Chapter 77
Chapter 77
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>Translator: Ryuma
>Chapter: 77
>Chapter Title: Ba Hui
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> “One tongue turns the wheel! One eyelash spans a thousand worlds! Wondrous extremes beyond words! Heavenly mysteries and divine strangeness—dare not engrave with qi! Our lord supreme! How dare you be startled!?”
>
> After the wooden bamboo slips spoke these words through a human tongue, everything around them began to distort. At the same time, everyone on the entire island experienced a shift in all their senses.
>
> Sight, taste, smell, hearing—everything fused together, forming an entirely new perception that ordinary people could never comprehend.
>
> Through this utterly bizarre perceptual ability, Li Huowang and the others broke through the limits of human senses.
>
> They saw into the deepest depths of the sky. In an immeasurably vast and dark abyss, countless even deeper black worlds rotated alongside the sun, and something was moving there.
>
> Li Huowang smelled a trace of the gaze shooting from that thing, tasted the terrifying aura on that gaze that made him shudder uncontrollably, and heard the bizarre rhythm from its slightest movement.
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> “Thump~ thump thump~ thump!!”
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> Li Huowang felt it was incredibly far away, yet its rhythm was so alluring and clear.
>
> Li Huowang couldn’t find anything in reality that matched this rhythm. The only somewhat similar thing was the thunder before the Joy God appeared.
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> But this thing was far, far more powerful than the Joy God. The puny Joy God was like a grain of sand next to a mountain by comparison.
>
> Li Huowang made this judgment almost without hesitation, even though he had no idea what exactly he was perceiving.
>
> “Commit suicide to bring out Danyangzi? No! Danyangzi would be nothing before it too! The gap between them is too vast!!”
>
> Li Huowang despaired as he realized this. Before that thing, mortals had no chance of resistance whatsoever.
>
> Just as Li Huowang had fallen into utter despair, standing there awaiting death, his fused senses inexplicably returned to normal.
>
> “Hm?” Before Li Huowang could figure out what had happened, his expression hardened. He gripped his sword and charged at Yuan Er outside with the fastest speed possible.
>
> At that moment, the completely blind Yuan Er lay gasping his last breaths. He merely turned his head, and with Li Huowang’s forceful sword swing, his head flew off.
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> As the head hit the ground, everything around them returned to normal.
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> Panting heavily, Li Huowang stood there gripping his sword, looking up uneasily at the pitch-black sky.
>
> There was nothing there now, as if everything before had been an illusion. But Li Huowang knew it absolutely wasn’t— that thing truly existed.
>
> Li Huowang tried to piece together the sensation of what he had perceived before, but to his shock, he found he could no longer recall what it had felt like.
>
> With his current five senses, he couldn’t comprehend the feeling of what he had touched earlier.
>
> The danger had passed, but the island was deathly silent.
>
> Everyone stood frozen in place, eyes filled with deep terror. Li Huowang had seen it, and so had they.
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> Everyone’s faces were ashen, their bodies trembling uncontrollably. They all felt cold— a bone-chilling cold emanating from deep within.
>
> “That’s it? Yuan Er went all out just to scare us a little?”
>
> Looking at the others around him, all unharmed, a sliver of doubt rose in Li Huowang’s heart.
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> Their current safety, paradoxically, made him feel uneasy.
>
> Li Huowang took a deep breath and used his bloodied longsword to pry open the curled red bamboo slips, revealing the dried, blackened flesh and organs inside.
>
> Li Huowang knelt on one knee, warily examining the contents of the red bamboo slips.
>
> The black characters carved on the red bamboo slips were tiny and extremely strange.
>
> He had never seen this script before, yet when he focused on it, he inexplicably recognized what it said.
>
> “White pill… precious dew… swallow its belly… pry its bones…”
>
> This was an utterly sinister bamboo slip. Every word recorded methods to trade with some existence using one’s maximum pain and flesh.
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> The mildest one described how to slice a bamboo strip horizontally under one’s fingernail and pry upward, ripping out the entire nail.
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> A more severe one involved chewing a mouthful of rusted iron scraps and forcing them down.
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> And toward the end, it even instructed readers on how to sacrifice their own blood kin and flesh to bargain with certain things.
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> The methods grew more bloody and horrific the further along they went, nearly surpassing Li Huowang’s tolerance.
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> Finally, after reading halfway through, Li Huowang couldn’t hold back and vomited violently.
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> After spewing out all the previous pork, the pallid-faced Li Huowang fought down his nausea, gritted his teeth, and forced himself to keep reading.
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> Until he figured out what Yuan Er had been doing, he couldn’t relax. What if it was some kind of curse? That would be big trouble.
>
> Enduring the disgust, he continued flipping through until he found Yuan Er’s method on the final fourth bamboo slip.
>
> “No, Yuan Er wasn’t just trying to scare us. He meant to summon something, but he failed.”
>
> “Ba Hui”—that was the thing’s name, and the source of all the suffering on these bamboo slips.
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> Yuan Er had failed because he couldn’t pay the price to summon it.
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> According to the bamboo slips, though his body was in extreme agony, his mind wasn’t suffering enough. Even after his entire family had just died, it was still far from sufficient.
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> To summon Ba Hui required extreme suffering of both body and spirit.
>
> Li Huowang turned his head to glance once more at Yuan Er’s eyeless, mouthless head.
>
> It seemed he had only just learned how to use the bamboo slips and wasn’t proficient yet.
>
> But that made sense—these methods on the slips were so deadly that using them even once brought one to the brink of death. No one could live long enough to master them.
>
> Though they were safe now, Li Huowang’s heart didn’t calm.
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> He didn’t care where the water bandits had gotten this vile bamboo slip. What concerned him more was who had written it.
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> Could there be a sect like Zhengde Temple?
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> Except instead of cultivating fleshly arts like the monks, they pursued ultimate suffering?
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> But if they trained according to this, there probably wouldn’t be many survivors.
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> “Unless their sect has some way to keep people alive even after enduring such wounds.”
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> Li Huowang clutched the bamboo slips, lost in wild speculation.
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> In this moment, Li Huowang realized that even his darkest guesses about this place had been too optimistic.
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> It was far more dangerous than he’d imagined. He already knew about special existences like the immortals and the Joy God.
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> But this time had truly opened his eyes—some things were far more terrifying than them.
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> “Ba Hui…” Li Huowang muttered to himself, standing dazed in place.
>
> (End of chapter)