The Thing

The stabbing headache had eased slightly, but Li Huowang still stared at the scene inside the revolving-light mirror, almost certain he was seeing things.

A huge red dot—the one that had represented the Military Sect’s formation—was being torn apart by something. A massive chunk of it had simply been ripped away.

“Impossible. That… how? The god-summoning ritual—I broke it!” Li Huowang looked up at the statue over his head. It was utterly still. Then he swept his gaze across the chicken-foot men lying in the blood around him, some on their backs, some on their sides.

His expression turning ugly, Li Huowang stabbed a finger into the mirror, pushing toward one of the smaller red dots near the battlefield. He needed to know what the hell was happening over there.

In an instant, his perspective shifted. He was riding a warhorse, galloping into the distance.

He turned his head to look at the battlefield—and froze.

The Military Sect’s massive formation was grappling with something invisible. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel its presence. Every movement it made visibly distorted the space around it, punching craters into the air itself.

From the vague outline of those warped folds in reality, Li Huowang could barely make out four legs. It was enormous. Flat. And covered in long, dangling appendages.

But beyond that, he couldn’t squeeze out any more details.

“What is this? What the hell is this?” Li Huowang’s teeth ground together so hard he thought they might crack. Whatever it was, one thing was clear: the Fa Sect’s scheme had still worked. They must have prepared a backup.

Even if he had stopped this ritual, the Fa Sect had succeeded with others somewhere else.

Taishan Shi’s memories had been flawed. But whether the Fa Sect had always distrusted him, or whether this whole thing had been a trap from the start, it didn’t change the desperate reality he was staring at now.

Li Huowang yanked his hand out of the mirror and shouted to the others, “Move! Everyone, move! Reinforce the southwest!”

Hearing the order, Zhao Jiabao and the rest, who had been on patrol, snapped into action without a second thought. They followed his command.

Li Huowang prepared to go too, even though his head was splitting, even though he had no idea if he could deal with that thing.

But he had to. If he let that creature massacre the Military Sect coalition, Daliang would be left for the Fa Sect to carve up.

“I need to get there fast. Fast.” Li Huowang pressed his hand to his head, his face twisted in agony.

With a wet pfft, the sharp blade of a halberd burst through Li Huowang’s chest. Peng Longteng, her whole body wreathed in flames, let out a low growl and jerked the blade upward. Li Huowang was launched high into the air, flung from the wooden city, hurtling southwest.

The rain was still falling. Under the violent storm, Li Huowang couldn’t keep his eyes open as he arced through the clouds. He could only gauge his position by the revolving-light mirror every time he dropped to a certain altitude.

He didn’t know how long he flew. By the time his charred, cracking skin had frozen stiff from the cold, his position overlapped with the massive red dot in the mirror.

“There.” Li Huowang tucked his limbs in and began to plummet.

As he broke through the cloud layer and re-entered the human world, he saw it—crouching in the center of the scarred battlefield, a bizarre, misshapen thing.

It looked a bit like a toad. But also more deformed. It had something of that statue from before, but not quite.

It was half-crouched, its body formless, shifting and writhing. The parts of it that had been completely invisible before were now crawling with iron and flesh—wriggling, seething.

When Li Huowang heard the coordinated battle cries coming from above it, he finally understood. The stuff covering it was the Military Sect. Every single one of them. They had completely swarmed the thing.

Suddenly, the creature let out a roar—neither tiger nor wolf—and shook off every soldier clinging to it. They flew into the air like rain, scattering in all directions.

With the Military Sect retreating, the creature returned to its previous state. The space around it still warped, but its body was once again utterly transparent.

The Military Sect’s attack hadn’t seemed to hurt it. Or maybe it had, but its blood was just as invisible as the rest of it.

The soldiers who had been shaken off tried to reform their formation, but Li Huowang could feel it. They were running out of steam.

“Xuanpin! Xuanpin!” Li Huowang shouted into the air, frantic. “I don’t care where you are right now, but you’d better get here. This is trouble—massive trouble. Something this huge, don’t tell me you didn’t see it!”

“A situation this critical—don’t you dare tell me, you old fox, that you don’t have a backup plan. Stop holding out! Those Fa Sect bastards really summoned this thing!”

Li Huowang’s voice echoed across the empty battlefield, but no one answered. It was as if Xuanpin couldn’t care less about a life-or-death crisis like this.

Furious as he was, Li Huowang couldn’t say he was surprised. He clenched his fists and started walking toward the distant creature with steady steps.

“Xuanpin. If I make it out of this alive, you’re on my list. You’re on it!”

As his roar faded, the thunder of hooves sounded from behind. Peng Longteng swept her halberd down, hooking Li Huowang onto her horse’s back, and they charged toward the distant battlefield.

They say a mountain can kill a horse just by how far it looks. It took nearly half a zhuxiang before Li Huowang was finally close enough to see the thing up close.

When he was beside it, he truly understood its power. Something was spreading out from the creature—an emotion, a will, trying to infect everything around it, to assimilate the whole world into a piece of itself.

It was bestial. And ambitious.

They had said it wasn’t a Siming, but in Li Huowang’s eyes, this thing wasn’t far off. Only a Siming could unconsciously try to absorb everything around it.

With a hair-raising crunch, the invisible, monstrous jaw opened and shut. The crushed bodies of Military Sect soldiers, mixed with blood, fell in a wet slosh.

The soldiers swarmed over the creature again, hacking at it with every weapon they had. But it did little good. It was as if nothing in this world could hurt it.

“What do I do?” The question popped into Li Huowang’s head. Faced with something like this, how was he supposed to fight?

He watched the soldiers charge forward, wave after wave, never hesitating. Li Huowang took a slow, deep breath.

“Screw it. I’ll try.”

He hesitated, reaching for the hilt of the spine-sword. But feeling how much his head still hurt, he thought better of it and let his hand fall.

“No. Zhuge Yuan probably isn’t coming back. I need to build something else. Something new.”