The City Wall

Chapter 716: The City Wall

The half-body of a woman lay twitching beside the foul well. The eyeball that had fallen from its socket wobbled slightly with each tremor.

Then her body went still. After a few breaths, the rats seemed to sense something. Coated in filth, they crawled out from inside her and scattered in every direction.

Not long after, Li Huowang’s foot stepped over the woman’s head as he walked past, heading forward.

He frowned at everything around him. This was a destroyed town. Rubble stretched in every direction. No living person remained. Scorched earth and death were all that was left.

Li Huowang remembered this place. After escaping from Qingfeng Temple, he had once stayed here overnight.

Back then, it had been bustling with life. Now, not a single person was left. Everyone had been butchered.

This was close to the front lines. Whether by war or by the Fa Sect’s deception, the outcome was the same for the people of Siqi.

Judging by the freshness of the corpses, the slaughter hadn’t happened long ago.

“Suisui, take a rest. We’re almost there.” Li Huowang sat down on a bench, pulled out his dry rations and water, and began to eat.

Li Sui looked at the bodies around them with a sorrowful expression. “Dad, so many people died.” She had finally come to understand what death meant.

“Yeah. ‘Better to be a dog in peace than a man in chaos’—that’s not just an empty saying.”

As a monk nearby began reciting sutras for the dead, Li Huowang’s heart remained numb. He had seen too many corpses along this road. He had long since gone past feeling.

In truth, his mind was entirely occupied with his own affairs.

“How did this happen? Why did cultivating the True end up giving me a daughter like Suisui?” The question flashed through his mind.

Advancing in his cultivation method was certainly a good thing. But what had just happened made Li Huowang’s heart sink for no clear reason.

He had been practicing this cultivation method for a long time. It was true that the further he went, the stronger he became. At first, even making the smallest change had left him with splitting headaches and nosebleeds.

Now that he had reached the fourth cycle, creating objects out of thin air came as easily as reaching for a cup.

But this cultivation method—the one that came from Doumu—did it truly have no hidden dangers? A flicker of worry began to surface in Li Huowang’s heart.

Suddenly, something occurred to him. “Back then, I asked Ji Zai about this!”

“Ji Zai didn’t object, which is why I kept practicing. Could it be…” Li Huowang’s heart sank lower and lower.

Ji Zai was his Siming. But this Siming, mired in bewilderment and unable to help him in the slightest, didn’t it have its own private schemes?

If he couldn’t use the Ao-Jing Sect’s methods anymore, and if he abandoned this cultivation ability, then he would have nothing left but to charge in with a sword and fight hand-to-hand.

“No. I can’t let my guard down around Ji Zai. I still need to keep using the painful sacrifices from the Thousand Greats Record. I can’t let him think he has me cornered.” Li Huowang quickly settled on his next course of action.

He still knew too little about the Siming. He couldn’t fully trust them—not even if that Siming was a future version of himself.

He had to make Ji Zai understand that there were limits. Only then would he avoid ending up as a pawn being moved at someone else’s whim.

Just as Li Huowang tilted his water gourd, raised it to his mouth, and washed down the dry rations, he caught a faint red glow on the horizon to his left, along with rolling black smoke.

“If I remember right, that’s…” Li Huowang reached his right index finger into the swivel-mirror on his left side.

In moments, he understood what was happening over there. A Fa Sect fortress—a city built on defensible terrain—was being held by a large army.

That location was a strategic chokepoint. There was no way around it; they would have to take it by force. Attempting a flanking maneuver would cut off their own supply lines.

After pulling his finger back, Li Huowang immediately took Li Sui and sprinted toward that direction.

They passed through a grove. A horrifying battlefield unfolded before Li Huowang’s eyes. On top of the city wall, steaming hot golden broth was being poured down. Some Battle-family cultivators, massive in build, endured the boiling liquid that left their skin blistered and peeling, and leapt upward anyway.

A few had already made it inside the city. Everything was a chaotic mess—inside and out, the clash of battle never ceased.

Li Huowang didn’t approach recklessly. Instead, he first circled the four sides of the city wall.

When he spotted a weak point on the eastern wall—a section that hadn’t yet been breached—he shifted his body into the earth, turned invisible, and crept closer.

Once he reached the wall, Li Huowang didn’t climb over it. Instead, he pressed his hand against the surface.

Closing his eyes, he pushed his hands forward. His entire body squeezed directly into the wall.

When his form emerged on the other side, he looked back. The wall behind him had returned to its undisturbed state, as if nothing had happened.

“Let’s go!” A tentacle lashed out from Li Huowang’s body, hooked onto the eaves, and hoisted him up.

As soon as he steadied himself, he was stunned to find that the City God Temple was gone. In its place, at the center of the city, sat an enormous statue.

The statue was pitch-black. Its left hand, pressed against its abdomen, formed the Vajra seal; its right hand rested at its chest, holding a precious jade bottle. The face was kind and compassionate, yet the more Li Huowang looked at it, the more wrong it felt.

Whatever this thing was, it was definitely not the Yu’er Shen. The true Yu’er Shen, the one who dwelled in darkness, could not be constructed out of mud and bamboo.

“Is the Yu’er Shen changing its identity to deceive more people?” It made sense, he supposed. If the Fa Sect revealed the true appearance of the Yu’er Shen, half their followers would probably desert.

“Tap-tap-tap.” Li Huowang’s feet rapidly beat against the roof tiles as he dashed toward the yamen in the center of the city.

The city was vast, but under these circumstances, Li Huowang had no trouble finding it. After all, the yamen was the only building where a stone lion and a stone skeleton were permitted to stand guard.

“Shiiing!” A long spear suddenly pierced through the roof tiles, stabbing into the sole of Li Huowang’s foot. “An ambush? I’ve been spotted!”

Before Li Huowang could react, the spear was yanked back.

With a crash of shattered tiles, Li Huowang dropped straight through the hole and into the room below.

There, he saw a man who looked like he was walking on stilts, holding a pair of double-headed spears.

The man stared at Li Huowang’s feet with a sinister smile. “Heh heh. With such clumsy moves, you dare to raid our camp? My spearheads have been coated with—”

Before he could finish, Li Huowang’s body instantly shrank by a full zhang. His Purple-Tasseled Sword plunged straight into the man’s neck.

“I don’t care what you coated them with! I’ll coat your neck first!”

After everything he had been through, Li Huowang had learned how to use his Heart-Element abilities. No matter what the man had applied to his spear—if Li Huowang didn’t hear it, it meant nothing at all!

Under the man’s disbelieving gaze, Li Huowang flicked his wrist. Blood sprayed upward. Without looking back, he turned and decisively leaped out of the house.

(End of Chapter)