Eat Full

1,242 words

“Hoo… hoo…”

Qiu Chibao lay flat on the ground, cheeks puffed out, carefully blowing air onto the kindling beneath her cracked bowl.

Gurgle. Hearing her own stomach, Qiu Chibao grabbed her belt rope and cinched it a little tighter.

Though her name meant “Chibao—Eat Full,” she had rarely ever gotten a full meal.

It had been that way with her parents. After she married, it only got worse.

After blowing for a while, she saw the fire start to die down, and panic flickered across her face.

Glancing around, she hurriedly grabbed some human bones from the nearby bonfire and tossed them into the flames.

Only when the fire beneath her cracked bowl blazed back to life did she finally let out a breath of relief.

She carefully lifted the tile covering the bowl, revealing three river stones rolling and knocking together in the boiling water inside.

Pulling out a rusted knife, she gently poked at the stones. A grin spread across her grimy face.

She replaced the tile, added a bit more fuel to the fire, then carefully gathered the bundle made from a tattered padded jacket into her arms, rocking it gently.

“Son, the stones are almost boiled soft today. When they’re soft enough, you drink this stone soup, and not only will your sickness be completely cured, you’ll even become an immortal!”

Qiu Chibao grew more excited as she spoke, beaming down at the baby cooing and babbling in the bundle.

Just as she spoke, a ripple of commotion passed through the drowsy crowd around her, spreading from the edges inward.

The old man sleeping nearby was jolted awake. He stretched his arms, and as he straightened his legs, he kicked the cracked bowl over.

“My stone soup!” Qiu Chibao’s anguished shriek cut through the air.

All around, the faith followers wearing white headbands rose to their feet.

“Kill him! Kill that red-robed Daoist! He killed our shaman!”

The crowd began to stir. The atmosphere grew hot and volatile.

“Who? Who killed our shaman? Without the shaman to commune with Grandfather Shidu, what if the stone soup stops working!”

Qiu Chibao, who had been scrambling on the ground to retrieve the stones, instantly forgot the rage of a moment ago. She tucked the rusted knife inside the bundle and stood up, swaying unsteadily.

She tried to push through the crowd toward where the shouting was coming from, but she was too short, too thin. She couldn’t squeeze in.

“Move! Get out of the way! I can’t get through!” Qiu Chibao shouted at the top of her lungs, but no one listened.

Then, abruptly, the people in front of her seemed to hear her shouts. They parted, half left, half right, clearing a path.

Standing before her was a man covered in black tentacles, wearing a red Daoist robe, his face hidden behind a copper-coin mask.

Seeing the blade this Daoist held upright before her, Qiu Chibao felt the protection of Grandfather Shidu. She felt no fear at all. Instead, clutching her crying son, she charged straight at the monster bristling with black feelers.

“You killed our shaman! You smashed my stone soup!” Qiu Chibao gnashed her teeth, plunging the rusted little knife deep into the chest of the red-robed Daoist.

The next instant, Qiu Chibao felt the world go dark, and then she knew nothing at all.

—

“Dad! Dad!”

Li Sui’s voice snapped Li Huowang abruptly back to the present.

He couldn’t afford to be distracted right now. These people were all his enemies.

Li Huowang, drenched almost head to toe in blood, sucked in a sharp breath, tightened his grip on his sword hilt, and chased after Peng Longteng, who had already gone completely berserk in the distance.

“Don’t linger around here! Push forward! As far forward as you can go!”

But faced with Li Huowang’s command, Peng Longteng seemed not to hear him. She just kept on killing.

“I’ll say it one more time. Forward. Or I’ll turn you back into a hallucination and never let you out again.”

Peng Longteng stopped dead. She clenched her right fist. With a crunch of bone, the wide-open mouth of the head in her palm was instantly crushed to pulp—red and white oozing through her fingers.

Though she clearly resisted, Peng Longteng obeyed the threat. Only a living body could enjoy this kind of bloody satisfaction, and to have a body, she had to rely on Li Huowang.

The towering Peng Longteng grabbed two burly men and turned into a crimson whirlwind, tearing a bloody path straight through the Faith followers.

With Peng Longteng clearing the way ahead, Li Huowang’s immediate surroundings were much easier. But he couldn’t be glad at all. The image of that woman holding her dead child kept replaying in his mind.

He looked around at the Faith followers again—at their skeletal frames and distended bellies.

The red that had coated everything slowly retreated, letting the world return to its natural colors.

Peng Longteng stomped down, squeezing the contents out of a man’s belly. There was no food inside. Only clumps of packed earth. Chalk clay.

Eating chalk clay couldn’t keep a person alive for long. Li Huowang also saw a wasted thigh. They were eating human flesh too.

Li Huowang knew that once a person joined the Faith, they’d do nothing but burn, kill, loot, and rape. The Yu’er Shen they prayed to for salvation probably had nothing good in store for them either. But was any of this really a choice these people could make?

“Grandfather Shidu bless me!” A white-haired old man raised a club and charged at Li Huowang without a hint of hesitation.

The copper-coin sword in Li Sui’s hand flew out, whipping around the man’s throat like a long chain and yanking hard. A head hit the ground.

