Is the phone call from Li Huowang's mother's broken phone real?

The chapter deliberately leaves this ambiguous. The phone shows nothing on its cracked screen, but Li Huowang heard screams and a voice that knew his name. The novel refuses to classify it as delusion or reality.

Why does Li Huowang laugh off the incident in front of his mother?

He is performing normalcy as a defense mechanism—both to protect his mother from worry and to protect himself from being sent back to the hospital. The mask drops the second he is alone.

She is a neighbor who appears to be spying on Li Huowang from her window. In this chapter, she turns out to be the source of his "watched" feeling, an anticlimax that does not eliminate his deeper paranoia about the phone call.

Surveillance

1,133 words

"Son, don't forget to take your medicine!"

Once the sound of the voice faded outside the door, Li Huowang let out a sigh. He finally had a moment to sort through his thoughts, to piece together exactly what had happened last night.

First of all, he couldn't be too certain right now. Last night had been too vague. Maybe he had just seen wrong.

If he wanted to confirm whether someone was following him, he needed concrete evidence.

Otherwise, everyone would just think he was losing his mind. The image he had in their eyes right now was already bad enough.

And besides, Li Huowang wasn't entirely sure he could trust what he saw and heard either.

A flicker of hesitation crossed his face. He picked up his phone and quickly typed into the search bar.

I feel like someone is watching me with ill intent, trying to harm me. What could be the reason?

After entering the line, various answers appeared. Li Huowang scrolled down rapidly until his finger suddenly stopped on one entry.

Persecutory delusion.

The patient firmly believes, without basis, that certain individuals, groups, or organizations are engaging in harmful activities against them—such as poisoning their food, tracking them, or plotting conspiracies. These beliefs stem from pathological reasoning and distorted convictions, neither aligning with objective reality nor the patient's educational background. The content of the delusion is often absurd, yet the patient remains utterly convinced and cannot be reasoned with or corrected by personal experience.

Reading this, Li Huowang's fingers began to tremble slightly. A terrifying speculation crept into his mind.

"Could I really have a mental illness?"

He opened his phone's contacts and scrolled to Yi Donglai's number.

But after a moment of hesitation, he closed the contact list again.

He had just gotten out. He really didn't want to go back. He didn't want to make the people who cared about him worry anymore either. If his mother found out the result, how devastated would she be?

Li Huowang continued searching on the browser, various pieces of information flashing before his eyes.

He kept switching keywords—surveillance, mental illness, persecution—searching for a different possibility.

Then, another piece of content appeared before him.

In his later years, Hemingway's mental state collapsed. He constantly told people about his harrowing experience of being watched, claiming he was being wiretapped and his mail intercepted. Once, during a meal, he even pointed at two people at a nearby table and declared they were the agents monitoring him. This behavior was dismissed as paranoid delusions.

Under the pressure, Hemingway's mind truly began to fray, reinforcing everyone's belief that he had delusions and had become mentally ill. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital and subjected to electroshock therapy, which was popular at the time.

Everyone knows the final result. The broken Hemingway committed suicide. Many textbooks and books claim he couldn't bear the pressures of life and killed himself out of despair.

But fifty years later, declassified files revealed the truth: Hemingway really had been under constant surveillance. What he said wasn't delusion. There really was an organization watching him every moment.

"Ah!" Li Huowang squeezed his eyes shut in pain and flung his phone onto the bed. Difficulty wasn't scary. What was scary was that he had no idea what to do. No matter which direction he went, it felt wrong.

"What do I do? Is this real or not? Should I even go looking for the answer?"

Just as he was trapped in this dilemma, he suddenly felt that sensation again.

This time, Li Huowang didn't move rashly. The window was open now, and it was daytime.

He slowly turned his back, silently pulling open the left drawer. He took out a mirror.

Li Huowang bowed his head, slowly shifting the mirror in his hand, trying to observe the owner of that gaze through the reflection.

Inch by inch, he raised it. Finally, he saw a pair of women's shoes. His heartbeat quickened.

With a sudden jerk of the mirror, Aunt Qi's old face appeared in the reflection.

"Damn it!"

Li Huowang spun around in exasperation, stuck his head out the window, and shouted in that direction: "Hey! Aunt Qi! Aren't you tired crouching there all day? No one to take your shift? Want to come inside and sit?!"

Watching Aunt Qi in the distance pretend to leave as if nothing had happened, the phone at home rang.

Li Huowang recognized the ringtone. It was his mother's phone.

He walked out, picked up the cracked-screen phone from the cabinet, swiped it open, and put it to his ear. "Hello? Who is it?"

But there was no sound on the other end of the line. Just silence.

"Who is it? Sun Xiaoqin isn't here. I'm her son. My mom's not in. Who are you looking for?"

"Li Huowang?" A voice came from the other end.

The voice was strange, as if it had been processed by a computer.

Li Huowang's brow furrowed. The suspicion that had just settled began to creep back up.

"I'm Li Huowang. Who the hell are you?"

