"Sizzle~" A large tongue licked Li Huowang's red cheek, taking off a big piece of his newly grown skin.
The excruciating pain, like being scrubbed with steel brushes, forced Li Huowang to open his eyes again.
This novel is available on bit.ly/3iBfjkV.
Li Huowang looked around in confusion and found himself still in the dead town, but with many collapsed houses.
After passing out yesterday, it seemed that many things had happened.
Now that it was already bright, judging from the position of the sun, he had been lying here for a day.
"Hmm~" Mantou kept calling out to Li Huowang, looking like it wanted to approach him but was too scared.
Li Huowang suddenly noticed that his body was missing.
Last night, he had been burned from the inside out by flames. He should have been dead, but now he was very much alive. His charred skin had fallen off, and his body was covered with a thin layer of skin.
"It seems that my recovery ability has increased again, no, not just my recovery ability, it's an all-around amplification."
Li Huowang looked down at his reddened body, as if it had been scalded.
All his clothes had been burned off, but fortunately, neither the Daqian Record nor his long sword, nor the iron torture devices, had been damaged by the flames.
He stumbled to his feet, feeling sore all over from the breeze.
Li Huowang wandered around the dead town with a dog.
After a few turns, he found new clothes in a second-hand store full of spider webs.
He found a blue Daoist robe behind the counter with a skull-less skeleton shopkeeper, and then tore off a large piece of cloth to wrap everything up.
His newly formed delicate skin was easily scraped off by the fabric, and "peach blossoms" gradually spread on the Daoist robe.
Flesh and skin were stuck together, and every movement caused Li Huowang to feel a sharp pain, making it torture to walk.
He found a long bench in the second-hand store and sat on it, trembling and waiting for his skin to fully heal.
As time passed, the whole second-hand store gradually became dark.
The old clothes hanging from the beams, in the dark, looked like rows of hanged ghosts.
A breeze blew from somewhere, causing the clothes to sway gently, making the whole room even more eerie and terrifying.
"Woof! Woof woof!!" Mantou barked at the swaying clothes, then cowered under Li Huowang's bench.
"Shh, don't bark. There are no ghosts in this world. When people die, they're gone. Otherwise, they would have come to take my life long ago." Li Huowang whispered to Mantou while gently stroking its head.
Mantou gradually calmed down and licked Li Huowang's palm with its tongue.
When it accidentally licked Li Huowang's skin, it broke open and it dared not lick anymore. It looked at Li Huowang with guilt in its eyes.
Li Huowang gently pressed Mantou's belly where it had been kicked.
The blood on its mouth showed that Mantou was indeed injured, but it seemed that it wasn't too serious since it could run from the mountain top to the town below. There was only one reason why it hadn't died.
Because Jiang Yingzi was kind-hearted and didn't want to kill Mantou, even though the dog saw her as an enemy and not its owner.
"Yingzi..." In the dim second-hand store, Li Huowang stared blankly at the swaying clothes in front of him.
At that moment, he thought of many things.
Suddenly, he stood up despite the pain on his skin.Li Huowang walked up to the headless owner of the old clothing store, picked him up, and walked outside.
The sword, as sharp as mud, was once again used as a shovel to dig a hole.
After digging a large hole, Li Huowang straightened the head found in the antique store and the headless skeleton, and buried them again.
A piece of door panel was removed, and Li Huowang wanted to carve some words, but he found that he had forgotten how to write them.
Finally, he simply carved a pattern of clothes with the tip of his sword and inserted it in front of the grave.
Immediately after, Li Huowang turned and walked into another room, carrying out the bodies of a mother and daughter.
As each skeleton was buried, tombstones with patterns were erected.
Without the skin healing properly and constantly rubbing against the clothes, it quickly rotted away.
With the addition of acute pain, it was no different from Ling Chi.
But Li Huowang didn't stop at all. The more his body hurt, the slightly better he felt inside.
As Li Huowang continued to move, his Daoist robe gradually turned dark red again.
When Li Huowang walked into a bungalow again, he was stunned to see a bamboo cradle inside and was a little afraid to approach it.
"Hehe... compared to you, am I not a saint?" A familiar voice sounded like thunder in Li Huowang's ear.
He turned his head suddenly and saw his master Danyang Zi with three heads standing on the debris of the opposite house.
Looking at the three smiling faces, Li Huowang felt as if he was in an ice cave.
The next second, Li Huowang moved. He ignored Danyang Zi on the roof and turned his head slowly to walk towards the distant mountains.
He started to walk slowly, then jogged, and finally ran with gritted teeth, leaving a trail of blood drops behind him.
"You explain to me! What is going on!! Why is Danyang Zi still here!"
In a bright cave, under the gaze of a group of followers of the Ao Jing sect, Li Huowang, panting and bleeding, loudly questioned the several dissolution holes on the wall in front of him.
An old voice came from one of the caves. "Young man, everything between us is over. Your master has long been dead. We have not seen him in you either."
At this moment, Li Huowang's pupils shrank to the smallest point, and he pointed to a cave with trembling fingers.
"Then tell me what that is? Are you all blind? What bullshit about him being dead! His influence on me is even greater now! He can appear anytime! This thing hasn't been eradicated at all!!"
Hearing this, Li Huowang suddenly felt something was wrong with himself. Danyang Zi could exist because of cultivation, but what about Jiang Yingzi?
Li Huowang looked straight at the woman in the distance who had lost her hands and feet and was covered in blood and flesh.
She still stared at him with extreme hatred.
"Young man, we said before that we will only banish your master and those bizarre illusions you have. We have nothing to do with your hearts."
(Note: The translations of the character names are based on their pronunciation and do not necessarily reflect their actual meanings.)