Chapter Summaries

Key events

• Once the Hellfire has fully wrapped around the dead branch, Jiang Yu emerges from hiding, reassuring the group that she is herself—not the death-affected version they feared.
• She explains that the rest of her is returning through the Xuanhuang Wood, which is channeling gains she made in another dimension. Poseidon and her Avatar have already returned and are in deep meditation.
• Jiang Yu reports that the World Origin is nearly done absorbing the advanced magical knowledge in the Black Gem. When it turns its attention back to the world, World Ascension may begin in earnest—and sooner than expected.
• The group hopes this means they can eventually return home, but Zhang Jixin stresses that they must first survive World Ascension and ensure the branch burns completely.
• Xiao Xiao explains that the Hellfire’s apparent heat is not ordinary temperature: it reflects each person’s sins. Those with few or no sins feel little, while the gravely sinful feel as if they are burning from within.

Character developments and interactions

• Jiang Yu’s return comforts the group, and her warm, familiar manner puts them at ease. Her account of her gains and the Black Cat’s help confirms her identity.
• Zhang Jixin shows practical resolve and surprising philosophical insight, arguing that the group should value World Ascension rather than chase an impossible chance to reach Jiang Yu’s other realm. The Fat Wizard jokes that Zhang may be possessed, prompting a comic scuffle.
• The Fat Wizard’s longing for home comes out through an elaborate list of foods he misses; the Furry Dragon responds by drooling, while Dylan collects its saliva and mocks the Wizard’s priorities.
• Blue Sparrow confirms that she, like Jiang Yu, feels no heat from the Hellfire. Xiao Xiao’s explanation shifts the group’s understanding of the ritual’s flames.

Significant themes

• Home and endurance: The prospect of returning home gives the group hope, but survival remains their immediate responsibility.
• Chance and acceptance: Zhang Jixin frames unexpected opportunities as blessings that cannot be forced.
• Sin and judgment: The Hellfire acts as a measure of moral burden, making guilt or wrongdoing feel physically painful.
• Connection and transformation: Jiang Yu’s return through the Xuanhuang Wood shows how bonds and magical conduits can carry change across dimensions.

Key plot points and events

• The group discusses why the Fat Wizard is suffering Hellfire’s effects: Xiao Xiao and Dylan argue that, unlike Sister Yu and Blue Sparrow—whose merit offsets their sin—he has accumulated plenty of sin through gluttony, anger, pride, and laziness.
• The Fat Wizard realizes that even his dried fish came from the Small World’s silver rivers, proving his obsession with food. His attention soon shifts to grilling Dragon meat over the Hellfire burning the Dead Branch.
• Big Mao retreats from the Fat Wizard when he threatens to cook Dragon meat, while Xiao Xiao offers to prepare a Detoxifier if the experiment goes badly.
• The group observes that the branch’s shadow has fractured into writhing threads. The Diviner suspects they are tangible causal lines, which Hellfire is burning away along with the branch’s accumulated sin.
• As the branch sheds layer after layer, the shadow fades. Zhang Jixin compares the process to dismantling a tower, with deeper, more tangled causality likely to burn more slowly. Dylan, however, is more interested in the barbecue.

Character developments and interactions

• The Fat Wizard’s appetite remains unstoppable: even criticism and danger do little to distract him from food. He has also prepared Dragon meat years in advance.
• Xiao Xiao and Dylan tease and judge the Fat Wizard, while Zhang Jixin adds a more serious explanation of the branch’s burning.
• The group’s discussion blends moral speculation with affectionate mockery, but they remain alert to the strange and potentially dangerous effects of the Hellfire.

Significant themes

• Merit, sin, and consequence: The characters debate whether merit can offset sin and whether the Fat Wizard’s habits have earned him punishment.
• Causality and moral residue: The branch’s shadow may embody tangled causal lines, and Hellfire appears to burn them away layer by layer.
• Comedy amid danger: The group investigates a mysterious process while the Fat Wizard and Dylan keep returning to food.

