out of Li Huowang’s body, slapped the floor, and held him fast, keeping him from making contact.

“What the hell are these things!” Gritting his teeth, Li Huowang raised both blades and slashed at the Lü carving before him. Crunch. The carving split in two.

Suddenly something tripped him from below. He stumbled left—and directly into the path of Han Xiangzi’s twisted bamboo flute, already aimed and waiting for his temple to meet it. The tip was barely an inch away when something yanked the figure sideways, out of range.

Thump! Li Huowang slammed his sword into the deck to steady himself, then slowly straightened up, his face twisted in rage. “Are you rotten lumps of wood done playing yet?”

A steel striker clicked against flint on his body. Flames erupted, covering him in a sheet of fire. The next instant, the blaze spread like a contagion onto the semi-immortal root carvings around him. The dark hold lit up in an instant.

The Eight Immortals, which had kept their motionless poses until now, finally moved. Burning burls and roots stretched their flame-swathed limbs and began crawling toward him.

Just as Li Huowang was about to set the whole ship ablaze, the deck underfoot split open. Seawater surged in, dousing the flames and bringing the darkness back with it.

Water and fire hissed and fought. Li Huowang’s body seized with pain. Not willing to waste the moment, he reached down, took a rib from his navel, and jammed it backward into his chest.

Instantly, the pain he felt was shared with everything around him. For a moment, everything went still.

“You want to play that game? Fine! I’ll sink the whole damn ship!” Charred black, Li Huowang swam like a water ghost to the wooden wall, raised his spine sword, and hacked furiously. Each cut sent a rift tearing through the wood, also dragging seawater in. The wall became riddled with gashes.

But then something unexpected happened: the wooden splits writhed like living flesh and quickly sealed themselves. And that wasn’t all. Forms began to emerge from the dark seawater—the eight root-carved immortals again.

After the baptism of fire, they were even worse. A layer of charcoal clung to their already monstrous bodies; the charcoal flaked off like black mist, spreading in the water and making them more terrifying than before. The cut where Li Huowang had split Lü Dongbin had healed. All eight converged on him.

The immortals moved, trailing black mist from their charred bodies, agile as monkeys as they rushed him.

Li Huowang raised the spine sword and blocked He Xiangu’s lotus, then drove the Purple-Tasseled Sword into Zhang Guolao’s face. Then he opened his mouth wide—dense tentacles shot out of his throat and twisted Han Zhongli’s head clean off his shoulders.

Behind him, Li Sui wielded the Bronze Coin Sword, defending back-to-back. Despite the surprise attack underwater, Li Huowang wasn’t losing. But these semi-immortals were tenacious: merely cutting off a limb or separating a head wouldn’t stop them; he had to grind them to splinters before they’d stay down.

Dealing with them was one thing, but the bigger problem was running out of air.

With the high-intensity action and being deep underwater, Li Huowang’s lungs burned like fire. The pain twisted his face; veins bulged on his forehead. Instinct screamed at him to surface, but he was pinned under the massive ship, tangled with these bizarre immortals. Swimming free seemed impossible.

Under oxygen deprivation, his consciousness grew foggy. Hallucinations flickered at the edges.

He broke the surface, gasped air, a dagger clamped between his teeth… Took several deep breaths and dove back into the deep, swimming straight down.

The vivid surge of air snapped Li Huowang back to clarity. Strength flooded his limbs.