But the phone was silent again. Li Huowang pressed it close to his ear, listening carefully.

Vaguely, indistinctly, he seemed to hear some kind of screaming.

Li Huowang pulled out his own phone with his left hand and slowly began dialing the emergency number.

"Son, what are you doing?" Sun Xiaoqin walked in from outside, carrying a bag of fruit. She looked at Li Huowang holding her phone, a puzzled expression on her face.

"Nothing. Someone called your phone. Probably a wrong number," Li Huowang said, lowering the phone in his hand at the same time.

"A phone call? But my phone is broken."

"What?!" Li Huowang brought the phone back in front of him. On the screen, besides the crack and his own shocked face reflected in the black display, there was nothing.

"Son, what's wrong? Don't scare me." Panicking, Sun Xiaoqin rushed over, pulled Li Huowang into her arms, and stroked the back of his head, over and over again.

Suddenly, Li Huowang burst into laughter. "Mom, gotcha! How was that? Did I look convincing or what?"

Hearing this, Sun Xiaoqin let go of Li Huowang, her face flushing with anger as she pushed him hard. "You brat! You can't joke about things like that! You almost scared me to death!"

"Haha, I just saw you worrying about everything and wanted to cheer you up."

With that, Li Huowang stood up, wearing an indifferent expression as he walked back into the house.

The moment the door closed behind him, his face changed drastically. His fists clenched, and his expression twisted into a silent, furious roar in the empty room.

"What the hell is going on?! Is someone watching me, or not?!"

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Reading Guide Decoding

The Horror of the Normal World

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

This chapter leans heavily on a Western reference—Hemingway's tragic end—but the framing is pure Dao Gui Yi Xian: it weaponizes paranoia by validating it. The novel constantly asks: what if the people who think they're crazy are actually the only sane ones? This resonates deeply with Li Huowang's world, where the Heavenly Law of Bewilderment is not a state of mind but an actual, missing piece of cosmic order. In traditional Chinese medicine and folk psychology, "madness" (疯病) is often attributed to possession, spiritual imbalance, or a collision with the unseen. Li Huowang's struggle to label his experience as "mental illness" instead of "supernatural interference" is itself a modern act of cultural translation—one the novel refuses to make easy.

Chapter Overview

This chapter yanks us back to the so-called real world, but don't get comfortable. Li Huowang is home, freshly discharged, and already the walls are closing in. The paranoia that defined life in the Dao-Twisted World hasn't stayed behind—it's followed him through the door. What starts as a quiet morning of checking his phone for reassurance spirals into a full-blown ontological crisis. Is someone watching him, or is this just his sickness talking? And when a strange phone call from his mother's broken phone connects him to distant screams, the line between delusion and reality gets thinner than a cracked screen.

Key Plot Points

Li Huowang wakes to the mundane task of not forgetting his medication, but his mind is already churning on last night's ambiguous encounter.
He self-diagnoses via search engine, confronting the terrifying possibility that he might just be a textbook case of persecutory delusion.
The Hemingway anecdote becomes a dangerous mirror: a man who was dismissed as crazy, only to be proven right fifty years later. It's the anchor Li Huowang's paranoia grabs onto.
He confirms "the feeling" of being watched through a mirror trick—only to find it's just Aunt Qi from next door. An anticlimax that should be relief, but feels like a trap.
The real horror hits: his mother's broken phone rings, and a computer-processed voice speaks his name. He hears screams. The phone is dead in his hands.
Li Huowang covers his terror with a perfect performance of a prank, laughing it off for his mother's sake. But the mask drops the second he's alone.

Reading Guide

This is a slow-burn horror chapter that weaponizes the mundane. The real threat here isn't a monster or a demonic sect; it's the terrifying possibility that Li Huowang's mind is turning against him, and the even more terrifying possibility that it isn't. Pay close attention to the phone call. The fact that it came from a "dead" phone, that a voice spoke his name, and that he heard screams—these are not explained away. The novel refuses to tell us whether this is delusion or genuine contact from the Dao-Twisted World. That ambiguity is the point. Also, note the mirror. Li Huowang uses a reflective surface to check his blind spot, a tactic he learned in a world of monsters. He's bringing the survival logic of the Dao-Twisted World into his mother's home. That's not healing. That's infection.

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.

Is the phone call from Li Huowang's mother's broken phone real?: The chapter deliberately leaves this ambiguous. The phone shows nothing on its cracked screen, but Li Huowang heard screams and a voice that knew his name. The novel refuses to classify it as delusion or reality.
Why does Li Huowang laugh off the incident in front of his mother?: He is performing normalcy as a defense mechanism—both to protect his mother from worry and to protect himself from being sent back to the hospital. The mask drops the second he is alone.
Who is Aunt Qi?: She is a neighbor who appears to be spying on Li Huowang from her window. In this chapter, she turns out to be the source of his "watched" feeling, an anticlimax that does not eliminate his deeper paranoia about the phone call.