Awakening

1,273 words

Chapter 768: Awakening

“You two are siblings? He’s a Ba, and you’re a Ba too?”

Li Huowang decided to stop following their lead. He was going to figure out who these two were on his own terms. If there was nothing important, he would leave.

Listening to their pointless chatter was a waste of time.

Seeing Li Huowang change the subject, the other party didn’t take offense. “That’s right. I’m Ba Nanxu, he’s Ba Shengqing. We’re twins.”

“Twins? I never would have guessed. He’s so big, and you’re so thin.”

“That’s because we were conjoined twins. He absorbed all the nutrients, so of course I ended up skinny.”

Seeing Li Huowang’s shocked expression, Ba Nanxu pointed at the thorn tattoo on her face.

“We used to be connected. We only separated later. These are really just to cover the scars.”

Li Huowang immediately thought of the identical scar on Ba Shengqing. He really hadn’t expected that their facial tattoos came from something like this.

“The separation surgery must have been very dangerous?”

“No surgery. We didn’t have the means. Our parents died young. We used scissors to cut an opening ourselves, then we just tore ourselves apart.”

Hearing this, Li Huowang’s shocked expression slowly faded. “I don’t believe you. If you really did that, the pain alone would have killed you both. A wound that big, without going to a hospital, you would have bled to death.”

“Haha, that’s true too.” Ba Nanxu put the cigarette back in her mouth and took a deep drag.

There was something strange about this woman’s speech. She always seemed to drift, to lack a focal point.

Li Huowang glanced around the unique tattoo parlor one last time, then stood up to take his leave, walking towards the exit.

“Ji Zai, you’ve been robbed.”

A deeply familiar gaze made Li Huowang whip his head around, staring at Ba Nanxu in shock. “What did you just say?! Who the hell are you?!”

“Huh?” Ba Nanxu turned around in confusion.

“What did you just call me? Say it again!” Li Huowang rushed back and grabbed her arm tightly.

“Just now? I didn’t say anything just now. If you’re trying to hit on me, that’s a really weird technique.”

“Ji Zai!! Why did you just call me Ji Zai? What do you know? Why do you and Qian Fu both call me Ji Zai?!”

Why does everyone know me as Ji Zai? Why do they all know that false name Zhuge Yuan gave me? Could it be...

The bits of information he’d received over the past few days started to reassemble in his mind, beyond his control.

Li Huowang tried to shake off the terrifying thought that was taking root, but it only spread faster, and Zhao Lei’s words to him came flooding back unbidden.

“Answer me! Why did you call me Ji Zai?!”

“Let go.” A cold voice came from behind Li Huowang. Ba Shengqing, at some unknown point, was standing there holding his tattoo gun.

Li Huowang slowly released Ba Nanxu and stared very seriously at Ba Shengqing. Suddenly, another question burned in his mind.

“You were conjoined twins. Why are your surnames Ba? On what basis are you Ba?”

“Because our old man’s surname was Ba, so our surname is Ba. Is there a problem?” Ba Nanxu crossed her arms, looking at Li Huowang with suspicion.

“No!” Li Huowang looked at their many tattoos, at their split tongues, their tongue rings, lip rings, and nose rings, at the various patterns drawn on the skin of the people around them. His eyes grew brighter and brighter.

“Pain! Pain!! I understand, I understand!! You… you are…”

The words were on the tip of his tongue, but Li Huowang couldn’t get them out. The feeling of being unable to speak was driving him mad.

Li Huowang suddenly pulled out his military knife and slammed it deep into the palm of his own hand.

The sharp, full-body pain instantly cleared his mind. He pointed a trembling finger at the two people in front of him and shouted excitedly: “I understand! You are Bashe!! You are Bashe’s projections! It’s all fake!”

As the words left his mouth, Li Huowang felt a crushing pressure in his chest instantly vanish.

It wasn’t just Bashe. Li Huowang immediately thought of Chen Hongyu, the one who’d told him to buy snacks earlier. That guy was a Siming too. He was the Siming of Abbess Jingxin.

Maybe everyone else was a Siming. He just wasn’t familiar enough with them to recognize them.

But other Siming he might not know. Bashe, however, Li Huowang knew all too well.

From the moment he met them today, he’d felt something was off.

Seeing Li Huowang’s bizarre behavior, the Ba siblings furrowed their brows and took a few steps back. The customer in the booth was terrified by Li Huowang’s bloody hand and ran out, bare-chested and clutching his clothes.

“So you two are one person! No, you two are one Siming! I know you! I know you too well! No wonder it felt so familiar! Bashe! I recognize you!”

“Why do you call me Ji Zai? Why? Who is Ji Zai?” Li Huowang’s mind raced.

Clearly, this name was more than just a false name. It represented something much more.

“You are projections of a Siming, so am I…” Li Huowang looked down at his own body. “Am I a Siming? Am I a projection too?”

“Impossible! When did I become a Siming? When? What kind of Siming am I?”

As Li Huowang’s memories surfaced, things he had deliberately avoided began to present themselves in his mind.

“Was I cultivated into existence through my own practice of the True? I’m a Siming? So that means this world is all fake? This is all… a projection?”

A chilling, bone-deep fear seized Li Huowang’s heart. He forgot all about the Bashe before him and rushed straight out of the tattoo parlor, back onto the sun-drenched pedestrian street.

Yang Na ran up to him, her voice frantic. “Huowang? What’s wrong? What happened?”

Li Huowang had no attention to spare for Yang Na’s questions. His expression was panicked, his breathing rapid, as he stared wildly around him.

Suddenly, he dropped to his knees and put his hands on the stone slabs, feeling their smooth, hard surface. He even pressed his face against them, rubbing it back and forth.

