Why is Li Huowang looking for "death" in the lion’s corpse?

He's testing a theory. Each major faction in the Dao-Twisted World seems to draw power from a specific concept (flesh, decay). He saw the giant cauldron sacrifice to "death," so he expects the lion dance to use death too. Finding none means a *third* faction exists.

What is the point of the lion dance being a single organism?

It reveals that the "folk tradition" of the lion dance is a lie. The Qingqiu people think it's a performance, but it has always been a walking, living monster. Sun Baolu's trauma comes from this realization.

Why does Li Huowang seem so calm about tearing himself apart?

He's no longer a victim. He treats excruciating pain and self-mutilation as a tactical resource: a tool to be spent for an advantage. His lack of surprise is the sign of deep psychological damage, not strength.

Death

1,256 words

Chapter 235: Death

Within the dark, damp cave, the echoes of “Ring-ring-ring, thump-thump-thump!”—the sounds of bells and drums—merged into a single, continuous roar.

Accompanied by this sound, the Wandering Lord, the Second Spirit, and the other senior and junior disciples all joined the fight against the lion dance.

Li Huowang did not go to help. He had seen the other lion dance coming down from the ceiling. He couldn’t let that damned thing flank them.

Clang. Li Huowang drew his sword, charging forward with a killing intent that shot to the heavens.

Beneath the lion’s body, covered in white tassels, dozens of pitch-black, bare feet churned madly as it slammed toward Li Huowang with murderous momentum.

Soon, they both saw each other’s faces. They saw the killing intent in each other’s eyes.

As they crossed paths, the massive lion body wrapped Li Huowang in a stinking embrace, its white tassels brushing against him.

Yet the struck Li Huowang showed no sign of damage. He simply raised his longsword and slashed at the empty space beside him.

The two separated in a flash. The final result was that Li Huowang was completely unharmed, but several pairs of bare human feet lay beneath the lion dance, severed by Li Huowang’s blade.

The Li Huowang that had been struck was merely an afterimage. The lion dance hadn’t hit him at all. Before it even reached him, Li Huowang had already switched the positions of his real body and his phantom.

Seeing Li Huowang unscathed, the lion dance’s large, lantern-like left eye slowly shifted upward, revealing a pitch-black hole.

Seven or eight withered black hands, like a monkey’s, reached out from within, clinging to the lower rim of the eye socket like outward-growing lashes.

Then, a dozen or so eyes of various sizes crowded the massive socket. The expression on the entire man’s face turned venomous as it fixed its dozen eyes on Li Huowang’s true body.

Li Huowang clenched his jaw, staring coldly at the thing before him. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a lion dance! Absolutely not!

Tap. Throwing aside the crutch under his arm, he stamped his severed foot hard against the ground, his eyes blazing with murderous intent at the thing in front of him. “Come on, then!”

He held his longsword horizontally before his face, steeled his heart, and directly thrust his left hand toward the blade.

With a light shiiing, two of his fingers flew into the air, blood spraying, swelling as they spun, sharp bone spurs piercing through skin and flesh, corkscrewing toward the lion dance.

The flying fingers were incredibly fast. Before the lion dance could dodge, two bleeding red moles appeared on its huge, round face.

Li Huowang’s two fingers pierced its face and kept burrowing in. With the constant tearing of flesh, thick, black blood slowly trickled down its bare feet.

The people controlling the lion dance were injured, but they still refused to give up. The lion’s body shook violently, like a beast shaking off water, and the white tassels on its body lifted off, beginning to drift toward Li Huowang.

Such tricks were no challenge for Li Huowang. A pair of iron pincers appeared in his hand. He reached into his mouth and yanked hard, pulling out two of his molars.

The white teeth flew through the air, spinning and exploding. The shrapnel easily severed the floating white tassels, which fell weakly to the ground.

The lion’s body was also cut by the tooth shrapnel. Red blood stained the white lion form, making it look utterly pathetic.

