Mad

1,211 words

Chapter 176: Mad

"Stop! If we go through, you'll die too!"

As the bodhisattva drew closer, Danyangzi's voice carried a rare, deep fear. But Li Huowang, at this moment, seemed utterly unburdened.

"It's nothing! For my master to achieve immortality, what is this disciple's one life worth?!"

Li Huowang's movements, combined with the pull in the wind, made their advance slow but inexorable toward the open Mao Gate, no matter how Danyangzi struggled.

When the circular white halo behind the bodhisattva's head washed over them both,

Danyangzi's asphalt-coated feathers began to transform, shifting into the same white gauze that covered the bodhisattva.

Every part of Danyangzi—the writhing flesh, the everted, twisting organs—once enveloped by the white gauze, fell into absolute, silent death.

As Danyangzi felt his body dying piece by piece, a fierce unwillingness surged through him. He hadn't achieved immortality yet. He didn't want to die so pathetically.

"Huowang! Why be so absolute? Your flesh is still usable! Let's go down now—you go your way, I'll go mine! We'll never see each other again!"

But before Li Huowang could speak, one of the bandit-like hallucinations immediately warned him.

"Kid! Don't believe him! That old bastard hasn't spoken a single truthful word! His heart is poison!"

Just as Danyangzi glared venomously at the hallucination, a layer of faint white gauze covered his head. That head tilted to one side and fell into complete stillness.

Danyangzi's other head—the youthful one—saw this and was utterly terrified. He abandoned all pretense of dignity and began begging Li Huowang.

"Huowang! You win, alright? If we keep going like this, we'll both die! And heaven knows what that thing is! It might be a worse fate than death!"

"I'll kowtow to you, okay? You can be my master! Please, have mercy and spare me!"

Specks of thin gauze covered Li Huowang's eyes, yet he smiled with boundless joy.

"That won't do, Master. You said it yourself—we were going to achieve immortality together."

As the words left his mouth, they finally passed through that invisible, intangible membrane. They had entered the gate.

The moment they crossed the threshold, Li Huowang and Danyangzi's bodies were ripped apart.

Li Huowang saw the other's translucent form in the distance. Before either could utter half a word,

with a soft pop, like a burst of foam, Danyangzi's monstrous body disintegrated instantly.

The one who had tormented Li Huowang for so long vanished like an ant, dying without a sound.

Then, objects of various colors scattered from where Danyangzi had been, drifting deeper into the gate's opening.

The moment Li Huowang saw them, he understood what they were, yet he could not articulate it with any normal language.

If he had to force a word for it, it was desire. Greed. Obsession. Hatred. Murderous intent.

Although Li Huowang did not die like Danyangzi, his situation was no better.

The bodhisattva, vast as a mountain, reached out from within the white gauze with a rotting, skeletal claw to seize him.

But just as the enormous shadow was about to engulf him, from an unimaginable distance came a single, impossibly thin sound, like a suona horn.

At that sound, everything in Li Huowang's vision began to warp. In that instant, he possessed five completely different kinds of sight simultaneously.

In one of those visions, the Formless Bodhisattva before him was a mountain built from the bodies of the dead.

And beneath her shimmered an umbilical cord.

Not just her—every single thing behind the Mao Gate had an umbilical cord tied to it.

It wasn't just his sight that warped. Everything about Li Huowang began to twist. Sensations that were not his own were forcibly crammed into him.

Gradually, Li Huowang found himself moving, drifting rapidly toward the world of the White Jade Capital.

The deeper he drifted, the more perceptions crowded in on him.

"No… No, no!! NO!!"

Li Huowang began to understand this world. But that understanding was tearing him apart.

Amid his desperate screams, the one who was gradually comprehending everything plummeted deeper and deeper into the White Jade Capital.

As everything around him inverted completely, the last thing Li Huowang, now fully understanding, saw was a mass of agony and torment rushing toward him. It was Bashe.

