Prisoners

1,390 words

Li Huowang tightened his grip on the kitchen knife, his glare fixed on the man with the slicked-back hair and glasses.

Even though he had only met him once, Li Huowang recognized him immediately. This was the same mental patient from his therapy group back at Kangning Hospital. If his memory was right, the man’s name was Yuan Heping.

“So it was you. You’ve been one of them this whole time?” Li Huowang’s breath came fast as he stepped forward, knife raised.

Yuan Heping swallowed hard, his eyes darting between the glint of Li Huowang’s blade and the dark muzzle of the gun in Qing Wanglai’s hand on the other side. “Hey, hey, let’s not get hasty here. Murder means life in prison, you know! We didn’t do anything!”

Qing Wanglai moved beside Li Huowang and gently pushed his knife hand down. “We’ve already got them cornered. No need for the blade.”

Behind them, Qian Fu and Chen Hongyu walked over with a jump rope and bound the two men’s hands.

Only when he saw his enemies subdued did Li Huowang lower his knife. With the captives secured, his focus snapped to something else entirely.

“Where did you get a gun?!” Li Huowang demanded, turning to Qing Wanglai. That was much harder to get hold of than a knife.

The sheer energy it implied made Li Huowang start to seriously doubt who he was dealing with.

Qing Wanglai just smiled. He pointed the muzzle at Wu Qi’s head, and before anyone could react, clicked the trigger.

A tiny red flame flickered out of the barrel, swaying gently from side to side.

Wu Qi pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket and calmly lit it off Qing Wanglai’s gun-flame.

“It’s a fake?”

“Of course it’s a fake. This is a society of law. How could I possibly have something as dangerous as a real gun? I got it on Taobao’s Double Eleven sale.” Qing Wanglai released the trigger and slid the lighter back into his pants pocket.

“Aaaaahhhhh!!” A piercing scream cut through the alley. The familiar voice made Li Huowang’s heart lurch. “Shit! That’s Yang Na!”

He spun and sprinted toward the sound, his mind racing through the head count from earlier. Four people! We chased two! Zhao Lei went after one, and there was still one more hiding in the shadows!

His mind was bracing for a worst-case scenario. But when he reached Yang Na, he froze.

She was screaming, alright.

But she was screaming while simultaneously jamming a stun gun into an old man’s chest and holding the trigger down with all her might.

The man was already convulsing and foaming at the mouth, but Yang Na showed no sign of letting go.

“Nana! That’s enough! Let go of the trigger! You’ll electrocute him to death!”

Li Huowang had to call her name several times before she finally released the button. She threw the stun gun to the ground in a panic, burst into tears, and threw herself into Huowang’s arms. “Wuwuwu… Li Huowang… I was so scared.”

He held her close and comforted her gently, but his eyes were fixed on the stun gun on the ground. “Nana… where did you get that?”

He was both surprised and confused by what she had done.

Yang Na answered between sobs. “I… I bought it online with my best friend. I thought it was dangerous to meet a stranger late at night, so… I brought it for self-defense. I brought other stuff too.”

Li Huowang reached his arms around her and opened her bag. Besides the stun gun, there was pepper spray, a voice recorder, and a senior’s cell phone with a big red button on the back.

When she saw him pull out the senior phone, Yang Na choked out an explanation. “My grandma has one of those. If you press the red button, it calls the police automatically. You can even press it through the bag.”

“Did you keep all this stuff on you ever since we made contact with Qing Wanglai?” Li Huowang felt a pang of emotion. He knew she might not trust him, but she had still come along for his safety.

Just then, the others caught up. Before anyone could exchange more than a few words, they noticed people in the distance being drawn over by Yang Na’s screams.

“Let’s move! If someone films this in the middle of the night and posts it online, we’ll never be able to explain ourselves!” Zhao Lei grabbed the limp old man off the ground and threw him onto the back of his motorcycle.

Li Huowang glanced at the growing number of eyes on them, nodded, and pulled the still-shaken Yang Na toward Wu Qi’s RV.

The RV wound its way through backstreets. It wasn’t until they were back on a main road that anyone dared to breathe easy.

Qing Wanglai was driving. Wu Qi was checking on the old man to make sure Yang Na hadn’t fried him for good.

“It’s okay. The old guy’s tough. No permanent damage from the shock,” Wu Qi said as he kept an eye on Wang Gang, who was lying on the bed.

Now that things had calmed down, Li Huowang finally got a good look at his three captives. Yuan Heping with the slicked-back hair and glasses was one. The old man Yang Na had zapped was another—Li Huowang recognized him from Kangning too. He was the one who always hung around with Yuan Heping. His name was Wang Gang.

In hindsight, it was obvious now. Those needles in the hospital food—it had to be them.

“Who wants to talk first?” Li Huowang asked, gripping his kitchen knife.

“Are we doing this here? Why don’t we find someplace bigger? This RV is third-hand, you know. Don’t want you guys to collapse it.”

The RV wasn’t big to begin with. With this many people crammed in, it was way too tight. Qian Fu was stuck sitting on the induction cooktop, and Chen Hongyu was squeezed into the bathroom.

“Let’s go to my place. No one’s there,” Zhao Lei’s voice came from outside the window.

“Is it remote? Is the area safe?” Li Huowang asked.

No matter who these three were, they were the ones doing the kidnapping now. If anyone saw them, there’d be no explaining it away.

“Don’t worry, this kid’s place is about as remote as it gets,” Chen Hongyu answered, half his body poking out of the bathroom as he reached for the fridge.

