Chapter 338
Chapter 338
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>Translator: Ryuma
>Chapter: 338
>Chapter Title: Collapse
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“Master Heart, are you sure you didn’t get it wrong this time?”
Maybe the Sitien Division could kill innocents indiscriminately for the sake of getting the job done, but Li Huowang could never get past that hurdle in his heart.
As soon as Li Huowang said this, the little girl who had been worshiping Buddha shrank back, leaving only a set of clothes in place.
“Erjiu! Why didn’t you listen to this poor monk?” Li Huowang sneered coldly at Heart, who now looked like a wrathful guardian deity.
He walked over to the pile of clothes with his blade in hand and thrust it forcefully into the yellow prayer mat. Accompanied by a miserable cry like that of a small dog, bright red blood surged continuously from the mat.
That thing hadn’t left at all; it had merely shrunk itself extremely small and flat, hiding inside the prayer mat.
“Master Heart, if everything you say is always this accurate, I wouldn’t have to figure things out for myself.”
Another thing was that he didn’t want to be used as a tool by others, especially by something so repulsive.
Seeing that the atmosphere between the two was turning tense, Jixiang immediately stepped in to intervene.
“Enough! I’m not dead yet! You little brats, all behave yourselves! Don’t forget why I brought you here!”
Although Jixiang always had that smiling, amiable look, neither Li Huowang nor Heart saw him as someone who could be easily pushed around. Since he had spoken, they held their tongues.
Time passed bit by bit. Soon, they had been wandering through the Buddha Bone Temple for half an hour, but aside from that earlier ambush, they had found nothing.
Who knew if the Sitting Oblivion Daoists had left early or were deliberately avoiding them.
Though so much time had passed, Jixiang, as the leader, showed no sign of anxiety. Instead, his eyes grew brighter and brighter.
This only reinforced Li Huowang’s earlier suspicion: Jixiang definitely had ulterior motives for coming to this Buddha Bone Temple.
Just as they entered another hall filled with dried corpses, Jixiang’s expression suddenly turned ecstatic.
As his fingers on the abacus sped up, turning into afterimages, tiny sparks began to fly from it.
“Come quickly!”
Jixiang stepped on the marble floor in a specific pattern. After circling around three times in an extremely complex manner, the painted image of a seated Bodhisattva on one of the pillars moved unnaturally on its own.
Seeing this, Li Huowang thought with absolute certainty in his heart, “I was right before! Jixiang came here to find something! Dealing with the Sitting Oblivion Daoists was just a side task!”
Then, on the pillar’s image, the Buddha with an expression of neither joy nor sorrow rapidly aged and withered. In no time, it turned into a dried corpse.
The corpse’s two hands reached into its ribcage and slowly pried open its abdominal cavity.
However, when Jixiang, beaming with delight, looked up at the dried corpse image on the pillar, he froze.
The abdomen of the image was completely empty—nothing at all.
“Where’s the Heart Turbid? Someone got here first? But that shouldn’t be possible. This place is only findable by me.”
Heart Turbid? Hearing this name that contained the character for “heart,” Li Huowang, as a Heart Pure, felt especially sensitive to it.
“Could there be other humanoid heavenly treasures like Heart Pures? If Heart Pures embody bewilderment, then what’s the side effect of these?”
Just as he was about to ask Tuoba Danqing beside him, a long, muffled rumble made everyone look up simultaneously at the beams overhead.
Before anyone could react, the beggar-dressed Hong Da suddenly shouted, “Run! This hall is collapsing!”
The moment the words left his mouth, accompanied by a tremendous shaking, the massive beams carrying thousands of pounds of tiles crashed down heavily.
After a deafening crash, thick dust billowed up, engulfing everything.
“Ow.” That was how Li Huowang felt—every part of his body hurt.
Everything was foggy and hazy; he couldn’t tell where he was. He tried to move but felt a thousand pounds weighing him down. He was pinned.
As he pondered how to free himself, amid the shifting rubble and flying dust, a burly figure appeared before him.
When that person lifted the thousand-pound main beam off Li Huowang’s body, Li Huowang finally felt he could move.
He crawled out from under the tiles, shook the dust off himself, and said to the man, “Thanks, Brother Tuoba.”
The equally dusty and dirt-covered Tuoba Danqing set the beam down from his shoulder. “Come on, what are you thanking me for? We’ve drunk together and visited the brothels together. You think your big brother would just stand by and watch you die?”
“You alright? Where’s everyone else? This temple collapsing has to be the Sitting Oblivion Daoists’ doing.” Tuoba Danqing patted the dust off himself as well.
Li Huowang nodded. “Who says otherwise.”
With that, he quietly stepped a few inches away from Tuoba Danqing, always keeping him in his line of sight.
As the two spoke, a noise rose from the distant haze, and an extremely tall figure emerged—Master Heart.
When he saw the two standing together, his expression instantly grew grave. His thick finger pointed sharply at Li Huowang.
In the next moment, Tuoba Danqing beside him seemed to hear something in his ear and retreated repeatedly, quickly putting distance between them.
The three then stood in a triangle formation, with Heart and Tuoba Danqing glaring warily at Li Huowang.
In this situation, Li Huowang immediately realized that the monk Heart must have used his mind-reading ability to say something into Tuoba Danqing’s ear.
Just as they were about to make a move, Li Huowang looked at Tuoba Danqing and said, “Brother Tuoba, you can suspect me of being a Sitting Oblivion Daoist, but why not suspect that Heart is the fake one?”
“Don’t try to fool me. Would a Sitting Oblivion Daoist know mind-reading?” The previously warm Tuoba Danqing had clearly turned ice-cold.
“Why couldn’t a Sitting Oblivion Daoist know mind-reading? All their abilities are stolen from others!” Li Huowang, his face ashen, drew the sword from his back.
“We knew you’d try to sow discord like this, but Lord Jixiang already calculated it. Even if they came here wealthy, it would take three hours to learn mind-reading. So he’s real, and you’re fake.”
Faced with this baseless accusation, Li Huowang’s anger could no longer be suppressed.
“He’s obviously the fake one!”
As Li Huowang pointed his sword straight at the Heart monk, a familiar voice rang in his ear—the monk’s mind-reading.
“No, this poor monk is real. And I know you, Donor Er, are real too. But right now, this poor monk’s words are truth. Whomever this poor monk says is fake is fake.”
“What?!”
Li Huowang’s pupils dilated massively as he stared incredulously at the Heart monk before him.
He had considered many possibilities earlier, but he never imagined that he would be backstabbed by his own people first upon arriving here!
“Inner fighting at a time like this? Are you insane? Just because I stood up to you earlier?”
The Heart monk’s lips curled slightly before quickly returning to an expression of neither joy nor sorrow. “That’s right. This poor monk is just that petty.”
With that, he stamped his foot hard and charged at Li Huowang alongside Tuoba Danqing.
“You madman!”
Roaring with rage that tore at his heart and lungs, Li Huowang gritted his teeth, drew the Violet-Tasseled Sword, and rushed toward Heart.
As Li Huowang drew closer, a flash of cold light stabbed out from the nearby haze, aiming straight for his neck.
It was a rusty shortsword, gripped by the knife pawnbroker Hong Da.
Now surrounded on three sides, Li Huowang was in an extremely passive position.
“What the hell is going on?! Did they discover my identity?! Was this a trap set for me from the start?!”
(End of Chapter)