Chapter Summaries

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming and Fu Shu spot the Old Night Watchman among the powerful beings gathered outside the Nine-Story Spirit Shrine. Fu Shu warns that the Night Watchman is exceptionally dangerous; Gao Ming considers whether he might become an “unspeakable” if events turn desperate.
• The shrine’s arrival sparks fighting among the town’s ghost gods. Lord Tang has monopolized the funeral money, provoking the remaining taboo gods. His guests—mostly people he has exploited for protection payments—are stricken with illness, while those still carrying birthday gifts receive some protection.
• At the fourth watch, the Old Night Watchman intervenes and separates the factions. He condemns the shrine as a fraud and refuses Lord Tang’s offer to cooperate, recognizing Tang’s self-serving nature.
• The Butcher, already hostile toward the Night Watchman, accuses him of stealing his knife and threatens violence. The voices within the Butcher argue with each other.
• Paper People enter the shrine through its western door. Most burn to ash, but a few emerge transformed: their taboo-god brands vanish, their paper bodies grow human skin, and they continue upward beyond their former masters’ control.
• Convinced the shrine is dangerous, the Night Watchman calls for its destruction. Lord Tang publicly agrees but uses the moment to claim the northern entrance, accuse potential opponents of being accomplices, and pull guests toward it with black threads.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains alert to the Night Watchman’s unusual power and considers him a possible asset in a worst-case scenario.
• Fu Shu cautions Gao Ming against trusting anyone whose power he cannot control, emphasizing that survival depends on relying on oneself.
• The Old Night Watchman acts as a forceful mediator but is chiefly focused on the shrine. His refusal to join Lord Tang shows his distrust of Tang’s motives.
• Lord Tang reveals the depth of his exploitation of Dreamfold Town: he keeps indebted townspeople alive only to continue profiting from them. He presents himself as cooperative while maneuvering to control the shrine’s northern route.
• The Butcher grows more volatile, confronting the Night Watchman and threatening to kill anyone who blocks his escape.
• The taboo gods lose some of their Paper People when the shrine transforms them, demonstrating that the shrine can overturn supernatural authority.

Significant themes

• Greed and exploitation: Lord Tang’s wealth and power depend on keeping townspeople desperate and dependent.
• False appearances and self-interest: Tang speaks of protecting the town, but his actions serve his own ambitions.
• Uncertain power and trust: Gao Ming and Fu Shu weigh alliances against the danger of relying on forces they cannot control.
• Transformation and escape: The shrine’s ability to free some Paper People from their masters suggests both liberation and a perilous, unknown cost.
• A town on the brink: The factions’ competing motives turn the shrine into a flashpoint for conflict rather than a shared problem to solve.

Plot points and events

• As the night grows colder, townspeople flee into Spirit Vision. The Old Night Watchman tries to find someone—possibly Gao Ming—before entering through the building’s south door.
• The town’s “useful gods” and other entities enter Spirit Vision through different doors. Soon, the Water Dragon King arrives as a gigantic, wounded black snake. It ignores the doors and climbs the building’s exterior, leaving a bloody trail that forms dragon-like patterns.
• Gao Ming and Fu Shu realize the Water Dragon King may be trying to transform into a dragon. Spirit Vision and the Water Dragon King appear to have an old, hidden connection: the snake may once have supplied the building’s sacrifices and live food through the underground river.
• Gao Ming spots two children carrying a Firestarter and trying to burn the ancestral hall. They reveal they are the boy and girl sacrifices meant for the Water Dragon King, and that Chunniang rescued them and instructed them to burn the hall.
• Gao Ming suspects Chunniang has already gone to the riverbed to find what Zhang Mingli wants. He takes the Firestarter from the children, then heads to Spirit Vision; they insist on following him.
• Inside Spirit Vision, the group finds a vast, cloister-like interior. The townspeople bow to a veiled divine statue and head upstairs. Its image projects the noble ideal of giving impoverished scholars shelter, sharply contrasting with the surrounding nightmare.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming stays cautious and focused, delaying his decision to enter Spirit Vision until the others have gone inside. He protects the children, recognizes their link to Chunniang and Zhang Mingli, and draws them along despite the danger.
• Fu Shu is anxious about the threat posed by the Water Dragon King and worries that damaging the ancestral hall will bring consequences. He dismisses the children as a burden.
• Bai Huang mocks Fu Shu, still resentful after learning that he built Dreamfold Town.
• The Old Night Watchman appears uneasy and regretful, searching for someone before entering Spirit Vision.
• The two children are frightened but determined, and fiercely protective of Chunniang’s hiding place.
• Chunniang, though absent, emerges as an ally of the children and apparently of Zhang Mingli.

Significant themes

• False sanctuary: Spirit Vision offers comfort and refuge, yet its apparent holiness may conceal a dangerous pact with the Water Dragon King.
• Sacrifice and complicity: The building’s grandeur may rest on lives and offerings, while the townspeople rush toward safety without understanding its cost.
• Appearance versus reality: The statue’s compassionate ideals and the building’s “immortal” aura contrast with the bloodshed and corruption surrounding it.
• Trust and dependence: In a town filled with threats, even the children choose to follow Gao Ming, while old grievances continue to shape relationships.

Key plot points

• Gao Ming enters the nine-story Spirit Shrine with Fu Shu and Bai Huang. Despite the bloody, curse-filled town outside, the shrine appears peaceful and welcoming, with its doors left open.
• Gao Ming suspects the shrine’s divine image resembles Zhang Mingli, though neither Fu Shu nor Bai Huang can confirm it.
• A townsman inside claims that Zhu Ren—the Butcher—and Lord Tang have gone to the second floor. Under threat, the man briefly regains clarity, then slips back into a delusional belief that being killed will help him ascend.
• Gao Ming reacts with unusual violence, kicking the townsman repeatedly. The Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God warns him that something is affecting his state of mind. Gao Ming recognizes that he has become more impulsive and less constrained.
• Moving deeper inside, Gao Ming finds townspeople, paper people, and even Yellow Weasel gathered peacefully to hear the shrine’s master. The master, whose voice resembles Zhang Mingli’s, teaches that enlightenment comes from within, not from reaching higher floors.

