The Unruly Immortals

"One Tongue Turns the Wheel! A lash the span of a universe! The Wonderful Realm to its utmost, beyond the expression of words! Heaven favors the strange and the spirits, should we not fear to carve! Our Lord most high! How dare we tremble before him!?"

When the wooden bamboo slips were spoken by the meaty human tongue, as everything around started to distort, the facial perceptions of everyone on the island began to change simultaneously.

Vision, taste, smell, and hearing—all melded together, forming a novel sense beyond the understanding of ordinary people.

With this extremely peculiar sensory ability, Li Huowang and the others broke through the limits of human perception.

They saw, in the deepest part of the sky, within a vast and unfathomable abyss of darkness, something was stirring amidst countless deeper black worlds and the rotating sun.

Li Huowang smelled a trace of gaze shot from that entity and tasted the chilling terror on that gaze. He also saw the odd melody brought about by the slightest movement of that thing.

"Bang~ Bang Bang~ Bang!!"

Li Huowang felt it was very far, far away from him, yet its melody was so enchanting and clear.

Li Huowang couldn't find anything in reality that matched this melody. The only thing that bore a slight resemblance was the thunder before the arrival of the God of Happiness.

But this entity was far too mighty compared to the God of Happiness, which was like comparing sand to a mountain.

Li Huowang almost without hesitation made this judgment, even though he could not comprehend what it was that he perceived.

"Commit suicide to let Master Danyang come out? No! Master Danyang is nothing compared to it! The difference between them is too vast!!"

Li Huowang desperately realized this point, that in front of that entity, mortals had no chance of resistance.

Just as Li Huowang had given up all hope and stood there waiting for death, his distorted perceptions suddenly inexplicably returned to normal.

"Hmm?" Before Li Huowang could figure out what had just happened, his expression tensed, and he decisively drew his sword and rushed toward Yuan Er outside at top speed.

By this time, the completely blind Yuan Er was barely alive. He made only a slight turn of his head, and as Li Huowang swung his sword with force, the head flew off instantly.

As the head hit the ground, everything around reverted to normal.

Breathless, Li Huowang stood with his sword, looking up at the pitch-black sky with unsettled nerves.

It was empty now, as if everything before had been an illusion, but Li Huowang knew it was no illusion; that entity truly existed.

Li Huowang tried to piece together what he had perceived before, but to his astonishment, he found he could no longer recall what it felt like.

With his current senses, he couldn't understand what it was that he had encountered.

Although the danger had passed, the island was extremely quiet.

Everyone remained frozen in place, their eyes filled with deep fear; what Li Huowang had seen, they had seen too.

Each person was pale, and their bodies began to tremble uncontrollably, feeling very cold, with a bone-chilling frost seeping out from within their hearts.

"Is this it? Did Yuan Er exhaust all his strength, just to scare us a little?"

Looking at the others around him, unharmed, Li Huowang felt a tinge of confusion.

The safety of the situation now oddly brought him discomfort.

Li Huowang took a deep breath, lifted the curled red bamboo slip with his bloody longsword, and found that the flesh and organs inside were withered and black.

Li Huowang knelt on one knee and watched the content on the red bamboo slip with caution.

The small black characters carved on the red bamboo slip were very small and extremely strange.

He had never seen such characters before, yet oddly enough when he focused intently, he found that he could actually make out the content written on them.

"White Pill... Precious Dew... Swallow its belly... Pry its bones..."

This was an extremely malevolent bamboo scroll, all of its contents detailed how to use one's own maximum pain and flesh to trade with a certain entity for something.

The least severe among them described how to horizontally insert a sliver of bamboo under one's own fingernails and lever upwards to pry off the entire nail.

Another, more severe method, detailed how to chew a large mouthful of rusty iron filings and forcibly swallow them down.

Even further down, it instructed the reader on how to sacrifice their own kin's flesh and blood to make a trade with something.

These methods grew increasingly bloody and terrifying, even beginning to exceed Li Huowang's threshold of endurance.

Finally, after making it through half of the content, Li Huowang could not help but vomit profusely.

After spitting out all the pork he had eaten earlier, his face deathly pale, he forced himself to continue looking despite the nausea gnawing at him.

He couldn't be at ease until he found out what Yuan Er had been doing; if it was some kind of curse, that would be a huge problem.

Enduring the sick feeling, he continued to flip through, until at last, on the fourth bamboo strip from the end, he found Yuan Er's method.

"No, Yuan Er wasn't just trying to scare us; he originally intended to summon something, but he failed," Li Huowang said.

"Bahu" was the name of that entity and the source of all the suffering described in the bamboo scroll.

Yuan Er's failure was because he couldn't pay the price to summon it,

According to the requirements on the scroll, although his body was in extreme agony, his heart was not suffering enough, even though his family had just died, it was still not nearly enough.

To invite Bahu out, one must possess both extreme physical and mental anguish.

Li Huowang turned his head and looked once more at Yuan Er's eyeless, mouthless head.

It appeared he too had only just learned how to use the bamboo scroll and was not skilled in its methods.

However, that was to be expected, as the various methods described on the scroll, if used even once, would nearly guarantee death, leaving no chance to become familiar with them.

Even though he was now safe, Li Huowang's heart still did not settle down.

As for the disgusting bamboo scroll, where the bandits got it from, he couldn't be bothered to care; what he was more concerned about was who had written the scroll.

Could there be a sect similar to Zhengde Temple?

Only instead of cultivating flesh and blood techniques like monks, they cultivate the extreme of suffering?

But if one were to practice according to the content above, there likely wouldn't be many survivors.

"Unless their sect has some method that allows them to endure so much injury and still not die," Li Huowang pondered while looking at the bamboo scroll in his hands.

At this moment, Li Huowang realized that his previous notions about this place, even the darkest of speculations, seemed overly optimistic.

This place was far more dangerous than he had imagined, for he already knew of the existence of Immortal Sects and the God of Happiness.

But this encounter truly opened his eyes; some things are far more terrifying than them.

"Bahu..." Li Huowang stood still, muttering to himself.