The Unruly Immortals

"It was me? Did I slaughter the entire town? Did I kill Yingzi's whole family?"

Trembling, Li Huowang turned his head to look into the eyes of the dead girl in front of him.

Her pupils, completely devoid of life, were dilated to their fullest extent, the mockingly sardonic smile still hanging on her face.

"I killed her, a girl who wanted to avenge her parents? Am I really the one who deserves to die the most?"

At that moment, Li Huowang began to feel afraid, intensely afraid. He violently shoved away Yingzi's body and hurriedly stepped back.

Li Huowang shakily raised his hands, seeing them thoroughly stained red with Yingzi's blood.

"No, no, that's not right! I didn't time-travel here four years ago! Even if I did come here four years ago! I couldn't possibly have killed the whole town! And I definitely wouldn't have had the power to cause havoc in the Ao Jing Sect! I'm just an ordinary person!"

"You're not ordinary, ordinary people don't have your abilities," someone interjected.

Watching the increasingly terrified red-robed Taoist, Shou San continued to explain, "Honestly, I didn't want to have too much to do with you, who could know if you'd go mad midway... but since Master Jingxin requested, we're doing her a favor."

"Shut your mouth!!"

"Stop trying to deceive me! Aren't you all just greedy for Xinsu? Quit the act! I am right here! Come at me!"

Watching Li Huowang glaring at him furiously, Shou San took a slight step back. "Young friend Xuan Yang, please calm down a bit, we are here to help you, you must not bite the hand that feeds you."

The other's words were not at all helpful, instead, they deepened the fear in Li Huowang's heart, making it sound as if it were all true.

Shou San gestured slightly with his hand to make the other Ao Jing Sect members ready to act retreat.

"Young friend Xuan Yang, our Ao Jing Sect may not have a good reputation out there, but we are different from you, we don't kill people at random, everything has to be done with righteous cause,"

Glancing down once more at Yingzi's corpse, Li Huowang, with eyes red-rimmed, bit his teeth and rushed toward the cave's exit, head bowed.

Seeing the raging Li Huowang charging forward, any blocking Ao Jing Sect believers promptly backed against the walls, making way for him.

Outside the cave was nighttime, the round moon hanging in the sky, the cold wind that met him slightly sobering Li Huowang up.

He staggered to the side of a tree, squatting down with his back leaning against the trunk and hands covering his face, as his body trembled uncontrollably.

"Am I a murderous maniac? Am I worse than Master Danyang? Did I really kill Yingzi's whole family? And then I killed Yingzi who sought revenge?"

The intense suppression and pain weighed down on Li Huowang's head like a mountain, stretching the string in his heart taut to its limit.

Li Huowang, with his acute hearing, caught the sound of approaching footsteps. But now he wanted to hide, to ignore everything else.

Suddenly, he felt a light pat on his shoulder and a voice asked with a hint of concern, "Young friend Xuan Yang, are you leaving? Does our agreement still stand?"

The person's words easily shattered Li Huowang's fragile isolation.

"Impossible! Absolutely not!! I'm going to find evidence! That town couldn't possibly have been annihilated by me!"

Li Huowang got back on his feet, pushing the Shou San in front of him aside, and headed straight down towards the town at the bottom of the mountain.

Watching Li Huowang disappear on the mountain path, Shou San turned respectfully to ask a square-faced Ao Jing Sect believer, "Elder Shen Benyou, what do you think we should do now?"

The square-faced man knitted his brows in thought for a moment before saying, "Follow him and take a look, remember to be careful, don't get yourself killed."

Accompanied by the moonlight, Li Huowang returned to the desolate town once more.

In the darkness, the withered and sparse forest surrounded the empty and deadly silent town, all of which combined to be unspeakably eerie.

But Li Huowang didn't care about any of that, he frantically rushed in and started searching, not even stopping when he cut himself and bled profusely.

When he found a skeleton lying on the ground, his eyes lit up instantly. He pulled out a luminescent stone from his chest and leaned closer to examine it in detail.

"The entire left side of the skull is shattered! This was caused by a blunt object strike. It doesn't seem like my style, plus I don't even like to use blunt weapons."

Li Huowang's emotions gradually stabilized as he methodically continued to search through the other skeletal remains.

"This body's bones are charred black, and they crumble at the slightest touch. This person was burned to death, something I couldn't possibly do."

"And this is even more preposterous, half of his body is exposed, while the other half is stuck in the wall. How could I have managed that?"

The more he saw of the manner of death, the more at ease Li Huowang felt inside.

Seeing the skeleton before him blooming like a flower on the ground, the weight in Li Huowang's heart was completely lifted.

"I didn't kill anyone, I'm not a murderer, Yingzi must have remembered it wrong!" Li Huowang repeatedly affirmed his identity to himself.

However, another question popped up in Li Huowang's mind. "Why would Yingzi misidentify me? Could it be that there was a villain who looked exactly like me back then?"

"Hmm... This could be troublesome, who knows how much trouble this might cause in the future."

"But let's talk about this later. For now, I should focus on finding a way to deal with Master Danyang."

Just as Li Huowang was about to leave the decrepit wooden house, some papers nearby caught his attention.

He calmed down, walked over, and picked up the papers.

They were smeared with plenty of blood, seemingly written shortly before death.

Li Huowang couldn't make out the content written on them anymore, as he no longer recognized many of the characters.

"Wait a second, these three characters look so familiar."

With a slight frown, Li Huowang's fingers traced over the last three brush-written characters, filled with doubt.

He kept feeling them for a long, long time, and just as his frown deepened, suddenly, a thought exploded in his mind.

"Li Huowang! These three characters read Li Huowang!"

The moment he excitedly uttered the meaning of those three characters, Li Huowang instantly felt as if someone was choking him.

He looked around at the skeletal remains, his pupils dilating and then contracting again, as fear gradually began to erode his heart.

"No... It can't be possible! Yingzi definitely got it wrong! Their parents weren't killed by me! These people weren't killed by me either!"

Li Huowang nervously muttered to himself in denial, but his emotions became more and more agitated.

He could find all sorts of reasons to lie to himself, but the three characters on that piece of paper forced him to face reality.

As if a string had "snapped," so too did Li Huowang's last shred of composure.

"Li Huowang!! You killed them!! You maniac!!"

"No! I didn't!! I didn't! I didn't!! I'm not like Master Danyang and the others!"

Li Huowang, with veins bulging on his forehead, knelt amidst the pitifully arrayed skeletons, hysterically screaming into the air.

"Whoosh—" An Elixir, covered in hair, rolled into Li Huowang's mouth.

In an instant, the suppressed guilt and pain in his heart multiplied many times over, nearly devouring his sanity.

At that moment, a person slowly walked in, it was Shou San.

Completely charred, he casually snapped his fingers, and intense flames quickly enveloped his entire body, crackling fiercely.

With a gentle wave of his hand, the scorching flames rapidly spread along the ground, engulfing Li Huowang's whole body.