Character developments

• Gao Ming remains wary of the shrine’s apparent serenity, but its influence begins to affect him: he feels less restrained and more willing to act violently. He notices the change and deliberately calms himself.
• Bai Huang relaxes for the first time in a long while. With the children beside her, she appears younger and less burdened by worry.
• Fu Shu continues to puncture the shrine’s tranquil atmosphere with blunt, crude remarks, while warning Gao Ming that the place may be dangerous.
• The townsman shifts between devotional calm, brief fear and clarity, and a renewed delusion that death will help him reach the Immortal Palace.

Significant themes

• Safety versus freedom: The open doorway lets visitors compare the shrine’s calm with the horrors outside, making its refuge tempting without physically trapping anyone.
• Manipulation through belief: The townspeople’s yearning to escape danger makes them receptive to promises of immortality, even when those promises distort their judgment.
• Inner transformation and self-control: The shrine’s teaching locates enlightenment within the self, while Gao Ming’s sudden aggression shows how easily his own nature can be altered.
• Appearance versus reality: The shrine’s serene atmosphere contrasts sharply with the violence outside, leaving its true purpose uncertain.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming asks Fu Shu and Bai Huang to identify the divine image, but neither can help.
• Fu Shu and Bai Huang offer competing observations about why people might choose to stay in the shrine: Fu Shu sees its confidence, while Bai Huang notes that the danger outside makes refuge appealing.
• Gao Ming interrogates and then attacks the devout townsman, whose strange beliefs test Gao Ming’s restraint.
• The shrine’s master addresses the gathered crowd, discouraging competition to climb the floors and urging them to find the Dao within themselves.

Key plot points and events

• In Spirit Vision, the divine statue teaches that cultivation means attending to one’s ordinary habits and finding one’s true nature. Its words resonate strongly with Gao Ming, deepening his connection to the Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God.
• Fu Shu bites Gao Ming to snap him out of the statue’s influence. He warns that the statue is subtly changing Gao Ming’s attitude toward Spirit Vision and that listening to it is dangerous.
• The statue calmly advises its followers—including a paper person and the transformed white pig, Li Zhu—against sacrifices and anomalous objects. It claims they can still change course and urges them to cultivate rather than fall into the Netherworld. Some believers begin breathing exercises and appear to improve.
• Gao Ming and his companions leave for the upper floors. The statue lets them pass and invites Gao Ming to ask questions; its obscured face increasingly resembles Zhang Mingli’s.
• A townsman whom Gao Ming previously injured charges after him, demanding that Gao Ming kill him so he can become immortal. Rosy radiance has made him stronger and more durable. He attacks with a wooden knife, and Gao Ming beheads him.
• The body dissolves into mist, while a strange creature emerges from the severed head and flies toward the upper floors, laughing. Only Gao Ming’s group can see it.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming recognizes that the statue’s teachings are affecting him, but struggles to distinguish insight from manipulation. He stays wary and acts decisively when the townsman attacks.
• Fu Shu serves as Gao Ming’s blunt safeguard, interrupting the statue’s influence and urging the group to leave.
• The white pig, Li Zhu, believes he was once human and begs the statue to restore him, showing how thoroughly the town’s transformations and beliefs have overtaken its inhabitants.
• Bai Huang and the water ghost children begin showing signs of the statue’s calming influence, prompting Gao Ming to hurry them away.
• The divine statue appears compassionate and welcoming, yet its growing resemblance to Zhang Mingli and its effect on listeners leave its intentions uncertain.

Significant themes

• Reality and illusion: The statue says that “the real is not real, and the false is not false,” reflecting the dreamlike instability of Spirit Vision.
• Influence and loss of self: Calm, reasonable-sounding teachings may still weaken resistance and alter perception.
• Faith and transformation: The statue offers a path of ordinary discipline, while the townspeople’s pursuit of immortality leads to grotesque change and violence.
• Unresolved identity: Li Zhu’s lost name and the creature emerging from the townsman’s head suggest that personal identity—and even the boundary between body and self—is unstable.

Plot points and events

• After Gao Ming beheads a townsman who asked him to, the man appears to “ascend” toward the spirit shrine’s upper floors. The faithful interpret this as proof that Gao Ming helped him become an immortal and crowd around Gao Ming, eager to learn from him.
• Fu Shu suspects the scene was staged: the townsman was likely influenced by the shrine’s rosy light and smoke, which can make delusions seem real. He warns that the shrine manipulates belief and perception.
• Gao Ming, Fu Shu, Bai Huang, and the two water-ghost children climb to the second floor. The children perceive the stairs as terrifying and impassable, but Bai Huang carries them up and shields them from the invasive smoke.
• Gao Ming suspects the shrine depends on people’s belief to make its imagined goals real. Bai Huang wonders whether it might be a “Heavenly Gate” out of the nightmare; Fu Shu cautions that speculating about its purpose may give it ideas to exploit.
• The second floor resembles an eight-trigram layout and contains a huge cauldron. A young man connected to Lord Tang explains that visitors can refine objects into medicines—or refine people into “human elixirs.”
• The young man reveals that Lord Tang used his children as medicine for his own heart’s ailment and has advanced to a higher floor. The young man’s siblings now grow grotesquely within his body, though he speaks calmly of their supposed path to immortality.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains alert and questions the shrine’s apparent rules, drawing on a memory of fear becoming real to suggest that collective belief may shape the shrine.
• Fu Shu acts as a skeptical counterweight, insisting there are no real immortals and warning the others not to indulge the shrine’s illusions. He is also openly pessimistic about saving others.
• Bai Huang shows compassion and resolve by carrying the terrified children upstairs despite the danger, and rejects Fu Shu’s demeaning view of her as a ghost or animal.
• The faithful become increasingly fervent, treating Gao Ming as a spiritual authority after misreading the townsman’s apparent “ascension.”
• Lord Tang’s son appears composed and welcoming, but his horrific condition reveals the cost of the shrine’s promise of immortality and his father’s pursuit of it.

