Chapter 97
Chapter 97
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>Translator: Ryuma
>Chapter: 97
>Chapter Title: Ba Hui Returns
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“Pain.” His heart felt like it was being sliced by a knife, and the massive gash in his abdomen made Li Huowang tremble all over in agony.
Yet despite the mental torment and the physical pain both reaching their peaks, Li Huowang’s face was smiling.
He grinned at those things bursting out from the bamboo grove. He recognized one of them—it was his own appearance, only that Li Huowang had a pair of huge blood-red eyes.
“Crack, crack, crack!” As Li Huowang ground his teeth with a grating sound,
Just like that, the barbs ripped out his large and small intestines raw, and the “bridge” in between swayed in the air.
“Aaahhh!!!” Li Huowang, nearly driven mad by the pain, raised the long awl in his hand and thrust it viciously into the bamboo slips glowing with eerie red light before him.
“Clang clang~!” Aberrant black flames exploded outward.
Li Huowang’s facial features began merging back together again, but this time, with the intense pain as an anchor, his senses sharpened greatly, allowing him to perceive things more clearly.
This time, he once more sensed Ba Hui in the extremely high and unfathomably deep sky, catching a glimpse of the alluring aura emanating from its body.
But Ba Hui was still Ba Hui, paying him no mind. However, through the double sacrifice of his utmost pain, Li Huowang obtained what he desired from it—a profoundly strange sensation.
Under Ba Hui’s aura, both his physical and mental pains began gradually transforming into something else entirely.
The next moment, an aura of utter terrified despair radiated from Li Huowang, a force absolutely not of the mortal realm.
As if under some immense pressure, everything around Li Huowang creaked and groaned, bending and toppling to one side.
Li Huowang raised his right hand with the twin awls and lightly slashed.
Space seemed to tear apart. Bamboo, leaves, and every living thing within were bisected clean through.
Among them, tiny figures the size of fingers crawled out from the half-rotted girl’s head, each bearing the exact same face as hers.
These things had just started to flee when they collapsed dead after only a few steps.
Although Twelfth-Moon Eighteenth wasn’t among them, Li Huowang—with his features fully fused—clearly sensed its location.
It was fleeing eastward. It was afraid—its five heads were all afraid. Li Huowang could even sense its deepest thoughts.
Hearing the terrified cries from those red eyes, Li Huowang laughed. He raised the long awl in his hand again and plunged it viciously back into his own abdomen.
In that instant, everything within radius of Li Huowang shared in the ultimate agony—even the bamboo and the stones on the ground.
They grew increasingly twisted and malformed, increasingly horrifying. They even let out sounds of desperate screams from the pain.
Twelfth-Moon Eighteenth, far off in the distance, was naturally among them.
Truthfully, Twelfth-Moon Eighteenth had no organs for feeling pain, yet now Li Huowang had bestowed upon it the ability to feel agony.
In this moment, all it felt was deep regret—why had it ever provoked this man?
But in merely an instant, it was drowned by the excruciating pain and, in utter despair, killed itself as swiftly as possible.
Once everything settled, Li Huowang’s swaying body slowly toppled to the right.
His entire body ached everywhere, yet Li Huowang laughed. He didn’t know why he did it, but he just laughed.
“With injuries this bad, I should die, right? Hahaha!!”
He felt his organs spilling from the hole in his abdomen, yet Li Huowang had no intention of stuffing them back in.
“Dying’s good! No more pain if I die. I’m so tired... But why me of all people... Actually... I don’t want to die... I want to feel the same as everyone else............”
Li Huowang, teetering on the brink of death, felt his mind grow hazy, his thoughts lagging a beat behind.
His fused features began to separate, as if about to return to their proper places.
In that instant of repositioning, Li Huowang felt as though the Ba Hui in the sky glanced at him.
The next second, Li Huowang’s vision went black, and he knew nothing more.
He didn’t know how much time passed before, in his groggy haze, Li Huowang heard drumming, footsteps—even the sound of a nurse snapping open an ampoule. These noises irritated him immensely.
“So noisy! Shut up!!”
Li Huowang’s eyes snapped open. He stared blankly at the cart holding the IV bottles in front of him.
It took a good while before Li Huowang realized he hadn’t died—he was in the midst of a hallucination.
Looking at the beeping machines around him, Li Huowang understood: this was the ICU.
He hadn’t died. Was he happy? Li Huowang didn’t feel particularly glad; instead, he felt a twinge of regret.
“Why haven’t I died yet?” Li Huowang pondered the question.
“Doctor, the patient in bed 12 is awake!” a shout rang out.
Ignoring the nurse’s delighted voice, Li Huowang quietly assessed his situation on the other side.
Hearing the door open, Li Huowang slowly closed his eyes, fully sealing off his external senses as he waited in silence for this hallucination to pass.
Suddenly, Li Huowang heard a familiar voice. It was his attending physician at the mental hospital, Li Xiangguo.
“Little Li, I know you’re awake. Open your eyes and let’s chat, yeah?”
Li Huowang didn’t budge. He wanted no contact with this place right now.
“Yang Na has a new boyfriend.”
Li Huowang’s eyes shot open, only to see the doctor standing there with arms crossed, a smug grin of success on his face.
He was about to clench his fist and smash that smiling face to pulp when he realized his right hand was handcuffed to the bed.
“Don’t get so worked up. Yang Na doesn’t have a new boyfriend. See? When something important comes up, you still react. So why resist it so much?”
The doctor in his white coat pulled up a stool and sat by Li Huowang’s bedside.
“Let me guess—you’ve gone and taken that side for real again?”
As Li Huowang’s breathing quickened, the nearby machine started alarming. In the end, though, he said nothing and closed his eyes again.
“Little Li, let’s skip the pleasantries this time. Since you think that side is real, why don’t we talk about it? Ask yourself honestly: between that world and ours, which one actually seems normal?”
(End of chapter)