The Unruly Immortals

When Li Huowang saw the extraordinary sorrow in Zhuge Yuan's expression, he understood that his friend must have held deep feelings for him.

Zhuge Yuan was a man of great loyalty, willing to go through fire and water for his friends, and for him to be forced to kill a friend himself was enough to imagine the torment he was feeling at the moment.

At this time, Zhuge Yuan spoke again, "Since my friend was controlled by the evil spirit, he could not only use the cultivation techniques and divine skills he had learned in the past, but his power has also become even more formidable after being possessed by the evil spirit."

"Brother Li, the Astrological Bureau always talks about how powerful the evil spirit is, but you must be careful, this evil spirit won't stick to one formula, the thing fighting you one moment might be the evil spirit, and the next, it could be something else."

"It always manages to switch bodies to possess, which is the most dangerous aspect of the evil spirit. You must seize the moment it's caught off guard to cut it down instantly."

"If you come across the evil spirit, you must be fully confident before you act, for if it captures you alive, it's worse than death. Evil spirit, 'evil' plays the dominant role, not 'spirit'."

Just as Zhuge Yuan finished speaking, he suddenly stopped. At his feet lay a mummified monkey, its mouth gaping wide, its limbs all twisted, its belly split open, and its rotten innards spread out across the ground like a blooming flower.

"Brother Zhuge, based on what you've said, it seems we've finally found the right one?" Zhuge Yuan nodded solemnly.

Li Huowang proceeded with utmost caution, slowly making his way deeper into the Peach Blossom Grove. The number of bodies on the ground, twisted and deformed from torture, was increasing, including not just animals but also people, their manner of death utterly tragic.

"Shh! Quiet! I think I heard something!" Li Huowang's words brought the Monk's prayers for the repose of souls to a halt.

He lay flat on the ground, pressing his ear against it, listening intently, "Is this... breathing?"

"Huff... huff... huff..." The rhythmic sound of breathing transmitted into Li Huowang's ears through the soil.

Li Huowang immediately gripped the hilt of his sword tightly and slowly moved towards the source of the sound.

Just as the sound grew louder, Li Huowang parted a branch and the sight before him made his eyes tremble uncontrollably.

Not far away, on open ground, a mass of flesh and blood mixed with bones and innards lay sprawled out like a small lake.

"Huff... huff... huff..." Accompanied by the sound of breathing, this mass of flesh bulged and contracted as strands of red color fell from the sky into the crevices of the bloodied flesh.

Li Huowang followed the trail of red upward and realized that the red was actually the evening glow from the sky—this creature was actually consuming the evening glow from above.

"Is this the evil spirit?" Just as Li Huowang thought this to himself, a rat scurried across the mass of flesh and started gnawing on a dried-up corpse a short distance away.

Suddenly, the mass of flesh began trembling. It rapidly coalesced, assembling into a doe the size of a hut.

This six-legged giant doe had massive elaphure antlers shaped like two peach trees on its head. Its fur was like a rotting rainbow, dim yet colorful.

The reason Li Huowang could tell it was a doe was because there was a dead fawn dragging from its underbelly. She seemed to be frozen in the moment of a difficult birth.

"Brother Zhuge, what has the evil spirit parasitized now?" Li Huowang asked in a low voice, looking at the giant doe in the distance.

"Ying Zhao, the common folk prefer to call it the Nine-Colored Deer," replied Zhuge Yuan.

The Nine-Colored Deer? Li Huowang looked at the rotten rainbow fur on the giant doe.

Suddenly, the spirit monster lurking in the distance moved, its body leaving afterimages as it dashed toward the corpse where the rat was, sprinting over.

Clearly, it could have just stepped on the rat and killed it, but instead, it opted not to. It first used its plum-blossom-shaped hoof to pin down the rat's tail then mercilessly ground its other hoof against the rat's hind legs back and forth.

The rat shrieked in agony, but the nine-colored deer showed no sign of stopping. It threw its head back and let out a cry, its voice brimming with pleasure.

Only after the rat's limbs had been completely crushed into a pulp did the nine-colored deer begin to press down on the rat's chest with one hoof, slowly pressing harder.

It wasn't until the rat had thoroughly vomited all its internal organs onto the ground that the nine-colored deer, satisfied, reverted to a puddle of flesh and blood.

Li Huowang, with furrowed brows, swallowed hard and then whispered in the lowest voice, "Brother Zhuge, has this creature been driven mad? Or does it always revel in torture like this?"

"Spirit monster, heaven and earth are unkind and treat all beings as straw dogs; this is the calamity created by heaven and earth, its very birth a mistake," muttered Zhuge Yuan, his expression darkening further as if remembering something.

"Then Brother Zhuge, what's the deal with this nine-colored deer? No matter what it is, I'm ready to take action," said Li Huowang.

"It consumes and utilizes the rosy clouds. Keep an eye on its body; those glimmers of dawn light are shot from there," instructed Zhuge Yuan.

"Mm," Li Huowang's body tensed like a hunting cheetah, his jaws clamped tight.

The spirit monster in the distance seemed to sense something, assembling a deer-like figure from bones and flesh and looking around the peach grove.

Suddenly, a Hong Zhong mahjong tile tumbled through the air and landed steadily on a peach tree. As the spirit monster turned its head to look in that direction, Li Huowang burst out from behind the peach tree, his Copper Coin Sword whipping out like a lash toward the creature.

With a crisp "snap," the flesh struck by the Copper Coin Sword immediately began to smoke black and withered away as if flowers were wilting.

While the attack was effective, it seemed that the sword capable of exorcising evil did not manage to kill the enemy in one strike.

The spirit monster screeched, assaulted by the sneak attack, and this time it did not regroup into a deer shape but surged over Li Huowang like a tsunami of blood and flesh.

Although it wrapped Li Huowang in blood and flesh in an instant, Li Huowang's body passed through unscathed, the blood and flesh merely a switched-out illusion.

"Kill!" The Purple Tassel Sword, sharp enough to slice through iron, viciously chopped down on the nine-colored deer, opening a large gash.

Seeing the cleaved flesh quickly heal, Zhuge Yuan began to strategize from the side.

"Brother Li, this won't do. This flesh is merely its shell; you must find the spirit monster within to have any effect!"

Just then, a red rosy light shot out from the nine-colored deer, which Li Huowang deflected with his sword. The light reflected in the air and swept down a large tract of the peach grove.

"What does the spirit monster look like?" Li Huowang quickly retreated, creating distance from his opponent.

"You can't see it; those who carry the Ten Emotions and Eight Miseries of life can never see its true form."

"If I can't see it, then there's no use looking!"

Li Huowang's expression turned fierce, and he immediately stripped off his red Taoist robe, pulled out the Fire Sickle, and slashed across his body.