The Madman

1,159 words

Li Huowang pressed a hand to his wound and moved slowly, shuffling until he reached Jingxin’s room. He sank down against the wall.

“Can’t even you handle Danyangzi?” Li Huowang asked.

“Of course we can. All we have to do is kill you.”

Jingxin’s words coaxed a laugh out of Li Huowang. “I didn’t know the nun had such a sense of humor.”

“I am not joking with you. Danyangzi’s roots are now firmly planted in you. You are one of his unfinished Three Corpses.”

“If you want to live and separate yourself from your master, that is delicate work—you two are connected too deeply. You could say you are already a small piece of Danyangzi. That is why I did not simply peel the Black Tai Sui from your stomach—because it is no longer just Danyangzi’s, it is also yours.”

Li Huowang had asked the nuns of Anci Nunnery to purge Danyangzi. It had not worked. They had coordinated with him, wounded Danyangzi severely, driven him off temporarily. But that was only a stopgap. The trouble remained. Unresolved.

Li Huowang hid in the darkness, back against the cold wall, staring numbly at the moss-stained layers of tile on the temple roof outside.

“It is not our fault. I did not know that half of your master was still alive. Our Anci Nunnery specializes in the Empty Self realm—when it comes to flesh, those oath-breaking monks of Zhengde Temple are better at it.”

“Reverend Mother, I do not blame you. I only want to know how long I have before I am fully transformed into Danyangzi.”

The failure had not discouraged him.

“At the current rate… about two months,” Jingxin said, walking into the shadows to a bamboo cradle. She rocked it gently, looking down at the old man inside with a kindly smile.

“Oh.”

“So… what do you plan to do?”

“I need to wait first. Wait for an answer. Reverend Mother, may I borrow something?”

For a long moment, the dim room was quiet.

Li Huowang took a deep breath. His expression wavered with strain. Then he snapped his eyes open.

The darkness around him had been replaced by white. He was back in the hospital.

He looked carefully. This was not the psychiatric ward—it was a regular hospital. In this hallucination, his wounds did not look healed yet.

His gaze dropped. His mother, Sun Xiaoqin, was asleep on a small stool at the bedside, her head resting on the edge of the bed, breathing deeply.

In Li Huowang’s memory, his mother had always been particular about cleanliness. But now her hair was greasy. It had been a long time since she had washed it.

He tried to reach out and found his limbs firmly strapped down. Helpless, he called softly to her. “Mom. It’s me. Huowang.”

When Sun Xiaoqin opened her eyes and saw her son staring at her, his expression completely normal, saying her name—she lunged forward and wrapped her arms around him, sobbing. “Son. You’re finally awake.”

He waited quietly until her emotions had settled. Then he asked, “Mom. Where’s Dad?”

“Your dad went to earn money. We’re very short on cash right now. We’ve run up a lot of debt.”

As soon as she said it, her heart clenched. She cupped his face and began explaining, her voice full of grief.

“Huowang, I don’t blame you. I know. None of this is what you wanted to do. It’s the illness. That damned madness! Why did it have to fall on my son out of all people?”

“Mom… could you untie one of my hands? I want to stretch it.”

Seeing her son speaking so normally, Sun Xiaoqin hesitated, then forced a smile.

“Alright. Stretching is good. If you’re tied up all day, your body will break.”

Once his right hand was free, Li Huowang smiled at her. “Thanks, Mom.”

He reached under his hospital gown and pulled out a heavy string of golden Buddhist prayer beads.

Under his mother’s stunned gaze, he placed them in her hand.

“Mom. Sell these. Pay off the family’s debts. If there’s anything left, buy back our house. I still like that neighborhood.”

Sun Xiaoqin stared at the heavy gold beads, disoriented. “What… what is this? Son, where did this gold come from? Did you go get it while I was asleep?”

Li Huowang shook his head slightly. He took off the jade pendant around his neck and placed it in her hand as well.

“Mom. Take this too. It should be worth something. Even though I know you’re a hallucination… I don’t want to see you suffer in front of me.”

At those words, Sun Xiaoqin forgot the gold and the jade. She grabbed his shoulders and shook him, tears streaming down her face.

“Son! Look carefully! I’m your mother! I’m not a hallucination! I am really not a hallucination!”

Li Huowang reached out and gently wiped the tears from her face. A faint smile touched his lips.

“Yeah. Right. You’re real, Mom. You’re not a hallucination. I was just messing with you.”

Hearing his comforting words, Sun Xiaoqin jumped up and down with joy, clasping her hands together and murmuring prayers of gratitude to the Bodhisattva.

As she excitedly pulled out her phone to video-call his father at work, Li Huowang reached out and picked at her clothes. He flicked a small vermillion button loose and tucked it into his own gown.

Perhaps because he had initiated the shift, this return came very quickly. In the video, his grey-haired father had not even managed half a sentence before everything around him transformed again.

He was back in the dim room.

As his senses returned, he saw Jingxin standing there in the dark, quietly watching him, holding the gold prayer beads.

Li Huowang raised his right hand. His breathing grew faster. His mind was a mess.

He gritted his teeth and thrust his hand toward his chest—and froze.

There was nothing there.

Faced with the outcome he had already expected, Li Huowang laughed.

