Chapter Summaries

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming opens Dream’s fourth shrine, placing his Flesh-and-Blood Immortal inside. The clash between Dream’s marks and the Blood City markings overwhelms him with visions and a warped perception of the world.
• Gao Yun’s voice—and the sight of his blazing figure—pull Gao Ming back to his senses. Gao Ming and the Flesh-and-Blood Immortal tear out their own hearts and use their blood to spread Blood City markings across the great tomb.
• The other Dream Ghosts help purge the shrine’s remaining Dream Marks. With all four shrines occupied, the Immortal grows vastly stronger, but gains only an intensification of Dream’s dangerous core ability: Delirium, which can drive everyone within a nightmare mad.
• Gao Ming links the city’s houses, ghosts, and markings into a living body, then summons Dreamfold Town. Its nightmares spread through Hanhai’s ruins, blending dream, reality, and Blood City—but the city has not yet fully become real.
• Gao Yun appears in a powerful, burning form and tells Gao Ming to claim the Home Gate’s key and return home for answers. He reveals that Gao Ming was the fifty-first person on the school bus, who should never have been there.
• Gao Yun walks into the city’s center and burns away, using his Unspeakable power to illuminate Blood City.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming risks losing himself to Dream’s influence but regains control and commits himself fully to rebuilding Blood City. His growing power comes with a serious danger: the Immortal’s enhanced Delirium could overwhelm allies and enemies alike.
• The Flesh-and-Blood Immortal becomes more powerful than an ordinary Unspeakable and begins functioning as Blood City’s heart, though he seems confused by his own transformation.
• The Dream Ghosts assist Gao Ming by clearing Dream’s remaining influence from the shrine.
• Gao Yun acts as Gao Ming’s anchor and guide. His farewell delivers a crucial clue about Gao Ming’s past before he sacrifices himself—or disappears—into the flames.
• Gao Ming, the Immortal, and the Dream Ghosts work together to transform the ruined city, while Gao Yun’s final message gives Gao Ming a new destination and question to pursue.

Significant themes

• Power and the risk of madness: Greater strength comes through an ability that threatens to erase reason.
• Identity and memory: Gao Ming must hold onto his name and purpose amid visions, while the mystery of the “extra” passenger challenges what he knows about himself.
• Sacrifice and rebirth: Gao Ming gives his heart’s blood to revive Blood City, and Gao Yun burns himself to illuminate it.
• Worlds merging: Dream, reality, and the supernatural increasingly overlap as Blood City begins to take shape.

Plot points and events

• Gao Yun’s flames activate the Blood City Tattoo, filling in the outlines Gao Ming traced and stripping away layers of corruption. Hanhai Blood City’s original buildings and battle memories begin to reappear.
• As the city transforms, decay spreads through North Harbor New City: bodies crowd the harbor, residents and officials mysteriously rot, and the General Investigation Bureau itself is infiltrated.
• A humanoid being formed from corpse fluid confronts the Bureau Chief. It reveals that Hanhai has long been kept under the control of other Blood Cities, with its people treated as livestock and the Bureau suppressing the city’s secrets.
• The creature questions the Chief about the Ghost Story Players, Yan Xizhi, and the enormous tree in the East District. It declares that Hanhai now has three Dream Ghosts and must be “cleaned out.”
• The Bureau Chief’s apparent body is destroyed, exposing his true form: five human upper bodies linked to a vast mass of flesh and blood beneath the Bureau. This mass is the remnant of Hanhai Blood City’s former ruler, transformed by the Saviors of Xinhu into a source of life for the dead land.
• The decay creature covets the mass but hesitates because of the powerful karma surrounding it. As it begins to drain the well, an earthquake shakes Hanhai.
• The creature rushes outside and sees that the black fog has opened. A powerful presence is burning within it—an Unspeakable like itself.

Character developments

• The Bureau Chief is revealed as a composite being who has concealed Hanhai’s true history and the nature of his own body. Despite his authority, he is submissive and unable to resist the decay creature.
• The decay creature shifts from interrogation to attempted seizure of Hanhai’s hidden treasure. Its confidence falters when it senses the newly emerged Unspeakable.
• Gao Yun and Gao Ming, though absent from the confrontation, are shown to be driving Hanhai’s transformation through flame and tattoo.

Significant themes

• Decay versus renewal: The spreading rot contrasts with the flames restoring Blood City’s buried identity.
• Control and exploitation: Hanhai’s population has been kept ignorant and fearful, treated as livestock by those governing the city.
• Buried history and memory: The reawakening Ghost Markings recover the scars and memories of past battles.
• Power and vulnerability: Even formidable institutions and beings can be exposed when hidden truths—or stronger forces—emerge.

Character interactions

• The decay creature interrogates and tortures the Bureau Chief, demanding answers about Hanhai’s emerging threats.
• The Chief tries to minimize or conceal the danger posed by Yan Xizhi and the East District tree, but the creature dismisses his explanations and kills his manifested head.
• The chapter ends with the creature confronting evidence of another Unspeakable, interrupting its attempt to claim Hanhai’s hidden source of life.

Plot and key events

• An entity from Rotting Blood City reflects on Hanhai’s destruction: nine Blood Cities and a traitor once slaughtered its Dream Ghosts, annihilated its Blood City Lord, and cursed the ruins to prevent its return.
• Gao Ming and the Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God begin rebuilding Hanhai. Four Dream Ghosts anchor Dream’s Shrines in the ruins, while Gao Yun burns away his power and identity to fuel the ritual.
• The ritual breaks through Hanhai’s false sky and briefly suppresses the curses. Gao Ming’s heart carries a message that restores citizens’ memories, revealing that Hanhai is a prison built from the remains of a destroyed Blood City, where ghosts were stripped of their powers and made to live as humans.
• Gao Ming condemns the unspeakable beings who orchestrated Hanhai’s suffering and vows revenge. The citizens’ fear, grief, and resentment gather around him and strengthen the ritual.
• Beneath the Shadow World, Gao Ming discovers the long-hidden corpse of Hanhai’s Blood City Lord. He places his heart into it, and the city’s will awakens. The corpse begins dissolving into blood and flesh, while Hanhai’s buildings reappear beneath a red sky.