Significant themes

• Belief and reality: The shrine may turn fear, fantasy, and shared conviction into something tangible.
• False salvation: Claims of immortality disguise manipulation, suffering, and grotesque transformation.
• Compassion versus self-preservation: Bai Huang risks herself for the children, while Fu Shu argues that survival should come first.
• The corruption of desire: Innocent hopes—such as escape, healing, or immortality—can be cultivated into tools of control.

Plot and key events

• Gao Ming and Bai Huang explore the second floor of the Nine-Story Spirit Shrine. Lord Tang’s son, now deeply absorbed in Daoist belief and visibly sprouting human heads, explains that the route to the third floor can be found by refining an Enlightenment Pill in the central furnace—or by entering the furnace oneself.
• Gao Ming rejects these options and asks about other people who entered the Shrine, including the Old Night Watchman. Lord Tang’s son cannot help, but warns them away from the room containing failed pills.
• As Gao Ming and Bai Huang leave, someone screams inside the furnace while being refined. The screams eventually turn to laughter, and the furnace opens with a striking display of golden patterns and medicinal fragrance.
• The Shrine Keeper emerges, rejuvenated and marked by the furnace’s flames. He says he refined a pill from his devotion to the Dao, but a failed pill accuses him of stealing offerings from the townspeople’s Ancestor Tablets. The Shrine Keeper denies the accusation and heads toward the Alchemy Rooms rather than seeking the third floor.
• The Daoist-clad townspeople surround him. Lord Tang’s son offers to test whether the Shrine Keeper’s blood contains Tang family ancestors—but, overcome by the medicinal fragrance, bites him instead. The others join in, attacking the Shrine Keeper as if he were an ingredient.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains cautious and skeptical, refusing the furnace’s apparent routes upward. He recognizes the Shrine Keeper and questions him about the Dream Priest.
• Lord Tang’s son appears welcoming and spiritually composed, but his multiplying heads and eventual hunger expose the grotesque corruption beneath that composure. His interaction with the Shrine Keeper turns from deferential curiosity to predatory attack.
• The Shrine Keeper has gained youth and apparent power through the furnace. He presents himself as sincere and wrongly accused, but the chapter leaves his honesty uncertain: the failed pill’s charge is serious, and his response does not settle the matter. The townspeople’s greed prevents any fair examination.
• The townspeople shift abruptly from calm, devout observers to a mob eager to consume the Shrine Keeper.

Significant themes

• Devotion corrupted by greed: Religious language and serene appearances conceal selfish motives and violence.
• The cost of immortality: The furnace’s “refinement” involves agony, bodily transformation, and death for all but one of its batch.
• Faith turned into appetite: Ancestor worship becomes a source of power and a pretext for consuming the person who may have profited from it.
• Appearance versus reality: The chapter repeatedly contrasts spiritual elegance with bodily horror, and claims of purity with predatory behavior.

Key plot points and events

• The second-floor alchemists accuse the shrine keeper of stealing offerings and exploiting people’s faith. They swarm him, consume his blood and flesh as if they were pills, and leave no trace of his body.
• Lord Tang’s son, who ate the most, is overwhelmed by the pill marks inside him. He reveals that his father used him to test pills and forced him to consume the people whose remains now inhabit his body.
• The second floor’s mist transforms him: his grotesque wounds disappear, his siblings’ heads become beads embedded in his body, and he rises through the furnace’s immortal light toward the Immortal Palace. The alchemists watch with envy, while the shrine keeper’s death is quickly erased from view.
• Gao Ming concludes that fear and pain warn people of danger; without them, people may accept lives in which they have no control. He believes he can resist the shrine’s illusions because he does not want its promised happiness.
• Gao Ming and Fu Shu search the pill rooms. A divine statue offers to trade ingredients, but its growing resemblance to Zhang Mingli unsettles Gao Ming.
• They find a corrupted black pill room. A one-armed alchemist explains that the Butcher once refined filth from his body there; the furnace could not destroy it, so the room became a dumping ground for ruined pills.

Character developments

• Gao Ming grows more certain that suffering and fear can preserve awareness and resistance. He also suspects the divine statue is drawing on his memories, though he is unsure whether it is truly connected to Zhang Mingli.
• Fu Shu remains wary and frustrated, warning Gao Ming that the furnace route could cost him his life and doubting that he is immune to illusions.
• Lord Tang’s son is revealed as both a victim of his father’s experiments and a participant in the forced consumption of others. He is then remade into an apparent immortal.
• The one-armed alchemist shows kindness by warning Gao Ming away from the corrupted room.

