Becoming the Siming

1,235 words

Chapter 583: Siming

"Your head really did fall off! Here, touch it yourself if you don't believe me!"

Li Huowang couldn't be bothered with the Dice's goading. He craned his neck and roared at the sky, his voice frantic and raw. "You want me to be your Heart-Pan? Dream on! Since I'm the hot commodity, I can pick whoever I want! And it sure as hell won't be you!"

"Li Huowang!" He stabbed a finger at the heavens, his voice ringing with finality. "I am destined to become a Siming! And the future Li Huowang is fated to come and help me right now!"

As the words left his mouth, he felt the Innate Pneuma inside him drain dry in an instant. He was cultivating the false into reality, forging a future version of himself that was a Siming.

Since Doumu was there to catch him if he fell, why not gamble big?

The Dice’s face was a mask of utter disbelief. He could no longer calculate what Li Huowang was trying to do. "Hongzhong, what the hell are you spouting? Have you lost your mind?"

Li Huowang felt the memories of Hongzhong within his mind beginning to erode his own past. Doumu was not going to wait idly.

But then, every wound he had ever suffered erupted across his body simultaneously, splitting open. The searing, agonizing pain wrenched Li Huowang back to himself.

This dual fracturing of mind and body pushed Li Huowang to the brink of death.

Yet it was precisely this torment that fueled his conviction. His method was working. Why else would they try so desperately to stop him?

To cultivate a future Siming into reality seemed like the wildest of fantasies. But Li Huowang believed it. He believed it with every fiber of his being.

A smile spread across Li Huowang's face. A smile of pure, unadulterated joy.

He didn't know how long passed. When he came to his senses again, he found himself in a vast expanse of white.

As confusion set in, the Chief Astrologer walked up to him and helped him to his feet.

"Li Huowang, are you sure you want to take this path? You have already touched the karmic threads of a Siming, but you do not necessarily have to become one."

Li Huowang ignored the question of whether this Chief Astrologer was real or not, cutting straight to the chase. "Do I have a choice? If I don't take this path, what am I supposed to do? Become Doumu's puppet? Or Bashe's?"

"Is the future me powerful? What Siming does he preside over?"

"The Way of Bewilderment, itself," the Chief Astrologer replied.

"Oh? So that means I could use bewilderment the same way Doumu uses truth and falsehood?" Li Huowang perked up.

"Yes. But the stronger you become, the deeper your bewilderment will be. They feed each other."

The Chief Astrologer’s voice grew deadly serious. "Let me ask you one last time. Are you truly prepared to walk this path?"

"Everything you once held dear may become illusion. And everything you once thought was illusion may become real."

Li Huowang let out a bitter chuckle. "Heh. Like I can tell the difference all that clearly now."

Hearing this self-deprecating remark, the Chief Astrologer nodded gently. He reached out from within his red robe, took it off, and revealed a white garment beneath.

It was not just any white garment. It was Yi Donglai’s white lab coat.

"Li Huowang? Li Huowang?" Yi Donglai snapped his fingers in front of the boy, the ballpoint pen still held loosely in his hand.

The scene shifted in an instant. Yi Donglai was gone, replaced by the Chief Astrologer in his red Daoist robe, and he was back on the battlefield, the air thick with the stench of blood.

But a second later, the towering Chief Astrologer morphed back into Yi Donglai, and the smell of blood was replaced by the antiseptic scent of a hospital.

"Li Huowang, have you forgotten what you still need to do?"

Yi Donglai’s words snapped Li Huowang back to reality. He saw a spiral metal slide in the hospital room, so long it nearly touched the ceiling.

Throwing off the covers, Li Huowang slowly approached the slide under Yi Donglai’s watchful gaze.

In the next moment, the slide turned into Gao Zhijian's Dragon Vein. Just as he was about to fly away, it turned back into the slide.

Scratching his head, Li Huowang dragged his frail body up the slide.

His weakness made even this simple act incredibly difficult. He kept slipping and sliding back down.

Outside the room, Sun Xiaoqin saw this and couldn't hold back, rushing forward to help, but her husband held her tight.

"Dr. Yi is giving our son hypnotherapy! Don't you dare go in there and mess it up! Listen to the doctor!"

Li Huowang glanced at them. His mother had become a Military Cultivator. His father had become Bai Lingmiao, holding the Military Cultivator back.

When he finally made it to the top of the slide, Li Huowang looked around and saw nothing. Then, he looked up and saw the circular, pancake-shaped energy-saving light fixture hanging upside down from the ceiling.

Crouching on the slide, he reached out and unscrewed the lamp cover.

"This is impossible! Absolutely impossible! I am the Dragon Vein now! Wherever I am, that is reality! You cannot trap me!" Gao Zhijian's voice was thick with bitter defiance.

"Real?" Li Huowang’s eyes flickered with a glimmer of confusion. He was beginning to lose his grip on what was what.

The lamp cover came off. From inside, Li Huowang pulled out an eighteen-faced dice.

He put the cover back and looked at the dice in his hand against the light. A smile slowly spread across his face.

Yi Donglai walked up the steps on the other side of the slide to join Li Huowang. He reached out, snatched the eighteen-faced dice from Li Huowang's hand, and put it into the pocket of his white lab coat.