Character developments

• Gao Ming becomes the voice and rallying point of Hanhai’s oppressed citizens, turning their recovered memories and anger into a force for resistance.
• Gao Yun sacrifices everything he gained from the dark shrine—his soul, will, abilities, and memories—to make the city’s rebirth possible.
• The Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God stands with Gao Ming in the ritual, helping restore Hanhai.
• The Rotting Blood City entity shifts from confidence in Hanhai’s permanent destruction to alarm as it witnesses the impossible rebirth.
• Hanhai’s citizens and imprisoned ghosts begin to understand their true history and unite through shared resentment and a desire for vengeance.

Significant themes

• Memory and identity: The city’s rulers altered memories and identities to conceal their crimes; recovering the truth becomes an act of liberation.
• Oppression and resistance: Hanhai’s inhabitants reject the role imposed on them and choose to fight their captors.
• Sacrifice and renewal: Gao Yun’s self-destruction and Gao Ming’s offering of his heart enable the city’s return.
• Collective will: Hanhai is reborn through the joined obsessions of its ghosts and citizens, not through one person’s strength alone.
• Justice and revenge: The chapter frames the rebuilding of Hanhai as both an escape from imposed fate and the beginning of retribution.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming and the Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God perform the rebirth ritual together, while the four Dream Ghosts secure the Shrines.
• Gao Yun’s sacrifice supports Gao Ming’s effort, protecting the ritual and linking his remaining presence to the awakening city.
• Gao Ming addresses Hanhai’s citizens through the voice in his heart, revealing the truth and urging them to refuse submission.
• The awakened Blood City Lord’s corpse responds to the collective will of Hanhai’s ghosts, while the Rotting Blood City observer watches in fearful disbelief.

Plot points and events

• The Hanhai Blood City begins taking shape as the Former City Lord’s corpse merges with Dreamfold Town’s deep dream. Its descent threatens to draw the attention of rival Blood City Lords.
• Hanhai’s Investigators, including the dying Bureau Chief, sacrifice themselves by merging into the city. Their bodies and wills help make it solid and accelerate its descent.
• Four distant Blood City Lords attack through their rules: one ages Hanhai’s people, another spreads decay, a third erodes memory and identity, and a fourth makes the Blood City illusory.
• Gao Ming and Gao Yun endure the attacks. Though their senses and identities are threatened, repeated experiences of death help them resist, and Gao Ming keeps the flames aloft—the key to Hanhai’s rebirth.
• As hope fades, Ji Zhe drives his Flesh-and-Blood Giant Tree into the nightmare, making it a bridge between worlds. Yan Xizhi, the Investigation Bureau’s Dream Ghost, and Weird Wish also enter the Blood City and merge with it, helping it become real again.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains steadfast under overwhelming pressure, becoming the anchor for Hanhai’s hopes. His resistance to decay stems from surviving the curse in Dreamfold Town.
• Gao Yun continues to burn himself to keep the flames alive and resists the time-based attack alongside Gao Ming.
• The Bureau Chief and Investigators fulfill their long-standing mission to protect Hanhai, sacrificing themselves to complete the city.
• Jingtuo God orders the Investigators to channel their ghost-mark power into the Blood City when the first enemy rule strikes.
• Ji Zhe turns his phobia-born transformation into an act of courage, sacrificing himself to create a path into the nightmare.
• Yan Xizhi, the Dream Ghost, and Weird Wish choose to join the Blood City without hesitation, accepting that they may perish if it fails.

Significant themes

• Collective sacrifice and solidarity: Hanhai’s people, regardless of their past, unite their wills and bodies to save the city.
• Memory, identity, and resilience: The characters withstand forces that erase memory and selfhood because their suffering and repeated losses have shaped them.
• Fear versus defiance: Even as terror spreads, characters act despite it, turning fear into resolve.
• Hope and rebirth: Hanhai’s survival depends on keeping the flames alive until the Blood City fully descends.

Plot points

• Hanhai Blood City’s descent is nearly halted as seven Blood City Lords turn their attention toward it. Their rules and influence threaten to drain Hanhai’s power and doom the city.
• With his other options exhausted, Gao Ming offers the Nether Fetus the chance to become Hanhai’s Blood City Lord. He promises to give him the heart carrying the city’s obsessions if Hanhai can be rebuilt.
• Gao Ming uses a clay figure of Xiang Nuan to reach the Nether Fetus. The figure crumbles, and the Nether Fetus emerges through the Heavenly Gate into Dreamfold Town, despite the Blood City Lords’ scrutiny.
• Moved by Gao Ming’s willingness to surrender the reward for his suffering, the Nether Fetus agrees to help. Before acting, he reveals that Gao Ming’s suffering may have been engineered: a Calamity God manipulated events to make Gao Ming a pawn in a plan to take Hanhai, even altering his fate and erasing his name.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming remains defiant despite his body decaying and his will weakening. His offer shows that restoring Hanhai matters more to him than gaining power for himself.
• The Nether Fetus shifts from wary observer to potential ally. Gao Ming’s sincerity recalls Wen Qing’s compassion toward him and prompts him to help.
• The Calamity God is revealed as a hidden antagonist whose scheme may account for Gao Ming’s pain and lost identity.
• Gao Ming and the Nether Fetus form a tentative alliance, grounded in Gao Ming’s generosity and the Nether Fetus’s recognition of that sacrifice.

