Fengdu

1,265 words

“Senior Brother Li? Is it really you? Senior Brother Li, are you here to save me?”

The moment Yang Xiaohai saw Li Huowang appear before him, it was as if he had finally found his anchor. He ran over and spilled everything that had happened like beans poured from a gourd.

When Yang Xiaohai finished, he noticed Senior Brother Li was studying him with a look that made him feel a little uneasy.

“Follow me.” Without another word to Yang Xiaohai, Li Huowang turned and strode quickly westward.

Yang Xiaohai hesitated for a moment, but remembering how Li Huowang had just saved his life from that strange man, he decided Li Huowang probably wouldn’t hurt him. He hurried after him.

He didn’t notice, however, that behind them, Magistrate Lyu, still pierced by the soul-collecting staff, struggled back to his feet.

The two walked through the darkness, one behind the other. With Li Huowang in front, Yang Xiaohai felt much safer.

“Senior Brother Li, where is this?”

“Where is this? This is the lowest level of Qingqiu. Fengdu.”

“Fengdu? Oh, right, Senior Brother Li, my wife came down with me too. Can you help me find her?”

“You have a wife already? That’s good.” A slight smile curling at the corner of his mouth, Li Huowang nodded in answer.

“Senior Brother Li, thank you so much!” Hearing that Li Huowang would actually help him find Zhao Xiumei, Yang Xiaohai thanked him with great excitement.

“We’re fellow disciples. No need to be so polite. Stay quiet and follow me. We’re almost there.”

They continued on. After about the time it takes for one stick of incense to burn, the ground began to grow uneven.

In some places, enormous pillars of stone jutted up into the darkness overhead. In others, the ground collapsed into vast, pitch-black pits. Everything around them became oppressively strange and eerie.

Faint points of green candlelight flickered within the pits. The strange men Yang Xiaohai had seen earlier were dragging their bulging soul-collecting staves toward the chasm, leaping in.

Hiding behind a massive pillar, Yang Xiaohai watched and sensed something was wrong. “Senior… Senior Brother Li, this doesn’t look like the way out.”

“This is your way out. Do you know what these holes are? And these mounds pressing up against the ground?” Li Huowang pointed at everything before him.

Without waiting for Yang Xiaohai to answer, Li Huowang answered his own question. “This is actually Kuilui. The Siming who governs death. Why is it lying here, not moving? Well, because if it’s the Siming in charge of death, naturally it has to be dead! Hahaha!”

Having said this, Li Huowang seemed to find his own words hilarious, clutching his stomach and roaring with laughter. He laughed so hard tears nearly came out.

“Senior Brother Li, what are you talking about? I don’t understand.” Yang Xiaohai was starting to panic.

“You still don’t get it? You already fell to your death a long time ago. You’re dead. When you’re dead, of course you belong to Kuilui. Why don’t you go merge with it already? I came all this way just to see you off.”

Hearing this, Yang Xiaohai’s legs gave out, and he collapsed to the ground. “I’m dead… I’m really dead?”

He pinched himself. When he saw no blood, he burst into a fit of devastated crying. “I haven’t even seen my parents yet! I can’t die! I want to live! I don’t want to die!”

At the moment Yang Xiaohai’s crying reached its most desperate and loudest pitch, Li Huowang suddenly clapped his hands together in front of him and laughed triumphantly. “Hahaha! I fooled you! You’re not dead at all! You still have your ten emotions and eight sufferings on you!”

As he laughed, the face on his face shifted from Li Huowang’s to Hong Zhong’s, and then from Hong Zhong’s back to Li Huowang’s.

Yang Xiaohai, who had been caught mid-sob, stared blankly at Senior Brother Li in front of him, momentarily unable to speak.

“Come on, I’ll take you out.” Still smiling, Li Huowang reached his hand out, offering to pull him up.

Yang Xiaohai didn’t know whether he should take that outstretched hand. He felt that Senior Brother Li before him had also become… strange. “Senior Brother Li, you’re not tricking me again, are you? This really isn’t the time for games.”

“Haha, don’t worry. I know my limits. I was just teasing you.” Li Huowang grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet, then turned back the way they came.

They hadn’t gone far when they ran straight into Magistrate Lyu, who was walking toward them. Seeing them, Magistrate Lyu spoke with a dazed confusion. “Little Daoist Priest? And you… Yang, was it? Yang Xiaohai? What are you two doing here?”

“Uncle Juren, what’s wrong with you? Didn’t we just meet?” Yang Xiaohai asked, utterly bewildered.

“Just now?” Magistrate Lyu looked at Yang Xiaohai as if he were a stranger, stopping in place to think.

“Enough, don’t waste words on him. The ten emotions and eight sufferings and the three souls and seven spirits have all dispersed from Lyu Juren. All that’s left on him is death qi. He’s already part of Kuilui now. He’ll just repeat the same short moment over and over, not knowing what happened before, not knowing what is happening now.”

Hearing this, Yang Xiaohai looked at Magistrate Lyu with pity. “Then Senior Brother Li, why did he end up like this? Is Lyu Juren dead?”

“How should I know?” Li Huowang said and walked on.

Yang Xiaohai hesitated, glanced once more at Magistrate Lyu, then hurried after him. This time, Magistrate Lyu did not follow. He simply stood there, lost in thought.

In the complete darkness, Yang Xiaohai followed Li Huowang onward. This time, they were ascending.

Just as Yang Xiaohai began to believe he might really get out, a violent tremor shook the air, and cracking sounds came from both the sky and the earth.

Li Huowang’s brow tightened. He spun around quickly, looking back at the pit and the enormous pillars. When he saw the chasm was actually shrinking, he cursed under his breath, “Here it comes again.”

“Senior Brother Li? What’s coming?” Yang Xiaohai asked, tense.

