Elemental Demons’ Entertainment (Part 1)
The journey through the portal was smooth sailing. Though the elemental demons’ teleportation formation wasn’t designed for human teleportation, Mu Yu’s wood-control ability made him a special case. To be safe, Xiaoshuai travelled inside Mu Yu’s shirt. Prior experience granted him the ability to land safely on the other side.
Upon landing, mist obstructed Mu Yu’s vision, but he could smell blood. Hearing something fly zoom through the air, he entered his wood spirit and transformed into grass.
“Anything?”
The speaker’s voice was deep. Both of the individuals who came had cracked skin. Mu Yu never detected any elemental demons the last time he was there because Mist City was so populated that they’d easily have picked up on elemental demons’ activities. Nevertheless, there they were, two fire demons searching for something in the west.
“Nothing.” The fire demon in the sky made a landing and withdrew his fire into him.
“Strange. I heard the formation activate. I thought someone used our formation. Whatever, let’s go. That was for nothing. Let’s finish off the remaining humans when we’re back,” one fire demon said with a wry smile.
A sick feeling visited Mu Yu’s stomach. Based on what he knew, the elemental demons had been raiding cities as part of their declaration of war on humanity. He, therefore, reasoned they might’ve captured humans. He always harboured a degree of dislike for Third Continent owing to what Feng Haochen suffered. Even so, he was rational enough to understand the ordinary folks were innocent in the matter. As such, he wouldn’t stand by and watch elemental demons attack ordinary humans.
Besides their flames, the fire demons flew fast enough to leave a trail of heat through friction. Mu Yu followed the trace from a distance to avoid detection. The scent of blood stood out more and more. Soon, traces of dry blood were also visible. The blood splattered on rocks clearly belonged to humans.
Mu Yu turned into a cave after a half an hour journey. The water stream was still clear. Dangling from the red trees were… Mu Yu held his breath as his eyes widened. Dangling from the trees were human corpses! The dry corpses were suspended from branches running through their collarbones. The enraging factor was none of them resembled cultivators. Their open eyes and grimaces suggested they were subjected to agonising pain before they died.
The two fire demons flew past the woods and into a cave halfway up the mountain. The words the wood elder voiced reverberated in Mu Yu’s mind. “All that hogwash about hating war and pursuing peace was nothing but lies!”
As he continued walking, Mu Yu found more corpses hanging off tree branches and white, swollen corpses floating along the water stream. Some corpses were buried neck-deep in the ground. He didn’t see a cultivator the entire way. Recalling the fire demons mentioning there were surviving humans, he raced toward the cave the two entered.
The hot interior of the cave was a sign Mu Yu was in the fire demons’ base. Against them, his wood-control ability would’ve granted them an unfair advantage. It didn’t go in very deep; however, it was large, and the ceiling was tall. He could hear something rising from the bright area up ahead.
Down below was a lava pit hundreds of metres deep. The rising sound was the sparks shooting up. Fire demons played in the lava as if it was a hot spring. There were more of them sitting on bridges they constructed using condensed lava.
Across the lava pit and a tad below was an enormous stone platform that protruded from the rocky wall. There were four humans incarcerated in a fire prison. Mu Yu sensed faint spiritual energy fluctuations. The two cultivators were young men. The cultivator in yellow sitting on the ground was visibly worn out and struggling to breathe. The youth in white was on his back and was leaking qi as a result of his severe injury. One of the ordinary humans was a middle-aged man dressed in cloth clothing. He was bleeding from his chest and looked distraught. The eight year old boy trembled in the man’s arms.
“Get a move on! Move it!”
“If you can get across, we’ll spare you, hihihi.”
There was a bearded man shakily crossing a narrow and thin wooden bridge below the stone platform. Calling it a platform was a bit of a stretch since it was practically a wooden stick that required one to traverse the same way they’d walk a tightrope. Slip and they would’ve fallen to their death in the lava. The fire demons’ cheering from below didn’t help. The wood was hot enough to burn the man’s shoes. Seeing his shoe on fire, he jolted, thereby losing his breath.
“Aaahh!”
Within the blink of an eye, the man’s scream died out in the lava. Smoke whisked up from where he plummeted to his demise.
Mu Yu shut his eyes. He had a slim chance of rescuing the captives at best.
“Those fire freaks rub me the wrong way,” fumed Xiaoshuai, popping out.
Mu Yu gnashed his teeth.
A fire demon next to the fire prison shouted, “Anyone else want to see a human-roasting performance? We still have four humans left.”
The fire demons below cried out in joy to express, “Yes.” They loved watching humans show despair and sizzling in the lava. Torturing humans was one form of entertainment to them. None of their human captives had crossed the bridge before.
A fire demon flew up to the platform. He summoned the guards back to his side and proposed, “Who wants to go first? Cross the bridge, and you’re a free man.”
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