Demonic Taoist Furnace

Chapter 1 · Handyman When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was blood. It's not someone else's blood. It's his own. Thick, dark red blood dripped from his forehead and smeared his eyelashes. He lay on the ground, his face pressed against the cold stone slab, and the mixed smell of earth and rust was under his nose. Someone grabbed his hair and lifted his head, and he saw a blurry, backlit face. The face was very thin, the chin was as pointed as an awl, and there was an unhurried smile hanging on the corner of the mouth. "Are you awake?" The voice came out of that mouth, light and airy, as if greeting an old friend. His name is Zhou He. Outer disciple. Three levels of Qi training. In the Demon Sect, a disciple at the third level of Qi training is not even qualified to enter the inner sect. His qualifications are inferior and his future is bleak. He has to carry his tail between his legs wherever he goes. But in front of the handyman, he is God. The stone road beneath his feet is his country. Gu Changsheng did not answer. He's calculating. Calculate whether you can survive today. After calculating for two seconds, the conclusion is that it is not possible. Zhou He let go of his hair, stood up, and looked at him condescendingly. There were three or four outer disciples behind him, arms folded, with expressions on their faces as if they were watching an insect struggling on the ground with its legs broken. "Have you finished your work today?" Zhou He's tone was casual, as if he was asking casually. Gu Changsheng is done. He gets up before dawn every day, cleans the excrement in the monster enclosure, carries the waste residue from the spirit stone mine, and soaks the roots of spirit grass in rotten bone water - that is the most annoying job of a handyman. The rotten bone water will make the palms of the hands white and wrinkled, and the cracked opening will be painful when it touches the water. He did it all, faster than anyone else, because he didn't want to be picked on. But when the outer disciples want to find fault, they are not done yet. "It's not done yet." Gu Changsheng said. Zhou He raised his eyebrows. "Then why are you lazy here?" Gu Changsheng said nothing. He pressed his face back to the stone, lowering his head, exposing the back of his neck. His hair was dark and stained with ash, but the roots had a cold shimmer in the midday light. A disciple named Sun Ping next to him stared at the back of his neck, his eyes sliding down his neck and into his tattered collar. Sun Ping licked his lips. "Senior Brother Zhou," he said, with a sticky smile in his voice, "this boy... Looks really good." Zhou He glanced at him. "What do you mean?" "It's not interesting." Sun Ping laughed, without moving his eyes away from Gu Changsheng, "I just think it's a pity to leave him here to do chores." "What a pity?" Another disciple named Wu Hai sneered, "What else can a waste with five elements and mixed spiritual roots do if he doesn't do chores?" They began to discuss him. It's like discussing an animal in a pen. Is the coat color good? Is the frame big? Can it be polished? Gu Changsheng remained motionless. He listened to these words clearly, but there was no expression on his face. The blood on his forehead was still flowing, dripping along the brow bone onto the stone floor, spreading a small dark red stain in the dust. His hand quietly clenched for a moment, then let go. Cannot resist. Cannot. This is not Blue Star. When he thought of Blue Star, his palms suddenly felt a little cold. He remembered the summer there, the air conditioner was buzzing, and he was nestled in the rental house, holding an ice Coke in one hand and reading novels on cultivating immortals on his mobile phone with the other. In those novels, the protagonists kill everyone after time travel, step on geniuses, and embrace beauties. It seems that all the villains who stand in the way exist to make the protagonists more comfortable. He thought so at the time. But now he knows. That's not the case. He now lives in the real world of immortal cultivation, where the life of a handyman is not as good as a grain of sand on the sole of an outer disciple's shoe. Being beaten to death, being used to test medicine, being fed to monsters - no one will seek justice for you. No one will even remember your name. "Okay," Zhou He finally said, "Look up." Gu Changsheng looked up. Zhou He squatted down, held his chin and turned it left and right, as if checking the quality of a product. He looked at it for a moment and smiled. There was no kindness in that smile, only something deeper and darker. "It is indeed a good birth." He took out a pill from his arms. The elixir was dusty, its surface was uneven, and it exuded a bitter and fishy medicinal smell. Gu Changsheng knew what it was after just one sniff - a low-grade elixir. The impurity content is extremely high, and erysipelas piles up like mountains. If this kind of thing is eaten, the efficacy of the medicine will only be 30 to 50% of the standard at most, and the rest will be all impurities, which will be deposited in the meridians, layer by layer, slowing down the speed of cultivation and making every subsequent breakthrough more difficult. The handymen privately call this "eating dirt" - what is eaten is hope, and what is left in the body are shackles. But that's not the most important thing. The most terrible thing is that the color of this elixir is wrong. Although normal low-grade elixirs are gray, they are not so gray as to turn blue. The green layer was very light, as if the spent medicine residue had been forcibly shaped into a pill shape. This is not an official elixir at all, it is a useless elixir thrown away by the alchemy hall. "This is my new pill," Zhou He handed the pill to his mouth, "Help me test the properties of the medicine." This is not a request. It's a command. Gu Changsheng looked at the elixir. The blue-gray medicinal powder rustled down between Zhou He's fingers and landed on the ground, turning the stone slabs an abnormal dark green. "Senior