Void

1,212 words

Four Qi, Xuantai Mountain, Yangming Temple, the Grand Hall.

The sound of a blade cutting into flesh rang out as Li Huowang watched the black-furred monk before him split in two. The black fluid spilling from the severed body surged toward his face.

Sensing that something was wrong with that black water, the four tentacles propping Li Huowang up from behind yanked him backward. The fluid brushed past him by the narrowest margin.

"Hah." The hall was filled with his murderous aura. Li Huowang parted his lips slightly and, from deep in his throat, exhaled a cloud of blood-tinged breath.

He had lost one hand, but he now gripped three swords at once. Behind him lay a dense field of dead monks.

With a savage expression, Li Huowang fixed his bloodshot eyes on the gilded Buddha statue far ahead.

The statue of the gilded Buddha sat cross-legged on the offering table, a strip of black cloth draped over its shoulder. Its expression was beyond sorrow, beyond joy. But the offerings of flesh and blood laid before it were enough to make anyone's skin crawl.

This temple had not only entirely defected to the Fa Sect—they had gone so far as to erect a Buddha-body for the Child-God Yu'er Shen! And even more unnerving was that their monk-soldiers could use military-path techniques. This place was a nest of trouble. It had to be wiped out as fast as possible.

Li Huowang took a deep breath, raised his sword, and charged toward the great Buddha. Just as he was about to reach the offering table, he stamped his right foot in midair, launching his body upward.

He followed with another kick from his left foot, pushing himself even higher.

Alternating his left and right feet, he propelled himself up to the face of the Buddha. Gritting his teeth, he raised his Purple-Tasseled Sword and swung it toward the Buddha's head.

But just then, the statue's gilded body suddenly split open. Black cracks spread across its surface, and from those fissures it was clear—the great golden Buddha was a living thing!

The enormous Buddha head's eyes bulged with fury. Its hands shot forward and seized Li Huowang. Its gaping black maw lunged down to bite him.

A wet, tearing sound. The Buddha's black fangs pierced Li Huowang's body, but they could not break his bones.

Bracing his feet against the lower jaw and his back against the upper, Li Huowang forced the thing to be unable to swallow him.

"You want to eat? Then eat your fill!!" Tilting his head, Li Huowang opened his own mouth wide toward the Buddha. "UUUUURP—!!"

The tentacles on his body retracted rapidly. Li Huowang regurgitated Li Sui—head and torso together—straight into the Buddha's gullet. "Li Sui! Eat him!"

After sending Li Sui inside, Li Huowang wedged his Purple-Tasseled Sword between the black fangs, pulled his spine-sword from his back, and leaped out the side. What awaited him were the Buddha's massive hands, slamming shut with a tremor.

But just then, a spinning halberd flew in from the side, hacking the Buddha's fingers clean in two.

"Destroying a Buddha? Good! Damn good! I've hated these bald donkeys for a long time!" Peng Longteng, riding her massive warhorse, caught the returning halberd and yanked the reins, charging straight at the now-animated Buddha.

Caught in the pincer between Li Huowang and Peng Longteng, even the towering Buddha was forced back step by step.

The situation was in his favor, and he felt Li Sui could handle it. But with not a single reaction from inside the Buddha's belly, Li Huowang still grew worried about Suisui trapped in the Buddha's stomach.

He should have crawled in with her. He had to end this fast.

Just as this thought crossed his mind, he saw the Buddha's belly bulge outward, forming half a dog's face.

Then a faint voice reached him from the navel. "Dad! Help! He... he ate my head."

Hearing that, Li Huowang's hair stood on end. He charged forward recklessly, ignoring the harm he took, and dug his Purple-Tasseled Sword into the Buddha's navel, slicing it open.

As Li Huowang stared at the severed tentacle fragments spilling out with the blood, a chill running through his body, a peeled-off dog head, dragging a length of intestine, poked out from the side. "Dad? Whose hands are these?"

It was Li Sui. She was perfectly fine. The voice just now had not come from her.

No sooner had Li Sui spoken than the severed tentacles rapidly became ethereal and disappeared completely. He had unintentionally Cultivated the True into being—both the tentacles and the cry for help.

"What—?" Before Li Huowang's shock could settle, the Buddha's hand slammed down. With a crack of breaking bones, he was crushed to the ground. Blood seeped slowly from between the giant palm's fingers.

Half an incense stick later, Li Huowang, drenched in blood, bent over with immense effort. He dragged the massive Buddha head, impossibly heavy, out of the hall.

Once he was out, looking down at the monk-soldiers still putting up a desperate fight below, Li Huowang braced himself. With a push from his right hand and a kick from his right foot, the enormous Buddha head tumbled down the blue-brick steps with a thunderous rumble.

When the monk-soldiers saw the Buddha's severed head rolling past them, their will to fight collapsed. The brutal, bloody battle had finally come to an end.

Once his breath was steady, Li Huowang sat sideways on a meditation cushion, occasionally gesturing inside the Xuanpin-given Spinning Light Mirror, watching the other battlefields.

To the military-path soldiers sweeping the area for survivors, this behavior looked utterly bizarre. But Li Huowang no longer cared to explain to anyone whether he was crazy or not. He knew he wasn't crazy. That was enough.