Seeing this, the lion dance seemed to back down. But it made no sound. Instead, the human legs beneath its body churned faster, dragging its broken form in an attempt to retreat into the darkness.

Li Huowang naturally wouldn’t let it escape. He put the pincers back into his mouth.

Faced with Li Huowang’s assault, the wounded lion dance didn’t last long. Soon, Li Huowang had killed it.

Without even a moment to catch his breath, Li Huowang rushed to help the others. With his intervention, that fight was also no contest.

Li Huowang leaped onto the lion’s head, raised his sword, and brought it down with all his might. He sliced along the edge of the huge corpse-face, peeling the entire skin off in one clean cut.

Without its face, the entire lion dance collapsed. With a deafening boom, the massive beast crashed to the ground. Thick, black, sticky blood slowly seeped out from beneath it, staining everything below.

Li Huowang pulled his sword from the lion’s back, rolled off, and stood panting as he looked at the others, still shaken. “Is everyone alright?”

“Nothing serious. Gao Zhijian’s left ear got grazed by a tassel and shifted down about an inch. Those tassels must be the same thing that touched Sun Baolu back then,” Chun Xiaoman replied.

Li Huowang looked at Gao Zhijian, who now had one ear higher than the other, and nodded. He wiped the blood from his sword on his robe’s hem and sheathed it.

Then he turned and reassessed the two bizarre lion dance corpses.

Behind those huge, flat human faces were not Qingqiu people holding up a lion’s head, but a mass of bloody, bloated, mangled flesh.

The entire lion dance was a single entity. Both the hands that held up the lion’s body and the feet that moved it all belonged to a single, twisted, terrifying organism.

Inside the bloody lion forms, various organs hung from blood vessels, perfectly confirming Li Huowang’s suspicions.

Li Huowang didn’t know if they were born this way or made into this. But either answer was a bad result, or perhaps an even worse one.

What was even more chilling was that these things didn’t just exist in this dark underground. They also appeared openly in the Qingqiu above, and had become a part of the Qingqiu people’s daily life.

What made Li Huowang feel a sense of悲哀 for himself was that he realized he wasn’t even surprised anymore.

“My god… what the hell is all this?” Dogwa stood nearby, stunned and slack-jawed.

“It… it wasn’t like this… it wasn’t supposed to be like this…” Sun Baolu’s expression was incredibly complex. The knowledge he had held for over a decade was being overturned by this scene.

“Senior Brother Li… what… what the hell is going on with them?”

Standing beside the lion corpse, Li Huowang couldn’t be bothered with the Lion Dance Palace’s problems in Qingqiu. He was just a passerby. What happened outside had nothing to do with him.

He was considering a problem that directly concerned himself.

Li Huowang carefully poked through the flesh and organs with his sword, as if searching for something.

“Senior Brother Li, what are you looking for?” Dogwa asked.

But Li Huowang’s answer left him confused.

“Looking for death.”

“What?”

Li Huowang didn’t explain. He furrowed his brow, staring at the massive remains before him, deep in thought.

“Something’s not right. Zhengde Temple believes in the Flesh Buddha, so they use flesh. The nuns of Anci Nunnery rot, so they use decay. But the giant cauldron back there… it was a sacrifice to death… yet this lion dance wasn’t using death at all.”

Thinking of this, Li Huowang turned his head to look back toward the giant cauldron. “Could it be… besides the Lion Dance Palace… there’s another sect under this grassland?!”

The thought sent a chill through Li Huowang’s body. This place was far more lively than he had ever imagined.

