The Little Head on the Wall

1,254 words

“Heehee, you broke the rules.”

The voice was thin, almost like a woman’s but not quite. The moment Li Huowang heard it, he was struck by a sudden, unwelcome memory—the small-footed woman who had first called out the name of the Deity of Joy. She had sounded just like this.

Li Huowang led the others out of the house and into the courtyard, their faces tense with alertness. There, propped against the left wall of the house, was a small head.

A little girl of about five or six clung to the top of the high wall, grinning in at them. Her hair was tied into two stubby horns that stuck up high and proud, bound with red string.

Red.

The moment Li Huowang saw the red string around her head, his heart lurched.

Could this brat be Layue Shiba?

The girl was still giggling. Li Huowang watched her for a moment, then spoke slowly.

“I broke the rules, but you’re no better. Aren’t you not supposed to be out at night either? Why are you still out here?”

“I’m a kid,” the child said, showing no hostility toward them at all. She moved her head sideways along the wall, then went on cheerfully, “If you give me something to eat, I won’t tell anyone.”

When they saw her head shift, the others’ eyes went wide. The Wu family compound’s wall was extremely high—at least two zhang. And this little girl had moved her head along the top of it with such ease, which meant she wasn’t standing on a ladder. She was just… standing there.

Li Huowang stared at the small head. And below it, the drab, solid wall of grey earth.

He couldn’t even begin to imagine the body structure of a child with an ordinary little head who was over six meters tall. A stick insect?

“Heehee, are you going to give me some or not? If you don’t, I’ll call someone,” the girl on the wall said again.

“I will, of course I will. Don’t be in such a hurry. I don’t have it on me. I have to go get it first, don’t I?”

Li Huowang played along, then leaned sideways to speak quietly to Gouwa, giving him terse instructions. As he listened, Gouwa’s face twisted in terror. But when Li Huowang pressed the Daoist bell into his hands, Gouwa finally nodded and turned to go back inside the house.

“Alright, he’s gone to get it. Let’s just wait a bit. Bored, aren’t you? Why don’t we chat for a while?”

“Sure! Sure! I like talking,” the girl said with perfect innocence.

Facing this thing whose allegiance was unknown, Li Huowang kept his tone very mild.

“Which family are you from, little one? I didn’t see you in the village earlier.”

“I dunno whose kid I am. They all say I’m the Stove God’s kid, but I obviously don’t look a thing like that painting of the Stove God stuck on the wall,” the girl answered.

“Oh? You don’t look like the Stove God? I think you’re a lot like him. You’re both such eaters. I remember when we used to make offerings to the Stove God, my grandfather would always smear pastry on the mouth of his portrait.”

As he spoke, Li Huowang’s right hand silently slipped behind his back to the red bamboo slip.

The girl’s little horn-buns swung back and forth as she shook her head. “You’re making stuff up. The Stove God clearly has four pairs of eyes and five hands, and he doesn’t have any feet. How do I look anything like him?”

Hearing her speak these words without a hint of guile, every person present felt a chill crawl up their spine. This description was nothing like the Stove God in their own minds.

“Little girl, you’re making that up, right? How could the Stove God have five hands? And if he doesn’t have feet, how does he get around?”

At Li Huowang’s deliberate challenge, the child grew visibly flustered.

“I’m not making it up! I’ve seen him! And besides, who says you need legs to walk? The Stove God can just stick his red guts out of his belly button and use them as feet!”

The moment she finished speaking, Gouwa’s terrified, almost weeping voice came from the other side of the wall.

“Brother Li!! This dead girl doesn’t have a body!! She’s just a head!”

Swoosh.

The girl’s head vanished back down behind the wall in an instant. It was immediately followed by Gouwa’s wretched, piercing scream.

“Ring the bell!” Li Huowang gritted his teeth and sprinted for the gate of the Wu compound.

When they rounded the wall to the other side, they saw a trembling, sobbing Gouwa kneeling on the ground, kowtowing frantically. His pants were already soaked through.

Li Huowang scanned the pitch-black alleyways around them, then strode over to Gouwa, grabbed him by the scruff, and snatched his bell back.

“Stop kowtowing! Talk! Which way did that head go?!”

Gouwa’s shaking hand pointed east. Li Huowang dropped him, drew his sword with one hand, raised his lantern with the other, and gave chase.

In the absolute darkness, everything around him seemed to become a man-eating monster, writhing and snarling in the gap between the lantern’s light and the blind spots beyond it.

But after running at full tilt for a long time, Li Huowang didn’t catch up with the girl’s head. Instead, he found himself in unfamiliar terrain. It looked like he had reached the edge of the village. In the distance were bamboo groves.

Finding nothing, Li Huowang cursed under his breath and turned back toward the group, whose lanterns were hurrying over to meet him.

Whatever that girl was, he could at least guess that even if she wasn’t Layue Shiba herself, she was closely connected to it. He hadn’t been wrong. Layue Shiba was here.

When Li Huowang finally stepped into the circle of lantern light, he froze.

They were his companions. All of them. But they were all standing perfectly still, holding their lanterns, their backs turned to him in perfect unison.

