He and It Chapter 69: Dark Sky Sanctuary (4)

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Chapter 69: Dark Sky Sanctuary (4)

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: GaeaTiamat

 

Yu Mengzhou, “…”

Goodness, you’re quite stubborn…

He breathlessly raised his hands as a sign of helpless concession, but in the end, he didn’t press the issue, just asked in a muffled voice, “Since I’m going to be locked up and working for you guys, can’t you find me something to eat?”

The horse’s eyes were like burning coals, but the look inside was so cold. It was hidden in the darkness without a word, as silent as when it came.

Yu Mengzhou sighed and leaned against the hard, choking cage. The extreme thirst didn’t diminish the need to sleep by half, and with no horses to disturb him, he soon fell into a deep sleep.

He didn’t know how long he slept, but when Yu Mengzhou woke up, the horses were roaming around a short distance away, and there was a large clearing by the side of the cage. Striker’s visit last night had spread the word and they all avoided him like the plague.

All Yu Mengzhou could hear was hoarse chatter echoing in his ears. His temperature had risen to an abnormal level. Not only was his head dizzy and his lips chapped, but he felt his tongue shriveling in his mouth like a wilting leaf.

Since he was a child, Yu Mengzhou had always been a figure of strength. He had never been sick, so this was the first time he had ever been in this situation.

He poked out his weak hand, barely able to reach into the toolbox, took out the purplish liquid, tried his best to overcome his shaking hands and blurred eyes, and gently smeared it on his lips. One to moisten the skin, the other to disinfect the cracks. Who knew what unknown germs lurked here.

“What’s he doing?” Striker asked, as he peeked in and looked around.

“Leave the human alone,” Sevenfold Eyes admonished, as it looked at Striker with eyes like cascading flames. “If you want him to live here for two more days, then don’t disobey Falchion.”

Striker said nothing.

Gao’er looked at him and twitched his own ears, which caused the muffled sound of brass rings clashing.

In the end, Striker hadn’t spent very much time among the horses, and had suffered the least. His curiosity hadn’t been dulled, and deep down, he still held a faint glimmer of hope for seemingly harmless objects.

Not to mention that the liar’s appearance was as deceptive as it was clever. With every gesture, every word, fitting to the listener’s mind and exuding flawless prowess. Compared to him, Blasphe, who was famous for her skillful words, was nothing more than a clumsy fool.

Strange. What kind of Archdemon’s blood flowed in that humanoid creature?

As he thought that, Gao’er glanced suspiciously at the bone cage. He scrutinized Yu Mengzhou’s face, and after a few moments, he suddenly realized with a shock that his attention had been attracted again. He hastily withdrew his eyes and moved a little farther away with a palpitating heart.

So close! It was about to disobey the chief’s order.

Yu Mengzhou really didn’t understand what was going on in the hearts of those horses, and he didn’t have the strength to speculate. He was starving and thirsty, and at such a moment, even a fishy pool of blood not far away actually held a tantalizing position in his mind. At least it was liquid.

If you really couldn’t, you could drink that. Anyway, it wasn’t human blood, and as long as it could satisfy your hunger and quench your thirst…

No. That blood belonged to the previous owner of the herd. If they could talk and had human form, could you really drink it?

Bullshit. Just to survive. Look at the shape of those horses. They’d have to be meters tall for a giant to ride on them, wouldn’t they? That’s not human, that’s demonic!

But who knows if demon blood is poisonous to humans? Don’t think about killing yourself. There’s still hope!

The lack of food and water reached such a level that Yu Mengzhou even had two voices in his head, arguing with each other in a self-indulgent manner.

Finally, the turnaround appeared in the evening. The twilight was overcast, and on the southeast horizon, a group of black dots flew up with a huff and a puff. A demon horse suddenly tilted its head and hissed, “The banshee of mourning! They’ve released the Annunciation Banshee!”

Falchion, who had been lying still in the shadows, rose to his feet and went to the front of his restless herd.

“The Word of the Lord Eater will be spreading soon. How are you resting?”

The herd responded with a rumbling growl. They plowed the crimson soil with their sharp, twisted front hooves. Blasphe said with malice, “Took care of that lot of crap, easy. Didn’t take much damage.”

On her saddle, she still had nailed the remnants of some barbed-encrusted brass boots, a remnant of her former rider.

“Then we’ll take the fight to them.” Falchion turned. “Drag that self-proclaimed artificer up. Now is the time for him to serve us.”

Striker’s eyes lit up and a few sparks of fire crashed urgently from his pupils, but before he could run over, his companion was already ahead of him.

Sevenfold Eyes ran to the cage, sniffed deeply first, bit the cage door once, and turned his head to report to the chief, “He’s passed out.”

You! You told me to leave the human alone in the morning!

Striker chewed angrily on his horse’s bit ¹ and stamped the ground with his front hooves, which made deep, fire-burning cracks.

“He said he was hungry yesterday!” He trotted over to the horse reluctantly, as his snake tail thrashed against his hind legs. “Hey, what do you want to eat?”