Significant themes

• Sacrifice and devotion: Gao Ming is willing to give up everything he has fought for to save Hanhai.
• Regret, deficiency, and belonging: Dreamfold Town and the Nether Fetus embody the hope that the incomplete and burdened can find a home.
• Agency versus manipulation: The revelation that Gao Ming’s fate was altered raises doubts about how much of his life has been his own.
• Compassion in suffering: The Nether Fetus recognizes a shared light in Gao Ming and Wen Qing, suggesting kindness can reach even those who see themselves as monstrous.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming wonders who the mysterious figure is. The Nether Fetus’s curses awaken an ordinary-looking chain in the Execution House, revealing it as a link to the blood-clad Calamity God known as Doctor Gao.
• Doctor Gao appears as a limited phantom and binds Hanhai Blood City with countless chains, helping pull it from the nightmare into the Deep World. He warns that Hanhai carries too much karmic burden.
• As Hanhai’s transformation accelerates, the Deep World’s immense despair crashes down on it. Gao Ming and the Nether Fetus endure the assault, while the Nether Fetus’s mother shelters the ordinary citizens beneath her whale-like body.
• After the black fog clears, Doctor Gao reveals a larger reality: human worlds are connected by fate, and the Deep World is where their despair gathers. The thirteen Blood Cities are powers that Fate does not recognize—and possible threats to its order.
• Doctor Gao explains that he has considered trying to kill the night that governs this system.

Character developments and interactions

• Doctor Gao is revealed as a powerful, calculating figure who has planned for this moment. Though his appearance is only a phantom, he calmly resists the Blood City Lords’ interference and shares his radical view of Fate.
• Gao Ming survives the overwhelming despair and begins to see the scale of the forces shaping his world.
• The Nether Fetus shows that his loyalty is intensely personal: he protects Gao Ming, not the wider group.
• The Nether Fetus’s mother acts selflessly, using the Deep World’s regrets to protect Hanhai’s citizens.
• Doctor Gao confronts the Blood City Lords’ rules, while Gao Ming and Hanhai’s collective will hold several of their gazes at bay.

Significant themes

• Fate versus resistance: The worlds appear governed by fixed rules, but the Blood Cities may offer ways to oppose them.
• Despair as a system: The Deep World is not merely frightening; it is the accumulated suffering of countless human worlds.
• Sacrifice and protection: Gao Ming, the Nether Fetus, and his mother respond differently to danger, revealing contrasting forms of loyalty and care.
• Hope through defiance: Doctor Gao’s ambition to kill the night suggests that even a seemingly invincible order might be challenged.

Key plot points and events

• The Blood-Clad Calamity God defies Fate, even as Fate attacks him and the Nether Fetus through unseen twists in the past and future. Both suffer devastating injuries, while Fate’s assault also kills many Hanhai citizens.
• Some citizens sacrifice themselves by merging their souls and memories with the nightmare Blood City to speed its arrival; Gao Ming shelters others in the Execution House.
• Gao Ming remains untouched by Fate. Holding the Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God’s beating heart, he becomes the link between Hanhai’s reality and nightmare. The Blood City Lords realize that Fate cannot trace him because his past and identity have been erased, leaving him seemingly too ordinary to notice.
• Empowered by Hanhai’s people and their memories, Gao Ming brings Hanhai Blood City into reality. Its rules transform the dead and strengthen the Greater Ghosts who had joined it.
• The Blood City’s arrival lets Gao Ming sense the wider deep world, including the distant Blood Sea and twelve other Blood Cities—many of them hostile to Hanhai.
• As Dreamfold Town is absorbed, Dream’s hidden power awakens in the four shrines. Vast butterfly wings emerge, revealing that Dream has been concealed within Gao Ming and the Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God, waiting to use Gao Ming’s body to return.
• The chapter ends with Dream’s wings, the Blood-Clad Calamity God, and the Nether Fetus all moving toward Gao Ming’s heart.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming emerges as the pivotal figure in Hanhai’s return. Though physically battered and stripped of his identity, he is protected from Fate’s reach and becomes the vessel through which reality and nightmare unite.
• The Blood-Clad Calamity God proves unusually defiant and reckless, openly challenging Fate and revealing that the Calamity Gods deliberately erased Gao Ming’s traces to make this moment possible.
• The Nether Fetus realizes that Gao Ming’s success may have been part of a scheme and grows resentful, especially since he had come in his original body and is exposed to Fate.
• The Blood City Lords shift their attention to Gao Ming after seeing Fate fail to affect him.
• Dream changes from a dormant threat into an immediate one, revealing its plan to be reborn through Gao Ming.

Significant themes

• Fate versus obscurity: Fate can trace people through their pasts and futures, but Gao Ming’s erasure from both makes him invisible to it.
• Sacrifice and collective memory: Hanhai’s people help restore their city, turning shared memories and deaths into its power.
• Reality and nightmare merging: Hanhai Blood City’s arrival blurs the boundary between the living world and the nightmare realm.
• Power and hidden danger: The city’s return brings strength, but also awakens Dream and draws multiple formidable enemies toward Gao Ming.

Plot points and events

• As Hanhai Blood City descends, Gao Ming must choose who will inherit it. He distrusts Doctor Gao, whose schemes seem responsible for much of his suffering, and rejects Dream, whose betrayal is tied to the city’s destruction. He chooses the Nether Fetus, believing Wen Qing—the Giant Whale who carries the world’s regrets—to be the safest guardian for Hanhai’s people.
• Gao Ming offers up his scarred heart, the core of the Blood City and the accumulated will of its inhabitants. Doctor Gao and Dream try to stop him, while the Nether Fetus fights them off amid a clash of powerful rules.
• Gao Ming struggles toward the Nether Fetus through the battle, determined that Hanhai’s dead should not be enslaved or crushed by Fate.
• Wen Qing appears, but instead of taking the heart or claiming the city, she touches it tenderly and mends its cracks. Her wings spread as the Blood City rises to fill the abyss and support Night Sky.
• The heart returns to Gao Ming’s chest. He gains a special rule power that connects him to the souls of Hanhai’s citizens and lets him sense the city itself.

