Why is the refugee from Great Qi a big deal?

He proves that the Dao-Twisted World (Great Qi) is geographically adjacent to the "normal" world (Great Liang). The barrier between the two realities is not a magical wall, but a physical road—and that road has now vanished, suggesting the border itself is collapsing.

What does the dead-end road mean?

It implies that the geography of the two worlds is unstable. The path the refugee walked exists in Great Qi, but not in Great Liang. It's a literal hole in reality that has now closed, leaving the refugee stranded.

Who is the old man eating tree bark?

A second refugee from Great Qi, further confirming the reality bleed. His act of eating bark is a visceral reminder of the famine and suffering that defines the dying world of Great Qi.

Why did Li Huowang pierce his own eardrums in a previous chapter?

It's a tactical self-mutilation to negate sound-based psychic attacks or commands. It reflects the novel's theme of sacrificing the body to preserve the mind. This chapter shows him healed and using his tentacles instead, showing his pragmatic adaptation.

The Dead-End Road

1,367 words

Chapter 616: Someone Comes

Faced with a man who had suddenly appeared in Niuxin Village out of nowhere, Li Huowang was naturally full of suspicion.

"Li Sui, check him out."

"Okay, Dad."

Several of Li Sui's tentacles shot over, swiftly dragging the ragged man out of the kitchen. The tentacles drilled directly into his seven orifices, probing his insides thoroughly from the inside out.

Under the just-risen moonlight, Li Huowang could now make out the man's face.

He was a stubbly, unkempt man, looking utterly haggard and emaciated. Beneath his tattered clothes, every rib was clearly visible. Hidden against his chest were a small pumpkin and two sweet potatoes.

"Ugh—" The man hunched over as Li Sui's tentacles slowly withdrew from his body.

"Dad, he's a human. There's nothing else inside him. His stomach has some mush. He's probably just an ordinary person."

Seeing the man's miserable state, Li Huowang, who had been on full alert, finally relaxed a little. If someone had gone to all the trouble of sneaking into Niuxin Village just to steal a few sweet potatoes, he wouldn't believe it.

He re-sheathed the spinal sword behind his back and asked the man, "What did you come to Niuxin Village for?"

"I... I'm a refugee! I haven't had anything to eat, I'm starving! Great Immortal, please spare me this once. I'm really about to die of hunger. I won't dare do it again." The man lay on the ground, trembling, not daring to lift his head.

Seeing the others gathering around, Li Huowang scanned the crowd for a moment, then pointed at Gouwa, who was watching the excitement. "Handle it. Feed him. Whether he stays or leaves after that is up to him."

With that, not waiting for Gouwa to reply, Li Huowang retracted the tentacles into his body and walked toward the Bai family compound.

Seeing that Li Huowang had confirmed the man was no threat, Gouwa's courage swelled immediately.

He clasped his hands behind his back and walked up to the man. The patches of white and black on his own face made the man flinch. "A refugee, huh? Had a rough time on the road?"

"Mm-hmm, mm-hmm!" The man nodded frantically. He reached into his chest, pulled out a sweet potato, and was about to shove it into his mouth when Gouwa snatched it away.

"Hmph, I can tell you've never really starved before. Stuffing that into your stomach like this—you trying to kill yourself? What you need right now is porridge! After two days of porridge, then you can eat solid food."

Gouwa looked around, then pointed at two village militia men. "You two, yeah, you two. Go quick and cook some porridge. Didn't you just hear your godfather's orders? This is my responsibility now."

Hearing that there was a refugee, the villagers swarmed over, eager to see the commotion.

Under the gaze of the Niuxin villagers, the man downed three bowls of porridge in a row. He tried to get another, but Gouwa stopped him.

"That's enough. Any more and you'll burst." Gouwa forcibly took the bowl away, then plopped himself down on a stool. "Alright, you've eaten. Now talk. Where are you from?"

The man looked fearfully at the people around him. When he saw the lard in Gouwa's wife's hands, he instinctively licked his lips. "I... I'm from Xi County."

"Xi County? Where's that? Never heard of it. What disaster hit your place? Why'd you have to flee?"

At these words, a look of intense terror flashed in the man's eyes, and his body began to tremble violently. "A... a Heavenly Calamity! The Sky Dog ate the sun! All the demons and monsters from the eighteen levels of hell crawled out! They... they killed everyone in sight! I hid in a temple to survive."