Brother Zhou," he said, "can I not eat it?" Zhou He smiled. The people behind him laughed. "What do you think?" Gu Changsheng was silent for two seconds. In these two seconds, he thought a lot. Thinking about why he came to the Demon Sect - because he wanted to cultivate immortality, wanted the legendary immortality, wanted to live as long as heaven and earth, and wanted to be immortal. How ridiculous. A waste with five elements and mixed spiritual roots, struggling to stay alive and still thinking about eternal life. Then he stretched out his hand and took the elixir. Not because he is stupid. It was because he knew that if he refused, Zhou He would find another way to make him eat it. Pour spiritual power into it, whip him until he opens his mouth, and use the only thing he can call "his own" in this demon sect - his life - as a threat. He can't escape. Resistance will only lead to faster and more miserable death. He popped the pill into his mouth and swallowed it. Then his body started to burn. That's not a metaphor. It was a real burning sensation starting from the Dantian and going outward. It was as if someone poured molten iron into his meridians, and the hot and violent medicine rushed wildly along his veins, impacting his heart, his internal organs, and the top of his head. He heard his bones ringing, he heard the blood roaring in his ears, and he heard Zhou He's laughter getting farther and farther away, becoming blurry, as if there was a deep layer of water between them. Then he lost hearing. Then he lost sight. He fell to the ground like a smashed fish. The stone was cold and hard, and his body twitched against it. Blood foam poured out of his mouth, mixed with dirt and dust, and formed into dark red mud at the corner of his mouth. Zhou He kicked him in the head. No response. "It won't work so soon?" He frowned, with a disappointed tone in his tone, as if he had watched a bad show. "That's what a handyman is like," Sun Ping shrugged. "He can't even carry a first-order elixir." Zhou He wiped his hands on Sun Ping's body, as if wiping off something dirty. "It's boring." He turned and left. Several people behind him followed him away, and no one looked back at the body on the ground that was still twitching slightly. The footsteps were far away. The laughter was far away. In the end even the echo disappeared. The handymen were still kneeling by the fence of the spirit animal enclosure, and no one moved. No one dared to move. An old handyman named Wang Gou secretly raised his head. He looked at the huddled body on the ground and the side face covered in blood and mud, and his lips trembled. Then he lowered his head again and continued to kneel. It's not that I don't want to save him. I don't dare. This is the Demon Sect. Here, sympathy is more deadly than a dead spiritual root. --- He floated in the darkness. No time, no space, no body. Just darkness, and him. He is no longer the handyman kneeling on the ground, no longer an ant being stepped on, no longer feeling pain, no longer breathing, no longer having a heartbeat. He thought: So this is what death feels like. He died once on Blue Star. It was too fast at that time, a truck hit him, and he lost consciousness before he had time to think. He thought death was just like that - quick and simple, without enough time to feel it. But now he discovered that there was a longer way to die. Slow enough that you can watch your consciousness drain away bit by bit with your own eyes, like a balloon with a hole in it, deflating bit by bit, until it deflates to nothing. Then he felt something. Not light. Not a sound. Not anything that can be described in words. It was a kind of existence - very faint, very distant, like something sinking at the bottom of an abyss, rising slowly and silently. He knows it. He has known it for a long time. From the first day he traveled to this world, he had occasional headaches. It was very light and brief, as if something touched it deep in the sea of ​​consciousness and then retracted. He thought it was a sequelae of time travel and didn't take it seriously. But now, as he was about to die, he truly felt it for the first time. It was a vague outline, hanging in the deepest part of his consciousness. Can't see shapes clearly, can't distinguish boundaries. He could just barely feel the general shape of it - like a furnace. Broken, old, cracked furnace. It was so big that it seemed like it could hold the entire world; and it was so small that it could sleep in his mind without being noticed. It was incomplete, as if someone had split it open and half of it collapsed. But it's still there. It's always there. He had no time to think more. Because it moved. It wasn't the stove itself that was moving, but a crack in it—a very thin, dark crack—that suddenly lit up. It only lit up once, very faintly, like the last spark buried deep under the ashes, blown by the wind and flickering. Then the power of the useless elixir that was raging in his body suddenly seemed to be held down by something. Not dispersal. Not resolve. He couldn't tell what it felt like - it was like there was suddenly a threshold in his body, and that threshold was so high that the violent force of the drug could not pass it. It was still tearing at his meridians and burning his Dantian, but it was suppressed. Like a snake nailed in a cage, struggling and rolling, but unable to bite anyone. He even vaguely felt that he seemed to "see" the structure of the medicinal power - those messy, twisted impurities that should not appear in the elixir, how they were entangled together, and how they tore his meridians. He didn't really understand. It felt more like a child who had never learned to read and suddenly saw ink marks on the paper. Although he didn't know what those strokes were, he knew they were words. He didn't know what it meant. All he knew was that he didn't have to die. The darkness recedes like the tide. Consciousness returned to his body, with pain, fatigue, and the dull sense of nothingness that comes with the rest of his life. He opened his eyes.