Black Cauldron

Seeing Xuan Yang cover Li Huowang's mouth, the others holding fireboxes rushed up immediately, surrounding Li Huowang with hostile eyes.

"Not leaving, huh? Then you die here today! There's no way we're letting you tip off that Pockmarked Head Master!"

Facing his own life-and-death situation, Li Huowang showed not a trace of panic. He rolled his eyes in exasperation, silently cursed the plot direction of this hallucination, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself strapped to a hospital bed with wide leather belts. The fellow disciples surrounding him had vanished.

"Aunt Wang, I'm awake. Can you loosen me up?" Li Huowang called into the microphone by his bed for the night-shift nurse, desperate to check if that jade pendant was still in his clothes.

But after shouting for a while with no response, Li Huowang understood—Nurse Wang was sneaking in another episode of her Mary Sue drama during the night shift. She always loved slacking off like that.

Li Huowang looked down at his chest wrapped in the blue-and-white hospital gown, twisting frantically, trying to feel through the pressure whether the jade pendant was there.

But his body was bound too tightly. He thought he felt it, then thought he didn't. After a few tries, he gave up helplessly.

Yawning, Li Huowang could only lie in bed now, praying that after Nurse Wang finished her drama, she'd take pity and glance at the camera.

In the dead of night, even the second floor housing severe patients was utterly quiet. Li Huowang drifted into a drowsy sleep. When he woke again, he found himself lying on the cold floor of a karst cave.

He was still in the same spot, but the ones who'd tried to escape earlier were all gone.

"Tch, you think you NPCs can handle me?" Li Huowang pulled the jade pendant from his chest, gave it a light toss in his palm, then tucked it back inside.

Half an incense stick later, he returned to the large common bed where he slept, lying in the haystack patiently waiting for daylight. Thinking of the pendant's value, he was too excited to sleep at all.

Without a clock, Li Huowang had no idea how long passed. When he saw the fellow disciples on either side starting to wake, he sat up too.

"Day's breaking here, so Aunt Wang should be changing shifts. Maybe I'll head back now? Nurse Ai is way more diligent than her."

Just as Li Huowang was hesitating, hurried footsteps sounded at the entrance.

A Daoist child in a black Daoist robe, hair tied up in a bun, scrambled in frantically from outside.

"Hurry! The master summons everyone to Huian Hall!!"

This sudden news left everyone baffled, but since the master commanded, they had no reason to refuse.

Soon, inside the largest karst cave—the so-called Huian Hall—all disciples had gathered. The torchlight clearly illuminated the confusion on every face.

Li Huowang keenly noticed something: some people were missing from the crowd. Besides Xuan Yang, several of Pockmarked Head Master's personal disciples were also absent.

"Oh ho, they ran off together?" he thought, enjoying the spectacle like watching a drama. The scene before him felt like binge-watching a series.

When an ugly head poked out from the dark tunnel, everyone except Li Huowang and the Daoist children instinctively lowered their heads.

That was their master, Danyangzi.

"Cough~!" A single cough made everyone tense up.

"Last night, during the second watch, some tried to flee. Among them were two of this Daoist's personal disciples. This old Daoist is deeply pained!!"

His words spoke of pain, but the malice on his face was so thick it nearly solidified into substance.

"Already caught? Xuan Yang and those guys are really pathetic." Li Huowang curled his lip.

"As they say, without rules, nothing stands. Wrongs must be punished—that is the rule of our West Mountain Donghua Sect! All follow me."

Not daring to breathe too loud, all the disciples silently trailed behind Danyangzi as he walked forward.

Passing through caves large and small, crossing by a rushing underground river, they soon arrived at a damp cave the size of a classroom.

Li Huowang saw that everyone who'd tried to escape last night was there, all tied up in a heap against the wall.

Their expressions listless, they grew agitated upon seeing their master, struggling as if trying to say something, but the rags stuffed in their mouths silenced them.

Danyangzi seemed uninterested in hearing their excuses. He turned one hand inward, formed a Daoist seal, and pointed forward. "Open!"

The smooth, water-worn floor of the cave suddenly split open into a large hole, and the escapees plummeted in.

The next moment, muffled screams and agonized cries erupted from the pit without end.

Faced with this horrifying scene, many Daoist children's legs began to tremble, and they wished they could shut their eyes tight.

"Get closer! This is what happens to those who flee!" Danyangzi's words drained several shades of color from everyone's faces.

No one dared defy the master's command. Shoving each other, they all moved to the edge of the hole.

The pit was dark. Very dark. Pitch black.

The circular black cavity was like a vortex, as if it would swallow everyone in.

After careful scrutiny, Li Huowang saw a large black cauldron inside. Twisted talismans were pressed along its rim.

Something seemed to be moving inside the cauldron, but Li Huowang couldn't make it out. The only information his senses could pick up was the pungent, nauseating stench of blood.

Whatever was in there, it was definitely extremely dangerous.

"Things in hallucinations shouldn't hurt me, logically. That's never happened before."

He said that, but his heart still tightened. He prepared to retreat back to the hospital at any moment.

"Shwish—!" A writhing shadow shot out from the pit, wrapped around a junior disciple beside Li Huowang, and yanked him back in.

Everyone was terrified by this. They scrambled back to the smooth cave walls. If not for Danyangzi watching nearby, they'd have bolted long ago.

Almost everyone present wore expressions of sheer panic, their hearts trembling as they guessed what that thing was.

But Li Huowang wasn't among those guessing. Because he'd stood closest, he'd seen it clearly.

That was a mass of black, flesh-textured substance, its slimy, viscous skin covered in clusters of short, constantly quivering black tentacles!

From this alone, Li Huowang could be certain that the thing Danyangzi had raised in this cave was definitely not any normal creature that existed in the world.

As for what it actually was, Li Huowang couldn't guess, nor did he want to walk over and take another look.

Even though he knew these things were all coming from inside his own head, Li Huowang truly didn't understand why he would fabricate something like this.

Li Huowang surveyed the utterly real surroundings, and a terrifying thought suddenly struck him. "Could this horrifying, bizarre world actually be real?"

This thought instantly made Li Huowang's body tremble. He thought of the people who had died before—if those people were real and not just his hallucinations, then if he had been grabbed by that thing just now, would he have died too?

Li Huowang was nearly crushed by this suffocating fear. He took a few deep, forceful breaths and immediately began to counsel himself using the method Doctor Li had taught him.

"These are all hallucinations. No matter how real they seem, they're still hallucinations. Li Huowang, you absolutely cannot get lost in these illusions again. You created all of this—what are you afraid of?"

"Yang Na is still waiting for me. I can't let her down. I can overcome all of this! I definitely can!"

Through his self-reassurance, Li Huowang's emotions gradually stabilized, enough for him to face everything before him with composure.