The Two-Table Gambit

1,362 words

Chapter 433: Both Sides

“Hehehe, how could there not be? There’s no mahjong in Great Liang, but there is in Great Qi!”

The moment the hallucinatory Hong Zhong finished speaking, an old woman rolled out from behind Zhuge Yuan.

Li Huowang recognized her. It was North Wind, the one Zhuge Yuan had captured and sent into Great Qi!

North Wind stood up, her expression utterly dazed. But as she took in her surroundings, her eyes sharpened with terrifying speed.

Then her face began to writhe. Wrinkles receded in an instant. Her features first settled into the blank face of a North Wind tile, and then the edges of that tile folded inward.

Her rectangular face became a cube. The flesh of her features coalesced rapidly, finally forming a six-sided die.

The die, using its single blood-red pip, tilted its face up toward the Great Liang emperor on the tree. Its tone carried a hint of smugness. “You really think you predicted every move? Did you predict that I would use my Heart-Pan to pull the Zuowandao of Great Qi over here? Heh. You can handle one table of mahjong—what about two tables?”

At these words, Li Huowang’s pupils shrank to pinpricks. So that was it. All those other Zuowandao, North Wind included—everything they’d done, from searching out Zhuge Yuan to deliberately losing to him, had been an act!

Their only real goal had been to make Zhuge Yuan transform them into Great Qi natives, get into Great Qi, and make contact with the Zuowandao over there!

Which meant—Great Qi was not something the Heart-Pan had dreamed up. Great Qi really existed!

Just as this thought crossed Li Huowang’s mind, the black-and-white vertical pupil in the sky suddenly warped. Its pupil split into three. The sixty-four hexagrams surrounding it began to spin at a furious rate.

Faced with the Zuowandao’s incoming reinforcements, the other side clearly had no intention of waiting to be crushed. They began to move.

The strange chanting in Li Huowang’s ears swelled instantly. The single voice fractured into multiple terrifying roars and mutterings.

Li Huowang’s head began to pound. Thick veins bulged from his forehead. It felt like his features were starting to melt.

That was never a sutra. It was a sound no mortal could comprehend. Just listening to it for a moment made anyone’s Ten Emotions and Eight Sufferings feel like they were coming unraveled.

If merely having the baleful aura disturb her Ten Emotions and Eight Sufferings could change Bai Lingmiao’s personality so dramatically, he couldn’t imagine what would happen if a person’s Ten Emotions and Eight Sufferings were truly shattered.

A full-scale battle was about to erupt. Li Huowang’s heart raced with desperation. Enduring the splitting pain, he strained to find the Heart-Element North Wind.

But worse—with the Great Qi Zuowandao arriving, the number of North Winds had jumped to eight! Locating the Heart-Element one was now far more difficult.

Boom.

The Zuowandao all sat down in a circle around the giant golden tree and began to chant.

The four dice positioned themselves at the four cardinal points—east, south, west, north. The pips on their faces now read four, two, five, and one.

“Heart-Fast, Sit-Forget, to the Utmost Way! The one preserving the True is nourished by Sitting in Forgetfulness; the one preserved is nourished by following form. Form-nourishing becomes Form-Immortal; Sitting in Forgetfulness-nourishing sheds form and enters Truth…”

The Zuowandao’s bizarre chanting instantly scattered the strange sutra-sound from the sky. The two voices tangled together midair. Under their influence, everything around began to warp—people and the golden ground twisted continuously.

With just a single thought from Li Huowang, the golden bricks beneath him swelled and coalesced into a statue of Yang Na, her head tilted, smiling.

“No. No matter what they’re about to do—it’s only going to get more dangerous. I have to find that Heart-Element North Wind and drag her out of here now!”

His mind raced. Soon he had an idea. He pulled out a dagger, tore open his clothes, and cut into his own shoulder. Exposing his collarbone, he took out a sheet of turmeric paper and began drawing a divination talisman.

This divination ability was useless for locating beings of advanced cultivation—it not only failed but would reveal his own position to them. But who said you couldn’t use it in reverse?!