Significant themes

• Faith twisted into exploitation: The alchemists’ reverence for pills makes them complicit in the shrine keeper’s slaughter.
• False transcendence: The son’s ascent appears holy, but it is built on torture, cannibalism, and the suffering of others.
• Fear and agency: Gao Ming sees pain and fear as signals that help people recognize danger and retain control.
• Corruption beneath serenity: The floor looks peaceful after the violence, while its hidden waste gathers in the black pill room.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming watches the alchemists consume the shrine keeper and later exchange a tense, cautionary discussion with Fu Shu about entering the furnace.
• The divine statue speaks to Gao Ming in a voice increasingly like Zhang Mingli’s, prompting suspicion and unease.
• The one-armed alchemist warns Gao Ming and explains the black room’s connection to the Butcher and the discarded ruined pills.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming watches the Alchemy Room fill with the Butcher’s black, writhing waste—an accumulation of distorted faces, limbs, and other remains that Spirit Vision cannot quickly destroy.
• The One-Armed Alchemist warns Gao Ming away, believing the substance could corrupt his “Dao heart.” Gao Ming secretly retrieves the man’s discarded “defunct pill,” which contains a damaged Black Ring and a shattered hand bone.
• Gao Ming recognizes the Alchemist as a former Tester. The Alchemist rejects that explanation, convinced that Spirit Vision is a path to immortality and that sacrificing his body and memories will perfect him.
• The Black Ring’s surviving messages reveal why the man became a Tester: Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals promised to help find his missing daughter if he reached Level Five. Fu Shu explains that the company itself abducts children for experiments, making the Alchemist’s hope tragically misplaced.
• Gao Ming concludes that Spirit Vision grows stronger when people obey its rules, so it must be opposed rather than followed. He enters the mass of waste, carrying the Butcher’s Knife, and declares he will take its trapped contents to the real Immortal Palace.
• As he cuts himself and invokes “Dream Release,” the chapter ends.

Character developments

• Gao Ming acts with growing resolve and compassion. Rather than dismissing the Alchemist as merely deluded, he recognizes him as a victim and chooses to confront Spirit Vision by embracing what it discards.
• The One-Armed Alchemist is revealed as a desperate father whose grief and hope have been exploited. He has sacrificed his arm, body, memories, and Black Ring in pursuit of a promised reunion with his daughter.
• Fu Shu remains distrustful and blunt, condemning Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals and anxiously insisting Gao Ming keep their agreement to escape together.
• Bai Huang is left responsible for keeping Fu Shu safe while Gao Ming enters the danger.

Themes

• Exploitation of hope and grief: The Alchemist’s desire to find his daughter makes him vulnerable to both the company’s promises and Spirit Vision’s false promise of transcendence.
• Resistance through noncompliance: Gao Ming believes Spirit Vision’s rules gain power through obedience; opposing them requires acting against what the system expects.
• The value of discarded things: The “waste” and failed pills contain people’s deepest emotions and memories. What others abandon may still hold meaning and power.
• Victims mistaken for lunatics: The Alchemist’s beliefs are distorted, but Gao Ming sees the suffering beneath them.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming and the Alchemist clash over whether Spirit Vision is a dream, a prison, or a route to immortality. The Alchemist sees Gao Ming as a threat to his faith; Gao Ming sees him as a fellow victim.
• Fu Shu mocks the Alchemist’s delusion but also exposes the cruel irony of trusting the company responsible for missing children.
• Fu Shu protests when Gao Ming leaves him with Bai Huang, revealing his dependence on Gao Ming even as Gao Ming proceeds alone.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming enters the Nine-Story Spirit Shrine’s black Alchemy Room and decides to use his own body as a cauldron, drawing the discarded Defunct Pills and their painful memories into his nightmare.
• He provokes the Butcher’s hidden killing intent, discovering that the Butcher had refined it out of himself in an attempt to advance. The awakened force attacks Gao Ming and helps him force open a crack in a locked chamber within his heart.
• As the Shrine tries to suppress him, Gao Ming’s body repeatedly breaks down and regenerates. The Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God holds him together while the Defunct Pills’ extreme emotions and memories spread through his flesh.
• Gao Ming and the Ghost God purify the black, rotting substance, revealing that the “waste” pills contain the experiences and emotions that made their former owners unique. Gao Ming vows not to ascend alone, but to make immortality possible for everyone whose memories he carries.
• Unable to destroy Gao Ming, the Shrine appears to initiate his ascent, sending him upward on a golden bridge. The Ghost God catches and shelters him as his consciousness is drawn away from the second floor.

Character developments

• Gao Ming embraces his role as a bearer of others’ suffering, turning discarded memories into part of himself rather than rejecting them. His vision of immortality becomes collective rather than personal.
• The Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God acts as Gao Ming’s protector and partner, using its power to keep his body intact and shield his soul during the apparent ascent.
• The Butcher’s killing intent is revealed as something the Butcher deliberately separated from himself to pursue a higher floor. Though it weakens after helping open Gao Ming’s heart chamber, its rage is drawn into Gao Ming’s body.

Significant themes

• Inner divinity: Gao Ming rejects the Shrine’s promise that the Immortal Palace lies above everyone, insisting it can exist within the heart.
• The value of pain and memory: Sorrowful experiences are not mere waste; they shape identity and can be transformed into something meaningful.
• Shared salvation versus individual advancement: Gao Ming refuses to ascend alone and accepts responsibility for the memories he carries.
• Transformation through suffering: Gao Ming’s body becomes a meeting place for human, spiritual, and divine qualities, though the process exacts a terrible physical cost.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming confronts the Butcher’s killing intent, urging it to turn its violence against “beasts wearing human skin” and corrupt ghost gods.
• He stops the Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God from intervening against the awakened intent, but relies on it to preserve his body through the ordeal.
• The Shrine attempts to crush Gao Ming with rosy light and furnace fire; when that fails, it redirects him upward, leaving his true fate uncertain.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming is driven upward through the Nine-Story Spirit Shrine by rosy radiance that repeatedly cuts into his body and prevents his wounds from healing. He suspects the shrine’s holy imagery conceals something monstrous and insists that the supposed immortals are really ghosts.
• The radiance cannot erase the Defunct Pill marks on him or penetrate his chest, where his nightmare and a mysterious locked room resist it. Gao Ming claims that room leads to the true Immortal Palace; his words trigger a disturbance, and much of the radiance withdraws.
• The ordeal leaves Gao Ming badly injured but strengthens him: the Defunct Pill marks are purified, his body begins to recover, and the locks on the room in his heart loosen.
• He awakens beside a shrine wall where cultivators are chiseling away stone, apparently trying to break through. They are also carving statues of the immortals they envision; most statues crumble, while a few draw a response from the palace above.
• A Daoist cultivator mistakes Gao Ming’s rosy radiance for a sign of divine protection and treats his body as a wondrous treasure. He carries Gao Ming toward the floor’s center and asks whether he came down from above. Gao Ming instead asks which floor they are on.