“It’s so real. How could it be fake? How could it be a projection?”

His pupils trembling, Li Huowang stood up abruptly and ran towards a nearby pillar.

He saw a poster stuck to it. He ripped off a large piece and held it close to his eyes, his trembling fingers tearing it into strips one by one.

He felt the sensation and heard the sound of paper tearing. He watched the poster split apart, clear and slow, right in front of him.

The contradiction within him made his expression twist with agony. “Could it be… that I’m just overthinking? Could it be that this is real?”

He suddenly crouched down, picked up the torn strips of paper from the ground, and shoved them into his mouth, chewing them loudly. He tasted the flavor, felt his saliva thoroughly soak the poster material.

Suddenly, Li Huowang felt the weight of stares. He looked up sharply to see a small crowd around him, pointing and whispering.

“What are they? Are they projections? Other Siming? Projections of other enemies? What are they surrounding me for?”

His expression gradually twisting into a snarl, Li Huowang reached both hands behind his back and gripped the hilts of his two military knives.

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Reading Guide Decoding

The Projection Thesis — Li Huowang Unravels Reality

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

Bashe (巴虺) isn’t a made-up name for this novel. In Chinese mythology, the Bashe (also called Bā shé) is an enormous snake from antiquity said to swallow elephants and take three years to digest them, leaving its bones behind as a legendary material. The character 虺 itself refers to a venomous snake or a serpent-like creature. The novel reclaims this ancient monster as a Siming—a high-dimensional god of Pain. The connection between “pain” and “Bashe” is a classic Dao Gui Yi Xian twist: taking an existing mythic beast and radicalizing it into a cosmic entity that feeds on suffering. Knowing that 巴虺 was originally a giant snake that could swallow elephants whole adds a nice layer of dread to the twins’ paired existence.

Conjoined twins and folk horror: The Ba siblings’ story about separating themselves with scissors is not just a gruesome detail—it taps into the folk-horror trope of self-mutilation as empowerment. In the Dao-Twisted World, pain is a currency and a language. The fact that they describe it so casually (“We just tore ourselves apart”) mirrors the novel’s core tenet: true strength is measured by how much suffering you can survive, not how much power you can accumulate. It also directly feeds Li Huowang’s final deduction—only a projection of Bashe would tell a story like that.

Chapter Overview

Welcome to the chapter where Li Huowang’s reality engine finally throws a rod. After the strange tattoo parlor detour, our favorite basket-case arrives at a deduction so terrifying it makes his previous “am I in a fake world?” episodes look like warm-up acts. He meets the twins Ba Nanxu and Ba Shengqing, gets called “Ji Zai” again, and proceeds to speedrun the five stages of grief in about two minutes of street-side paper-eating. If you’ve been waiting for the moment the novel’s ontological horror reaches critical mass—this is it. Buckle up, fellow Daoists. The ride is about to get very bumpy.

Key Plot Points

Li Huowang tries to interrogate the Ba siblings on his own terms but gets sidetracked by their story of being conjoined twins who separated themselves with scissors. He immediately calls bullshit on the medical feasibility of this, but Ba Nanxu just laughs it off.
As he’s about to leave, Ba Nanxu (seemingly without speaking) calls him “Ji Zai,” triggering a full-blown cognitive collapse. Li Huowang realizes this is the second time someone has used this specific false name, linking Qian Fu and the Bashe projection.
Putting all the pieces together (Zhao Lei’s warnings, the strange familiarity of the Ba siblings, the recurring name), Li Huowang stabs his own hand to force clarity and deduces: the Ba siblings are projections of Bashe, the Siming of Pain.
This leads to a terrifying cascade: if they’re projections, is everyone else also a Siming projection? Is he a projection? A Siming? When did he become one?
Overwhelmed, he flees to the street and begins frantically testing reality: touching the ground, rubbing his face on stone, tearing up a poster, and finally eating the paper strips to confirm physicality.
The chapter ends on a cliffhanger of paranoia: the ordinary pedestrians watching him become potential threats in his eyes. His hands go for his knives.

Reading Guide

This is one of those chapters you’ll want to reread immediately after finishing the book. The big reveal here isn’t a plot twist—it’s an epistemological twist. Li Huowang’s breakdown on the street is the emotional core: he physically cannot accept that reality might be a projection, so he tests it with his body (stabbing, rubbing, chewing). The horror is not in the idea itself, but in the impossibility of disproving it. Notice how the chapter ends not with a resolution, but with Li Huowang’s hands going for his weapons. The question isn’t “is this real?” anymore—it’s “who are the enemies?” Keep close tabs on who calls him “Ji Zai” from now on. That name is a key. And if you’re feeling brave, ask yourself: if everyone around you could be a Siming’s projection, how would you know?

Deep Dive: The Bashe Twins and the Symmetry of Pain

Let’s talk about the Ba siblings as a pair. They are conjoined twins who separated violently, and now they run a tattoo parlor where pain is the medium of their art. This is not a coincidence—this is thematic symmetry. Bashe, as the Siming of Pain, would naturally manifest as a duality: two beings who share a history of shared suffering and a profession that inflicts it. The fact that Li Huowang recognizes Bashe before he recognizes the name “Ji Zai” is the giveaway. He felt the “familiarity” first, the cold dread of a Siming he’s dealt with before. The twins are not just a disguise; they are Bashe’s direct projection, a form that embodies the very concept of pain as a shared, inherited, unescapable bond. The moment Li Huowang understands that, the entire street becomes a potential projection field, and his paranoia is no longer a symptom—it’s the correct survival instinct.