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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 14
Chapter Title: Helper
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Just after swallowing this pill, Li Huowang felt a ball of fire warming up in his dantian, and this fire showed signs of burning even more fiercely.
It burned so intensely that he couldn't even care about the nausea and queasiness surging inside him.
"Xuanyang, go back and rest. This medicine's effect is very strong; it'll take a while to fully absorb it."
"Yes, Master."
Staggering back to his quarters, Li Huowang leaned against the doorframe and retched violently, yet he could only vomit up some clear water. The entire pill had already been fully absorbed.
"Crack, crack." Li Huowang's joints creaked all over his body as his body twitched uncontrollably.
By now, the fire in his dantian had spread along his meridians to his limbs. Right now, he felt like he was wearing a thick cotton jacket in the height of summer—his whole body seemed boiled.
The heat also left his mind in a haze. Li Huowang lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling spinning overhead above him as he thought about everything that had just happened, recalling the terrified and despairing gazes of everyone in the Material Room.
He had become Danyangzi's repulsive accomplice, shoving onto others what the man had done to him.
The other man might be illiterate, but he wasn't stupid. In the face of absolute power, anything he did was pointless.
"I must kill him! I have to find a way to kill him!!" Li Huowang roared madly in his heart.
His right hand unconsciously gripped the edge of the stone bed. As he mentally shouted those final words, veins bulged on the back of his hand.
With a "crack," he snapped off a chunk from the hard stone bed.
This change caught Li Huowang completely off guard. He looked at his hand, then at the stone chunk gripped in it. He quickly realized this was the pill's doing.
It wasn't just strength—other aspects had changed too. Li Huowang even felt like his eyes could see farther now. That pill gave him a reborn sensation.
But the moment he thought about how he'd obtained this power, nausea welled up in Li Huowang's heart again.
"Senior Brother Li? Are you okay?" Bai Lingmiao cautiously poked her head in from the doorway.
Li Huowang looked up at her with a complicated expression, momentarily at a loss for words.
Bai Lingmiao took a step forward and said:
"Senior Brother Li, actually, you don't need to blame yourself. We all know you had no choice. If... I mean, if Master makes me go again, don't switch with someone else. Anyway, everyone's fate ends up the same."
Li Huowang didn't want to discuss this. Seeing the blood on her forehead, he pulled out a pill he'd refined earlier and handed it over.
"Eat it. It can stop the bleeding."
But when Bai Lingmiao saw the pill in Li Huowang's hand, she shook her head vigorously in terror.
"I won't eat pills. Absolutely not."
Li Huowang let out a few dry chuckles before casually tossing the pill onto the ground.
"Yeah, every medicine is three parts poison. It's not good to take them."
Bai Lingmiao bit her lip. After thinking for a moment, she asked Li Huowang:
"Senior Brother Li, are you planning to take on Master?"
Li Huowang's expression shifted as he nervously glanced toward the door and rushed over to shut it tight.
"It's fine. Master can't hear us right now. He relies on the 'Wandering Lord' to keep watch. Every market day, the 'Wandering Lord' has to head back to the market."
"What is the Wandering Lord?" Li Huowang asked, puzzled. This was the first time he'd heard the term.
"The Wandering Lord is the Wandering Lord. It's invisible and intangible. I heard my grandpa say only experts with real cultivation can command them."
"Oh?" Li Huowang's heart stirred as he committed this detail to memory—this information was crucial to him.
"When is market day?"
Hearing this, Bai Lingmiao looked at him in confusion.
"First and fifteenth of the lunar month for market day. Senior Brother Li, how don't you even know that? Didn't your parents take you to the market?"
Li Huowang shook his head. The memories in his mind—real or illusory—proved he'd only ever lived in the city before and had never taken part in rural trade gatherings like markets.
"Senior Brother Li, let's get back to the point. Do you really want to take on Master?"
Li Huowang's expression hardened.
"Of course! I wish I could eat his flesh and drink his blood!"
Bai Lingmiao took a deep breath and nodded vigorously.
"Then count me in, Senior Brother. I want to help with something like this too!"
Li Huowang looked at the girl before him and her resolute gaze. Bai Lingmiao wasn't as fragile as he'd imagined.
"Good, you're in." Li Huowang agreed. He really did need helpers right now.
After thinking it over carefully, Li Huowang said gravely to her:
"Two people aren't enough. Go to the Material Room first and keep an eye out—see if there are any others harboring resentment."
Others might not dare resist Danyangzi, but the drug primers in the Material Room were doomed to die. There had to be some unwilling among them; it was a fundamental conflict. Surely there were people he could recruit from that group.
"Mm." Bai Lingmiao nodded and turned to leave.
After sitting for a bit, Li Huowang picked up the round jade pendant tied to his waist. He thought of that senior brother who'd failed to escape.
"Xuanyang, oh Xuanyang—did you lot band together the same way back then? I hope I don't end up the same as you."
In the time that followed, Li Huowang threw himself fully into the Clear Wind Temple, organizing the Material Room meticulously—both people and things.
Faced with such an obedient disciple, Danyangzi naturally offered rewards, teaching him all sorts of basic pills as if he were truly grooming him as a disciple.
These ordinary pills weren't all that effective, at most letting Li Huowang treat minor colds and external wounds.
Li Huowang wasn't sure if it was Danyangzi's pills specifically or all pills in this world, but they all had limits—take too many, and treatment turned to harm.
They even had taboos; mixing them could easily cause problems.
Rather than say Li Huowang could now pass as a quack doctor, it was more accurate to call him a qualified poisoner.
The pills weren't the key—what mattered was that through this contact, Li Huowang's relationship with Danyangzi gradually warmed.
The man even had Li Huowang assist him nearby at times while refining pills.
When Danyangzi took another Daoist boy as a disciple, Li Huowang was no longer the lowest-ranked one—he'd fully integrated into the Clear Wind Temple.
Through such close-range contact, Li Huowang confirmed his suspicions: Danyangzi truly couldn't read, and he was extremely, extremely averse to others learning to.
He wouldn't allow any disciple to surpass him in anything, so the disciples he recruited were basically all illiterate.
This gave Li Huowang a faint sense of something wrong. He still remembered what Danyangzi had once told him.
"Because the way to immortality is written in Lord Laozi's Heavenly Book, and Lord Laozi personally delivered that Heavenly Book into my hands—who else in the whole world could achieve immortality? He said I could, so I definitely can!"
If the Lord Laozi he spoke of had given him a Heavenly Book, and neither the other disciples nor he himself could read—then who exactly had read it to him?
(End of chapter)