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Reading Guide Decoding

The Lion Dance Autopsy: Li Huowang Searches for a Missing Concept

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

The Lion Dance & Its Dark Inversion: A traditional Chinese lion dance is a celebratory, auspicious performance meant to ward off evil spirits. It’s performed by two people inside a colorful costume, mimicking a lion’s movements to drums and gongs. In the Dao-Twisted World, this wholesome tradition is inverted into a living, breathing flesh-monster, where the "dancers" aren't people but limbs fused into a single, grotesque entity. This is a classic Dao Gui Yi Xian trick: taking a safe, familiar folk practice and peeling back its skin (sometimes literally) to reveal the screaming rot underneath. The "Ding" & Sacrificial Systems: Li Huowang references the giant cauldron (Ding, 鼎) he saw earlier. In ancient China, bronze Ding were ritual vessels used for offering sacrifices to gods or ancestors—they were symbols of state power and religious authority. In this novel, each major faction seems to have a "signature" sacrificial offering: flesh (Zhengde Temple), decay (Anci Nunnery), and now Li Huowang is looking for "death." The lion dance’s failure to match the Ding’s pattern tells him that the city of Qingqiu has more than one horrifying cult lurking beneath its surface.

Chapter Overview

Our boy Li Huowang has gone full murder-blender, and let me tell you, the meat grinder doesn't stop until the last foot is severed. After the cliffhanger of the double-lion dance ambush, this chapter delivers a visceral, teeth-grindingly brutal combat sequence that showcases just how far Li Huowang has evolved from a confused victim into a cold, tactical predator. But beneath all the gore and self-mutilation is a detective’s mind at work—Li Huowang isn't just killing; he's reading the corpses, looking for a missing concept called "death." It’s a gruesome puzzle box wrapped in a screaming fight scene.

Key Plot Points

Li Huowang engages the second lion dance head-on while the rest of the group handles the other one. He uses his phantom-body switch to completely negate its charge, then counters with his signature self-mutilation attacks—slicing off two fingers and pulling out molars to use as projectile weapons.
The lion dance reveals its true face: a giant, male face with dozens of eyes crammed into one eye socket, and dozens of bare human legs churning beneath the lion skin. It’s not a costume; it’s a single, nightmarish organism.
Li Huowang kills both lion dances. The real horror comes from the autopsy: the lion is a single body—the hands holding it up and the feet moving it are all part of one twisted creature.
Sun Baolu’s worldview shatters. The lion dances he grew up with were never a performance; they were always monsters wearing a friendly skin.
Li Huowang searches the corpses for something specific: the concept of "death." The lion dance didn’t die using death as a power source, which contradicts the sacrificial pattern he observed from the giant cauldron. He suspects a third cult is buried beneath the Qingqiu plains.

Reading Guide

This chapter is a masterclass in visceral deduction. The fight isn’t just an action set-piece; it’s Li Huowang gathering data with every swing of his sword. Pay close attention to how he doesn't just kill the lion—he dissects it. He's looking for a metaphysical signature, a rule that ties the lion back to the sacrificial model he already knows. The fact that he doesn't find it is the real cliffhanger. Also, soak in that little moment where Li Huowang realizes he's not even surprised anymore. That’s the quiet horror of this chapter: the protagonist has become so desensitized to body horror and reality-warping monsters that gore is just… another data point. That’s not growth. That’s damage.

Quick Q&A

Lore recap (TL;DR) drawn from this chapter's Cultural / Xianxia Notes — same text as the FAQ structured data on this page.

Why is Li Huowang looking for "death" in the lion’s corpse?: He's testing a theory. Each major faction in the Dao-Twisted World seems to draw power from a specific concept (flesh, decay). He saw the giant cauldron sacrifice to "death," so he expects the lion dance to use death too. Finding none means a *third* faction exists.
What is the point of the lion dance being a single organism?: It reveals that the "folk tradition" of the lion dance is a lie. The Qingqiu people think it's a performance, but it has always been a walking, living monster. Sun Baolu's trauma comes from this realization.
Why does Li Huowang seem so calm about tearing himself apart?: He's no longer a victim. He treats excruciating pain and self-mutilation as a tactical resource: a tool to be spent for an advantage. His lack of surprise is the sign of deep psychological damage, not strength.