Yellow Skinned Taoist Master

Chapter 69: The Severed-Hand Worm

"Kill!"

Chen Huangpi roared, his ink-black hair flying wild in the air.

Two fingers pressed together, and the essence energy cycling in his liver — the energy that was slowly building the Liver Temple — was drained in an instant.

Through the cyan mist above him, the hand that had seized his wrist erupted in waves of sword qi.

Sword qi slashed in every direction, killing intent blazing!

But it had absolutely no effect.

He could feel it — the sword qi had not only failed to shatter the dead hand gripping his wrist, it had failed to so much as make it twitch.

And this was not weak sword qi. Yes, the Grand Duke Demon Slaying technique's sword qi was powered by the liver's essence energy, which was faint — but draining that entire reserve in a single strike still produced something that should not leave an ordinary evil spirit unscathed.

If anything, the hand seemed to take it as a provocation.

It suddenly squeezed.It couldn't injure Chen Huangpi — but it hurt, and he couldn't help a short, stifled grunt.

The further along in the Five Viscera Spirit Refining Art he progressed, the sharper his six senses became. His body was still impervious to fire and evil — but he was no longer quite like a corpse without pain receptors the way he'd been before.

The pain came fast and left fast.

In the next instant, Chen Huangpi became aware of a lifeless cold seeping from that hand into his body — moving from his palm to his wrist, then toward his elbow.

Wherever the cold passed, all sensation faded.

Chen Huangpi had the disturbing feeling that his hand was slowly becoming no longer his own.

"Huang Er!"

Before Chen Huangpi finished calling out, the brass oil lamp spat a jet of true flame directly at him.

In that single moment, Chen Huangpi became a figure of fire.

The true flames swept across his body and immediately drove back the eerie cold. The cold retreated as far as his elbow.

But at the wrist — it could not be driven back any further.

Because the dead hand gripping Chen Huangpi's wrist was locked on like a vice, and the cold it radiated never relented. No matter how fierce or savage the true flames burned, they could not sear that hand in the slightest.

"Evil spirit? A Disaster?"

The brass oil lamp felt its hair stand on end.

Whatever this hand in the cyan mist was — it gave it a profoundly bad feeling. A sense of deep unease. As if whatever it caught, nothing could ever get free of it again.

"Whatever it is — Demon Tree, cut!"

Chen Huangpi turned his killing intent cold and sharp.

He called directly on the power he had drawn from the Demon Tree. A dry, withered branch sprouted directly from his wrist. The junction where branch met wrist had no wound — as if it had always been part of his flesh.

The branch caught the air and grew.

Long, winding, whip-like — it reared back, the entire branch taking on an unnatural, dead-grey color.

CRACK!

The branch snapped forward.

The cyan mist churned. The very air split.

A dead-grey blade of sword qi slammed down onto that hand.

BOOM!

The hand shattered under the sword qi.

Small fragments — pale, trailing broken finger bones and tendons — scattered in all directions.

Chen Huangpi yanked his arm back.

Only then did he notice: from his wrist down, his hand had gone a waxy, sallow yellow.

And across the back of his hand, large patches of dark blue-black scarring had appeared.

For a moment Chen Huangpi was in a daze.

Because as a child, this was exactly what he had looked like. Sallow yellow skin, scarring in many places across his body. His master had called it a birthmark. Later, as he grew, it had faded naturally. By age eight it was completely gone. And once he started cultivating, his skin had grown increasingly fair and clear — nothing like the sallowness of before.

"How can this be?"

Chen Huangpi was deeply confused.

"Don't be scared — you just got frostbitten. I'll use fire to warm it — you'll be fine in a moment."

The brass oil lamp spiraled into a panic and shot a jet of true flame at once.

But Chen Huangpi's expression only grew more distant.

He clenched his fist. He could feel the true flames burning completely around it — without the slightest sense of heat or pain.

Yet below his wrist, he could clearly feel an uncomfortable wrongness.

As if his body had been divided into two parts. The part before cultivation — and the part after.

"How can this be?!"

The brass oil lamp erupted in disbelief: "My true flames had no effect? Who exactly was that hand?"

"It's not related to it."

Chen Huangpi shook his head, his tone complicated. "Look — it's going back to normal."

As he spoke, the dark blue-black scarring on his hand was fading. The sallow skin was returning to its usual clear, rosy tone.

The brass oil lamp watched in astonishment. "How did you do that?"

"The techniques Master passed me," Chen Huangpi said.

The Five Viscera Spirit Refining Art and the Yin-Yang Harmonization and Spirit Transformation Art.

The first cultivated the five organs, cycling through the five elements, nurturing his body from within.

The second focused purely on the soul, merging yin and yang, ultimately achieving a primordial spirit.

And both arts ran on their own — he didn't need to consciously tend to them at all.

It was after taking up these arts that Chen Huangpi's skin had become clear and fair, and his instincts had grown extraordinarily sharp. Before that — aside from being tough-skinned and hard-fleshed, stronger than average, sharper-eyed than average, with a better memory than average — he had been indistinguishable from any ordinary person.

"I feel like Master is definitely hiding something from me."

Chen Huangpi frowned: "And whatever it is — it matters enormously to me."

"I think there's something wrong with me."

"You've finally realized?"

The brass oil lamp's eyes went wide.

It had always known Chen Huangpi was dangerously strange.

Because from the moment it had been awakened by Guanzhu and had begun keeping Chen Huangpi company, the boy had already been four or five years old. And then he had simply stayed four or five years old. For who knew how many years afterward.

Then one night, while Chen Huangpi was sleeping, he suddenly looked eight years old — and his whole body was ice-cold. Like a corpse.

