Chapter 158: Liar

Chapter 158: The Deceiver

Li Huowang, in agony and on the verge of fainting, lunged forward and brought his longsword down with a heavy strike, shearing off a massive chunk of Erbing's facial skin. Beneath it lay Erbing's mangled, blood-soaked face.

Grabbing her by the neck, he hoisted Erbing's entire body into the air and shouted to the others locked in combat, "Stop fighting! Look at this! She's the one from the Seat of Oblivion! You've all been fooled by her!"

Yet what greeted Li Huowang was a crossbow bolt piercing straight into his abdomen. They had been driven completely mad with bloodlust.

Even if it had been a misunderstanding before, the corpses littering the ground had made the misunderstanding irreconcilable; whether it was or not before, it certainly was now.

Li Huowang hurled Erbing to the ground with all his might, and after ruthlessly stomping to shatter every bone in her hands, he charged straight into the very center of the battlefield. "Xiaoman, keep an eye on her!"

Watching Li Huowang slaughter madly through the crowd, Erbing chuckled.

Xiaoman's sword was instantly pressed against her neck. "You're in this state and you're still laughing? You'll have plenty of time to cry later!"

Erbing laughed even louder, and as several faces flickered rapidly across her features, she settled into a brand-new visage.

"Oh my, if not now, when should I laugh? Gambling with my own life, it's quite amusing to play it this way, isn't it?"

Yet at this moment, Jiang Yingzi, standing nearby, was not glaring at Li Huowang with her usual resentment.

Instead, she stared at Erbing's face with an exceedingly complex expression; she had just caught a glimpse of the Grand Elder of Seeing, Hearing, and Joy among those shifting faces.

In the end, the group still retreated, not because they had seen through Erbing's deception, but because they had suffered too many casualties and ultimately routed.

As the sky gradually paled, the sounds of hoofbeats and camel bells faded into the distance, leaving behind a field of corpses and a few masterless camels.

The sun rose slowly from the horizon of the Gobi Desert, casting an even deeper crimson hue upon the blood on the ground and the blood staining everyone's bodies.

Li Huowang, covered head to toe in wounds, stood like a statue amidst a pool of blood.

Neither side was in the wrong, yet under the deception of the Seat of Oblivion, they had ultimately been driven to an irretrievable point.

Jiang Yingzi watched everything unfolding before her eyes; she appeared somewhat flustered, as if pondering something.

"Hahaha! Good! Well done!" Erbing, now reduced to a human pillar, laughed uproariously.

Her voice caught Li Huowang's attention; he laughed along with her, tossed his sword aside, and turned to stagger over.

After hastily stuffing a handful of hemostatic and healing pills into Erbing's mouth, Li Huowang turned his head to Xiaoman beside him and said, "Go fetch the wound medicine we bought in town."

"What?" Xiaoman thought she had misheard.

"Didn't you hear what I said?! Bring the wound medicine over! Hurry!!"

Once the wound medicine arrived, Li Huowang carefully sprinkled it over Erbing's intestines, which had spilled out from her abdomen.

Li Huowang laid out the torture instruments, their hems already soaked in blood, in a row before her, and asked softly, "Will you talk or not?"

Erbing was taken aback. "Did you ask me anything?"

Erbing's right hand, limp from broken bones, was flipped over, and an iron spatula was wedged under her fingernails and pried upward with a sharp jerk.

After prying off all five fingernails in succession, Li Huowang looked at Erbing again, his breathing heavy as he continued to ask, "Will you talk or not?"

"What exactly do you want me to say?"

"Will you talk or not!" With malice gleaming in his eyes, Li Huowang thrust out his single arm and forcibly drove his fingers straight into her eye socket.

Accompanied by Erbing's agonizing scream, Li Huowang ruthlessly crushed her lively eyeball. "Will you fucking talk or not!"

"Senior Brother Li, are you alright?" Bai Lingmiao approached with a hint of timidity.

Li Huowang took a deep breath, stood up, and turned to look at her, speaking softly and gently, "I'm fine. Help me check on the others, and if anyone is too severely injured, remember to use the spirit summoning ritual to heal them."

As soon as Bai Lingmiao left, Li Huowang stepped heavily onto Erbing's spilled intestines, his voice erupting once more, filled with hatred and malice. "Will you talk or not!!"

He didn't actually want Erbing to say anything; he simply wanted to exact revenge. This entire situation was her fault, and Erbing had to pay the price.

The torture instruments Li Huowang had previously commissioned were usually only used for a few of them, with the rest left unused.

But at this moment, they finally had their purpose.

And as they were stained with blood one by one, Erbing transformed from a bewitching beauty into a mangled pillar of flesh and blood.

The bone-deep agony caused Erbing to faint several times, only to wake again.

Yet no matter how severe the torture, she showed no intention of begging Li Huowang for mercy.

Mangled and bloody, she looked at the increasingly demonic Li Huowang with her only remaining eye, a hint of amusement surfacing in her gaze; she smiled, laughing even louder.

The more Li Huowang tortured her, the louder her laughter became.

Looking at the dying Erbing before him, Li Huowang, breathing heavily, completely lost his patience; he raised his longsword and aimed it at her chest.

"Li Huowang, wait, could you ask her a question for me?"

The sudden voice made Li Huowang pause; he turned his head and saw that it was not his senior or junior martial siblings, but his own hallucination, Jiang Yingzi.

Her expression looked incredibly tormented, as if she feared something, yet also seemed to anticipate something.

"Could you ask her if the massacre four years ago was committed by the Seat of Oblivion?"

Before he could dwell on the anomaly of his hallucination, the news from her lips completely shocked Li Huowang.

Li Huowang's pupils instantly contracted to pinpoints as bizarre conjectures burst forth in his mind.

When he asked Erbing Jiang Yingzi's question, Erbing laughed once more.

"Hehehe~ So it really wasn't you who killed them? Be confident, you are the Heart of Purity! Killing tens of thousands of people is a trivial matter for you, isn't it?"

No sooner had the words left her mouth than Erbing's last remaining eye was completely crushed.

"It was you! The massacre four years ago was done by you!! You framed me for this!"

As Li Huowang's roar echoed, Jiang Yingzi's body beside him began to destabilize, and she wept.

Dragging her battered body, she came to Li Huowang's side. "Li Huowang, I was wrong. It was the Seat of Oblivion who killed my whole family, not you. We were all deceived by them."

Before Li Huowang could say anything, she wiped her tears and spoke tremblingly in her grief, "Li Huowang, I know it's presumptuous to make demands now, but could you avenge my family? If you help me, I will tell you a piece of news that is crucial to you."

Li Huowang was about to ask a question, but quickly came to his senses. "Why am I talking to a hallucination?"

"I am a hallucination, and the monk is a hallucination too, but Danyangzi is not! He is real!"

"The elders of the Xuanjing Sect were replaced by the Seat of Oblivion long ago; you were fooled by them! They never eliminated Danyangzi for you, they just hid him deeper! Your personality is still being influenced by Danyangzi!"

As soon as Yingzi finished speaking, her entire broken body gradually faded away. "I'm sorry..."

(End of Chapter)