The RV rattled and bumped until it finally stopped in the suburbs. The sky was just beginning to lighten. When Li Huowang entered the old building, he finally understood what they meant by “remote.” Zhao Lei lived in a basement apartment in the suburbs.

The moment Li Huowang shoved Yuan Heping inside, a wave of musty air hit his nose. The basement was huge, but it was crammed full of all kinds of junk. There were model kits, bottles and jars, and even some organs floating in formaldehyde—kneecaps, a single eyeball. He couldn’t tell if they were real.

The weird smell was coming from the takeout containers and trash bags piled around his feet.

Along one wall was a shelf full of figurines, some still unfinished, just heads waiting to be painted.

This guy didn’t just dress weird. The place he lived was just as strange.

“Is it soundproof?” Li Huowang walked to the table and tapped on a bottle the size of a watermelon. Inside was a model ship. Zhao Lei must make these for a living. The boat was incredibly detailed, down to the tiny, lifelike crewmen.

“Yeah. It’s soundproof.”

“Good.” Without another word, Li Huowang charged at Yuan Heping, kicked him into the wall, raised his kitchen knife, and swung it down toward his right hand.

“Aaaahhh… mmmph!!” Yuan Heping’s scream was cut off by Li Huowang’s hand clamping over his mouth.

“Don’t yell yet. Your hand’s still attached. There’ll be plenty of time for that later!”

Almost fainting from sheer terror, Yuan Heping looked down and saw that Li Huowang had only slammed the knife into the floor, right next to his palm.

But before he could even catch his breath, he saw the blade lift one corner, then press down toward his four fingers like a guillotine.

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Reading Guide Decoding

Horror, Humor, and a Very Prepared Girlfriend

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

This chapter is a fantastic example of the novel’s signature genre-juggling. The tension of a knife-and-gun standoff is immediately shattered by the “gun” being a gag lighter. This isn’t just a joke; it’s a narrative mechanism that perfectly embodies the novel’s zuowandao (坐忘道) logic—keeping the reader (and the protagonist) constantly off-balance between the horrific and the absurd. The contrast between the visceral threat of Li Huowang’s kitchen knife and the absurdity of Qing Wanglai’s “reality-check” gag reinforces the core theme: that the world’s rules are not to be trusted.

Yang Na’s gear is a modern-world foil to Li Huowang’s Dao-Twisted brutality. Her stun gun, pepper spray, and pre-programmed emergency phone are the tools of a rational person preparing for a rational danger (a mugging, a stalker). It’s a brilliant commentary on how a “normal” person, even one dragged into the supernatural, processes the threat through the lens of their own mundane reality. The image of her screaming in terror while methodically incapacitating an old man is a perfect, unforgettable picture of this cognitive dissonance.

Chapter Overview

Alright, buckle up, folks. This chapter is a masterclass in anti-climax wrapped in pure tension. Our boy Li Huowang is on a high, having just captured the traitors from Kangning Hospital, but the chapter knows exactly how to yank the rug out from under him. It starts with a fridged confrontation, throws in a fake-out with a gun that turns out to be a lighter, and then delivers the real horror: Yang Na, screaming like a banshee while calmly electrocuting a wizened old man. It’s a brilliant, gut-punching reminder that in Dao Gui Yi Xian, reality is always a little bit off. The chapter ends with a classic, bloody interrogation setup in a creepy basement, and you just know something is about to go sideways.

Key Plot Points

The group successfully corners the two traitors from the hospital, Yuan Heping and Wang Gang, in an alley.
Li Huowang, spoiling for blood, gets his knife. A tense standoff is broken by Qing Wanglai pulling out what looks like a gun.
In a moment of pitch-black comedy, Qing Wanglai “fires” the gun—it’s a cigarette lighter. He and Wu Qi share a casual light, defusing the situation with a surreal normalcy.
A scream from outside sends Li Huowang into a panic, thinking Yang Na is under attack.
The big “threat” turns out to be Yang Na, who has pinned down the old man Wang Gang and is literally electrocuting him into submission while screaming her head off. She is, it turns out, ludicrously overprepared for a late-night meeting, carrying a stun gun, pepper spray, a recorder, and a senior’s panic-button phone.
The group flees the scene to avoid being filmed by curious onlookers.
They retreat to Zhao Lei’s bizarre, cluttered basement apartment, filled with model ships and jars of questionable organs.
Sizing up his captives, Li Huowang drops the pretense and instantly lunges at Yuan Heping, slamming his knife into the floor beside the man’s hand, threatening a digit-by-digit interrogation.

Reading Guide

This chapter is pure setup, but the setup is wonderful. Pay close attention to Li Huowang’s reaction to Yang Na’s preparedness. He’s touched, but also clearly disturbed by the efficiency with which she handled the threat. It’s a rare moment of vulnerability and respect for her that cuts through his usual paranoid intensity. Also, did anyone else feel a tiny shiver of dread for Zhao Lei, the model painter? His basement apartment is a creep-fest. The one thing we know about people in these novels is that their living spaces are always a foreshadowing of their true nature or fate. And a room full of half-finished model heads? That’s a bad omen.

The final scene is a classic tension builder. Li Huowang goes straight for the psychological terror, slamming his knife into the floor rather than the hand. He’s sending a message, but the real edge is that we, the reader, know he’s capable of worse. The chapter ends on a perfect, brutal cliffhanger, leaving us wondering just how far Li Huowang is willing to go to break his captive and if the captive even knows what Li Huowang really wants.