Peng Longteng

A hallucination of a female soldier, clad in armor, who shows silent contempt for Li Huowang’s weakness; she embodies martial disdain and unreachable strength.

Definition

A hallucination of a female soldier, clad in armor, who shows silent contempt for Li Huowang’s weakness; she embodies martial disdain and unreachable strength.

Story context

Li Huowang is healing. His skin has grown back, *The Thousand Greats Record* is safely buried under his flesh, and the endless grasslands of Qingqiu feel almost... peaceful. But the quiet gives him room to think—and what he thinks about is the two headless corpses that follow him everywhere he goes. Peng Longteng and Jin Shan Zhang stand as silent witnesses to his past violence, while Li Huowang pokes at his own dead skin, feeds it to his dog, and speculates on whether his hallucinations are a Heart-Element ability or proof that he really is just losing his mind. As the group rests before the final leg to Nüren Mountain, he interrogates the quietest member of the party, Sun Baolu, about whether this land has any masters who might help him before his head fills up with ghosts.

Why it matters

This is a quiet chapter, a breather between horrors, but don't be fooled into thinking nothing happens. This is Li Huowang doing what he does best in the lulls: *obsessively cataloging his own internal pathology*. The skin-peeling scene with Mantou is a masterclass in the novel's signature tone—casual, almost domestic body horror that normalizes the grotesque. He feeds his dead skin to his dog. The dog is happy. The reader is deeply unsettled.