Yu Mengzhou, half-asleep, suddenly heard a voice ask him, “What do you want to eat?” and almost cried out in joy. He tried with all his strength to get out a single word, “Water…”

“Water.” Striker cocked his big head and turned to Gao’er. “Hey, he wants water! What’s water?”

Gao’er cautiously stayed in a position not too far from the cage and said in a nonchalant voice, “How do I know what water is? Do I have to serve this crook?”

Falchion stared indifferently at the cage. No demon horse would dare to find the “water” Yu Mengzhou needed without his say-so.

“…Listen,” Yu Mengzhou said, as he bargained with the herd through a throat too swollen to make much sound. “You can’t work without a deposit. Food…Understand? Food, the deposit that is…”

“A very reasonable request,” the demon horses said carefully as they turned to their leader. “In keeping with the rules of the Demon Realm.”

Falchion was silent for a long moment, then said to Gao’er, “Go find food that people can eat. Stalk alone in the shadows, and be careful where you walk.”

Gao’er breathed out a hot breath and the bronze bells on his saddle chimed in unison, “Understood.”

Under the shroud of dusk, he quickly transformed into a puddle of swift shadows and swept off into the distance at a speed that was difficult to witness with the naked eye.

Soon, the hunting Demon Horse returned.

Regathering the nightmarish original form on the ground, he twisted his head and yanked two things off his back, a cranial flask and a burnt, unknown chunk of flesh.

“Drink!” He impatiently flung the bottle into Yu Mengzhou’s arms then kicked the chunk of meat to the youth’s feet. “This was found from a tribe of scared little demons. Humans should be able to handle it.”

Striker asked, “Did they offer it to you?”

“Don’t care,” Gao’er said indifferently. “They don’t taste good anyway.”

With trembling hands, Yu Mengzhou shakily twisted the skull-shaped monstrosity of a bottle. By now, he couldn’t care less. When he took a look inside, Yu Mengzhou was in a bit of a trance.

Contained inside, wasn’t blood, brain plasma or other irregularities, but a deep purple, unusually thick liquid, that when shaken, immediately clung like tears on the wall of the bottle, and it smelt bad.

Forget it. No matter whether to drink or not to drink, either way is death so just do it.

Yu Mengzhou tilted his neck, determined to pour that bottle of stuff down. As expected, it was bitter and spicy, and more difficult than drinking traditional Chinese medicine. However, in the end, it was a drink that contained water, which allowed for a little bit of strength to be restored.

The flavor of the meat wasn’t good either, and he could taste that the roast master’s craftsmanship was close to nonexistent. Where it was overcooked, it was like chewing a tire, and where it was half-cooked, a bite was like soaked cotton wool.Yu Mengzhou bared his teeth as he ate it, but hunger was after all the best spice under the heavens, and he barely filled his stomach as he endured the smell of blood and charring.

“…What the hell are you guys doing?” He wiped his mouth and covered his forehead, as he looked hard at the horses in front of him.

“Igniting pain and inflicting torment,” Falchion replied. “Since you claim to be an artisan and took a deposit, it’s time to fulfill your promise.”

Yu Mengzhou’s head hurt even more as he asked, “Excuse me, what? If I understood correctly…You’re asking to torture you guys?”

“This is common sense for artisans! The fact that you don’t know that only means you’re a liar,” Blasphe hissed.

“I never said anything about being an artisan in your area!” Yu Mengzhou retorted in a loud voice, fighting back his sore throat. “I’m not sick in the head, and you guys don’t look like you have…Well you guys do look more than sick, but why, ah? What the hell does that accomplish?”

“Pain is a source of motivation, the currency that passes for magic.” Striker explained at the risk of being lectured by the chief. “War is coming, but without the guidance of the Rider Masters, the suffering that ye have endured will soon not be enough to sustain ye against the constant stream of hordes…”

Falchion stepped forward, and interrupted Striker.

“So that is to say, you can’t do it.”

Yu Mengzhou took a deep breath and lifted his toolbox. “Can’t do it, and torture isn’t the job to do. Only hoof trimming, I’m willing to try and fix that for you, regardless, seeing as you are all horses, but don’t even think about anything else.”

He moved his sore legs and looked up at the horses in front of him.

“Which one of you comes first? Or do you line up one by one?”

The horses stared at him with different expressions, but all of them contained a little confusion. What Yu Mengzhou said was beyond their understanding. Why couldn’t torture be considered a job? How would hoof trimming work, and what did lining up mean?

There was no hoof repair stool, so Yu Mengzhou looked around, pulled over a piece of air-dried giant bone of different heights that he could use according to the horse’s type.

Although repairing a huge horse was costly, there was a real benefit for the farrier – no need to bend over, so no waist injuries.

The demon horses started snorting in unison. They hovered in nervous vigilance, but after all, they were demonic warhorses born for killing, so their hesitation was only for a moment. Soon, there was a demonic horse who came out of the crowd, and asked in a vicious voice, “How do you want to fix it?!”