Character developments

• Gao Ming moves from wary calculation to a sincere, self-sacrificing choice. His repeated deaths have made him hardened, but Wen Qing’s tenderness briefly reconnects him with the emotions he buried.
• The Nether Fetus accepts the heart despite having little desire to become a Blood City Lord; his hatred of Fate fuels his ferocious defense against Doctor Gao and Dream.
• Wen Qing proves to be a compassionate alternative to the powerful claimants: she heals rather than takes, and offers Gao Ming a sense of comfort and belonging.

Significant themes

• Choice and agency: Gao Ming tries to decide Hanhai’s fate despite having spent his life unable to control his own.
• Sacrifice and responsibility: He risks everything to protect the city’s departed souls.
• Regret, grief, and healing: Wen Qing embodies the world’s unresolved sorrow, while her touch suggests that even deeply damaged hearts can be mended.
• Compassion amid darkness: The chapter insists that the Deep World need not remain cruel, even if its inhabitants have grown used to suffering.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming rejects Doctor Gao’s manipulation and Dream’s claim, choosing instead to entrust Hanhai to the Nether Fetus and Wen Qing.
• The Nether Fetus battles Doctor Gao and Dream to protect the chance Gao Ming offers him.
• Wen Qing meets Gao Ming’s sacrifice not with possession, but with tenderness, changing the moment from a transfer of power into one of healing and recognition.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming awakens as the thirteenth Blood City Lord after Hanhai Blood City descends. His new city is the realm of dreams, linked to the minds of all living people; he can perceive the black fog and seize ghost gods’ wills.
• Hanhai needs two Lords to govern it: one bound to the city and one free to act beyond it. Gao Yun becomes the city-bound soul, while Gao Ming embodies its drive to expand.
• Gao Yun explains that many versions of Gao Ming and Gao Yun existed along different branches of fate. Their repeated deaths and other intertwined time loops were part of a scheme to evade fate’s attention, with plans set in motion ten years earlier.
• Though Gao Yun was the strongest version and Gao Ming the weakest, Gao Ming ultimately brought events to this point. Gao Yun urges him to revisit his home and uncover where his story began.
• The Blood-Clad Calamity God’s memories threaten to overrun the newborn city. Rather than be consumed, he willingly breaks apart and merges with Hanhai, strengthening it. He predicts Gao Ming will soon choose a danger far worse than being hunted by a Calamity God.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming gains immense power and a new role, but remains focused on the crisis before him. He and Gao Yun must cooperate to wield Hanhai’s rules.
• Gao Yun is revealed as a distinct person—not merely Gao Ming’s past or ghostly self—who has been trapped in fate’s schemes since ten years ago. He becomes Hanhai’s guardian and speaks to Gao Ming with pain and sympathy.
• The Blood-Clad Calamity God appears composed even under attack. His voluntary merging with Hanhai is mysterious, and his final words suggest he expects Gao Ming to pursue a perilous course.
• The Nether Fetus continues its relentless assault, leaving Dream and the Blood-Clad Calamity God unable to stop Hanhai’s transformation.

Significant themes

• Fate versus agency: repeated deaths and branching destinies were manipulated to hide events from fate, yet Gao Ming’s choices still shape the outcome.
• Identity and alternate selves: Gao Ming and Gao Yun resemble one another but are separate beings formed along different paths.
• Dreams as freedom and power: Hanhai connects countless minds, offering a space where souls can be free, while also making dreams a source of formidable influence.
• Sacrifice and transformation: Gao Yun gives up his freedom to anchor the city, while the Blood-Clad Calamity God turns himself into nourishment for it.

Plot points and events

• After one manifestation of the Calamity God dissolves, Gao Ming and Gao Yun use Hanhai Blood City’s power to destroy Dream’s buried lingering will. Instead of weakening, the city’s rules grow stronger.
• The Nether Fetus suspects Dream had planned for it to be caught beneath Fate’s night sky. It vents its anger on a statue of Doctor Gao, then withdraws without closing Dreamfold Town’s Heavenly Gate, allowing Lone Island to approach Hanhai.
• Gao Ming decides not to merge the Execution House into the Blood City. Instead, he and Gao Yun move its Flesh-and-Blood Furnace to Hanhai and reforge its chains, marking the city’s buildings with Hanhai’s Ghost Markings.
• The Dream Ghosts emerge from the Blood-Red Buildings, greatly empowered. The Investigation Bureau Chief, Principal Yan, Weird Wish, Phobia, and Ji Zhe—now part of the Flesh-and-Blood Giant Tree—can wield their dream powers against even Unspeakables.
• They trap a stray cat that is actually Rotting Blood City’s Unspeakable. In a dream, the Ghosts devour its power and rules; it wakes believing itself to be an ordinary cat.
• Hanhai’s residents witness the victory, and rumors spread that the Blood City will begin hunting powerful enemies.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming shifts from rebuilding Hanhai to strengthening it, treating the Execution House as a resource to be adapted rather than absorbed. He directs the Dream Ghosts’ test against the captured Unspeakable.
• Gao Yun helps Gao Ming understand the Execution House’s possible connection to the Blood-Clad Calamity God, prompting the decision to preserve and reforge it.
• The Nether Fetus remains hostile and resentful toward Dream, but its refusal to shut the Heavenly Gate leaves a path for Lone Island to join Hanhai.
• The Dream Ghosts move from constrained spirits to formidable city defenders. Their cooperation turns the Regulator—once a terrifying enemy—into a harmless cat.
• Ji Zhe still feels inferior and sees himself as merely the Giant Tree’s mouthpiece, unaware that others regard his words and reactions as significant.
• The Investigation Bureau Chief confronts the captured Regulator over the deaths and manipulated fates of Investigators, giving the victory a personal dimension.

