Chapter 477: Lingnie

Li Huowang saw the profound sorrow on Zhuge Yuan's face and knew this friend must have meant a great deal to him.

Zhuge Yuan was an exceptionally loyal and righteous man, always willing to stand by his friends no matter what. The thought of him having to personally kill a friend made it easy to imagine the agony he was experiencing.

Zhuge Yuan spoke again. "After my friend was controlled by the baleful spirit, he could not only use the cultivation techniques and supernatural abilities he had learned, but those powers also became far more potent due to the baleful spirit."

"Brother Li," he continued, "the Supervisory Division often emphasizes the baleful spirit's immense power, but you must be careful. This entity isn't bound by conventional rules. The thing you're fighting might be the baleful spirit one moment, and something else entirely the next."

"It can constantly switch between hosts, and that's the most dangerous thing about it. You must strike it down in an instant, before it has a chance to react."

"If you encounter a baleful spirit, make sure you have absolute certainty before you engage. If it captures you alive, it will be worse than death. Remember, with a 'baleful spirit,' the emphasis is on the 'baleful' aspect, not the 'spirit.'"

Zhuge Yuan stopped abruptly as soon as he finished speaking. Lying at his feet was a mummified monkey. Its mouth was agape, its limbs were twisted, and its belly was ripped open, with its putrid internal organs splayed out on the ground like a grotesque flower.

"Brother Zhuge, based on what you've told me, it seems we've found the source this time?" Zhuge Yuan nodded cautiously.

Li Huowang proceeded with extreme caution, slowly walking deeper into the peach blossom forest. The ground became increasingly littered with twisted and deformed corpses, not only of animals but also of humans, all dead in gruesome and tragic ways.

"Shh! Quiet! I think I hear something!" Li Huowang's words silenced the monk's chanting.

He knelt and pressed his ear to the ground, listening intently. "Is that... breathing?"

A rhythmic exhalation—"Hoo... hoo... hoo..."—traveled through the ground and into Li Huowang's ears.

Li Huowang immediately tightened his grip on his sword hilt and slowly moved towards the sound.

As the sound grew louder, Li Huowang pushed aside a curtain of branches. The sight that greeted him made his eyes widen in shock.

In a clearing nearby, a vast expanse of flesh, bones, and internal organs lay sprawled on the ground, resembling a small, grotesque pond.

"Hoo... hoo... hoo..." The mass of flesh expanded and contracted with each breath. Streaks of red light drifted down from the sky, seeping into its crevices.

Li Huowang followed the red light upward and realized it was the evening glow from the sky. This creature was devouring the sunset itself.

"Is this the baleful spirit?" Li Huowang wondered to himself. Just then, a mouse scurried past the pulsating mass, burrowed into a nearby shriveled corpse, and began to gnaw on it.

Suddenly, the mass of flesh began to tremble. It rapidly coalesced, startlingly reassembling itself into a gigantic doe, as large as a small house.

This six-legged giant doe had enormous, plum-blossom-shaped antlers on its head, resembling two gnarled peach trees. Its fur was like a decaying rainbow, dull yet still containing faint hues.

Li Huowang could tell it was a doe because a dead fawn was dragging from beneath its belly, seemingly frozen in the agonizing moment of a difficult birth.

"Brother Zhuge," Li Huowang whispered, gazing at the colossal doe in the distance, "what is this baleful spirit possessing now?"

"An Yingzhao," Zhuge Yuan replied. "Common folk prefer to call it the Nine-Colored Deer."

The Nine-Colored Deer? Li Huowang looked at the decaying, rainbow-hued fur covering the giant doe.

Suddenly, the baleful spirit in the distance stirred. Its body, leaving a blurred afterimage, galloped towards the corpse where the mouse was feeding.

Though it could have easily crushed the mouse to death with a single stomp, it deliberately chose not to. Instead, it first pinned the mouse's tail with a plum-blossom-shaped hoof, then used another hoof to brutally rub back and forth on the mouse's hind legs.

The mouse shrieked in agony, but the Nine-Colored Deer showed no sign of stopping. It threw back its head and whinnied, a sound brimming with perverse pleasure.

Once the mouse's limbs were completely pulverized, the Nine-Colored Deer lifted a hoof and slowly pressed it down onto the mouse's chest.

Only when the mouse had completely vomited its internal organs onto the ground did the Nine-Colored Deer finally seem satisfied, once again dissolving into a shapeless mass of flesh.

Li Huowang, his brow furrowed, swallowed with difficulty. He then spoke in the lowest possible voice: "Brother Zhuge, has this creature been driven mad? Or does it inherently enjoy such sadistic torment?"

"A baleful spirit," Zhuge Yuan replied, his face growing even grimmer, as if recalling a painful memory. "Heaven and Earth are unkind, treating all beings as straw dogs. This is the very evil created by Heaven and Earth; its existence itself is an error."

"Then, Brother Zhuge, what's the strategy against this Nine-Colored Deer?" Regardless of what it was, Li Huowang was already preparing for a confrontation.

"It consumes the glow and uses it too," Zhuge Yuan explained. "Keep a close eye on its body; those streaks of light emanate from within it."

"Understood." Li Huowang's body tensed, arching slightly like a leopard preparing to spring, his jaw clenched tight.

The distant baleful spirit seemed to sense something. A portion of its bones and flesh pieced together, forming a deer-like shape that peered intently into the surrounding peach grove.

Suddenly, a "Red Dragon" mahjong tile tumbled through the air and landed steadily on a peach tree. Just as the baleful spirit turned its head to look in that direction, Li Huowang burst from behind the tree, swinging the copper coin sword in his hand like a long whip, lashing it forcefully towards the creature.

With a sharp "crack," the flesh struck by the copper coin sword rapidly emitted black smoke and withered away as if a flower had instantly decayed.

While the attack had an effect, it appeared this sword, capable of slaying evil and dispelling curses, hadn't delivered a fatal blow.

The ambushed baleful spirit shrieked. This time, it didn't re-form into a deer. Instead, it surged towards Li Huowang like a vast tsunami of flesh.

Although it instantly enveloped Li Huowang in its mass of flesh, his body passed through it unscathed. It was merely a switched-out illusory double.

"Kill!" The Purple Tassel Sword, sharp enough to cut iron like mud, slashed fiercely into the Nine-Colored Deer, tearing a large gash across its form.

Seeing the severed flesh rapidly heal, Zhuge Yuan offered advice from the sidelines.

"Brother Li, this won't work!" Zhuge Yuan called out. "This physical form is just its outer shell. You need to find the baleful spirit within its body for your attack to be effective!"

At that moment, a beam of red light shot from the Nine-Colored Deer. Li Huowang blocked it with his sword, causing it to refract through the air and sweep through a large section of the nearby peach forest, toppling trees.

"What does that baleful spirit look like?" Li Huowang demanded, rapidly retreating to create distance.

"You can't see it," Zhuge Yuan replied. "No living person carrying the ten emotions and eight sufferings can discern its true form."

"If I can't see it, then I won't look!" Li Huowang declared.

Li Huowang's expression hardened. He immediately stripped off his red Daoist robe, pulled out a fire striker, and drew it across his own skin.