Character developments

• Gao Ming endures extreme pain without surrendering his clarity or conviction. He becomes more certain that the shrine’s sacred appearance is deceptive, and he recognizes that surviving its radiance has strengthened him and weakened the seal on his inner chamber.
• The Daoist cultivator appears sincere and devout, but interprets Gao Ming through the shrine’s religious worldview, seeing a divine treasure where Gao Ming experiences torment.

Significant themes

• False holiness and concealed horror: The shrine’s radiant, auspicious appearance may disguise a grotesque reality.
• Faith versus perception: The cultivators’ beliefs shape what they see; the Daoist reads Gao Ming’s suffering as divine favor.
• Endurance and transformation: Gao Ming’s ordeal is both destructive and strengthening, turning apparent punishment into an opportunity for power and discovery.
• The nature of immortality: The cultivators pursue the Dao by carving idealized immortals, while Gao Ming doubts that any true immortals exist in Dreamfold Town.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming openly challenges the shrine’s supposed morality and divinity, while the shrine’s radiance attacks him and reacts to his claims.
• The Daoist helps Gao Ming by carrying him away from the dangerous wall, but their perspectives remain sharply different: the cultivator sees a blessed relic, while Gao Ming sees an injured body caught in a sinister system.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming reaches the seventh level of Spirit Vision with help from a cultivator who believes the Immortal Palace offers a path to immortality.
• The cultivator reveals that someone was supposedly taken into the Palace after carving a statue of an immortal he had seen there.
• At his workshop, the cultivator prepares to kill and eat Gao Ming, hoping to consume the rosy radiance in his body. Gao Ming warns that the radiance is poisonous and that immortality is a deception, but the cultivator refuses to believe him.
• To survive and buy time for his body to recover, Gao Ming invents a story: he claims to have fallen from the ninth level and offers to help the cultivator become immortal if he first shows him the earlier sculptor’s work.
• The cultivator takes Gao Ming to a collection of carvings beneath a mysterious statue that has always stood at the seventh level’s center. Gao Ming recognizes the smaller, lifelike carving as the Old Night Watchman, shown holding incense amid toppled ancestor tablets and the severed tail of a black snake.
• Gao Ming concludes that the Night Watchman appeared inside Spirit Vision and fought something there—likely connected to the crash heard in the Immortal Palace. He suspects the earlier sculptor was drawn into the Palace not for making an “immortal” statue, but because he glimpsed a real event within it.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains resourceful under threat, using deception and careful observation to keep the cultivator from killing him. The carving strengthens his suspicion that events inside Spirit Vision are real, not a vision of immortals.
• The cultivator is consumed by the promise of immortality. His desperation overrides his scruples, though a remnant of human compassion makes him hesitate before harming Gao Ming. He demands proof in the form of help carving a statue.
• Their exchange contrasts Gao Ming’s skepticism and practical thinking with the cultivator’s fervent, dangerous faith.

Significant themes

• False hope and fanaticism: The promise of immortality drives people to violence and makes them reject warnings.
• Survival through ingenuity: Gao Ming relies on manipulation and patience when physically vulnerable.
• Appearance versus reality: The “immortal” tale may conceal a glimpse of genuine events within Spirit Vision.
• The cost of witnessing: The sculptor’s apparent ascent may have resulted from seeing something forbidden, rather than earning divine favor.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming devises a way to attract the Immortal Palace’s attention: instead of obeying Spirit Vision’s rules, he will provoke it by having a cultivator carve a forbidden image.
• He persuades the cautious cultivator to use nearby stone rather than return to his workshop. The cultivator agrees only after Gao Ming promises proof that the Palace can be made to react.
• Following a ritual involving talismans, blood, and Daoist chants, the cultivator carves Gao Ming’s description of the Flesh-and-Blood Immortal: a being with four faces and eight arms.
• The cultivator then stabs Gao Ming and uses his blood to open the statue’s eyes. The carving begins to look alive, but a golden beam from the Immortal Palace destroys its eyes and cracks its body.
• The cultivator interprets the beam as a sign of ascension. Gao Ming calls it a path sent by the Palace, further encouraging him.
• The spectacle draws nearby ascetics, who surround the cultivator and demand to know how he provoked the Palace. An elder recognizes him as the Stonecutter’s apprentice and asks whether his master revealed a secret before ascending.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming is strategic, provocative, and willing to exploit others’ beliefs. Though badly injured, he pushes the ritual forward and uses the cultivator’s ambition to create a direct challenge to Spirit Vision.
• The cultivator shifts from fearful suspicion to intense commitment. He risks himself and suffers greatly to make the carving, then stands his ground when others arrive, still devoted to the possibility of becoming immortal.
• The surrounding ascetics and the elder respond with curiosity and urgency, treating the golden beam as a potentially valuable sign. The elder’s recognition of the cultivator links the event to the Stonecutter’s earlier ascension.