Significant themes

• Power through unity: Hanhai’s rules and the Dream Ghosts’ combined abilities make the city far more dangerous than its individual parts.
• Reversal of fear and control: Those who once manipulated others’ fates become vulnerable to the same terror they imposed.
• Transformation and identity: The Unspeakable’s power is stripped away so completely that it accepts a new, ordinary identity.
• Uncertain protection and belonging: Hanhai may offer refuge to Lone Island, the Nether Fetus, and Wen Qing, though who will ultimately protect whom remains unclear.
• Reputation and hidden strength: Ji Zhe underestimates himself, while outsiders may perceive Hanhai as an expansionist threat based on its growing power.

Plot points and events

• Hanhai Blood City has been restored, but its rise has made enemies of other Blood City Lords, who may soon attack.
• Gao Ming and Gao Yun discuss Hanhai’s vulnerability. Gao Yun is now inseparable from the city after giving everything to it, so he will remain to defend it. Gao Ming plans to travel to Xinhu, find help, destroy Dream, and repair Hanhai’s incomplete rules.
• Gao Ming detects an anomaly where the Blood City meets the black fog and leaves the city’s future in Gao Yun’s hands. He heads alone to the tunnel that connects Hanhai and Xinhu.
• The tunnel, now partly transformed by Hanhai’s blood-red rules, reveals many versions of itself. Each branching tunnel reflects a different path of destiny, and each connects to one of Gao Ming’s corpses.
• Seeing countless possible pasts converge, Gao Ming realizes he can no longer identify which path leads to his original home. He wonders how to find it and touches the key to the Home Gate and the posthumous photograph he carries.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming has grown powerful enough to understand Hanhai’s rules, but his strength has not resolved his personal uncertainty about where he comes from. He accepts that his many alternate destinies have merged, yet still longs to find his true home.
• Gao Yun has become part of Hanhai Blood City itself. Though he jokes with Gao Ming, he takes on the responsibility of protecting the city and urges Gao Ming to pursue his own plans.
• Their exchange shows mutual trust: Gao Ming entrusts Hanhai to Gao Yun, while Gao Yun supports his departure and reminds him that powerful Calamity Gods may intervene if the city faces destruction.
• Gao Ming also recalls his promise to deliver a message to an Unspeakable and hopes Xinhu’s Blood City Lord may become an ally.

Significant themes

• Destiny and identity: The branching tunnels embody countless possible lives, leaving Gao Ming unsure which one was truly his.
• Home and belonging: Even after gaining immense power and breaking a cycle of death, Gao Ming remains unable to locate his original home.
• Sacrifice and responsibility: Gao Yun’s fusion with the city and Gao Ming’s departure reflect the costs of protecting Hanhai.
• Freedom and peril: Hanhai’s restoration gives its people hope and agency, but also draws the attention of powerful enemies.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming sees a couple enter the Deep World through a tunnel. They are searching for their son, unaware that this world is extremely dangerous.
• He follows them in secret, protecting them through several threats until they reach the former Lishan Hospital. They seek Doctor Lu Zang, who had told them their child worked there, but his consultation room is empty.
• Gao Ming suspects Lu Zang manipulated parents across different tributaries of fate—altering their memories and using them to draw people into the Shadow World.
• To give the couple someone to accompany them, Gao Ming creates a flesh-and-blood double of himself and sends it to stay with them.
• He finds an unremarkable emergency-exit door in the tunnel and opens it with a key Xuan Wen left him. Behind it are messages and notebooks written by parents who have searched the Shadow World for him.
• Their writings warn against Lu Zang and Lishan Hospital, describe dangers and possible safe places, and plead for Gao Ming to survive. Some parents also recorded Ghost Markings they hoped might help him.

Character developments

• Gao Ming realizes that remembrance and belief may be what allow him to return after death: people searching for him keep his tributaries of fate from being severed.
• His view of his parents’ efforts shifts from suspicion to painful appreciation. He reads their messages as a deeply meaningful letter and recognizes the risks they took for him.
• He acts protectively toward the newly arrived couple despite knowing he is not the son they are looking for.

Significant themes

• Memory, identity, and survival: Being remembered may preserve a person’s existence, even across repeated deaths and divergent timelines.
• Parental love and sacrifice: Ordinary parents endure a hostile supernatural world, driven by the hope of finding their child.
• Hope amid despair: Their repeated instruction to “Live. Live well” offers a fragile counterweight to the Shadow World’s cruelty.
• Manipulation and trust: Lu Zang exploits the parents’ love, turning their search into part of a plan to spread the Shadow World’s influence.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming silently protects the couple as they travel, then sends a double to remain with them.
• The couple seek help from Lu Zang, but find only his abandoned room.
• Through the parents’ accumulated notes, Gao Ming encounters the efforts and warnings of many versions of his father and mother—an indirect but powerful connection with them.

Key plot points and events

• After reading his parents’ final message, Gao Ming realizes he can no longer identify which memories or past belong to him. He accepts that the converging branches of fate—and the parents within them—are all his.
• Messages left by his parents begin vanishing. Gao Ming concludes that Fate is erasing people who remember or care about him, aiming to make him disappear by removing every connection to him.
• He preserves the messages in his heart, protects the room, and resolves to resist Fate rather than let it destroy those around him. Sensing danger beyond Hanhai Blood City, he turns back instead of pressing farther through the Tunnel.
• Back in Hanhai, the city continues to grow, drawing in the world’s regrets and forgotten dreams. Ji Zhe suggests a class reunion; Gao Ming approves but says he cannot attend.
• Gao Ming meets the immensely strengthened Flesh-and-Blood Immortal. He calls forth its four wills and asks about its connection to Rotting Blood City and why consuming rot seems to make it more alive. The chapter ends as the Immortal shares a memory with him.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming shifts from uncertainty about his identity toward accepting all the lives and relationships tied to his fate. He recognizes Fate as his enemy and commits to fighting it, despite the overwhelming odds.
• Ji Zhe takes pride in helping Hanhai become a home for lost dreams and regrets, and longs to reunite with old classmates.
• Gong Xi, the Immortal’s human aspect, yields control so the other three wills can face Gao Ming. The Immortal’s new power makes it a formidable presence, but its shared memory suggests it is willing to help answer Gao Ming’s questions.
• Gao Ming’s bond with the Immortal is reinforced by their shared blood and life-and-death connection.