Li Huowang stepped over the head and kept pushing forward.

Watching the faces all around him, Li Huowang was reminded, unpleasantly, of his master Danyangzi, whom he had killed.

These people were exactly like Danyangzi. Stupid in their faith. Ignorant. Toyed with at will.

When he saw the fervor in a certain severed head’s eyes, Li Huowang understood. The hardships of the world had already stripped these people of everything—including their sanity. All they had left was to place their hope in this so-called Yu’er Shen, even if that same Yu’er Shen was the very one who had ground them down to this state.

They were not wrong. But right now, Li Huowang could only use their flesh and blood to pave a way out.

Then again, maybe that was fine. To live like this, like walking corpses… death might be a mercy.

Jin Shan Zhao, who had been reduced to half a body, trembled as he watched. His eyes were full of grief, and tears streamed down his face without stopping. “Ah—” After following Li Huowang for so long, he finally made his first sound.

Just as Li Huowang’s eyes flickered toward him, the ground suddenly gave way beneath his feet. Both his calves sank into the dirt.

Immediately after, three mounds of raised earth surged toward him from under the feet of the surrounding crowd, closing in fast.

Li Huowang had known there would have to be some troublesome figures hidden among the Faith followers, directing them. He just hadn’t expected that even moving as fast as he was, these people would still be able to latch onto him.

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Reading Guide Decoding

The Valley of Dry Bones – Chapter 540’s Unforgiving Moral Kick

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

Chalk Clay (观音土, guānyīn tǔ): Also known as “Guan Yin clay” or “kaolin,” this is a white, chalky mineral that poor Chinese peasants historically ate during famines. It expands in the stomach to create a false sensation of fullness, but it provides zero nutrition and eventually kills the eater through intestinal compaction. The novel uses it here as a stark, factual indictment of the systemic horrors the Faith followers endure. They are not just fanatics; they are victims of a world that has eaten them alive.

Human Flesh / “Rice Meat” (米肉, mǐ ròu): In the context of the Dao-Twisted World, this is a horrifying reification of cannibalism justified as divine sustenance. The term “rice meat” (米肉) plays on the idea of human flesh as a sacred, staple food—a corruption of the act of eating into a religious duty. This ties back to earlier chapters and the long-running theme of cannibalism as a grim necessity in this broken world.

Rice meat (米肉)

A term used in the Dao-Twisted World for human flesh consumed as food, often framed as a divine or sacred substance; a grim corruption of ritual cannibalism.

Chapter Overview

Buckle up, because Chapter 540 is a masterclass in uncomfortable horror. We open not with our protagonist, but with Qiu Chibao—a starving woman boiling river stones into “soup” to cure her baby, burning human bones for fuel under a cracked bowl. This isn’t the flashy, grotesque horror of a Flesh Buddha. This is the slow, grinding horror of mundane desperation, of people who have been hollowed out so completely that they can no longer tell the difference between a magic ritual and a delusion. When the Faith followers rise up against the “red-robed Daoist” who killed their shaman, Qiu Chibao charges with a rusted knife, clutching a dead infant she believes is still alive. Li Huowang kills her without a second thought. But the scene lingers. It sticks to him, and to us, as a visceral reminder that in the Dao-Twisted World, the line between enemy and victim has been erased.

Key Plot Points

The chapter opens through the eyes of Qiu Chibao, a starving mother boiling river stones to make “stone soup” for her sick baby, using human bones as fuel. This establishes the brutal, unsustainable reality of the Faith followers’ existence.
The Faith followers rise up against Li Huowang, mistaking him for the killer of their shaman. The uprising is chaotic, fueled by desperation and misplaced faith.
Li Huowang, in the midst of his own life-or-death escape, summons Peng Longteng, whose bloodlust is only barely restrained by his threat to re-incorporate her. She carves a path of absolute carnage.
Li Huowang has a moment of clarity: the Faith followers aren’t just crazed cultists. Their bellies are full of chalk clay—a filler eaten by the starving to stave off hunger. They are also eating “human flesh” (米肉, mǐ ròu). This re-contextualizes them as victims of systemic collapse, not just monsters.
The chapter ends with Li Huowang realizing that hidden practitioners are among the mob; they have been tracking him through the dirt, closing in as he fled.

Reading Guide

Alright, fellow Daoists, let me just say: this chapter hurts. It’s a hard reset after the high-octane battles of the siege. The horror here isn’t a monster with a thousand arms—it’s a woman named “Eat Full” who has never been full. It’s a baby dead in its mother’s arms while she believes they’re both on the verge of becoming immortals.

The genius of this chapter is that it doesn’t excuse these people. The Faith followers are murderous raiders. They do burn and loot. But Li Huowang, in this rare moment of exhausted clarity, realizes that their fanaticism isn’t born of evil—it’s born of a world that gave them nothing else. And that doesn’t change what he has to do. He can understand them and still crush their skulls to escape.

Pay attention to the way the narrative shifts between Qiu Chibao’s perspective and Li Huowang’s. The first segment reads like a folk horror tragedy; the second is a raw, bloody war zone. The collision between these two tones is what makes Daoguai Yixian’s horror so effective—it forces you to feel pity for the people your protagonist has to kill.