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Within the borders of Siqi, on a scenic hillside, a group of people dressed in mourning white gathered around a fresh grave. They scattered copper coins, burned paper ingots, and wailed.

"Senior Brother Li! Wuuh… why did you have to die so suddenly? If you're gone, what are we supposed to do?"

Red-eyed, Gouwa knelt there, howling loudly. Mid-cry, he abruptly stopped and stole a glance at Bai Lingmiao.

In stark contrast to his theatrics, Bai Lingmiao was eerily calm. She did not shed a single tear. She just burned paper, sheet by sheet.

Even when the paper ran out, her hands continued the motion, endlessly feeding nothing into the air.

Seeing this, Gouwa sighed, sniffled, and threw himself back onto the gravestone, resuming his loud wailing.

"Senior Brother Li! Healthy and whole, how could you just leave?! Without you to back us up, won't the others just bully us to death?"

Just as he was putting all his effort into the wailing, he saw the mound of earth on the grave shift.

"Huh?" Gouwa thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. But as he instinctively rubbed them, a hand shot out from the pile of dirt right in front of his face.

"Goddammit!! A corpse is rising!" Gouwa shrieked, stumbling backward in terror.

Bai Lingmiao, however, reacted instantly. Her emotional composure shattered, she threw herself onto the grave mound, frantically clawing at the dirt.

The other disciples snapped out of their shock and rushed to help.

But before they could even dig him out, Li Huowang, clad in burial clothes, suddenly appeared atop the grave mound without warning.

His face was twisted in agony. He clutched his head, his features twitching as he muttered to himself. He looked terrifying.

"Senior Brother Li!" Tears streaming down her face, Bai Lingmiao rushed toward him. He grabbed her.

His bloodshot eyes were fixed on the girl before him. "Alive! Everything is alive! This world—it's alive!!"

Seeing this, Xiao Man, who had been reaching for her sword, let out a breath of relief. "It's fine. It's not a corpse rising. It's Senior Brother Li."

Despite Li Huowang's bizarre state, Bai Lingmiao was too worried to be afraid. She looked at him with deep concern. "Senior Brother Li, what's wrong with you?"

"Listen to me! I know what's wrong!" Li Huowang's hysterical shout drowned out everything around him.

"This world is alive! And if it's alive, that means what happens to a person—it happens to the world too!"

"I know I'm crazy! But this world is crazy too!! It's crazy!!"

After screaming these words, Li Huowang shoved Bai Lingmiao to the ground.

With one hand pointing at the gloomy sky above and the other pointing at his own chest, Li Huowang repeated it with extreme, manic stubbornness.

"It's crazy. It's crazy! It's far crazier than I am!"

After repeating this a dozen times, Li Huowang, who had been wound as tight as a bowstring, suddenly went limp and collapsed to the ground.

End of Book One.

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Reading Guide Decoding

The End of Book One: The World is Alive, and It's Crazier Than I Am

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

The Formless Bodhisattva & The Suona: The "Formless Bodhisattva" (无相菩萨) appearing here is a deliberate corruption of Buddhist iconography. A bodhisattva is a being of compassion who delays their own enlightenment to help others. In the Dao-Twisted World, she is a mountain of corpses—pure horror. The suona (唢呐) is a Chinese double-reeded horn traditionally used in both festive and funerary music. Its thin, piercing wail is perfect for signaling a perceptual boundary being crossed. This is not heavenly music; this is the sound of reality breaking.

The White Jade Capital (白玉京): This appears in Li Huowang's visions as the true "space" beyond the Mao Gate. In Daoist lore, the White Jade Capital is the heavenly palace of the gods, especially the supreme Jade Emperor. Here, it's the seat of the Siming, the final layer of the cosmic nightmare. The suona's cry is Li Huowang's ticket into its deepest, most maddening halls.

The Mao Gate (牦之门): The name itself is a corrupted pun. The "Nantian Men" (South Heavenly Gate) is the traditional entrance to the celestial realm. By deliberately misreading "Nan" as "Mao," Danyangzi has built a fake ascension path—a fraudulent, back-alley door into a cosmic horror show that mimics celestial bureaucracy. It's not a door to heaven; it's a trap leading to an abattoir of true forms.