That time, the brass oil lamp had been utterly terrified. It thought Chen Huangpi was finally showing his true form.

But then Guanzhu suddenly appeared out of nowhere and made a silencing gesture at it — and then it lost consciousness.

When it came to, it was already early morning the following day. Chen Huangpi had been the one to wake it, jumping around in delight, celebrating that he had finally grown up.

And from that day forward, Guanzhu no longer fed Chen Huangpi those unpleasant-tasting porridges, but cooked proper meals instead. The deity shrine also received new offerings daily — various kinds: fruits, pastries, noodles, rice. All sorts of things.

Then, after another period of time the lamp couldn't quite account for, Chen Huangpi stopped changing again — and the lamp had thought that was the end of it. But then Guanzhu went mad without warning. Long after that, he had inexplicably passed on those sinister techniques to Chen Huangpi. And only once he began cultivating them did Chen Huangpi start growing again.

The brass oil lamp was thrilled.

If only Guanzhu hadn't specifically forbidden it from ever bringing this up, it would have told Chen Huangpi everything long ago.

Now that Chen Huangpi had figured it out himself — that had nothing to do with the lamp anymore.

But…

Chen Huangpi gave the brass oil lamp a puzzled look, clearly not understanding its reaction.

"I'm not stupid — doesn't it make sense that something's wrong with me?"

"Yes, of course it does."

The lamp said reflexively: "You've been dangerous and strange from the beginning — no wait, what's 'normal' about any of this? Weren't you just realizing that you're not normal?"

"I hatched from an egg."

Chen Huangpi emphasized those two words, then continued: "Everything that happens to me is perfectly normal given that. What isn't normal is — I feel like just now, when that hand grabbed me, I was starting to become… normal."

Normal, or not normal.

The question tied the brass oil lamp in a knot it couldn't untangle.

Chen Huangpi hatched from an egg — so anything that happened to him was normal. But the abnormal thing was that he was becoming normal. So was that normal or not?

The lamp couldn't work it out. It looked at Chen Huangpi expectantly, waiting for him to explain.

But Chen Huangpi had gone silent, staring at it with a fixed and unmoving gaze.

That look was strange. Like staring at something filthy.

"Master — what are you staring at me for? I'm perfectly normal, all right."

"Chen Huangpi?"

The lamp asked, puzzled: "Why aren't you speaking?"

"Don't move."

Chen Huangpi's lips didn't move. The voice sounded in the lamp's mind.

The brass oil lamp sensed something was wrong.

Because it and Chen Huangpi had just swapped positions. And since it had risen slightly to spray the true flames at his hand, if that hand had not been shattered by the sword qi — all it would have taken was for the hand to push through the mist from above and it could have seized the lamp's head.

Chen Huangpi and the brass oil lamp had been together for years.

You could predict what the other was thinking before anything was said.

The next second.

They erupted simultaneously.

The brass oil lamp dropped, spraying jets of true flame straight up above itself.

Chen Huangpi gripped his dried branch like a blade and in an instant unleashed seven or eight blades of dead-grey sword qi.

The sword qi materialized like ghosts.

Saturated with savage killing intent.

BOOM BOOM BOOM!

Seven or eight arms that had been reaching through the cyan mist toward the lamp were shattered into pieces by true flame and sword qi before they could touch it.

But more arms pushed through the mist.

Dense, endless, inexhaustible.

Every single arm was a hideous, bloodless white — utterly without life. Each one severed at the upper arm, the stumps joined together into one another, forming a profoundly wrong creature.

Like a worm made entirely of arms.

Chen Huangpi and the brass oil lamp looked at it for only a single moment.

And then had no more desire to fight whatsoever.

"Run!"

"I'll scout ahead."

The brass oil lamp's slender arm shot forward and extended outward without limit. The cyan mist could obstruct its eyes and its spirit sense both. Who knew what was hidden inside it. If it was just dead things, that was manageable. But if there was something like the Demon Tree lurking in it, they were finished.

Chen Huangpi's Liver Temple was not yet forged. Against something like that, there would be nothing they could do.

"Huang Er — there's no time! Just go!"

Not waiting for the lamp to feel out a path, Chen Huangpi grabbed it and plunged headlong into the cyan mist.

At the same time, he snapped his head back, and the branch in his hand unleashed wave after wave of sword qi.

The sword qi raged.

Where it struck the creature, it blasted apart several arms in an instant.

But more arms surged forward immediately after.

In a flash, Chen Huangpi suddenly remembered — in the last image he had seen from the Fox Mountain God's memories, beyond the ten thousand deities being ground to dust on that enormous millstone-like altar, he had also seen the Daoist priests of the Pure Immortal Temple — in their last moments, things had grown out of their bodies and taken them over, transforming them into evil spirits. Among them, Xu Qingshan had cut off his own arms again and again — but each time they were cut off, they grew back, only to be cut off again — until at the end, countless arms were chasing him, trying to drag him into becoming an evil spirit.

Could these arms be the ones Xu Qingshan had cut off?

No — they surely were Xu Qingshan's arms.

Because now, those arms were forming hand seal after hand seal.

Chen Huangpi only needed one glance. And then — just as he could read those strange bird-and-insect script markings and inscriptions — he understood what that hand seal meant.

Life-Slaying Sword Formula — Soul-Slaying!

This was one of the techniques he had seen in the Old Temple's Scripture Pavilion — one of those arts without written text.

If these severed arms weren't Xu Qingshan's —

then why would they use a technique from the Pure Immortal Temple?

"Huang Er!!!"

"Stop yelling — I've been grabbed by an evil spirit too!"

The brass oil lamp let out a wail — and was yanked toward a wall of cyan mist. Chen Huangpi, still gripping it, was dragged in with it.