Chapter 791
Chapter 791
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>Translator: Ryuma
>Chapter: 791
>Chapter Title: Tian Wu
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When he sensed the intense anger emanating from those black shadows in the water, Li Huowang laughed even louder, showing no fear whatsoever.
“You won’t live to laugh again!” The rotten umbrella plunged into Li Huowang’s abdomen twisted sharply, snapping his tentacles right off.
Next, as Ruseng pressed down on the umbrella handle, the rotten umbrella burst open. The ribs and canopy tore Li Huowang’s body apart into quarters, and his scarlet blood mixed with the muddy brown river water, carrying chunks of his corpse downstream.
Staring at Ruseng before him, umbrella in hand, Li Huowang’s quartered body wore an even broader smile.
Suddenly, writhing black tentacles erupted from each chunk of flesh. They knotted together swiftly and yanked hard, reassembling Li Huowang’s sundered body.
“If I say it’s a trick, does that mean there’s definitely no ambush? Why didn’t you check for yourselves?”
No sooner had Li Huowang spoken than the raging river plummeted, drying up at breakneck speed. Someone had sealed the breach in the embankment.
With both feet planted on the muddy riverbed, free from the river’s grip, Li Huowang eyed his foes encircled by his allies.
Zhengde Temple, Bardo Temple, Luo Cult, Mohists, Sitting Landscape Cult, Military School—along with some sects Li Huowang didn’t recognize—all had sent reinforcements, surrounding these Law Cult elites completely.
This was an ambush for those plotting to ambush him—a massacre. The dire situation had flipped in an instant.
Li Huowang sized up his enemies anew. The water had been too murky earlier for a clear view, just vague black shapes. Now, with the river gone, their faces were plain to see.
Aside from Ruseng, whom he’d encountered twice before with his four umbrellas, there were several new faces.
The most striking was a sodden clump of black hair huddled together. On closer inspection, it was a pile of water monkeys, pressed tight as if guarding something.
Without the river’s power, their strength had clearly waned.
Beside the water monkeys stood four chicken-foot men wearing organ masks, filthy red threads dangling from beneath their veils. Li Huowang knew their kind—he’d fought them before.
Next to the chicken-foot men was someone unfamiliar: a figure in a stone mask. Its carved brows and eyes were hollow, ears rounded, nose high-bridged, mouth wide and slightly agape—majestic and sacred.
It resembled somewhat the bronze mask Li Huowang had seen on Da Liang’s palace walls, only this one was stone.
The last was a hunchbacked physician with a massive gourd on his back. Half his face was that of a physician, the other half warped flesh. Things no human bore sprouted from that half—dragging like a puddle of mud across the ground, pulsing with his breath.
For some reason, the mere sight of him made Li Huowang’s skin itch. Scratching his arm with his chin left mosquito-bite welts.
This was a battlefield. No time for introductions. Zhengde Temple’s monk struck first.
“Mara Gnisni. Mahisvara!” Behind them, the Flesh Buddha swept away by the river sat cross-legged. As he chanted, everything around the Buddha—mud, stones, felled tree stumps—morphed into flesh. The transformation spread toward the Law Cultists’ feet.
A muffled dragon roar echoed from amid the water monkeys. The easing rain swelled again, bucketfuls pouring down. The huddled water monkeys bloomed like a flower bud.
A woman covered in fish-scale tattoos emerged. Li Huowang knew the style—she was Dan like Yang Xiaohai.
But unlike seafaring Dan, she oozed menace. She sneered disdainfully all around, baring jagged shark teeth. In her arms, she cradled a small statue shrouded in fish skin. Though tiny, it gave Li Huowang profound unease.
“Come on!” Peng Longteng spurred her horse, hooking Li Huowang with her giant halberd as she charged the Dan woman. Clearly, the rain tied to that thing’s spell.
At that moment, a mass of writhing limbs bound in white tassels appeared from nowhere, smothering the water monkeys and Dan woman.
As their organs shifted, Li Huowang recalled: those white tassels were Lion Dance Palace tricks.
At this life-or-death crux, even they had come to help.
With others taking the lead, Li Huowang veered toward the physician.
No room for mercy here—kill or be killed. Wary of this unknown foe’s origins and powers, Li Huowang held back, unleashing his cultivation supernatural ability instead.
Under his gaze, the scholar’s body turned utterly to stone. But cracks spiderwebbed across it next instant, yellow smoke billowing from the gourd’s mouth toward Li Huowang.
“Longteng! Probe this guy’s tricks!”
“Hyah!” Peng Longteng dug in her spurs, ignoring the drifting yellow smoke, barreling toward the cracking statue.
The smoke touched her, and her body warped fast. Screaming mouths and writhing multi-fingered hands burst from her armor’s seams, still mutating.
Her horse fared worse: mid-gallop, its four legs split to six, then eight.
Droplets of bizarre, iridescent liquid seeped from Peng Longteng’s warping flesh, granting life to lifeless things below.
Li Huowang knew this stuff—the warp that had overrun Da Qi.
“With Yu’er God dead, did this seize its heavenly law? Or another Sima’s?” He swung his hand, trying to revert the cultivated Peng Longteng to illusion.
Yet she grew stranger, slipping from his control under that black ooze.
Fused to her horse, Peng Longteng slowed, collapsed, twisted into a rotten gourd oozing the stuff.
The half-faced physician stepped from behind the towering gourd, patted it, and grinned with rotting black teeth.
“I am Tian Wu. Greetings, True Person Li.”
(End of chapter)