"After the calamity passed, most people were dead. To stay alive, I went looking for food, but the land had been drought-stricken for three years. There was nothing left."

"I had no choice. I had to flee. I had to find a way to live."

"Oh." Gouwa nodded with understanding. "So that's how it is. A Heavenly Calamity, huh? I know about those. We had one here too. Scary stuff. Luckily, it only lasted a little while."

"A little while?" The man's voice cracked. His eyes were filled with grief and fury. "Why?! Why did yours only last a little while, but ours lasted for dozens of days?! Why?!"

At this, the people around him sucked in a sharp breath. If that kind of calamity lasted for dozens of days... no wonder he had to flee.

"Aren't you from Liang?" Zhao Wu asked, his brow furrowed. "As far as I know, the Heavenly Calamity only lasted a little while across the whole of Liang."

"Huh? Liang? Where's Liang? Did I... Did I wander beyond the border in just that short time?" The man looked utterly bewildered.

"You're not from Liang?"

"No, I'm not. I'm from Great Qi."

Hearing this, the crowd began to murmur amongst themselves.

"From Great Qi? Where's Great Qi? Isn't Liang bordered by Qingqiu to the left and the sea to the right? Where would Great Qi be?"

"What about above or below?"

"I... I really don't know. But it can't be Great Qi. I remember a dynasty called Great Qi existed thousands of years ago."

Li Sui, who had already put on her human skin suit, noted these words carefully. She picked up her skirt and walked toward her house.

"Dad! Dad!" The moment Li Sui entered the house, she saw her father cutting open his own scalp to check on how his head was healing.

"Dad, there's a man from Great Qi down there. The place we went to before, that was Great Qi, right?"

"What? From Great Qi? Are you sure you heard that right?" Li Huowang didn't even bother to wipe the blood from his head. He vaulted over the windowsill and rushed toward the kitchen.

Under the pressure of Li Huowang's row of torture implements, the man dared not hide anything. He poured out everything he knew.

And by comparing it with the Great Qi he remembered in his own mind, Li Huowang found that this man was indeed from Great Qi! He wasn't a fake!

"Someone from Great Qi... has come to Liang... has come to Liang..." Li Huowang's expression grew grave as he thought for a moment, then he pressed the man again. "Speak! How did you get here? Is there another Heart-Pan?"

"What 'Heart-Pan'? I... I just walked along the road ahead and ended up here." The man's face was pale with fear, not daring to say anything wrong.

"Take me to see it!" Li Huowang grabbed him and dragged him toward the dirt road at the edge of the village.

Soon, under the man's guidance, Li Huowang arrived at a fork in the road at the foot of Niuxin Mountain.

"I... I came from that road. I saw the woods were dense over there, so I followed the cart tracks and found your village."

"Let's go. Keep walking." Li Huowang didn't know what this meant, but he felt things were far from simple.

They hadn't gone far, however, when they stopped. There was no road ahead. It was a dead end.

Seeing the gleaming torture implements hanging from Li Huowang's waist, the man looked like he was about to cry. "I... I swear to the Three Mountain Kings, I'm not lying to you! I really did come from this way!"

He was about to say more when Li Huowang, whose left ear had twitched, shoved him aside. Li Huowang gripped his sword hilt and charged into the nearby woods.

Soon, he found an old man at the foot of a large tree. The man was ragged and had a grotesquely swollen stomach. He was using a sharp stone to desperately cut at the tree's bark.

After peeling off a large strip of bark, he carefully separated the soft, green, moist inner layer from the hard outer bark.

Then, opening his nearly toothless mouth, his hands trembling and tears streaming down his face, he stuffed the soft inner bark into his mouth.

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Reading Guide Decoding

The Threshold is Breaking: Refugees from Great Qi

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

This chapter presents a subtle but profound horror: the collapse of geographic reality. In standard xianxia, different nations (like Liang and Qi) exist on the same map. Here, they are separate ontological zones. When the refugee speaks of "Great Qi," he is not referring to a neighboring kingdom on a forgotten border, but to an entirely different layer of existence—a Dao-Twisted dimension. His bewilderment at being told he is in "Liang" mirrors the classic folkloric motif of the "Fisherman and the Peach Blossom Spring" (桃花源记), where a traveler stumbles into a hidden, time-displaced world. But where that story was a dreamy utopia, this is a horror of porous boundaries; the nightmare world is leaking into reality, one starving refugee at a time. The dead-end road he claims to have walked is a terrifying image: a physical path that now leads to nowhere, as if the geography itself is being erased or retconned.

