Chapter 244: Treatment

Lying on the soft grass, Li Huowang, breathless from exhaustion, looked at the squirming Black Grand-Emperor in the distance and smiled with joy.

He hadn't felt this happy in a long time, not since Yang Na gave him chocolate.

Though his entire body ached terribly and he was utterly drained of strength, this arduous journey underground had finally achieved its purpose.

With the Black Grand-Emperor, he could finally bid farewell to the hallucinations, no longer oscillating between reality and illusion. He could free himself from the confusion of the Heart Element.

“They all say consuming the Black Grand-Emperor is not advisable long-term; it grows bigger and bigger in your stomach.”

“But I refuse to believe it! If it comes down to it, once it’s big enough, I’ll just cut open my belly, dig out the Black Grand-Emperor, and swallow it again!”

As Li Huowang was still pondering the success rate of this bizarre plan, he suddenly noticed that everyone else’s expressions seemed off.

They had clearly escaped to safety, yet they stood there as if they’d seen a ghost. And despite his own severe injuries, no one came to help him up.

“Don’t just stand there, keep pulling the chain! Han Fu is tied to the other end; his little head is still alive. Drag him up; I need to pry some information out of him.” Li Huowang instructed, but unusually, no one paid him any mind.

“What’s wrong with all of you?” Li Huowang, propping himself up with one hand on the soft grass, crawled towards them. However, everyone instinctively took a step back.

“Senior Brother Li? Are you… really Senior Brother Li?” Bai Lingmiao, with her hands clasped to her chest, wept as she stared in horror at the figure before her.

She didn’t need to speak. Li Huowang had already sensed something was amiss with his own body. He raised his hands, observing them with a single eye located beneath his ear, filled with shock.

As he wiggled his fingers slightly, Li Huowang saw two conjoined fingers, growing from his elbow, twitch faintly.

“How is this possible! What in the—” Li Huowang propped himself up with his malformed hands and abruptly rolled over.

Under the moonlight, when Li Huowang saw the state of his own body, he was nearly too terrified to make a sound.

He could barely comprehend that this grotesque mass of flesh was actually his body!

Sun Baolu’s body, which he had seen before, was child's play compared to this. His current body was a chaotic mess of inverted and displaced organs, with tiny white spikes mixed in, swaying gently. He looked utterly inhuman!

“It’s the power of those white spikes! This is what happened after they pulled me down.” Li Huowang grabbed one of the white spikes on his body and watched in horror as the fingers holding it slowly twisted.

“Am I still human?” The question echoed in Li Huowang’s deeply confused mind. His trembling hand reached for his disfigured face; his features were completely shifted, no longer in their original positions.

“How is this possible! This is utterly preposterous! Is this… really a normal world?”

Li Huowang shivered violently.

“No, Li Huowang, calm down. This is nothing serious. Yes, it’s nothing serious.”

Li Huowang turned to face the others, his horrifying face contorted into an expression of confidence. “It’s fine, don’t panic. We’ll definitely fix this.”

With that, Li Huowang hooked a dagger with his malformed right hand and plunged it directly into his face.

To everyone’s disbelief, he forcibly cut an incision.

Li Huowang grabbed the ear at the edge of the gash, and with a roar, forcefully moved it towards its original position.

But the next moment, the re-positioned ear lifelessly dropped to the ground.

Seeing the ear on the ground, Li Huowang smiled even more broadly. “Right, this works too! My body’s healing ability is very strong. I just need to cut off everything that grew wrong and let them grow back.”

“What’s the big deal about being a ‘human stick’ for a few days?”

Watching Li Huowang point the dagger at his own eye, Gouwa nervously stepped forward, gesticulating wildly from a distance.

“Senior Brother Li, please don’t! It’s better to live miserably than die cleanly, and besides, you still have hands and feet…”

Halfway through, Gouwa ran out of words. Senior Brother Li’s condition was just too horrific; he couldn’t bear to look.

He thought it would be better for him to simply die if he had to endure such a state.

Li Huowang’s knife stopped. His eyes stared blankly at his inverted pinky finger. A thought suddenly sparked in his mind. “Wait! If these white spikes can turn me into this monstrosity, doesn’t that mean they can also change me back?”

Li Huowang’s eyes lit up. He looked at the white spikes clinging to his hand, then directly grabbed a bunch and placed them on his eye.

The white spikes moved, continuously twisting Li Huowang’s fingers.

“You damn things, be quiet!” Li Huowang slammed the white spikes onto the ground, then pressed them against his face again.

Gradually, Li Huowang felt his vision begin to shift, sliding downwards under the influence of the white spikes.

Li Huowang fiercely hooked his eyeball with three fingers, slowly trying to move it back to its proper position. Yet, no matter how he moved it, it wouldn’t return to its original spot.

“Slash!” A deep gash ripped open from the corner of his eye. Li Huowang again grabbed his bloodshot eye, forcibly pulling it somewhat back towards its place.

“Is that about right?” Li Huowang, still gasping for breath, asked the others.

After receiving a unanimous affirmative, he began moving other organs.

The process was far from straightforward. While the white spikes could help move things, they were never quite precise.

At this point, he had to use the knife to fix things himself.

Gouwa, carefully repositioning Li Huowang’s left ear, trembled, and the ear slipped, falling to the ground with a soft thud.

Panicked, he picked it up, secretly glanced left and right, spat a bit of saliva on it, and tremblingly tried to reattach it to Li Huowang’s head.

A hand on his shoulder made Gouwa flinch. He turned to see Bai Lingmiao holding a needle and thread. “Give it to me; I’ll sew it on.”

Gouwa immediately let out a huge sigh of relief and quickly handed it over.

This ordeal was comparable to torture. Perhaps it was the joy of acquiring the Black Grand-Emperor that sustained him, or perhaps Li Huowang had simply grown accustomed to pain.

By the time his mangled body was barely reassembled into a human shape, dawn had broken, yet Li Huowang’s screams remained full of vigor.