Significant themes

• Faith and manipulation: Gao Ming turns the cultivator’s yearning for immortality into a tool.
• Defiance versus obedience: The plan depends on violating Spirit Vision’s rules rather than complying with them.
• The cost of ambition: The carving ritual drains the cultivator and further harms Gao Ming, while offering no clear promise of success.
• Interpretation of the supernatural: The golden beam is taken as divine favor by the cultivator, but may instead be a hostile response—leaving its true meaning uncertain.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming’s rosy radiance is exposed, and he announces that he knows how to provoke the Immortal Palace’s response. The cultivators restrain the man who had kept Gao Ming captive and demand answers.
• Carried to the center of the seventh floor, Gao Ming offers two routes: carve suitable stone from the tower for a slim chance of “ascending,” or carve the central divine statue—which he claims will guarantee the Immortal Palace’s reception.
• Gao Ming secretly intends to make the statue resemble Blood City, the nightmare city whose accumulated blood debts he hopes to draw into the Immortal Palace. The captors, led by the man who abducted him, begin carving.
• As the cultivators carve and sacrifice their blood, the mist around the Immortal Palace clears. Meanwhile, Gao Ming follows his own instructions inward, treating his body as a world and his apertures as places to store memory fragments.
• He forges a blade from the Butcher’s killing intent and the pain, darkness, and despair of his repeated deaths. Memories of offering his secret to save others, only to be betrayed, fuel a blaze of fear, resentment, and rage.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming shifts from captive to manipulator, openly exploiting the cultivators’ hunger for immortality while pursuing a dangerous, personal plan. He also begins confronting painful memories he had kept sealed away.
• The former captor regrets his actions and, trusting Gao Ming more than the others do, becomes the first to carve the statue.
• The cultivators move from suspicion to desperate belief, competing for a chance at immortality and following Gao Ming’s instructions.
• Gao Ming addresses the crowd as a supposed authority, while the cultivators alternately question him, defend his status, and act on his guidance.

Significant themes

• Faith and exploitation: The statue embodies the cultivators’ shared belief, which Gao Ming recognizes as something that can be manipulated.
• Immortality and sacrifice: The cultivators shed blood for transcendence, while Gao Ming turns his own suffering and memories into the tools of transformation.
• Betrayal and repeated sacrifice: Gao Ming’s recollections portray kindness repeatedly answered with abandonment, shaping his growing anger.
• Memory, identity, and reality: By carving both stone and his own body, Gao Ming blurs the boundary between inner experience and the world outside.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming experiences memories from repeated deaths and lives, recognizing that he has met the same people thousands of times while they have known him only once. Beneath the memories, he finds a deep loneliness.
• The Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God feeds that loneliness into the Flesh-and-Blood Furnace. Gao Ming uses a chisel marked “Hollow Person” and other Sculpting Knives to carve the memories into gods, gradually recovering his sense of self.
• Gao Ming and the Seventh Floor’s cultivators complete the next stages of the ritual: they animate the Blood City Tattoo, carve a statue of Blood City, and open it with Gao Ming’s blood. The statue and his tattoo begin to merge, revealing a passage into the desires sustaining Spirit Vision.
• When the ritual reaches Organ Installation, the cultivators turn against one another over who should be sacrificed. Gao Ming refuses to let them choose victims and instead throws himself into the statue, becoming its internal organs.
• Blood City comes alive as a place of death and despair. Some cultivators are pulled inside, while others are crushed by the Immortal Palace’s descending golden light. Gao Ming recognizes that Spirit Vision is reacting to him—and appears desperate.

Character developments

• Gao Ming confronts the loneliness of his repeated existence and begins rebuilding his identity through the memories he carves. He also commits himself to the transformation of Blood City, sacrificing his body to complete it.
• The Seventh Floor’s cultivators shift from cooperation to self-preservation when immortality requires a sacrifice, revealing the limits of their loyalty.
• The Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God acts as a guide in Gao Ming’s inner process, turning his buried loneliness into part of his cultivation.

Character interactions

• The Ghost God presses a hand to Gao Ming’s shoulder and channels his memories’ loneliness into the furnace.
• Gao Ming works with the cultivators to construct Blood City, but they argue over sacrificing absent or less powerful fellow cultivators.
• Gao Ming rejects their proposal, insisting he will help them become immortal before diving into the statue himself.
• The Immortal Palace confronts Blood City directly, setting up an open clash between Spirit Vision and Gao Ming’s creation.

Significant themes

• Loneliness and identity: Gao Ming’s repeated lives have isolated him, and carving memories becomes a way to recover who he is.
• Faith and false immortality: Collective desire sustains Spirit Vision, while the promise of immortality drives the cultivators toward betrayal.
• Sacrifice and transformation: Gao Ming chooses self-sacrifice over sacrificing others, turning Blood City from a lifeless image into a terrifying living force.
• Rebellion against authority: The Immortal Palace’s hostility suggests that the supposed immortals are not beyond fear or challenge.

Plot points

• Gao Ming realizes his perspective has merged with the Blood City Divine Statue’s. He discovers that the Nine-Story Spirit Shrine and its Immortal Palace are sustained by collective desire and belief: when enough people believe something is real, belief can make it so.
• Gao Ming redirects the cultivators’ longing toward Blood City, causing them to believe the dead city is the Immortal Palace. Their desires empower the city and flow into Gao Ming, strengthening the Blood City Tattoo and blurring the boundary between his nightmare and reality.
• The Spirit Shrine, threatened by this shift, begins destroying its own statue and attempts to force Gao Ming to ascend. The statue breaks, but its spiritual essence appears to transfer into Gao Ming, who resists the golden radiance and falls from the Immortal Palace.
• Gao Ming awakens on an immense, unfamiliar floor. Injured and unable to move, he is approached by a young deer. After drinking his blood, the deer becomes more real and carries him on its back.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming grasps how belief powers the Spirit Shrine and uses that insight against it. His connection to Blood City deepens, and he becomes a vessel for its growing spiritual power.
• The Spirit Shrine reveals its vulnerability: it depends on people’s desires and belief. To stop Gao Ming from gaining more power, it is willing to sacrifice the statue and abandon the Seventh Floor.
• The deer shifts from an ethereal woodland creature toward something more substantial after drinking Gao Ming’s blood. It treats him as kin and helps him despite his pain frightening it at first.

Significant themes

• Belief shapes reality: Collective conviction can turn illusion into fact, but also make people vulnerable to forces that exploit their hopes.
• Desire as power and imprisonment: Longing fuels extraordinary change, yet the Spirit Shrine uses it to bind its followers to the promise of immortality.
• Unstable boundaries: As Blood City’s power enters Gao Ming, nightmare and reality become increasingly difficult to distinguish.

