Red

Story context

This is the chapter where the last of Li Huowang’s hope is surgically removed, and the wound is left open to the rain. After the massacre at Niuxin Village—where he killed Bai Lingmiao’s entire clan—our walking catastrophe of a protagonist finally stops running. He trudges through mud, endures living rainwater on fresh scar tissue like a walking acupuncture session from hell, and holes up in a temple whose optimistic couplet about fate is already half-eaten by moss. The chapter then folds inward: Li Huowang has a four-on-one intervention with his hallucinations (Red Zhong, the Monk, Peng Longteng, and Jin Shan Zhao), nearly suicides with the Purple-Tasseled Sword, and then slides into a sensory-switch where his “real world” body is now a homeless man eating out of trash cans. By the end, a kid throws a rock at him, calls him a madman, and Li Huowang laughs—loudly, freely, and absolutely broken. This is the sound of a man accepting the label the world gave him, because fighting it hurt too much.

Why it matters

Get ready to feel *uncomfortable*, fellow Daoists, because this chapter doesn’t give you a cool power-up or a dramatic vow of vengeance. It gives you a man eating cold barbecue out of a trash can. Li Huowang is past bargaining, past rage, and sliding straight into the “depression” phase of grief, with the volume turned up to eleven and the dignity turned down to zero. If you’ve been reading for the catharsis of him fighting back—this is the chapter where he first stops fighting entirely and just… lets the rain hit him.

Quick facts

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Source novel

Dao Gui Yi Xian