“Heh. I should have guessed. How could that side be real? And I actually believed what a hallucination said to me. I really am out of my mind.”

He laughed until he stopped. Because he realized this was not good news at all. He had just lost the last shred of possibility in his fantasy.

Li Huowang took a deep breath and said softly to the empty air, “Sorry if I scared you, Mom. I’m sorry. Tie my hands back up, so I don’t touch you.”

The nun, who had been silently watching everything, spoke. “If that side is false… then who were you talking to just now?”

Li Huowang looked up at the dark shape of the nun. “Can’t I talk to myself?”

“What do you plan to do now?”

Li Huowang drew in a long, slow breath, and in an instant his eyes were filled with murderous intent.

“I want Danyangzi dead.”

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Reading Guide Decoding

The Button Test and the Two-Month Clock

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

The Three Corpses (三尸 / San Shi): In Daoist internal alchemy, the Three Corpses are malevolent, parasitic spirits that reside in the human body, feeding on its vitality and reporting one’s sins to the heavens. They are a classic obstacle to immortality; practitioners seek to “kill” or expel them through meditation, diet, and ritual. In the Dao-Twisted World, this concept is literalized and inverted: Danyangzi is turning Li Huowang into one of his own Three Corpses—a flesh-and-blood parasitic extension of the master, not a spirit to be purged but an identity to be overwritten. Grotesque, right?

Anci Nunnery (安慈庵) vs. Zhengde Temple: The novel uses two flavors of corrupted Buddhism. Zhengde Temple is polished corruption—grand, secretive, and ritualistically perverse. Anci Nunnery is decayed corruption: dilapidated, openly vulgar, and indifferent to piety. Jingxin is still capable of helping, but she admits her limits—flesh-body horror is the monks’ specialty. This sets up a spiritual “division of labor” in the broken religious landscape of the Dao-Twisted World.

Objects Crossing Realms: The gold beads and jade pendant that Li Huowang passes to his mother are a recurring supernatural phenomenon—objects from the hallucinatory world manifesting physically in the hospital reality. But the red button he takes from his mother’s clothes returns to nothing, confirming that the hospital was not a crossover point but a closed loop inside his own mind. This is the novel using material proof as a knife to cut his last hope.

Chapter Overview

Welp, folks, the Anci Nunnery exorcism didn’t exactly go to plan. Chapter 111 opens with Li Huowang licking his wounds—literally—after the nuns’ best attempt to peel Danyangzi out of him only managed to wound the bastard temporarily. The clock is ticking: two months until Li Huowang becomes Danyangzi completely. But instead of despair, our favorite walking disaster does something utterly heartbreaking: he slips into a hospital hallucination, has a perfectly normal conversation with his mom, gives her gold and jade to pay the family’s debts… and then coldly reminds himself it’s all fake. The chapter ends with Li Huowang’s quiet, lethal decision: no more waiting. Time to kill Danyangzi.

Key Plot Points

Jingxin explains the grim prognosis: Danyangzi’s roots are so entwined with Li Huowang that killing the master would require killing the disciple. They are, in effect, sharing a body, which is why the Black Tai Sui couldn’t be removed.
Li Huowang requests a temporary loan from the nunnery and triggers a voluntary shift back to the hospital reality.
In the hospital, Sun Xiaoqin is exhausted and unkempt, revealing the financial strain caused by Li Huowang’s illness. She is overjoyed when he speaks coherently.
Li Huowang produces a string of gold prayer beads and a jade pendant from his hallucination—objects that “cross over” with him—and gives them to his mother, asking her to pay off debts and buy back their old house.
When he mutters that he knows she is just a hallucination, Sun Xiaoqin panics, desperately insisting she is real. Li Huowang soothes her with a lie.
He surreptitiously picks a red button from her clothes as a “souvenir” and shifts back.
Back in the dark temple room, he reaches for the button—and finds nothing. The grim realization hits him coldly: the hospital was a fantasy.
Li Huowang’s final resolution: “I want Danyangzi dead.”

Reading Guide

Get ready, fellow Daoists, because Chapter 111 is a punch to the gut disguised as a quiet, dimly lit room. The emotional core here is brutal: Li Huowang does something genuinely kind for his mother, and then immediately tells himself it was all fake—yet he still apologizes to the empty air when he comes back. The red button trick is devastating. The novel’s horror weaponizes love: it’s not the monster that breaks him, it’s the realization that the person he loves most in the world might not even be real. And yet—and this is why we keep reading—he doesn’t collapse. He makes a choice. The line “I want Danyangzi dead” isn’t a flashy battle cry; it’s the quiet, sharp sound of a man who has just lost everything and decided to make someone pay for it. There are no magic shortcuts or sudden power-ups here—just two months, a cursed body, and a plan that will almost certainly hurt.

If you’re new to the genre’s obsession with mental unwellness as a narrative engine, note how Li Huowang uses his hallucination as a functional tool—he asks his mother for news about the family’s finances, he gives away objects, he even steals a “proof” to test later. His madness is logical, systematic, and heartbreakingly practical. That’s the unique flavor of Dao Gui Yi Xian: a protagonist who wields his psychosis like a scalpel while bleeding out.