The Gate Is Open

1,173 words

The Gate Is Open

“Mao Gate?!” Danyangzi stared in shock at the three large characters carved into the colossal jade plaque.

The three words, so utterly unexpected, slammed into him, making his mind buzz and swarm with a torrent of questions in an instant.

“How can it be the Mao Gate? Isn’t this the Southern Heavenly Gate? Isn’t this the entrance to the Immortal Realm? Aren’t these the ones who achieved immortality?”

He looked down at the stars beneath his feet, then up again at the pitch-black void of the Heaven-Outside-Heaven.

For a moment, he didn’t know what to do next. It was as if, in that single instant, everything had lost all meaning.

“Still don’t get it? There never was any damned Immortal Realm in this world! You were tricked. Your entire life has been a joke!”

A familiar voice suddenly appeared, and Danyangzi whipped his head around. Yet nothing materialized where the sound had come from.

Just as he thought the previous hallucination was returning, he found the source of the voice. It was one of his own three heads.

His left head had been replaced, without warning, by Li Huowang’s.

“That is absolutely impossible! The Three Corpses have been severed! Who are you?!”

Startled, Danyangzi raised the flesh-and-copper-coin sword in his hand, pressing its tip against Li Huowang’s neck.

Li Huowang, however, seemed utterly unconcerned. He let out a chuckle. “Guess.”

“You treacherous, master-betraying disciple!” Enraged, Danyangzi tried to strike, but found he couldn’t cut down. A force within his own body was holding him back.

Suddenly, his other hand, not holding the sword, shot up and slapped Danyangzi across the face.

Watching Danyangzi fume until it seemed smoke would pour from his seven orifices, Li Huowang’s smile only grew wider.

Earlier, when he saw this three-headed Danyangzi coming to absorb him, Li Huowang, having barely regained his senses, had made a single, immediate decision: he was not going to let Danyangzi have it easy!

As he was sucked into the main body alongside the other Danyangzi, an idea had crystallized in his mind.

“You dare strike me?!” Danyangzi, driven mad by the provocation, attacked Li Huowang with savage desperation.

But this was, after all, Danyangzi’s body. Gradually, Li Huowang began to lose ground, and the flesh-and-copper-coin sword soon bit into his neck.

Yet Li Huowang’s face showed no fear. He laughed, a sound of pure, unrestrained release.

“Bald-head! You know what? For a while, I was always trying to find ways to kill you. I wanted you gone. But I tried everything, and nothing worked.”

“But just now, I realized I was thinking about it all wrong. I don’t need to kill you. I just need to make your life a living hell.”

“Turns out all the torment and pain I’ve endured over the years finally came in handy.”

Before Danyangzi could even process the meaning of his words, other voices began to materialize out of thin air around them.

“Goat-balls, you motherless bastard! You’ll die a dog’s death! Lad! Kill him! Get revenge for me!”

“Lick-ass old shit, why don’t you just die already!”

“Daoist, kill him! This man is pure evil! You must act for heaven!”

At that moment, both Li Huowang’s hallucinations and Danyangzi’s hallucinations began to surface.

Li Huowang’s bewilderment was now settling onto Danyangzi.

In the pitch-black Heaven-Outside-Heaven, their bodies twisted and elongated, turning strange and long, writhing around the two of them like seaweed.

Li Huowang’s Heart-Element, following his will, had manifested once more on Danyangzi’s body. This time, on the real one.

Seeing Danyangzi’s breath grow ragged, Li Huowang continued his taunts against the pockmarked skull.

“Master, how do you like it? This is your disciple’s filial offering to you. Even if you kill me, who knows? Maybe now you’ll have to bear the Heart-Element’s torment all on your own!”

“You madman!” At those words, Danyangzi hesitated, unable to strike. He looked at everything around him and felt a fear he couldn’t name.

“Mad? I learned it from you, Master! You taught me well!”

As the two remained locked in a stalemate, the massive jade plaque beside them underwent a new change.

The terrifying monsters that had seemed to be devouring something behind a veil of haze inside it drew closer, sizing up the two men through the jade’s surface.