Key events

• The Fat Wizard cooks Dragon Tenderloin over a burning Deadwood Branch, insisting that cumin would spoil its authentic flavor. The meat quickly turns gray, dry, and rock-like, with a tomb-like smell.
• The hunters each refuse it for their own reasons: Dylan objects to being mistaken for a zombie, Zhang Jixin claims he is unqualified to appreciate fine food, Jiang Yu cites a need to eat vegetarian, and the Furry Dragon cannot eat its own kind. Xiao Xiao takes a skewer to preserve for experiments.
• Unwilling to waste scarce food, the Fat Wizard eats the meat himself. It has no flavor and a texture like dry rope, chalk, and ash, but he declares it edible and keeps eating despite turning vivid blue.
• Zhang Jixin eventually tries a piece and says it has a distinctive flavor. Dylan tastes some too. Once the meat is passed around, however, the Fat Wizard starts retching. Zhang and Dylan promptly beat him for not holding it in long enough, while he rinses his mouth with Siren Rum.

Character developments and interactions

• The Fat Wizard’s thrift and stubbornness are on display: even an appalling meal is better, in his view, than wasting food. His insistence on calling it edible becomes comic bravado.
• The others tease and evade him, using excuses or blunt observations to avoid eating. Their mockery turns to wary curiosity once he insists the meat is tolerable.
• Zhang Jixin and Dylan move from skepticism to trying the meat, then unite in anger when the Fat Wizard’s retching exposes how bad it really is. Xiao Xiao’s willingness to take a sample contrasts with everyone else’s reluctance.

Significant themes

• Frugality versus enjoyment: The Fat Wizard’s “no wasting food” principle outweighs both taste and common sense.
• Camaraderie through comic conflict: The group’s banter, excuses, and eventual scuffle show their familiar, irreverent rapport.
• Appearance and reality: The Fat Wizard keeps claiming the meat is edible, but its awful appearance, texture, and smell—and finally his reaction—tell a different story.

Plot points and events

• Hellfire completely consumes the Deadwood Branch, leaving a strip of cold, dry white ash. Xiao Xiao declares it thoroughly dead and detects nothing abnormal.
• The fire grows larger and more powerful after consuming the branch. Xiao Xiao seals it in a glass bottle with talismans, where it takes on the clearer form of a dragon with golden eyes and a hint of awareness.
• Dylan and the Fat Wizard collect every speck of ash, arguing that containing the remains will prevent further trouble. Jiang Yu and Xiao Xiao inspect them and decide not to feed them to the Xuanhuang Wood: doing so might revive fragments of Death or create a new will.
• Jiang Yu senses that her missing parts—and the world’s ascension—are both drawing very near.

Character developments and interactions

• Dylan is wary of the Hellfire dragon’s growing sentience and briefly wonders whether Death could return through it. The Fat Wizard persuades him to help gather the ashes with his irreverent, self-serving logic.
• Xiao Xiao takes charge of containing the increasingly dangerous Hellfire and evaluating the remains. He cautions Jiang Yu against depending too much on Black Cat.
• Jiang Yu admits that she deliberately relies on Black Cat to give him another anchor in the world. Aware that she cannot reach his level, she chooses to depend on him rather than pretend otherwise.
• Xiao Xiao teases Jiang Yu by comparing her reasoning to Poseidon, whom he suggests may be her daughter. Jiang Yu takes the remark as a compliment.
• Zhang Jixin joins Jiang Yu and Xiao Xiao and asks about her missing parts; she answers that their return is imminent.

Significant themes

• Death, sin, and transformation: Hellfire burns away the branch’s karmic residue, leaving only inert ash, while absorbing its power and becoming more formidable.
• Containment versus revival: The characters must decide whether the remains are safe to reuse or might regenerate a dangerous will; they choose caution.
• Dependence and connection: Jiang Yu consciously treats reliance on Black Cat as a way to anchor him in the world, reframing vulnerability as an act of attachment.
• Impending change: The approaching return of Jiang Yu’s missing parts and the world’s ascension signal that a major transition is close.

Jiang Yu’s enormous consciousness struggled to return from World’s End to her small body, but Black Cat had prepared a way for it to descend through the xuanhuang wood. The chapter ended as a branch emerged from a crack in the sky, beginning the process of bringing her consciousness down.