“Evil spirits. Evil spirits from somewhere else. Someone seems to want to wake Kuilui up! We need to go, fast. Don’t get caught in the fallout.”

With that, Li Huowang grabbed Yang Xiaohai and quickened their pace.

“Senior Brother Li… if this Kuilui really wakes up, what happens?”

“Kuilui is the Siming in charge of death. What do you think will happen if it wakes up?”

As they talked, the tremors grew louder. Then Yang Xiaohai heard the sound of surging waves echoing through this dark, underground place.

“They’re coming! Let’s take the high path!” Li Huowang stomped his feet against the ground and, dragging Yang Xiaohai with him, leaped up onto the rock ceiling above.

Hanging upside down, Yang Xiaohai was pulled along as they sprinted. Even upside down, neither of them showed any sign of falling.

Soon, Yang Xiaohai saw, below them, a vast tide of dark seawater rushing in. The color of this water was terribly strange—like a rotting rainbow, a tarnished spectrum of colors.

This bizarre seawater surged violently toward the location of the great pit. A vaporous mist rose from it, and Yang Xiaohai felt his own body beginning to melt.

He was melting like a lit candle, dripping inward as liquid wax.

—

Next chapter: 23:30.

Tomorrow: make up for the debt.

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Reading Guide Decoding

The Gu-Curse Demon’s Promise and the Heavens Beyond the Heavens

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

Fengdu (酆都): Not just a scary name, but a deeply historical layer of Chinese mythology. Fengdu is the ancient capital of the dead, a city-sized administrative hub for the afterlife, ruled by the ten Yama Kings (阎王). Every soul is said to pass through for judgment. Placing it as the lowest level of Qingqiu turns the fox-demon realm into a multi-tiered cosmic prison, with dead gods and bureaucratic hells stacked on top of each other.

Kuilui (魁櫑): A novel-specific entity, but built on recognizable foundations. The character 魁 often relates to "chief" or "head," and 櫑 suggests a vessel or container. Calling it the Siming of Death implies an inseparable bond: death itself has a keeper, and that keeper is now dead. The horror is that the ontological system is broken—the death of the god of death doesn't end death, but warps it into a perverse, unfinished process.

Ten Emotions and Eight Sufferings (十情八苦): While often associated loosely with Buddhist frameworks of suffering, this particular set is not a standard Buddhist formulation (which is usually the Eight Sufferings like birth, aging, sickness, death, etc.). The "ten emotions" are a creative expansion by the author, implying that to live is to be bound by emotional knots that tie the soul to the body. Dispersing them is death. Yang Xiaohai still has his, which is the only proof he's still alive.

Zuowandao's Psychological Warfare: The entire performance in this chapter—the fake rescue, the fake death reveal, the face-shift—is a masterclass in the Way of Sitting in Forgetfulness. Their goal is never just to deceive, but to make the victim question the reliability of any perception. Even a brute-force monster can be handled if you know it’s a monster. Zuowandao’s cruelty is making you doubt that you know anything at all.

Zuowandao

The Way of Sitting in Forgetfulness; a sect of cosmic tricksters who corrupt reality through lies, deception, and ontological pranks.

Chapter Overview

This chapter takes us on a truly nightmarish descent—or maybe an ascent, depending on your angle—into the lowest depths of Qingqiu. Yang Xiaohai, who we last saw falling into this mess, encounters a person wearing Li Huowang’s face, a person who may be Li Huowang, but also may be Hong Zhong of Zuowandao doing what he does best: playing with reality right up to the edge of sanity. The chapter is a brutal rollercoaster of hope, hopelessness, and a punchline that lands somewhere between prank and ontological warfare.

Key Plot Points

Yang Xiaohai’s initial relief is visceral: he sees Li Huowang and immediately believes rescue is at hand. His trust is both touching and terrifyingly fragile.
The setting is revealed to be Fengdu—the ghost city, the underworld, the absolute bottom of the Qingqiu hierarchy, where even the dead fear to tread.
Li Huowang (or someone wearing his face) explains that the entire cavern system is the corpse of Kuilui, the Siming of Death, lying dead in its own domain—an ouroboros of mortality.
Yang Xiaohai is psychologically broken by the lie (“you’re already dead”), only to have it shattered by the “truth” (“just kidding”). This swap is pure Zuowandao: using despair as a stage, and hope as a weapon.
The “Lu Huowang” mask slips between Li Huowang and Hong Zhong mid-laugh, confirming the speaker is not the real Senior Brother but a trickster in his skin.
The encounter with Magistrate Lyu—now a broken record of his final moments, repeating endlessly as part of Kuilui—drives home the horror of what death means in this place.
The chapter climaxes with the arrival of a corrupted, rainbow-hued tide from across other realms, actively trying to reawaken the dead Siming. The chapter ends with Yang Xiaohai literally melting into his own perception of reality.

Reading Guide

Fellow mortal, if you weren’t already feeling queasy about trusting anyone in this story, this chapter is here to twist that knife a little deeper. Hong Zhong’s little prank on Yang Xiaohai is simultaneously cruel and hilarious—it’s the kind of “joke” that only a complete monster would have the emotional stamina to pull off. Watch for the detail of the face-shifting: it isn’t a smooth morphing effect. It snaps back and forth, like a hand slapping a mask on and off. That visual is crucial. It tells us the speaker isn’t even trying to be Li Huowang for very long; he’s just wearing that face like a convention badge.

And that melting scene at the end? Chef’s kiss. It’s not real. It’s a sensory hallucination triggered by the mist of the cross-realm tide. But Yang Xiaohai feels it, experiences it, and the narration doesn’t correct him. To him, it is real. That’s the Dao Gui signature move: reality updating its code on the fly, and you’re the only one still running the old version.