Significant themes

• Identity and memory: Gao Ming’s personal past is uncertain, but emotional bonds help define who he is.
• Fate versus resistance: Fate tries to “correct” deviations by erasing connections, while Gao Ming decides that Fate itself may be wrong.
• Erasure and grief: Losing someone’s traces is portrayed as more devastating than ordinary death.
• Home and belonging: Hanhai becomes a refuge for forgotten dreams, regrets, and displaced people.

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming learns that Rotting Blood City embodies decay and rebirth. Its rebirth ruler was destroyed by Fate’s schemes, but its indestructible heart survived and was imprisoned in Hanhai Dead City. That heart is now the Flesh-and-Blood Immortal, whose power could help Hanhai resist greater threats.
• Gao Ming brands Hanhai’s Blood City markings onto the Immortal, hoping to strengthen it. He even considers having it devour the General Investigation Bureau chief to gain more power.
• Gao Ming and Gao Yun discuss whether the deep world is a sealed “black box” created by Fate. Gao Ming suggests that sacrificing all Thirteen Blood Cities might let them burn the deep world and break Fate’s control.
• Reports from Xinhu reveal that Number Two and Bai Xiao’s group have encountered serious trouble. Gao Ming decides to focus on Xinhu, aiming to devour unspeakables’ dreams and create more Dream Ghosts.
• He secretly takes several promising Hanhai citizens through Dream’s Main Shrine to Xinhu. Zhang Ding has gone to Hanjiang, where something has frightened him despite his considerable strength.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming grows more willing to pursue extreme, potentially catastrophic ways to challenge Fate. He remains outwardly gentle but is increasingly comfortable wielding powerful monsters and making ruthless plans.
• Gao Yun challenges Gao Ming’s trust in the Flesh-and-Blood Immortal and warns him against dwelling on radical ideas. Despite their disagreement, Gao Yun continues helping manage Hanhai and advises him to focus on immediate needs.
• The Flesh-and-Blood Immortal is revealed to have the potential to become a major protector of Hanhai, owing to its origin as the heart of Rotting Blood City’s rebirth ruler.
• Zhang Ding’s fear suggests that Hanjiang contains a threat beyond what his strength should normally trouble him with.

Significant themes

• Decay and rebirth: Rotting is not merely destruction but part of an ongoing cycle of renewal.
• Fate and resistance: The Blood Cities’ rules may be poisons to Fate, and Gao Ming considers sacrificing everything to break Fate’s hold.
• Trust and sacrifice: Gao Ming’s strategy depends on trusting powerful, dangerous allies and accepting potentially extreme costs.
• The unknown: Both the deep world and the dangers in Hanjiang remain ominous, sealed mysteries.

Chapter summary: “The Meaning of Dreams”

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming leaves the newly restored Hanhai to find Xinhu’s Saviors and pursue the fifth Shrine of Dreams, which he senses is inside Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals.
• Crossing into Xinhu, he reflects on the city’s former promise of progress and how human nature ultimately undermined it. The bright, prosperous Xinhu contrasts sharply with dark, devastated Hanjiang.
• A young woman gives Gao Ming a ride. During the journey, she chats about city life and receives a worried call from her parents, who warn her about recent disappearances.
• At an isolated roadside hut, Gao Ming discovers a woman who has been murdered by a man and woman attempting to obtain her phone password. He kills the perpetrators with the Flesh-and-Blood Immortal’s power, covers the victim, and uses her phone to alert the police.
• The driver, already dead and unknowingly continuing her route through sheer fixation, takes Gao Ming toward the city. As she begins to fade, he gives her a peaceful dream and places her in the Execution House.
• Gao Ming reaches Xinhu Smart City and enters Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals. His presence sends people into dreams, allowing him to pass security and descend to the facility’s core, where he finds a large black box.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming combines ruthless action with compassion: he swiftly punishes the killers but treats the victim respectfully and gives the dead driver a painless dream. He wonders whether dreams can offer freedom from suffering.
• The driver is proud of Xinhu and affectionate toward her parents, though she is unaware that she has died. Her ordinary concerns and kindness make Gao Ming’s final mercy especially poignant.
• The murderers reveal their greed and cruelty through their argument over the victim’s password; Gao Ming disposes of them without hesitation.
• The driver’s conversation with Gao Ming creates a brief, human connection, while her parents’ call foreshadows the danger she faces.

Significant themes

• Human nature and progress: Xinhu’s technological ambitions coexist with violence and selfishness; advancement cannot overcome human cruelty by itself.
• Dreams as mercy: Gao Ming’s “dream without death” offers comfort and release, presenting dreams not only as danger but also as refuge.
• The unseen dead: The driver’s continued journey shows how attachment and unfinished purpose can persist beyond death.
• A stark urban divide: Xinhu’s bright prosperity beside Hanjiang’s darkness symbolizes unequal, unstable realities.