He jammed the yellow talisman into his own bloody collarbone. Before the bone-crack sound even emerged, he saw that among the eight North Winds in the distance, one—a woman—jerked her head up and stared directly at him.

“Found her! It’s her!”

Invisible, Li Huowang began to move across the warped golden ground, walking on its surface as if treading on water, closing in on the Heart-Element North Wind.

His approach did not draw the attention of the major powers. He’d expected that—neither the Supervisory Heavenly Office nor the Zuowandao had any spare hands to waste on him.

Facing the Zuowandao’s move, the Celestial Supervisor of the Supervisory Heavenly Office and the National Preceptor of Great Liang naturally weren’t going to just sit there.

Li Huowang saw the white-haired Great Liang National Preceptor wave his star-adorned longsword. His Daoist robe billowed without wind. Among the low-hanging, snow-heavy clouds, pinpricks of starlight began to appear.

Then another figure, entirely shrouded in a vermilion robe, stepped forward. Three people followed behind him—if Li Huowang’s guess was correct, these were the Deputy Celestial Supervisors who had entered the palace. The one in the red robe could only be the highest authority of the Great Liang Supervisory Heavenly Office—the Celestial Supervisor himself.

Six ancient hands, each with terrifyingly long nails, emerged from the wide Daoist robe. They arranged themselves in three tiers—upper, middle, lower. The upper tier formed hand seals. The middle traced talismans. The lower pressed mudras.

Three different voices—old, young, small—began chanting from within the robe in a bizarre, rhythmic cadence.

One heaven per world, by world a white lotus opens. This lotus is not the Buddha’s seed, nor is it a worldly bloom. Riding a phoenix, I pluck its petals; touching its stem, I forge ancient smoke. I no longer know this body is light—I am already at the peak of the lotus leaf.

As this voice arose, the Zuowandao’s chanting weakened. The twisting golden bricks stopped. The strange sutra-sound regained dominance. The giant eye in the sky descended another notch.

Under the giant eye’s gaze, some of the Zuowandao on the periphery began to collapse. First, their bodies bloomed open like lotuses, one after another. Then, their orderly flesh reverted to chaos.

Just as Li Huowang thought they were about to continue their contest, a thunderous crack echoed out. The base of the giant tree suddenly destabilized and toppled over.

The Zuowandao, who had been seated in meditation, all stood up with jeering laughter and charged toward the crown of the tree.

Boom after boom. Silver arcs flickered within the snow-laden clouds. Then, with a tearing screech, a dark bolt of lightning slammed downward. The entire battlefield dissolved into chaos.

“Now’s my chance!” Without a second thought, Li Huowang quickened his pace and charged toward the Heart-Element North Wind.

This time, both sides were clearly playing for keeps. The entire world shifted wildly—now dusk, now noon. With that chanting sound filling the air, Li Huowang felt as if even his own body no longer belonged to him.

He couldn’t tell which side had the advantage. There was no way to judge.

But no matter what was happening around him, none of it could shake his resolve. His gaze never left the Heart-Element North Wind.

The Heart-Element North Wind was glaring furiously at the Great Liang emperor, sheltered by the three Deputy Celestial Supervisors, as if she wanted to do something.

But the next moment, she clutched her face in pain and dropped to one knee. Dark gold liquid began seeping from her eye sockets.

Just as a dark bolt of lightning arced down toward her from the sky, a right hand missing two fingers grabbed her arm and yanked her aside.

“What happened?! Are you hurt?!” Li Huowang shouted as he pulled North Wind, urgently retreating from the battlefield.

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Reading Guide Decoding

The Celestial Mahjong Game Gets a Second Table

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

The Mahjong Metaphor: The Zuowandao’s “two tables of mahjong” isn’t just a snide taunt—it’s a perfect encapsulation of the novel’s twisted social structure. Mahjong is a game of four players, each trying to complete a hidden hand while disrupting others. By pulling in a second table from Great Qi, the Zuowandao double the chaos, making it impossible for the Celestial Supervisor to keep track of all threats. This also reinforces the “Great Liang vs. Great Qi” political layer, where two incompatible realms’ supernatural systems collide.