Li Sui, filthy and exhausted, slumped against Li Huowang's back. She nudged her head into him. "Dad, we're so strong. We killed so many bad guys."

Li Huowang let out a quiet sigh and withdrew his finger from the mirror. Of course he knew he was strong. His current power probably surpassed even Danyangzi when he had become a half-immortal.

But that kind of strength came with a price. A severe one.

The more powerful his Cultivate the True technique became, the more it would silently alter the world around him based on his thoughts. Not just the things he thought about seriously. Even a fleeting, half-formed notion could be turned from falsehood into reality by his power.

He recalled Li Sui's cry for help. The false corpse of Li Sui that he had unconsciously Cultivated into existence—he had only had the barest hint of a suspicion, and the world had produced the corresponding reality.

This was very bad. It had even started affecting his combat performance. If the enemy today hadn't been so weak, he and Li Sui might have been finished.

When nothing false before his eyes was any longer false, the real would cease to exist as well.

This wasn't the first time. Counting the time he had accidentally Cultivated Bai Lingmiao, it was already the fourth.

At this point, it was less a fight against the Fa Sect, and more a fight against himself.

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Reading Guide Decoding

The Real Enemy Might Be Your Own Brain

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

This chapter leans hard into the novel's distinctive take on Cultivate the True (修真), twisting it from a path of enlightenment into a curse of accidental creation. In traditional xianxia, 修真 (cultivating truth/authenticity) is the pinnacle of a Daoist practitioner's goal—shedding illusion to reach a state of pure, undeniable reality. But in Dao Gui Yi Xian, that very "truth" is weaponized. Li Huowang's power drags the contents of his subconscious into the physical world, making uncertainty a lethal vulnerability. Also of note is the corrupted Buddhist temple, which mirrors real-world anxieties about the syncretic mixing of folk faiths. The "living Buddha" is a horrid fusion of state-approved Buddhism with the Fa Sect's grotesque worship of the Child-God, a being drawn from the ancient Classic of Mountains and Seas—a textbook example of how the novel takes a cultural root and forces it to bloom into a rotten, bloody flower. The battle imagery—bone blades, spine swords, self-cannibalization, and flesh offerings—is a direct feast of the novel's signature Dung-Beetle Ascension aesthetic: power demanded, taken, and paid for with the material of one's own body.

Buddhist monk-soldiers (僧兵)

Historically, martial monks trained in combat. In this novel, they are corrupted followers of the Fa Sect who also use military-path cultivation techniques.

Chapter Overview

Alright, buckle up, fellow Daoists, because this chapter delivers a brutal slice of what Dao Gui Yi Xian does best—visceral combat, creeping ontological horror, and a protagonist who is less a hero and more a walking, bleeding paradox. Li Huowang storms a corrupted temple, hacks through a legion of monk-soldiers, and faces a living gilded Buddha possessed by the Child-God, Yu'er Shen. But the real enemy isn't the flesh-eating statue; it's the weapon inside his own head. His Cultivate the True ability, once a source of power, has become a passive, reality-poisoning curse. A stray worry about his daughter, Li Sui, becomes real as a mutilated corpse. The chapter is called "Void"—and it's a masterclass in that concept, not as emptiness, but as the terrifying space where anything you might imagine, especially your worst fears, can physically manifest and try to kill you.

Key Plot Points

The chapter opens with Li Huowang in the thick of combat at a temple that has fully defected to the Fa Sect, with a gilded Buddha reshaped to venerate the Child-God Yu'er Shen. After a bloody slaughter, he confronts the living Buddha-statue, a monstrous entity that cages Li Sui in its stomach. Peng Longteng, the savage commander, provides brutal backup, hacking the Buddha's fingers clean off. But the tide turns when Li Huowang hears a desperate cry for help from Li Sui inside the Buddha's belly, followed by the sight of severed tentacles spilling from the wound he cuts. He rushes in, only to discover the mutilated body was fake—an accidental Cultivation of the True brought to life by a moment of worry. The real Li Sui emerges unharmed, and the false flesh vanishes. The battle ends with Li Huowang crushing the army's morale by rolling the severed Buddha head down the temple steps. The chapter's real climax, however, is the bleak internal realization that follows: his power is no longer under his "control." Every stray thought, every flash of fear, risks rewriting reality into a more terrible shape. He is fighting a war on two fronts, and the most dangerous foe is his own mind.

Reading Guide

If you're reading this and thinking, "Wait, so his OP power is now a drawback?"—yes, exactly. That's the golden trap this novel sets, and it's what makes Li Huowang such a compelling disaster. He is not a cultivator accumulating power; he is a man trying to hold the shape of his own sanity against a universe that actively complies with his worst impulses. Pay close attention to the way his internal monologue shifts: from animal aggression during the fight, to cold tactical analysis, to a panicked, paternal desperation when he thinks Li Sui is hurt, and finally to exhaustion laced with nihilistic clarity. That last line—"it's less a fight against the Fa Sect, and more a fight against himself"—is the central thesis of this whole arc. Also, a fun detail: the way Li Huowang rejects the need to explain his "craziness" to the military-path soldiers. He's no longer performing sanity for others. He knows. That's a quiet, powerful character moment. Enjoy the bloodsport, but don't miss the existential dread hiding in the shadows of the gilded Buddha.