Key events

• Gao Ming is severely wounded and covered head to toe in the Blood City Tattoo, which has become bound to his body. His awareness is repeatedly drawn into the city’s grim scenes, leaving him feeling like its only living inhabitant.
• As the desires of others pour into his heart chamber, the sealed space begins to transform into Blood City. Cracks spread through its lock, and voices from within describe a city in crisis: the Investigation Bureau is hunting Ghost Story Players, black fog is swallowing homes, Hande Private Academy has vanished, and posthumous photographs may be the last hope.
• The voices offer conflicting warnings about Gao Ming’s identity and where he should search for the truth. He cannot make sense of them, so he falls silent and waits for his wounds to heal.
• Carried by the deer, he reaches a forest near the Immortal Palace’s waterfall and overhears the ghost gods from Dreamfold Town. They argue over the cost of reaching immortality, the Thirteen Methods of Ascension, and who should claim the palace.
• As the ghost gods’ influence spreads, the eighth level’s landscape turns monstrous: trees, streams, animals, and insects mutate. The ghost gods then shed their disguises and begin their final contest to ascend.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming is physically broken and increasingly uncertain of his identity, yet remains focused on finding the truth. He endures the voices in his heart and recognizes that he cannot yet return to help those calling for him.
• The deer continues to carry Gao Ming but grows terrified as it approaches the ghost gods. Unlike the surrounding creatures, it does not mutate, perhaps because it drank Gao Ming’s blood.
• The ghost gods reveal their ambition and rivalry through a tense exchange: some demand recognition for sacrifices already made, while others propose dividing the spoils or competing for the Immortal Palace.
• The voices in Gao Ming’s heart act as competing guides—some warn him against returning to Hanhai, while others insist that reality holds the truth and urge him to discover his real identity.

Significant themes

• Identity and reality: Gao Ming questions whether he is truly Gao Ming, and the chapter suggests that nightmares may be consequences of truths hidden in reality.
• The cost of power: The ghost gods debate sacrifice and entitlement as they pursue immortality.
• Isolation amid connection: Gao Ming is linked to a city and many desperate voices, but cannot reach or help them.
• Corruption and transformation: The Blood City Tattoo and the eighth level’s mutations show reality being reshaped by desire and supernatural power.

Key plot points and events

• The Eighth Layer of the Spirit Shrine transforms from a peaceful landscape into a realm of ghostly horrors. Gao Ming realizes the Spirit Shrine’s beauty was an illusion—and that Dreamfold Town’s ghost gods came to seize it, not to become immortals.
• Gao Ming hides beneath an Immortal Deer, which disguises itself by covering its bright markings with ashes. His wounds heal rapidly, and the Blood City Tattoo and the Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God within him become fully tangible.
• His Black Ring’s readings exceed its limits and the device shuts down, likely drawing scrutiny from Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals. Gao Ming decides he needs leverage against the company, ideally by becoming an unspeakable, but recognizes that his best hope may lie with the ghost god in his heart.
• Lord Tang launches a sudden attempt to reach the Immortal Palace. Using the Water Dragon King’s shed skin, he disguises himself as a giant serpent and swims up the Immortal Waterfall.
• The disguise breaks apart in the torrent. Gao Ming realizes Lord Tang’s true body is inside the serpent’s head, but before he can act, a butcher’s knife flies from the woods and strikes it. The serpent and its cargo are swept back into the pool, and the head disappears beneath the water.

Character developments

• Gao Ming becomes more powerful and physically resilient, but his malfunctioning Black Ring puts him at risk from Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals. He remains cautious, observing rather than acting until he understands the situation.
• Lord Tang reveals his greed and ambition, attempting to claim the Immortal Palace for himself. His scheme fails when his borrowed serpent skin disintegrates and the corpses he controlled become a hindrance.
• The Immortal Deer shows unusual cleverness by copying Gao Ming’s hiding strategy and camouflaging itself.

Significant themes

• Illusion and hidden reality: The Spirit Shrine’s idyllic appearance conceals a horrific landscape and a struggle for power.
• Ambition and its consequences: Lord Tang’s obsession with claiming the Immortal Palace leaves him exposed and ultimately defeated.
• Survival through caution and strategy: Gao Ming chooses concealment and careful observation while assessing both his enemies and his own new abilities.
• Power and control: Gao Ming’s transformation may give him leverage, but it also makes him more valuable—and more vulnerable—to the pharmaceutical company.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming comforts and hides with the deer, treating it as a companion despite its mysterious true form.
• Gao Ming considers the Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God in his heart as his potential best chance of becoming an unspeakable, while accepting that he cannot simply claim that opportunity on the ghost god’s behalf.
• The other ghost gods fail to stop Lord Tang’s sudden ascent; the chapter ends with an unidentified attacker intervening against him.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming suspects Lord Tang survived his apparent defeat and is still hiding nearby.
• The Butcher emerges from the woods, looking gaunt but dangerous. After reaching the shrine’s eighth floor, he has surrendered nearly everything—his followers, memories, lifespan, and other powers—leaving only his slaughtering knives and a single-minded desire for truth.
• Speaking in two distinct voices, the Butcher rejects the idea that everything is merely an illusion and challenges the supposed immortal to prove itself. He then sacrifices his body and memories in one final strike at the Immortal Palace.
• His cleaver cuts through the waterfall, stars, and palace—but lodges in the Heavenly Gate. The ghost gods realize the palace is an illusion, while the gate itself is real and may offer a way out of the shrine.
• As the others focus on the gate, Gao Ming and Deer retrieve the Butcher’s pig-face mask. Inside, Gao Ming finds many carved names, including Li Zhu’s, and senses warmth and power in them.