Reverse Divination: Li Huowang uses a divination taliban not to predict the future, but to probe for a powerful being’s location. The catch? For ordinary use, the target would sense you. But by stabbing it into his own exposed collarbone, he weaponizes the backlash—the Heart-Element North Wind feels the probe and instinctively reacts, revealing her position. It’s a classic “break the rules to survive” tactic, very in-line with the novel’s rejection of standard xianxia power-level logic.

Ten Emotions and Eight Sufferings: This is a dark expansion of the Buddhist Eight Sufferings (birth, aging, sickness, death, meeting what we hate, being separated from what we love, not getting what we want, and the suffering of the five aggregates). In the Dao-Twisted World, the Ten Emotions and Eight Sufferings are treated as fragile threads that hold a person’s identity together. If a force like the Giant Eye’s chant can rattle them, a person’s very self could unravel—mirroring Bai Lingmiao’s earlier personality shift from corrupted baleful aura.

Flower Tiles (花牌)

Additional mahjong tiles in some regional sets, including plum, orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum, god of wealth, cat, and mouse; the author uses them to imply different supernatural rules between Great Liang and Great Qi.

Chapter Overview

Get ready, dear readers—the game board just doubled in size, and Li Huowang is no longer a player; he’s a man trying to pull the escape cord before the whole planet explodes. In this chapter, the Zuowandao reveal their ultimate gambit: they never actually lost. That “capture” of North Wind was a Trojan horse, allowing a crack team of Great Qi Zuowandao—led by four dice-wielding clones—to be imported directly into the Great Liang court. Now it’s a full celestial brawl: the Great Liang emperor and his office of super-cops versus a foreign, fake-cultivating cabal, all beneath the watchful multicolored pupil of something far worse. And Li Huowang? He’s just a guy with a dagger, a self-inflicted divination wound, and a desperate need to kidnap the one person who can body-swap before the sky falls.

Key Plot Points

The captured North Wind is revealed to have been a deliberate plant; she transforms from an elderly woman into a living die, confirming that multiple “North Wind” avatars exist and that the Heart-Element one has the ability to body-swap.
Hong Zhong’s hallucinatory projection gleefully reveals that by turning Zuowandao into Great Qi citizens through Zhuge Yuan, they have successfully summoned reinforcements from an entirely different empire—proving Great Qi is real, not a dream, which shakes Li Huowang’s worldview.
The Supervisory Heavenly Office’s full power deploys: the National Preceptor summons starlight, and the Celestial Supervisor emerges in red robes with three Deputies, using triple-tiered hand seals and Daoist chants that conjure white lotus imagery to counter the Zuowandao’s “Sitting in Forgetfulness” chant.
The “Ten Emotions and Eight Sufferings” concept is expanded: Li Huowang realizes the strange chant in the sky isn’t a sutra but an incomprehensible force that can destabilize a person’s very soul, and he fears for Bai Lingmiao’s sanity after her earlier corruption.
Amid the chaotic battle—lotus demons, dark lightning, collapsing golden tree—Li Huowang uses a reversed divination taliban (cutting into his own collarbone) to locate the Heart-Element North Wind, and despite her injuries, he drags her out of the warzone.

Reading Guide

Pay attention to the “body-swap” rule introduced here. The Heart-Element North Wind can apparently change faces and identities, which is why eight identical copies appeared. Li Huowang is literally dragging an unknown, shape-shifting hostage out of a celestial battlefield—he has no idea if the person he rescued is actually the one he needs.
The war isn’t over. The toppling of the golden tree and the “dark lightning” suggest the battle is escalating, not ending. Li Huowang’s escape is a temporary retreat from a conflict that now spans two empires. Expect the Zuowandao’s “two-table” gambit to have long-lasting consequences.
Great Qi is real. This is a massive lore drop: Li Huowang’s earlier suspicions are confirmed. The otherworldly realm Zhuge Yuan comes from is not a hallucination or an Upper Realm projection—it’s a separate, tangible empire with its own Zuowandao, its own rules, and presumably its own horrors. The novel just opened a door to an entirely new battlefield.