Key plot points

• Gao Ming confronts an immense, seamless Black Box inside Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals, sensing an unknowable presence within it that has been watching him.
• The presence attacks by switching off lights across nearby rooms and floors. Each click seems to erase not just illumination but the people and sounds inside the affected space, with the darkness closing in on Gao Ming.
• When the darkness reaches him, the presence seems able to invade his memories and threaten the foundations of his existence. Gao Ming counters with a warning: if it tries to erase him, he will use Delirium, a dangerous power connected to Dream’s Main Shrine, against it.
• The attack stops. A ruined, unusually intricate Shrine appears, containing dream worlds circling a pair of blood-red wings. Gao Ming recognizes it as Dream’s last Shrine and takes it.
• The presence then extinguishes the lights around the building, leaving Gao Ming isolated beneath one remaining light—a clear warning. He leaves, and the lights return. Once he ends the dreams he had cast over the building, he notices that some rooms contain fewer people and others seem to contain something extra.
• Reflecting on the incident, Gao Ming connects the Black Box to Number Zero and Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals’ interest in Xinhu. He wonders whether Xinhu is more than a passage between the Deep World and the human world.

Character developments and interactions

• Gao Ming faces an enemy whose nature and rules he cannot understand. Though inexperienced against unknowable beings, he responds with calculated defiance, prepared to risk a devastating counterattack. He secures Dream’s last Shrine and leaves without yielding to the warning.
• The Black Box’s presence demonstrates both overwhelming power and restraint: it attacks Gao Ming but stops short of its apparent final blow, then permits him to take the Shrine. Its motives and limits remain unclear.
• Their exchange is largely a contest of threat and judgment. Gao Ming refuses to bargain or dwell on the presence’s intentions, while the presence’s retreat suggests the confrontation is occurring at a moment when it cannot afford further entanglement.

Significant themes

• The unknowable and fear: Gao Ming can neither perceive nor name his opponent, making uncertainty itself a weapon.
• Power and risk: Though outmatched in knowledge, Gao Ming relies on willingness to use extreme force.
• Memory and existence: The attack targets the memories that underlie Gao Ming, suggesting that identity and survival are vulnerable to supernatural rules.
• Unresolved motives and hidden routes: The chapter deepens the mystery surrounding Xinhu and why powerful beings seek control of it.

Key plot points

• Gao Ming suspects Xinhu Blood City is concealing a deeper secret. Smart Brain’s police are arresting people it identifies as criminals, while Number Zero’s influence leads citizens toward sacrifice by their own choices.
• Wanting to save Xuan Wen from the coming turmoil, Gao Ming finds her working at an orphanage after she has been removed from Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals’ management.
• Xuan Wen admits she helped shape Gao Ming’s painful life and treated their closeness as part of a plan to cultivate and recruit him. Gao Ming acknowledges the truth but still thanks her.
• Gao Ming offers to take her back to Hanhai, warning that she may be caught between the Blood City Lords and the returning Saviors. He also recognizes that she secretly defied Number Zero by protecting his parents’ safe house.
• Xuan Wen refuses to leave. She believes Gao Ming is destined to face his path alone, and that those closest to him will be endangered. The chapter ends with her caring for the orphanage girl and choosing not to become another source of pain for him.

Character development and relationships

• Gao Ming shows compassion and emotional complexity: despite Xuan Wen’s betrayal and manipulation, he remains grateful and wants to protect her. He sees her as his sole witness across repeated rebirths.
• Xuan Wen confronts her past actions openly. Her refusal to go with Gao Ming is driven by guilt, affection, and fear that she will become his weakness. Her tenderness toward the children contrasts with her former role as a schemer.
• The little girl offers a straightforward, affectionate counterpoint to the adults’ guarded feelings. She clings to Xuan Wen and recognizes Gao Ming’s deep pain.

Significant themes

• Manipulation, choice, and fate: Characters are shaped by larger forces, yet Xuan Wen’s secret disobedience shows that they can still make choices.
• Love entangled with harm: Xuan Wen’s affection for Gao Ming is inseparable from the suffering she helped cause.
• Isolation and sacrifice: Gao Ming sees himself as alone, while Xuan Wen believes closeness to him brings danger.
• Humanity amid schemes: The child’s simple care and the orphanage’s warm dreams contrast with the conspiracies and coming violence surrounding them.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming receives a handwritten list from a little girl, delivered on Xuan Wen’s behalf. It names several former colleagues and their locations, including Xia Yang at the Skyline Hotel and Jingtuo God at the cemetery administration office.
• At the hotel, Gao Ming enters Xia Yang’s private suite and uses his power over dreams to read the emotions preserved in Xia Yang’s paintings.
• The paintings reveal that Lu Zang showed Xia Yang versions of himself living in different Mortal Worlds. Xia Yang then killed those alternate selves and absorbed what remained of their fates.
• Teacher Xia confirms that Lu Zang raised the Candidates in this way, with Gao Ming as the sole exception. Xia Yang admits he had long been aware of his madness, which his family had disguised as genius.
• Gao Ming next investigates Jingtuo God’s past. He finds a handmade statue resembling Lu Zang and discovers graves containing Jingtuo God’s posthumous photographs from different Mortal Worlds.
• The chapter ends with Gao Ming realizing that Jingtuo God, unlike Xia Yang, honored the selves who died in other worlds.

Character developments

• Gao Ming acts with confidence as Blood City Lord, investigating his former colleagues through their dreams and possessions.
• Xia Yang is revealed as a gifted, privileged artist whose strange work documented his encounters with alternate lives. He knowingly embraced a violent path of self-destruction and absorption.
• Jingtuo God appears to have responded to the same experience of alternate lives in a markedly different way, preserving and honoring his other selves.
• Teacher Xia breaks his long silence to explain the Candidates’ shared history and acknowledge that Gao Ming was not raised like the others.

