Reverend Insanity (; also rendered in English as Daoist Gu and Gu Daoist Master) is a Chinese xianxia web novel written by Gu Zhen Ren (), an author whose pen name is identical to the novel's title. It was serialized on the online platform Qidian from 2012 until its removal in 2019, and comprises 2,334 chapters across six volumes. The published text stops immediately before its final battle, and no ending has ever been written. In 2019 the novel was removed from Chinese platforms during a national campaign against online literature, and officials cited content promoting what they described as unhealthy values of violence, cruelty, and extreme individualism.
The novel follows Fang Yuan (), a transmigrator from modern Earth who has already lived five hundred years in the story's world when it opens. Facing destruction at the hands of an alliance of "righteous path" forces, he activates the time-reversing Spring Autumn Cicada () and wakes in his fifteen-year-old body with five centuries of memories intact. Across his second life he pursues a single objective, eternal life, through scheming and cultivation and an unconstrained willingness to sacrifice anyone who stands in its way. Power in the setting revolves around gu (), living creatures described in the work's tagline as "the true essence of heaven and earth", each of which grants exactly one ability to the cultivator who refines and wields it.
The work is noted for its amoral villain protagonist, a deliberate inversion of xianxia conventions that the author set out in the preface to the serialization, and Fang Yuan has become one of Chinese web fiction's best-known villains. The character's values were central to the official case for removing the novel. The literary portal of the state-run newspaper Guangming Daily had already assessed the book in 2017 as the strongest work of the "dark school" of web fiction since Yan Yu Jiangnan's Xiedu (, 2003), and warned its readers that the author's own outlook should not be confused with that of his protagonist.
After its removal from Qidian, the novel developed a substantial international readership through unofficial fan translations, and an official English edition ran on Webnovel. Domestic discussion of the book survived its ban, and in a 2024 fan ballot conducted by Qidian the author's subsequent novel took first place in what Chinese media described as a demonstration of the persistence of the book's readership.
Plot
The novel is told in the third person and follows a single protagonist across two lifetimes. Its six published volumes are summarised below in order.
Volume 1: Demonic Nature Never Changes (199 chapters)
The narrative opens at the end of Fang Yuan's first life. A transmigrator from modern Earth, he has spent five hundred years in the Gu World rising from a junior of the Gu Yue clan to a feared overlord of the demonic path. Encircled on a mountain summit by the sects of the righteous path and denounced for the slaughter he committed to refine his signature gu, he detonates the Spring Autumn Cicada and tears his soul back five hundred years into his fifteen-year-old body on Qing Mao Mountain in the Southern Border.
The mountain is held by three villages of Gu Masters, the Gu Yue, the Bai and the Xiong, whose fortunes rest on a spirit spring beneath the Gu Yue caverns that produces primeval stones. At the Aperture Opening Ceremony Fang Yuan tests as a grade-C talent, the same verdict that humiliated him the first time, while his twin brother Fang Zheng is judged superior and taken into a senior clansman's household. Rather than accept the clan's charity he works from memory. He baits the three-hundred-year-old trail of the Flower Wine Monk, a demonic Gu Master killed in the clan's own history, with jars of green bamboo wine, and the wine bug he catches as a vital gu leads him to the corpse, the inheritance, and a recording gu whose wall replays the truth of how the clan's venerated fourth patriarch actually died.
What follows is the novel's demonstration of method. Fang Yuan kills a merchant's son in the hidden cave and frames a rival family; he extorts primeval stones from classmates and cultivates the reputation the clan expects while robbing it in silence. When a wolf tide breaks over the mountain in the same season that a rank-five constable arrives to investigate the murders, the two crises collide: the clan's first ancestor rises as a blood corpse, the mountain begins to collapse, and Fang Yuan refines the man-beast burial gu by sacrificing a child of the clan before seizing the yin-yang rebirth gu to drag the dying Bai Ning Bing back to life and into a woman's body under his control. He leaves the ruins of his own home with the inheritance of White Bone Mountain, taken while impersonating his brother.
Volume 2: Demonic Youth Leaves the Mountain (206 chapters)
The caravans that cross the Ten Thousand Mountains are the only artery of the Southern Border, and Fang Yuan travels out with one, under the alias Hei Tu, attaching himself to the Shang trading family and shielding its young mistress Shang Xin Ci from the politics of her own house while the road lets him rebuild his cultivation in the open. The volume's centrepiece is the decennial opening of the Three Kings blessed land, where three inheritances left by dead Gu Immortals and the tortoise land spirit that administers them draw every power in the region, all of them racing a land that is visibly collapsing.
It is here that Fang Yuan suffers the first serious defeat of his second life. Betrayed by Bai Ning Bing and the Tie family and taken prisoner with his prize in reach, he detonates the Spring Autumn Cicada a second time rather than lose everything, and the rebirth does not return him to the same place. He emerges at the Hu Immortal blessed land in Central Continent, kills the competitors already inside, and takes the blessed land and its Soul Shaking Mountain for himself, the first base of operations in the novel that is genuinely his.
