Chapter 607
Chapter 607
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>Translator: Ryuma
>Chapter: 607
>Chapter Title: True and False
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The wooden ship cabin wasn’t large, about the size of a classroom, but its entire walls were rounded like the burrow of some insect or ant.
Moreover, these irregular walls were similarly covered in all sorts of relief carvings. As the densely packed little wooden figures on the carvings moved to the edges of the walls, pointing and gesturing at Li Huowang, the entire cabin surged like a living thing.
It was within this bizarre ship cabin that Li Huowang finally laid eyes on the true form of what they called the Yin-Yang Doumu’s heart-pan.
The man sat upon a brown grand master’s chair, shirtless, with a bronze mask on his face much like the one at the entrance to the Bureau of Astronomy. The only difference was that this mask had a green face and fangs, making it look utterly terrifying.
The man’s body was skin and bones, yet his belly was grotesquely huge. On his round, bulging stomach was painted a Yin-Yang Taiji fish that writhed and spread outward in all directions.
The five chains from the necks of the heart elements were wrapped around his left arm. Evidently, he had been the one speaking earlier. He had no legs—or rather, his lower body had completely fused with the brown grand master’s chair.
Li Huowang stared at him, about to open his mouth to demand answers, but the other man clearly had no intention of saying anything.
As soon as he saw Li Huowang enter, the man yanked hard on the chains with his left hand. With a clanking rattle, the five heart elements outside were instantly dragged in, lunging toward Li Huowang’s back.
As the five heart elements opened their mouths in unison and chanted something, wooden planks rose from the floor, stabbing toward his body.
“Will this ever end?!” Li Huowang roared in fury, gripping his spine bone sword tightly. Ignoring the heart elements closing in behind him, he charged straight at the masked man ahead.
Just as Li Huowang swung his sword at him, his ears—which should have been deaf—suddenly picked up a sound. The voice came from beneath the mask.
“Heavenly Platform attains the Dao. Gezhao becomes true. Jade Capital Golden Palace. Positioned in the Supreme Ultimate. Great Compassion, Great Vow. Great Sage, Great Mercy. Supreme Jade Capital. Inner Prime of Heaven’s Mechanism. Jade Void Purple Spirit. Universal Transformation, Mysterious Serenity. Eternal Dao responds swiftly.”
It wasn’t just the masked man chanting; the five heart elements behind Li Huowang were chanting along as well.
During their incantation, Li Huowang and the hallucinations around him flickered faintly. Something invisible to ordinary eyes in the mortal world slipped away from his body.
In the next moment, the rift from Li Huowang’s swing slashed across the man’s face. But the rift—which had always been devastating in the past two histories—didn’t cleave him in two. Instead, it scattered like a gentle breeze.
“How is this possible? It doesn’t work on him?! Could this guy in front of me be another dragon vein?”
As Li Huowang clenched his teeth in unwillingness, Peng Longteng’s towering form appeared beside him in an instant, seizing him and hurling him forward.
As Li Huowang slammed into the masked man with a trail of afterimages, the purple-tasseled sword in his hand and the copper coin sword entwined by Li Sui’s tentacles plunged together into the man’s massively swollen belly.
Yet, to everyone’s astonishment, the two swords along with Li Huowang’s body passed straight through the man’s form, emerging behind the rattan grand master’s chair.
Stunned, Li Huowang paused for a breath before raising his weapons once more to strike at him.
Though the sword did indeed pierce the man’s body, it left no wound— not even damaging the wooden chair beneath him.
“This isn’t right!!” Li Huowang raised his weapon and viciously stabbed it into his own thigh.
The purple-tasseled sword, which could slice through iron like mud, easily passed through Li Huowang’s thigh and out the other side. But not only did he feel no pain—there wasn’t even any blood on the blade.
Li Huowang understood now. The man wasn’t a dragon vein or anything else. The problem was with himself.
The proof was that ever since earlier, this Doumu heart-pan hadn’t so much as glanced at him, as if he didn’t exist at all.
“What the hell is...” In shock, Li Huowang raised his hand to touch his head, only for it to pass straight through.
At this moment, Li Huowang was like a bodiless ghost—unable to touch anything, not even himself.
“What’s going on?” As Li Huowang stared in bewilderment, a familiar voice rang in his ear. “You’ve turned fake! Hurry and figure something out—I’ll hold off the Doumu heart-pan!”
At that moment, the ceiling of the entire ship cabin slowly opened. The Doumu heart-pan, with the five heart elements in tow, knelt in ritual obeisance toward the starry sky above.
“Neither existent nor empty, this is called the True Void. Manifest spiritual traces in the dusty world, guard the holy carriage in Jambudvipa. Great Compassion, Great Vow. Great Sage, Great Mercy. Saintly Virtue, Vast Radiance, Golden Sovereign. Great Sage Marici. Perfect Brightness Doumu Heavenly Venerable!!”
The starry points were shrouded by roiling darkness, as if something were about to emerge.
“Neither existent nor empty? I’ve turned fake? I’m fake now?” Li Huowang looked down at his current body, at a loss for what to do.
No matter what he did now, he couldn’t affect reality at all. It seemed this clash was already lost.
“No! No! There’s still a way. He can borrow the Doumu’s true-false Heavenly Dao as her heart-pan. Well, as Ji Zai’s heart-pan, I can borrow his Heavenly Dao too!”
“Bewilderment... Bewilderment, damn it!! How the hell do you even use this thing?!” Li Huowang clenched his fists and shouted in rage.
Li Huowang, covered in serious wounds, was in a dire predicament right now. He’d gotten cocky. Armed with just a boning knife, he couldn’t possibly fight Xu Shou’s bodyguard dogs—let alone the guns they carried!
“Bang!” A wooden crate in front of Li Huowang exploded in an instant, forcing him to shrink even further into the corner.
“Woof woof woof!” The barking rang out again. At the sound, images of those five bull terriers flashed in Li Huowang’s mind.
These were fighting dogs; when they went berserk, they felt no pain from bites. Against things like this, his boning knife was utterly useless.
Earlier on the deck, he’d sacrificed his left arm just to kill one. He hadn’t expected them to follow him here.
As the footsteps and barking grew closer, intense reluctance burned in Li Huowang’s eyes. “Is this how it ends? No way!! I need a proper weapon! One strong enough to deal with them all!”
Fortunately, Li Huowang had prepared for contingencies before coming. If things went south, he’d use his backup plan.
Without hesitation, Li Huowang pulled out a medicine bottle from his bosom, twisted off the cap, tilted his head back, and dumped all the red capsules inside into his mouth.
After chewing them forcefully with his mouth open and swallowing them down, Li Huowang felt the surroundings begin to change. The cruise ship’s smooth white paint gradually morphed into yellow-brown wooden planks marked with growth rings.
And Li Huowang, who had been pondering how to use this special Heavenly Dao called Bewilderment, was stunned to discover that his hand could once again touch his head without passing through.