• Jiang Yu explained that her consciousness had grown so vast that leaving World’s End and returning to her body would be difficult.
• Xiao Xiao, Zhang Jixin, and Fatty Xin discussed how Jiang Yu might strengthen her body or otherwise accommodate her consciousness.
• Xiao Xiao warned the group about Fatty Xin’s bag of Death Ashes, and Jiang Yu took it for the communal treasury.
• Dylan spotted a long branch descending through a crack in the pale green sky.
• Jiang Yu explained that the xuanhuang wood would gather her dispersed consciousness through its branches and draw it down through the trunk.

A luminous bud descended from the cracked sky, prompting the group to worry that Jiang Yu’s consciousness might emerge or become distorted. It opened into a purple-marked peach, leaving the group facing an unexplained object that seemed connected to her.

• Zhang Jixin wondered whether a little Jiang Yu would emerge from the bud, while Fatty Xin worried about the effects of merging with another consciousness.
• Xiao Xiao assured the group that the divinations showed great fortune, and several others cast yarrow stalks that also produced auspicious results.
• Xiao Xiao recorded the bud’s pulse, and Jiang Yu noted that it matched her heartbeat.
• As the bud descended, Jiang Yu reached out and touched it while it contracted, causing cracks to spread across its surface.
• The bud’s shell vanished in a burst of light, revealing a purple-marked peach with a faint fragrance.

Jiang Yu plucked a mysterious peach from the tree as the young wizards discussed its enticing fragrance and resemblance to legendary fruits. She decided to save it for World Ascension and sealed it inside a jade box.

• Fatty Xin, Dylan, and Zhang Jixin reacted to the peach’s fragrance and recalled the Xuanhuang Fruit, while Jiang Yu proposed sharing future fruit at a Xuanhuang Conference.
• Dylan compared the peach to a Peach of Immortality, and Fatty Xin argued with him as Xiao Xiao recorded details of the fruit and the visions from the shattered bud.
• Jiang Yu plucked the peach, and the branch sprang into the crack in the sky before the gap closed.
• Jiang Yu said she would wait until World Ascension to eat the peach and placed it in a jade box, which sealed itself and became indistinguishable from an ordinary piece of jade.

Poseidon and Little Jade woke after their time in a higher realm and compared what they had experienced and learned. Little Jade worried her memories of the Lunar Law’s Grid World were fading, and the conversation ended when Poseidon reminded her that her husband was a Legend.

• Poseidon woke in her fox form, changed into human form, and noticed the unusually pure fragrance coming from a piece of green jade.
• Poseidon and Little Jade observed that Little Jade’s presence had become more independent and mature.
• Poseidon described the golden-red river, abyss-like eyes, auroras of laws, and Mother Jiang’s immense face that she had seen.
• Little Jade described absorbing magical theories and laws in the Lunar Law’s Grid World, but said the memories were already fading.
• Poseidon reassured Little Jade that losing the experience would not prevent them from becoming Grand Wizards, then pointed out that Little Jade’s husband was a Legend.

Little Jade explained to Poseidon that the Jiang Yu currently in charge was also an Avatar, so she had no need to seize power or oppose her. Poseidon learned that Jiang Yu was inspecting the Xuanhuang Wood below the elevated Central Hall, and worried that a conflict might mean stricter discipline for her.

• Poseidon asked if Little Jade planned to rebel, and Little Jade said she wanted independence but did not need to usurp the current Jiang Yu, who was also an Avatar.
• Little Jade explained that the current Jiang Yu had returned only a small portion of her consciousness from heaven while the rest was stored for World Ascension.
• Little Jade told Poseidon that Jiang Yu was inspecting the Xuanhuang Wood below the hall, which had been raised after more than a week of work.
• Poseidon learned that she had slept for nine days and tied her tail beneath her skirt before Jiang Yu returned.
• Poseidon hoped Little Jade and Jiang Yu would fight so she could avoid homework, but Little Jade warned that both Avatars would remain aligned with the True Self's judgments.