Then, without warning, the jade plaque vanished into the darkness. In its place appeared a series of wondrous scenes, like a kaleidoscope.

What Li Huowang and Danyangzi saw there was a stunning, evil abnormality built upon a foundation of terror and anomaly.

A faint breeze drifted out from the wondrous scene, carrying a sigh that pulled Li Huowang and Danyangzi toward it.

“The White Jade Capital in heaven, with its twelve towers and five cities. An immortal touched my head, and I bound my hair to receive long life. Is this the White Jade Capital? Is this the White Jade Capital?!”

An old Daoist from the hallucination, with the bearing of an immortal, trembled with excitement at the sight before him.

Danyangzi, whose eyes should have been filled with unwillingness, instead burst forth with immense potential upon seeing this. Too lazy to bicker with Li Huowang, he frantically charged toward it.

“I’m going to the White Jade Capital! I’m going to become an immortal! I am going to become an immortal!”

Danyangzi, of course, could not let him succeed. He used all his strength to pull him back.

“Don’t you dare stop me from becoming an immortal! Don’t you dare!” Danyangzi struggled, throwing everything into rushing forward.

They strained and struggled, drawing closer and closer, until they could make out the so-called immortals waiting inside to touch their heads.

In the strange scene, closest to them was a bodhisattva. Her movements were gentle and graceful, and the hem of her robe, drifting erratically in the air, gave the illusion of being underwater.

A pale, eerie halo enveloped the back of her head, making it impossible to see her face. But as they drew near enough, they could make it out. The halo was actually composed of countless white eyes, large and small.

And this was merely the most normal aspect. Looking further, the strangeness only grew more extreme.

Staring at this formless bodhisattva, a sliver of fear suddenly welled up in Danyangzi’s heart. It deepened rapidly, consuming him entirely.

Every instinct in his body screamed that this was an exceptionally dangerous place. Absolutely not to be entered.

“No. This isn’t the Southern Heavenly Gate! This is the Mao Gate! And those aren’t immortals inside!” Danyangzi, whose mind had been clouded by the dream of ascension, suddenly realized the truth.

But just as he was about to retreat, Li Huowang, bound to him as one, suddenly spoke.

“Master! Are you ready? Your disciple is here to help you become an immortal!”

In that instant, Li Huowang, who had been pulling outward, abruptly released all his force. Catching Danyangzi before he could brace himself, he dragged him headlong into the face of the bodhisattva.

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Reading Guide Decoding

The Gate of Lies: Danyangzi's Final Revelation

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

The Southern Heavenly Gate (南天门) is the iconic main entrance to Heaven in Chinese mythology, especially the Daoist celestial bureaucracy. It’s the gate all cultivators dream of crossing to achieve immortality. Changing it to Mao Gate (牦之门) is a devastating subversion—牦 (Mao) primarily means “yak” or “coarse wool” in classical Chinese, carrying connotations of the animalistic and the base. It suggests the path Danyangzi walked leads not to transcendence but to a beastly parody of divinity.

This chapter also plays directly with the Mao Gate / Nantian Men rebus from earlier in the arc—where Li Huowang’s reading of a misaligned gate name was dismissed as madness. Now it’s confirmed as the truth. The novel weaponizes the folk motif of “wrong gate, wrong destination,” a common horror in Chinese ghost stories where a traveler enters a familiar door only to find themselves in a demon’s lair.

The White Jade Capital (白玉京) is a key term. In Daoist poetry, most famously Li Bai’s line “天上白玉京，十二楼五城” (The White Jade Capital in heaven, with twelve towers and five cities), it represents the ultimate celestial destination. Here, its beauty is a trap: a halo of grasping white eyes, not radiant saints. The novel corrupts the most sacred image in Daoist cosmology into a horror show.

On the alchemical side, the Three Corpses (三尸/San Shi) are central to the internal conflict. Traditional Daoist cultivation holds that three parasitic demons reside in the human body—in the head, chest, and belly—spurring lust, greed, and delusion. Cutting them off is a prerequisite for immortality. Danyangzi claims to have severed them, yet Li Huowang’s intrusion into his body proves otherwise. The “cutting” was incomplete, and now the parasites have returned in a new, far more personal form.

