The author Ernest Hemingway, suffering from severe paranoia, was institutionalized and treated with electroshock therapy before his suicide. Fifty years after his death, declassified files confirmed he had indeed been under FBI surveillance.
Definition
The author Ernest Hemingway, suffering from severe paranoia, was institutionalized and treated with electroshock therapy before his suicide. Fifty years after his death, declassified files confirmed he had indeed been under FBI surveillance.
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.
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.
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