Chapter Overview

Well, fellow travelers, we've reached the end of Book One—and hoo boy, does it go out with a bang. Or rather, a pop. Chapter 176 is the climax of everything Li Huowang has been building toward since he first stumbled into that cave temple. It's not a victory lap. It's a conceptual suicide. Danyangzi is erased, yes, but the cost isn't Li Huowang's life—it's his sanity itself. Or rather, his model of reality. This chapter formally introduces the novel's deepest horror: the world is not a stage for suffering; it is a living, mad thing—and if you can understand it, you can no longer pretend you're the only one who's broken. Get ready for a descent into the White Jade Capital, a truly terrifying vision of omnipresent umbilical cords, and a resurrection scene that flips the script from "triumphant return" to "existential meltdown on a hillside."

Key Plot Points

Forced Entry: Danyangzi tries to negotiate and beg his way out of going through the Mao Gate, but Li Huowang—wearing that terrible, joyful smile—keeps dragging them both forward, invoking Danyangzi's own promise of "achieving immortality together."
Danyangzi's Dissolution: Crossing the threshold rips them apart and dissolves Danyangzi's body like a soap bubble. His essence scatters as abstract concepts—desire, greed, obsession—drifting into the depths of the gate. The tormentor of a hundred-odd chapters is gone in an instant.
The Bodhisattva and the Perception Shift: Li Huowang is nearly crushed by a rotting skeletal hand, but a distant suona sound triggers an explosive, five-fold perceptual overload. He sees the Formless Bodhisattva as a pile of corpses, and everything in the White Jade Capital is connected by umbilical cords, suggesting a biological, systemic reality.
Understanding and Drowning: Li Huowang begins to understand the world, but this understanding is physical and annihilating. He screams as he's pulled deeper, and his final vision before the chapter break is of Bashe—pure, rushing agony—proving the existence and intent of this primordial god.
The Resurrection and the Revelation: Back in Siqi, Li Huowang bursts from his own grave (literally!) after a comedic moment of "frightened mourners." But this is no happy return. He grabs Bai Lingmiao and delivers the chapter's final, breaking revelation: "This world is alive! And it's crazier than I am!" He collapses, having shattered his own framework for measuring reality.

Reading Guide

This chapter is the fruition of Daode Yixian's entire promise: the final break between the "standard xianxia" formula and its dark, folk-horror soul. Danyangzi's death isn't a triumphant boss-kill. It's pathetic and swift, a consequence of stepping into a reality he never understood. The true antagonist is not the mad alchemist but the mad system he was trying to trick. The real climax is Li Huowang's "understanding" – a forced revelation that the universe is a living, sentient, sick organism. If you've ever wondered what a cosmic-horror protagonist feels when they "see the truth," it's this: a mind that can no longer compartmentalize suffering as bad luck or personal tragedy, because the world is a co-sufferer. His final speech on the hillside—"It's crazy, it's far crazier than I am"—is the novel's thesis statement. The story of Book One was a man trying to prove he was sane in a mad world. Book One ends with the proof that the world is mad, and he was just the first to notice. Strap in for Book Two. It's about to get a lot weirder.

Book One Retrospective: A Deeper Look

Looking back across these 176 chapters, the true genius of the narrative architecture becomes clear. The story was never about Li Huowang escaping madness, but about calibrating himself to the wrongness of his environment. Danyangzi's various cult-indoctrination and body-horror schemes were all, in a twisted way, teaching Li Huowang how to see reality as a hostile, breathing entity. The hospital world wasn't a refuge; it was a different layer of the same mad organism. The novel refuses to answer the question of which reality is "real," because the answer is that both are equally real and equally mad. The final image of Bashe—the primordial god of pain—rushing toward him isn't an end; it's the starting line for the torment of true cosmic understanding.