"Come on, let's go down."

Yi Donglai helped Li Huowang down the steps and led him back to the hospital bed. "How do you feel about this session?"

Li Huowang turned his head. He saw Gao Zhijian, looking confused and rubbing his head, slowly stand up again. He shook his head, a little puzzled himself. "I can't really say. But at least for now, it looks like the problem is solved."

"Brother Li, has Great Qi been saved?" Zhuge Yuan’s voice boomed out as his body began to fade away.

"I think... my illness is cured."

Hearing this, a look of release washed over Zhuge Yuan's face, and he vanished completely from Li Huowang's sight.

"So, how do you feel now?" Yi Donglai pressed on.

"I feel... I feel like something between the two sides is starting to overlap." Li Huowang stared at his own bony hands in confusion.

"Mm, that's normal. It means my method is working. Remember to take your medicine on time. Work with me, and you'll recover faster."

The hospital door was suddenly pushed open. A crowd of doctors rushed in, pointing at Li Huowang and clicking their tongues in wonder.

Sun Xiaoqin pushed her way through them, threw herself onto Li Huowang, and burst into tears of joy.

"Son, you're cured! Thank the heavens! Your illness is finally gone!"

(End of Volume 3)

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Reading Guide Decoding

Volume 3 Finale: A Desperate Ascension and a Bitter Cure

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

Siming (司命) & Heart-Pan (心蟠): This chapter deepens the novel's already staggering cosmology. We already knew Siming were high-dimensional, reality-bending "Arbiters of Fate." Now we learn the term Heart-Pan (心蟠). A Heart-Pan is a mortal who acts as a Siming's "past" and "seed"—its connection to the lower world to ensure its own existence. Think of it as a Siming's anchor or its larval stage. Being a Siming's Heart-Pan means being their puppet, a role Li Huowang violently rejects, preferring to become the thing itself.

The Way of Bewilderment (迷惘天道): Li Huowang is told his future Siming domain will be "Bewilderment Itself." This is a perfect, tragic irony. Bewilderment—the inability to tell truth from falsehood, illusion from reality—has been the curse of his life and his greatest weapon (his Heart-Element power to "cultivate the false"). His future ascension means his power will literally grow from the very thing that tortures him most.

Chapter Overview

Hold onto your meridians, fellow daoists, because Volume 3 wraps up with a bang—or rather, with the chilling, triumphant laughter of a man losing his mind on purpose. Li Huowang makes a terrifyingly bold play: he decides to become a Siming, an Arbiter of Fate, by sheer force of belief. He gambles everything on the idea that his future, more powerful self will come back to save him right now. It's a gamble that breaks reality, confuses gods, and lands him smack in the middle of a therapy session with Dr. Yi Donglai. The lines between the two worlds blur more than ever, leaving us with a cured (?) Li Huowang, a vanished Zhuge Yuan, and a mother's tearful joy that feels just a little too good to be true. Get ready for a finale that’s part cosmic horror, part psychiatric breakthrough, and entirely mind-bending.

Key Plot Points

Li Huowang rejects the Dice's taunts and Doumu's coercion, declaring he will become a Siming himself.
He drains his Innate Pneuma to "cultivate the false into reality," attempting to make a future, more powerful version of himself exist.
The Void year entity attacks, draining Li Huowang's yang life and nearly killing Gao Zhijian, but Gao Zhijian's latent power awakens, unleashing his Dragon Vein.
During his struggle, Li Huowang experiences a vision of the Chief Astrologer, who confirms he is on the path to becoming the Siming of Bewilderment.
The vision collapses, and Li Huowang is transported to a hospital room with Dr. Yi Donglai.
Using hypnosis, Yi Donglai helps Li Huowang resolve the mental conflict, pulling an eighteen-faced dice (symbolizing the Dice's influence) out of a ceiling light.
The Dice's possession of Gao Zhijian ends, and Zhuge Yuan finally fades away, his duty fulfilled.
Li Huowang declares his illness cured, and the doctors and his mother celebrate, ending Volume 3 on a note of fragile, uncertain victory.

Reading Guide

This is a masterclass in weird fiction's central trick: making the solution feel as terrifying as the problem. Li Huowang "cures" himself not by destroying his hallucinatory world, but by leaning so hard into its logic that he forces it to rewrite its own rules. The "Winning by Losing" strategy is in full effect. He accepts his future as a Siming of Bewilderment, which sounds like a nightmare, but he frames it as a victory.

The final scene with Dr. Yi Donglai is pure genius. The Chief Astrologer shed his red robe to reveal a white lab coat. What does that tell us? Are the gods of the Dao-Twisted World just psychiatric constructs? Or is modern psychology just another form of divine exorcism? The novel refuses to give a clear answer, but it gives us a powerful symbol: the line between the healer and the prophet has been completely erased.

And that eighteen-sided dice? That's the Dice's meddling, literally unscrewed from a light fixture. It's a perfect, bizarre, and mundane solution to a supernatural problem. The real horror, however, lingers in that final question: is Li Huowang truly better, or has he just found a more comfortable lie to live in? Volume 3 ends, and the only thing certain is uncertainty.