Volume 3: Demon Plunges the World into Chaos (244 chapters)
Fang Yuan spends his early years in the Hu Immortal blessed land converting it into an industrial base, purging the stone people of Soul Shaking Mountain when they obstruct his monopoly and farming the land's resources through the world's gu exchange. A calamity beyond his preparation drives him north: he transmits to the Northern Plains, kills the steppe hero Chang Shan Yin, takes the dead man's face and name, and becomes the wolf king that a tribal confederation needs, herding a great pack of wolves through the rivalries of the grasslands and into the decennial contest for the imperial court.
That contest opens the blessed land of Giant Sun Immortal Venerable and the Eighty-Eight Cornered True Yang Building, the treasure house the dead Venerable built for his blood descendants, administered by the Venerable's own will. Fang Yuan descends into it with a copy of its blueprints obtained from the Lang Ya blessed land, exploits the knowledge he carried over from his first life, and walks out with the volume's decisive prize, the rank-nine Wisdom Gu, along with the forced ascension of the gu immortal Tai Bai Yun Sheng and a rank-eight luck gu that ends up in the hands of the slave-born Ma Hong Yun. He sabotages the building as he leaves and brings it down; a symbol of the Northern Plains falls, the region reorganises around the loss, and Fang Yuan ascends to Gu Immortal status in the ruin he made.
Volume 4: Demon Lord Roams Unchecked (372 chapters)
The fourth volume is where the protagonist stops being a talented mortal and becomes an institution. Its centrepiece is the war at Yi Tian Mountain, four conflicts layered on one battlefield: a mortal free-for-all staged for reputation, a Gu Immortal battle over a rank-eight immortal gu house, Shadow Sect's ritual to refine the Supreme Immortal Fetus gu with ten extreme physiques as its sacrificial foci, and the two rival designs of Shadow Sect and Heavenly Court underneath them all. Fang Yuan has by now lost his original body and is living as an immortal zombie, a dead man whose cultivation cannot advance.
He survives by the only route open to him. In the final hour of the battle he swaps souls with Ying Wu Xie and takes the Supreme Immortal Fetus gu out of the ritual, and the body it grows for him is something the world has no place for. He becomes a complete Otherworldly Demon: a being of no lineage and no place in the world's destined order, immune to the Fate Gu's killing move and able to cultivate every path at once, since the dao marks he accumulates no longer conflict with one another. The gu has a cost that shapes the rest of the novel, since it must be fed by devouring immortal apertures of a matching rank, and so his advancement becomes a campaign of swallowing other people's worlds whole. When the head of Shadow Sect dies, the sect itself falls to him, and the zombie alliance that had been its instrument is spent in the process.
Volume 5: Demon King Reigns Supreme (945 chapters)
The longest volume opens at Fang Yuan's lowest ebb and ends with him remaking the world's politics. As an immortal zombie his cultivation is frozen and he is hunted across five regions, and two set pieces define the volume. The first is the Reverse Flow River, a secret realm in which no gu may be used, the current runs against every thought of progress, and the river itself has no end; by walking upstream for as long as it takes he refines the Perseverance gu inside his own body and becomes only the second master of the river in history, after Primordial Lotus Immortal Venerable of Heavenly Court.
The second is the Fate Gu. Through the long middle of the novel Heavenly Court has been restoring the rank-nine Fate Gu it has guarded since antiquity, the object through which destiny is administered over all living things, and Fang Yuan leads coalitions of the regions against it twice. In the second assault he reaches the tower where it is kept and shatters it with his own hands. The world does not end. The walls between the five regions dissolve, qi tides sweep the two heavens, the hidden grotto-heavens of past ages stand suddenly exposed, and the Venerables of history begin returning through the arrangements they left behind, so that the novel's politics become a war of the dead conducted by their surviving schemes.
Volume 6: Demon Venerable, Eternal Life (368 chapters)
With destiny broken, the last volume is a race among the revived Venerables for the two conditions of immortality, the Primordial Realm (), which holds the secrets of every cultivation path, and the Ice of Facts (), which can rewrite the world's laws. Fang Yuan walks into the Mad Demon Cave, the ruin built by an ancient Venerable to deduce the workings of heaven, and comes out of its ninth layer as a Venerable of the refinement path, the first living person to hold that rank in the modern era.
He proclaims himself the Great Love Immortal Venerable, a name his enemies answer with Heaven Refining Demon Venerable, and founds the Heaven and Earth One Family Great Love Alliance from the Eastern Sea at the age of fifty-seven. Its currency is access to him: he will refine any gu up to the eighth rank for anyone who can pay the price, which makes him the hub of the world's economy and the patron of its non-human peoples, and his rhetoric of harmony among the five regions borrows the language of the long-dead Paradise Earth Immortal Venerable, whose last wishes he claims to have received. Three Venerables now stand over the world, and the novel's final published movement is the convergence of Fang Yuan, Star Constellation Immortal Venerable and Giant Sun Immortal Venerable on Heavenly Court itself. The text breaks off there, mid-battle, with the eternal life that has driven the protagonist across two lifetimes still unwon.
Setting