Chapter Overview

Buckle up, because Chapter 175 isn’t just a clash—it’s a spiritual demolition derby. Danyangzi finally reaches the grand gate he’s been chasing his whole life, only to find the nameplate reads something very different from “Southern Heavenly Gate.” The world he built on faith and gore crumbles in an instant. But before he can even process the existential crisis, his own body betrays him. Li Huowang’s head has replaced one of his three, and the student has become the master’s worst torment. This chapter delivers a masterclass in psychological warfare: no spells, no chants, just two madmen tearing at each other’s souls while the real truth peels back like rotten skin. And that final charge into the White Jade Capital? Pure, desperate defiance.

Key Plot Points

Danyangzi reads the jade plaque: it says “Mao Gate” (牦之门), not the Southern Heavenly Gate (南天门) he expected. The revelation that there is no Immortal Realm shatters him.
Li Huowang’s head replaces one of Danyangzi’s three. He appears not as a separate entity but as an integrated part of the fusion, mocking him from within.
Danyangzi tries to cut Li Huowang down but is physically restrained by his own body—Li Huowang even slaps him, using the shared physiology as a weapon.
Both sets of hallucinations converge. Li Huowang’s bewilderment (迷惘) and Danyangzi’s victims begin to manifest as writhing, seaweed-like forms around them.
Li Huowang weaponizes the Heart-Element’s burden: even if Danyangzi kills him, the torment may transfer permanently to the pursuer.
The jade plaque vanishes, replaced by a kaleidoscopic vision of the White Jade Capital. The “immortals” inside are revealed to be a bodhisattva with a halo made of white eyes.
Danyangzi’s instinct screams danger and attempts to pull back, but Li Huowang reverses the tug-of-war at the last second, dragging them both into the bodhisattva’s face.

Reading Guide

This is one of those rare chapters where the battle is entirely internal—no swords drawn in the physical world, but a full-scale war in the spiritual one. What makes it so gripping is the role reversal. Danyangzi, a man who has spent centuries brutalizing and exploiting others, is suddenly the one whose worldview shatters. Li Huowang, the perpetual victim, takes the driver’s seat and shows he has learned the game. His taunts are not random cruelty; they are precise strikes at Danyangzi’s greatest weakness: the terror of having sacrificed everything for a lie.

Pay special attention to the hallucination-deluge. Both Li Huowang’s and Danyangzi’s mental debris—dead disciples, betrayed allies, grotesque memories—flood the Heaven-Outside-Heaven space. The novel makes no distinction between whose ghost is whose; in this fused consciousness, suffering is shared and weaponized. The climax, where Li Huowang reverses direction and drags them into the White Jade Capital, is a stunning act of spiteful rebirth. He doesn’t kill Danyangzi; he invests him in a eternal nightmare. And for a man like Li Huowang, that counts as a win.

Deep Dive: The Real Meaning of the Mao Gate

It’s worth unpacking the Mao Gate a bit more, because this is where the novel’s folk-horror DNA really shines. In Chinese rural tradition, gates and doors are heavily ritualized—the wrong threshold can lead to spiritual catastrophe. “Nantian Men” is a known, bureaucratic address in the celestial map. “Mao Gate” is not. It sounds like a mistake, like a sign a trickster spirit painted in the middle of the night. This is the Zuowandao’s territory: the path one thinks leads to salvation actually ends in a slaughterhouse.

Furthermore, “牦” (Mao) shares phonetic and graphic elements with “毛” (hair/rough), lending the gate an animalistic, unrefined quality. It’s the backdoor of the universe, a cattle-gate to the gods’ larder. Danyangzi’s final, horrified recognition that the immortals he sought are just residents of a cosmic butcher-shop is the most devastating moment in his character arc—and Li Huowang, laughing on the inside the entire time, makes sure he pays the admission fee.