Chapter Overview

Get ready for a quiet chapter that lands like a rock dropped into a still pond. After the relentless psychic horrors and body-modifying rituals, this chapter is a slow-burn horror of connection: a starved, terrified refugee stumbles into Niuxin Village claiming to be from a completely different country—Great Qi. But Li Huowang knows Great Qi. He walked through its twisted, Dao-corrupted hellscape. The fact that a random ordinary man has walked from that nightmare into the relative safety of the Liang borderlands is wrong in a way that feels far more sinister than any monster. Li Huowang’s investigation leads him not to a grand conspiracy or a hidden enemy, but to a dead end on a dirt path and a starving old man eating tree bark—a chilling reminder that the boundary between realities is breaking down, and the famine of a dying world is starting to bleed through.

Key Plot Points

A starved, ragged man is discovered stealing food in the village kitchen. Li Sui performs a thorough tentacle-based internal examination, confirming he is a normal human with no parasitic implants or hidden tricks.
After being fed porridge (under Gouwa's enthusiastic, self-important supervision), the man reveals his story: he survived a "Heavenly Calamity" that lasted for dozens of days in his homeland—a stark contrast to the brief, terrifying events Niuxin Village has experienced.
The man does not recognize the country of "Great Liang" and identifies himself as a citizen of "Great Qi." This immediately alarms Li Huowang, as Great Qi is the Dao-Twisted World he previously traversed.
Li Huowang interrogates the man, forcing him to reveal the path he took. They trace it back to a fork in the road that leads to a literal dead end—the physical road simply does not exist where the man claims he walked.
While searching the woods near the dead end, Li Huowang discovers a second refugee: a nearly toothless, starving old man who is desperately eating raw tree bark. The implication is clear: the boundary between the two worlds is thinning, and desperate people are crossing over by accident.

Reading Guide

Welcome back, fellow Daoists, to another installment of "Li Huowang's Day Gets Progressively Worse." This chapter is a masterclass in using the mundane to build cosmic dread. No flesh Buddhas. No screaming cosmic entities. Just a hungry man with a pumpkin, a dead-end road, and a starving old man eating bark. But the implications are catastrophic. Our boy Li Huowang, who has spent so long fighting for a stable reality, is now confronted with proof that the barriers between worlds are not just permeable—they are dissolving. Keep your eyes on the details: the contrast between the village's "brief" calamity and the refugee's "dozens of days" of horror, the way Li Huowang instinctively treats his tentacles as normal investigative tools, and the final, chilling image of the old man in the woods. This is the quiet before a much larger storm. The question isn't if the Dao-Twisted World will fully invade Liang. The question is who and what will come through that dead-end road next.

Deeper Lore: The Migrant Crisis of a Dying Dimension

The most terrifying implication of this chapter is that it frames the Dao-Twisted World (Great Qi) not as a stable hellscape, but as a dying one. The refugee didn't escape through a portal or a magical ritual; he just walked away from a calamity that destroyed his home. The land is barren. The people are dead. The only survivors are the ones who fled into temples or walked until they literally couldn't walk anymore. This transforms the nature of the "Heavenly Calamities" (天灾). They are not attacks; they are symptoms of a system-wide collapse. Great Qi is rotting from the inside, and its starving, desperate population is spilling into Liang the way refugees have always spilled across borders in human history—without permission, without understanding, and with nothing left but the need to survive. This is not a war. This is a leak.

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 the refugee from Great Qi a big deal?: He proves that the Dao-Twisted World (Great Qi) is geographically adjacent to the "normal" world (Great Liang). The barrier between the two realities is not a magical wall, but a physical road—and that road has now vanished, suggesting the border itself is collapsing.
What does the dead-end road mean?: It implies that the geography of the two worlds is unstable. The path the refugee walked exists in Great Qi, but not in Great Liang. It's a literal hole in reality that has now closed, leaving the refugee stranded.
Who is the old man eating tree bark?: A second refugee from Great Qi, further confirming the reality bleed. His act of eating bark is a visceral reminder of the famine and suffering that defines the dying world of Great Qi.
Why did Li Huowang pierce his own eardrums in a previous chapter?: It's a tactical self-mutilation to negate sound-based psychic attacks or commands. It reflects the novel's theme of sacrificing the body to preserve the mind. This chapter shows him healed and using his tentacles instead, showing his pragmatic adaptation.