This demon horse was blood red. Only the saddle blanket was pure black. Yu Mengzhou had a deep impression of it. He had heard it’s companion called him, he was Bloody Butcher.

The fact that they could talk was kind of a plus for him. Yu Mengzhou consoled himself with the fact that at least they could communicate.

“Stand here,” he gestured. “Because the conditions aren’t that good right now to immobilize you, but if you stand still, it will work. Is that okay?”

Bloody Butcher scoffed at this bit of torturous foreplay as his companion looked on.

The trick of enforcing endurance, or having to endure, had been performed on them by untold numbers of riders long ago, and in comparison to the suffering they had endured, this was as tiny as a drop of blood compared to a sea of blood.

He stood still without a word.

“Raise your front hoof, yes, left first, I think. Bend it a bit, hitch it here.” Yu Mengzhou drew out the thick gloves reserved for trimming. “Is the height still right? Not the right adjustment?”

Bloody Butcher remained silent. He seemed to enter some kind of state of readiness. His hideous sternum rumbled, and the skin of his mouth began to ripple in folds, tellingly. Yu Mengzhou sighed quietly, stretched out his arm as far as he could, and touched the warhorse’s withers softly and skillfully with the bare palm of his hand. He avoided the burning flames. Under  his hand, it was like he was caressing delicate, blood-soaked, lacquered leather.

“Relax, relax…It’s nothing,” Yu Mengzhou soothed. “It might hurt a little. Just bear with it.”

After a few touches, the horse’s body trembled a little. Yu Mengzhou didn’t dare to touch Bloody Butcher’s nose. With these demon horses, their relationship wasn’t close enough.

Yu Mengzhou bent down, put on his gloves and apron, and finally opened his long closed toolbox, which contained hoof-trimming tools still in their shiny new condition. The horses all stepped back in confusion and fear, and they had to, because with the opening of the box, a warm, unfamiliar odor was filling the air, and they weren’t used to it.

Yu Mengzhou didn’t notice their behavior. After some thought, he first took a closer look at the condition of the horse’s hooves.

It was bad.

In all his hoof trimming career, he had never seen hooves in such bad condition.

Clusters of iron thorns, messy steel nails, knotted brass wires with blades twisted into weird shapes and embedded deep into the hoof’s horny texture, and five brass wedges as thick as a pinky finger, driven crosswise into the sole of the hoof, with the tips flaring out directly from the top of the hoof, vaguely formed in the shape of an inverted pentagram, locked in place by coagulating blood-scabs and hardened flesh… It was probably enough to make an algophobe have a seizure and faint just by looking at it.

He didn’t say anything. First he drew out a single-sided curved knife, and began to concentrate on scraping the hoof surface of the uneven crusts of hard flesh. Yu Mengzhou’s movement was fast, and his knife was even faster, in two strokes, he shoveled the fishy-smelling scabs, dug out the clumps of iron thorns inside, and pried them one by one into the ground, and every time he pried them out, there was a sound similar to that of broken strings, “ching!”

Prying couldn’t be worse, so he took out the hoof cutters, and evenly knocked on the horse’s hooves. After he shocked away the crushed remnants the blood crust, he had to pick out the copper wires and clip them off one by one.

“What’s he doing?” Striker asked frostily.

“Probably…He has a special habit of being able to add his own after he’s erased the traces of the previous Knight…Right?” Blasphe, who had always been good at coquettish speech, couldn’t find the words either. Beside her, Falchion gazed at Yu Mengzhou’s movements with a slight loss of concentration.

In order to tear out the copper wires, Yu Mengzhou had to use all his strength. He had to break them off one by one, then carefully pull them off in circles because they were embedded with small, delicate blades, and if he was not careful, the blades would get broken in the hooves.

He pulled and threw, while his face dripped with sweat, but he didn’t not forget his habit of reassuring the horse. “Good boy, good boy. No, it’ll be all right soon. No…”

Bloody Butcher stood stiffly in place, his eyes frozen open. Even his mane forgot to burn and drooped to one side in shock.

It was hard to pull to the head. When he saw that the horse’s hooves were about to be completely rid of the roaming coiled copper wire, Yu Mengzhou cautiously clamped the end of it, but what came out was a scaly and thin tail that was connected to the copper wire. 

Yu Mengzhou, “?”

He looked at the half-metal, half-creature thing with disgust and muttered, “What is this?”

He changed his grip to tug, while the living thing inside also began to desperately wriggle and struggle. The final result of tugging it out was actually a tapeworm-like living snake. Once it was forcibly evicted from its host’s body, it furiously coiled around itself then turned back to take a bite!

“Shit!” Yu Mengzhou cried out in terror, and with a single slash shattered it into two pieces. When he looked up, a large hollowed-out hole had appeared in the sole of the horse’s hoof, while blood was slowly flowing outward.

He said in shock, “What the hell?!”

“A copperized snake,” Bloody Butcher hung his head and replied in a muffled voice. “The tormentor’s favorite pet.”