Themes

• Isolation and belonging: The opening suggests that loneliness comes from being unable to find one’s way home.
• Identity and alternate selves: The Candidates’ encounters with other versions of themselves raise questions about what makes a person unique.
• Different responses to loss: Xia Yang consumes his alternate selves, while Jingtuo God honors them.
• Madness and perception: Xia Yang’s art records a reality others cannot see, while his family recasts his madness as exceptional talent.

Character interactions

• The little girl passes Xuan Wen’s message to Gao Ming and speaks warmly about her mother’s changed appearance after seeing him.
• Gao Ming encounters Xia Yang indirectly through his paintings, while Teacher Xia supplies the history behind them.
• Gao Ming’s investigation of Jingtuo God relies on traces left in staff dreams, a statue, and the cemetery’s graves.

Chapter Summary: “Ten Different Fates”

Key plot points and events

• Gao Ming studies the photograph of Jingtuo God that he recovered from the grave. Like Xia Yang’s paintings, the photograph retains supernatural power—an entangled force associated with chaos and death.
• Using the Blood City Lord’s abilities, Gao Ming examines the other Candidates’ threads of fate. All ten, including himself, have been interfered with by Lu Zang; their threads are unnaturally tangled, damaged, or entangled with other people’s.
• Gao Ming visits Xinhu No. 7 Special Care Hospital to investigate Situ An, whose traces are scattered throughout the facility. By exploring the dreams of its staff and patients, he learns that Situ An repeatedly tried to kill Lu Zang, using the hospital’s rules and patients’ deaths as weapons. Though he always failed, he earned Lu Zang’s respect.
• In Isolation Room No. 4, Gao Ming finds a coded record left by Situ An. It reveals that Lu Zang erased Situ An’s past and took him into other Mortal Worlds. There, different versions of Situ An communicated indirectly across diverging timelines, building a network to resist Fate and develop ways to control their own destinies.
• Gao Ming deciphers enough of the record to locate Situ An in Xinhu Blood City. He decides to investigate the city, believing it may contain a passage to other Mortal Worlds. He also plans to bring the Saviors back and provoke another Blood City War.

Character developments

• Gao Ming grows more adept at using dreams and threads of fate to uncover hidden histories. He sees Situ An as both a future target and a useful enemy of Fate.
• Situ An emerges as a determined, strategic opponent of Lu Zang. His apparent madness concealed sustained efforts to resist Lu Zang and coordinate with versions of himself across worlds.
• Lu Zang is shown to have manipulated every Candidate, while taking an especially strong interest in Situ An.

Significant themes

• Resistance to fate: The Candidates’ altered threads and Situ An’s cross-world schemes show attempts to escape or weaponize Fate’s control.
• Identity across timelines: Situ An’s versions trust that their shared identity will let them recognize clues and cooperate without meeting.
• Memory, mourning, and survival: Gao Ming’s mourning gives Bucha’s dead soul a place to return to, while the preserved objects and writings of the Candidates carry traces of their past.
• Opposition and uneasy alignment: Gao Ming may intend to kill Situ An, but recognizes that both Situ An and Lu Zang oppose Fate.

Character interactions

• Gao Ming engages with the dead through Bucha’s photograph and with the living through their dreams, using both to trace the Candidates’ histories.
• Situ An’s versions communicate across different branches of fate through coded hints, while Situ An himself once played a prolonged contest against Lu Zang.
• Gao Ming’s relationship with Situ An remains hostile, yet their shared opposition to Fate creates a temporary strategic overlap.

Plot points and events

• Gao Ming finds Zhang Mingli hiding in an employee apartment building. Zhang has survived Number Zero’s pursuit by absorbing the powers and curses left by the Saviors.
• Gao Ming asks Zhang to help revive the Saviors in Xinhu Blood City. They discover that Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals has destroyed the Taboo Players’ hideouts and blocked access to the city through the Forbidden Game.
• Zhang leads Gao Ming to a struggling theater and summons Bai Xian, a former Taboo Player who switched sides during the earlier conflict.
• Bai initially refuses to get involved. But Gao Ming uses the Dream Ghost’s power in the theater and recreates a scene from the Savior’s past: a young man performing onstage while also watching from the audience.
• The vision awakens buried memories in Zhang and Bai, and the Savior appears to sense Gao Ming. When the dream ends, two petals—one white, one red—remain and bind themselves to Gao Ming’s Blood City Ghost Markings.
• Bai agrees to help. He reveals that he has Game Pods and helmets, and that he uploaded his memories to conceal his past from Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals. He goes to a private clinic to recover them.

Character developments and interactions

• Zhang Mingli is stronger but remains skeptical of the idea of becoming an “unspeakable.” His sharp, insulting manner toward Bai gives way to a defense of Bai and Huang Ying’s decision to switch sides, explaining that it was a desperate effort to find a way forward for the Taboo Players.
• Bai Xian is guarded and controlled, carrying the burden of his past and the Savior’s fading legacy. Gao Ming’s vision stirs memories he had nearly forgotten, and he ultimately chooses to help.
• Gao Ming demonstrates the Dream Ghost’s ability to reconstruct memories and recognize traces of the Savior. He offers the Savior Hanhai Blood City’s protection, then leaves with the mysterious twin petals marked on his hand.
• The chapter’s central interactions are between Gao Ming and Zhang, who unite to seek the Saviors, and Zhang and Bai, whose tense reunion exposes old sacrifices and mistrust.

Significant themes

• Memory and erasure: The Savior’s name and Bai’s past are fading, while Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals actively suppresses the Taboo Players.
• Sacrifice and divided loyalties: Bai and Huang Ying’s apparent betrayal was, according to Zhang, a calculated sacrifice made under pressure.
• Fate and connection: The red and white petals remain entwined despite fate’s attempt to destroy them, suggesting a powerful bond or a clue about the Savior.
• Hope amid collapse: Though the Taboo Players’ bases are gone and the theater is nearly abandoned, the effort to reach Xinhu and recover the Saviors continues.