“What are you doing?” Li Huowang took a cautious half-step back and tightened his grip on the Daoist bell.

The moment the question left his lips, they all turned around at once.

Their faces had changed.

Every single one of them now wore the face of that little girl.

All those identical female faces smiled at him at the same time.

“Heeheehee. You broke the rules again. You won’t give me any food, so I’m going to tell everyone else. They’ll come looking for you.”

Rrrrring—!!

The ear-splitting sound of the bell tore through the night. The figures vanished as quickly as shadows touched by light.

The clamor of the bell was naturally a powerful draw in the silence of the dark. Before long, Li Huowang saw his fellow disciples gathering around him. But this time, none of them were wearing that little girl’s face.

After cautiously verifying their identities with information only Qingfeng Temple disciples would know, Li Huowang finally let out a breath. These were the real ones.

“Brother Li, what happened? What was all that just now?”

“Nothing. Just a trick of the eye.” Li Huowang shook his head and swept his gaze over the surrounding darkness. He saw nothing unusual. Then he led the others back the way they had come.

But no sooner had they left than a pair of blood-red eyes opened in the darkness.

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Reading Guide Decoding

A Folk Horror Game of Rules and Snacks

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

The Stove God (Zao Ye or Zao Jun, the Kitchen God) is a beloved figure in Chinese folk religion. Every year, on the 23rd or 24th day of the twelfth lunar month, families smear sticky malt candy (guandong tang) on his painted lips before burning his portrait, sending him up to heaven to report on the household’s behavior over the past year. The candy sweetens his words—or gums them shut entirely. It’s a charming, domestic ritual.

This chapter uses those familiar associations and twists them into something monstrous. The girl’s description of a Stove God with five hands, eight eyes, and a set of red intestines used as legs is a deliberate, corrupted mirror-image—an intentional subversion designed to create cognitive dissonance. For readers in the know, this is the novel telling you: nothing sacred is safe here. This is a world where even the gods of hearth and home have been remade into something you pray not to meet.

The red string itself is a folk motif often associated with binding fate (as in the “red thread of destiny”) or warding off evil. Here, it signals the opposite—a marker of danger, not protection.

Chapter Overview

Fellow Daoists, get ready for the kind of horror that doesn’t need claws or fangs to make your skin crawl. In this chapter, our favorite paranoid alchemist-in-training, Li Huowang, comes face to face with something that looks like a child but follows rules that belong to no human world. And as always in the Dao-Twisted World, the real terror isn’t what attacks—it’s the rules you break without knowing you were inside a game at all. This chapter delivers a masterclass in psychological unease, where a single wall and a grinning little head force Li Huowang into a desperate game of logic, ritual, and survival. Buckle up: this is folk horror at its finest, and the monster is asking for a snack.

Key Plot Points

Li Huowang and his group are alerted by a strange, thin voice from outside their courtyard. The voice sounds eerily familiar to the small-footed woman who once summoned the Deity of Joy.
On the wall, they find a young girl of about five or six with red-string pigtails—a visual detail that immediately spikes Li Huowang’s blood pressure.
The girl accuses Li Huowang of breaking the rules, but she herself is out at night, a contradiction she hand-waves by saying children are allowed.
Li Huowang plays along, feigning generosity to buy time. He sends Gouwa to retrieve the Daoist bell, a risky gambit that places the cowardly disciple in the line of supernatural fire.
During their conversation, the girl casually describes the Stove God (Zao Ye). Her description—four pairs of eyes, five hands, no feet, and crawling on its own red intestines—deviates wildly from folk belief, marking her as something deeply wrong.
When Gouwa finally spots her on the other side of the wall, his scream reveals the truth: she has no body. She is just a head floating above the ground.
Li Huowang chases the head but ends up in unfamiliar territory near the bamboo grove. When he returns to his group, they all have her face. A single ring of the Daoist bell dispels the illusion.
After confirming his companions’ identities, Li Huowang leads them back. But in the final line, a pair of blood-red eyes opens in the darkness, implying the threat has not passed—only paused its game.

Reading Guide

This chapter is a masterstroke of folk-horror pacing. It doesn’t attack with violence; it attacks with information. The girl’s casual description of the Stove God is the real payload—it reveals that the thing on the wall has seen something it shouldn’t have, and worse, thinks it’s perfectly normal. That gap between “what you believe is sacred” and “what this creature accepts as true” is the very definition of uncanny horror in the Chinese folk tradition. Pay attention to how Li Huowang handles the encounter: he doesn’t reach for violence first. He talks. He gathers intel. He probes her logic. This is Li Huowang at his most survival-sharp, and it marks a key shift from the frantic, scared apprentice of earlier chapters into a man who knows that survival is first a game of information, then a game of force. Also, note the boundary rule: “Don’t go out at night.” The girl doesn’t break it—she exploits its loophole. That’s the kind of legalistic, rule-bound supernatural logic that defines the deepest horrors in this novel. If you love the feel of The Wailing or Noroi: The Curse, this chapter hits that same nerve.