Skull

Story context

This chapter delivers a devastating gut punch disguised as a quiet, domestic interlude. We open with Li Huowang in the modern world, exchanging tender—almost painfully normal—words with his mother, Sun Xiaoqin. But nothing here is simple. His refusal to eat isn’t stubbornness; it’s a survival protocol for someone whose body is being used in two realities at once. Dr. Yi Donglai, the stubborn new psychiatrist, drops a bombshell: he’s found “patterns” in Li Huowang’s condition and has a new treatment plan. But before we can process that, the world flips. Li Huowang wakes in the saddle, under a violent storm, racing toward the capital. And what he finds there is a scene of irreversible political horror: Princess Anping is dead, her head added to a grisly pyramid by a patched-robed Daoist. The last obstacle to Ji Lin’s coronation is gone. The Dice has won. And Li Huowang, for once, arrives too late.

Why it matters

Well, folks, the Dice has played his final hand, and it’s a royal flush on a bed of skulls. This chapter is the payoff of a political plot that’s been simmering for hundreds of chapters—and it hits like a freight train. Li Huowang’s desperate logic at the end is both brilliant and tragic: he can’t undo the murder, but he *can* kill the messenger. If no one knows Anping is dead, she’s effectively still alive. It’s a Zuowandao-level move from a man who’s learned from the worst teachers.

Quick facts

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Source novel

Dao Gui Yi Xian