Character developments

• The Butcher reaches the end of his long, destructive journey. Though stripped of his former madness and nearly all he possessed, he chooses truth over survival, giving his life to test whether the Heavenly Gate is real.
• Gao Ming remains wary of Lord Tang and alert to danger, but also acts quickly and cautiously, taking advantage of the ghost gods’ distraction.
• Deer is terrified by the Butcher yet stays with Gao Ming, later showing a gentle, sorrowful response to the mask.

Interactions

• Gao Ming steadies Deer when it trembles at the Butcher’s approach; afterward, Deer nudges the mask, and Gao Ming lets it.
• The Butcher’s two voices express his inner conflict and his demand for proof before he makes his final attack.
• The ghost gods’ attention shifts from the fallen Butcher to the newly revealed gate, allowing Gao Ming and Deer to retrieve the mask unnoticed.

Significant themes

• Truth versus illusion: The palace is false, but the Heavenly Gate is real, opening the possibility of escape.
• Sacrifice and conviction: The Butcher gives up everything to test what he has been told and reach beyond the nightmare.
• Retribution and uncertainty: Gao Ming believes Lord Tang may still face consequences, though the timing remains unknown.
• Memory and the dead: The names carved inside the mask suggest the Butcher preserved a connection to those he killed, and that their memories still hold power.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming reflects on the Butcher, realizing that despite his frightening reputation, he had been unusually honest and had protected animals—including a donkey transformed from a Tester. Gao Ming sees Dreamfold Town as the force that twisted a decent person into a bloodthirsty figure.
• With the Heavenly Gate confirmed to be real, the town’s ghost gods focus on reaching it. Gao Ming chooses to stay out of the initial struggle, retreating with Deer and hiding near the Immortal Waterfall.
• Several powerful forces advance toward the Immortal Palace: skeletons form a stairway from the north, while a vast burial mound and funeral winds gather to the south. Their combined aura of death threatens the shrine.
• A voice resembling Zhang Mingli denounces the ghost gods and urges them to become immortals to escape Dream’s power. Gao Ming suspects the speaker is the spirit shrine impersonating Zhang Mingli, and remains unwilling to cooperate with it.
• The shrine’s Zhang Mingli figure reveals that the Immortal Palace is being empowered by the faith of the townspeople, paper figures, and livestock throughout the shrine. Their belief makes the illusory palace real, allowing it to unleash a celestial river that smashes into the White Bone Stairway.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming shows clear-eyed distrust of the shrine’s claims and refuses to join its cause, even though he wants to save Zhang Mingli. He is willing to embrace Dream’s power if it can help him change things.
• The Butcher, recalled through Gao Ming’s memories, emerges as a tragic figure: a fundamentally straightforward person corrupted by Dreamfold Town.
• The shrine’s Zhang Mingli impersonator manipulates the inhabitants’ hopes, presenting itself as their protector while using their devotion to strengthen the Immortal Palace.
• The ghost gods ignore the shrine’s speeches and continue their advance, setting up a confrontation between them and the newly empowered palace.

Significant themes

• Faith as power: The inhabitants’ sincere belief—not the palace’s objective reality—makes it solid and dangerous.
• Manipulation and false salvation: The promise of immortality offers hope to the suffering while serving the shrine’s agenda.
• Corruption by place and circumstance: Dreamfold Town can turn even an honest person into a monster.
• Ambiguous alliances: Gao Ming’s goals do not make him willing to trust or cooperate with those who appear to share them.

Plot points and events

• The Taboo God in the white sedan chair attacks “Zhang Mingli,” whose stitched body begins to rot. He redirects the affliction through a mirror onto the Spirit Shrine’s believers, making them suffer in his place.
• Most believers endure the agony and surrender their strength willingly, driven by the hope that the shrine’s false Immortal Palace offers a way out of their bleak lives.
• Their belief floods Gao Ming’s Heart Chamber, intensifying the voices there and bringing the nightmare’s illusions closer to reality. As Gao loses control of his thoughts, the Blood City Tattoo begins developing on its own. Deer senses a terrible presence gathering beneath it.
• “Zhang Mingli” draws on the believers’ power to make the Immortal Palace increasingly real. Dreamfold Town’s Ghost Gods and Useful Gods unite against the shrine: they attack from four directions, with the Useful Gods forming a giant god from the town’s natural features.
• The palace is damaged, but “Zhang Mingli” traps the Ghost Gods and links them to the Heavenly Gate. He claims to have anticipated their actions and intends to use their combined Vow Power to make the gate real.
• As the Ghost Gods’ power gathers on the now-real Heavenly Gate, “Zhang Mingli” approaches it. At the same time, Gao’s consciousness sinks toward the locked room in his Heart Chamber, whose lock is nearly broken.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming begins to understand why the believers cling to their faith: like the figures in his nightmares, they are risking everything for an impossible hope. Accepting the voices in his heart, however, overwhelms him and threatens to fracture his personality.
• “Zhang Mingli” reveals himself as ruthless beneath his righteous rhetoric. He sacrifices believers without hesitation and treats their suffering—and even their deaths—as acceptable costs for his plan.
• The believers are not merely passive victims: they willingly shoulder “Zhang Mingli’s” pain and lend him their strength, showing both their desperation and devotion.
• The Ghost Gods and Useful Gods form a temporary alliance to seize or neutralize the shrine, though their cooperation appears driven by necessity rather than trust.
• Deer quietly protects Gao by hiding beneath its belly, while sensing the danger building around him.

Significant themes

• Hope as both salvation and exploitation: The Immortal Palace gives people a glimpse of another life, but that hope lets the shrine’s master consume them.
• Faith making illusion real: Collective belief empowers the shrine, materializes the palace, and turns the Heavenly Gate into a tangible object.
• Sacrifice and desperation: The believers’ willingness to suffer shows how far people may go for a chance at escape.
• Truth versus self-preservation: Gao is warned that recovering his past may restore the source of his suffering, leaving the locked room’s meaning—and whether he should open it—unresolved.