Literature / Devil Venerable Also Wants To Know

Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know (魔尊也想知道) is a xianxia and danmei Web Novel by Cyan Wings.

In one world, an author wrote a romance novel titled Abusive Romance about a powerful primordial goddess who was reincarnated as a Naïve Everygirl named Baili Qingmiao and fell hopelessly in love with Hè Wenzhao, a reincarnation of another god, that got trashed by readers who thought that Baili Qingmiao was a brainless Love Martyr for constantly going back to Hè Wenzhao and even giving up her divine nature for him in spite of him repeatedly treating her poorly and sleeping with other women. In many of these readers' opinion, Baili Qingmiao would have been far better off with Wenren È, the handsome and noble demonic cultivation sect leader who sacrificed his life to save her.

In another world, however, Wenren È receives a copy of this Abusive Romance novel and is completely bemused by it because he can't fathom how he, the coolly pragmatic Venerable Lord who only cares about advancing his cultivation and managing his eccentric and backstab-happy demonic sect, could ever fall in love with or sacrifice himself for a girl like Baili Qingmiao or how other major plot developments in the book could happen in such a seemingly illogical manner.

Armed with this book, Wenren È sets out to try to prevent his death and other undesirable plot events from occurring and also get a leg up on his enemies with his foreknowledge. Along the way, many other characters end up affecting the plot too in both comedic and dramatic ways, including but not limited to: Wenren È’s Left Protector Yin Hanjiang who's madly devoted to his lord and who Wenren È finds himself paying an increasing amount of attention to, his Right Protector Shu Yanyan who enjoys using her body and feminine wiles on hapless men, Altar Master Qiu Congxue who dangerously lacks both brains and skin, and Baili Qingmiao herself who has a knack for attracting both MacGuffins and trouble.

The novel is 82 chapters long and has an English fan translation available.

---

This novel contains examples of the following tropes:

• Above Good and Evil:
  • One of the major themes of the novel is that the world can't be divided between good and evil people and the ongoing conflict between the righteous and demonic cultivation sects isn't a Black-and-White Morality battle or even a case of maintaining the Balance Between Good and Evil, but a Grey-and-Gray Morality conflict where both sides are trying to cheat Heaven to gain power, just with differing methods, and it's far more important to make sure that neither side becomes so powerful that the human world becomes negatively affected as a result.
  • Baili Qingmiao's past primordial goddess incarnation took this view, not valuing any individual life over the rest and considering the disasters and calamities she inflicted on the mortal world to be necessary to bring about rebirth.
• Amusing Injuries: Shu Yanyan and Qiu Congxue get injured multiple times over the course of the novel in ways that are almost always Played for Laughs because 1) they're powerful cultivators who can easily recover from these injuries over time and 2) most of these injuries are a direct result of them being overly reckless or stupid.
• And Now You Must Marry Me: In the Abusive Romance book, the Violet Pavilion Master said that she would give Hè Wenzhao the herb required to cure his master only if he married her which he agreed to in spite of Baili Qingmiao's tearful protests. In the revised storyline that actually happens in the main narrative, the Violet Pavilion Master unexpectedly appears as a man and asks to marry Baili Qingmiao instead, leaving Hè Wenzhao as the one trying to protest the marriage, but the marriage ultimately doesn't happen due to Wenren È beating him to a pulp and kidnapping him for his own purposes.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Yin Hanjiang delivers one to Baili Qingmiao when she's still unable to completely let go of Hè Wenzhao in spite of knowing full well by that point that Hè Wenzhao will endanger many other people's lives if he isn't stopped.
  Yin Hanjiang: You were willing to give up everything because Hè Wenzhao taught you to value mortal lives. Now that those lives and Hè Wenzhao are placed side by side, which will you choose, Baili Qingmiao? [...] Do you actually love Hè Wenzhao, or are you just intoxicated by the feeling of infatuation? Figure it out!
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The ultimate goal of most cultivators is to become powerful enough to ascend into the immortal realm. The original Abusive Romance book ended with Baili Qingmiao and Hè Wenzhao ascending together to become immortals, while the current timeline has none of its characters ascend within its timespan, but it's virtually guaranteed that Baili Qingmiao will do so after she completes her duties as the new Shangqing sect leader and it's hinted that Wenren È and Yin Hanjiang might do the same in the future.
• At Least I Admit It: One of the main reasons the demonic cultivation sects are portrayed as A Lighter Shade of Grey than the righteous cultivation sects. The demonic cultivators may be selfish, petty, violent, and care more about their personal advancement than the well-being of the sect as a whole but they're upfront about it, whereas the righteous cultivators can be every bit as selfish, petty, violent, and backstabbing as their demonic counterparts but they try to hide it and hypocritically act like they're morally superior to them.
• Back from the Dead: Wenren È does this after about a year and a half spent in the Blood Hell. The first extra reveals that he also did this after the original ending of God of Annihilation, although it took him much longer than in the revised storyline.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: Cultivators must complete a tribulation every time they move up a level in their cultivation and a common type of this is the heavenly tribulation that sends nine lightning bolts to strike down the cultivator, each lightning bolt twice as strong as the previous one.
• Buried Alive: This happened to Yin Hanjiang when he was only five years old. He got buried in a mass grave and would have died covered with the corpses of his family and neighbors had Wenren È not pulled him out.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Baili Qingmiao and Hè Wenzhao fell in love with each other at first sight when they were young and their time together as children is stated to be the one period in the Abusive Romance book where their relationship came across as genuinely sweet.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: When Qiu Congxue's life is saved by Baili Qingmiao who underwent an extremely arduous and near-fatal trek to get the Flesh Mushroom to revive her, her immediate response is to try to kill Baili Qingmiao because the mushroom restored her flesh body and turned her into a wandering immortal who could no longer follow the hungry ghost cultivation path.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Wenren È, after failing to get the Violet Pavilion Master to tell him what he knows, hands him over to Altar Master Miao who's gleeful to have a living body to shove as many of his insects into as possible and observe the effects. The victim lasts only a week before he cracks.
• Curse That Cures: Baili Qingmiao and Zhongli Qian being infected with heart-linking parasites that cause them to feel the other's emotions, while certainly not the most convenient of situations and failing to make them fall in love with each other like Wenren È had hoped for, turns out to be a tremendous aid in helping Baili Qingmiao work towards letting go of her feelings for Hè Wenzhao because they give Zhongli Qian the ability to calm her emotions down whenever she's in danger of falling back into her obsessive infatuation with her shixiong. It also helps her out on other occasions when she's in grave danger or in a deep depression and Zhongli Qian smoothing out the worst of her emotions prevents her from becoming too panicked or suicidal.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique:
  • The Burning Sky Drum is an extremely powerful immortal artifact that can rapidly improve one's cultivation just by sitting on it, but it's so dangerous to use that the former Xuanyuan sect leader suffered a qi deviation when he tried playing it despite him being at one of the highest possible cultivation levels. When Yin Hanjiang plays it for a prolonged amount of time during the Great Sect War to give Wenren È a boost in strength, it damages him so badly that it practically liquefies his internal organs.
  • The Blood Severing Art is a cultivation technique that brings a person's body and soul to the brink of death and then fuses them together to give them unimaginable power and immortality as long as a single drop of their blood remains, but it's so dangerous that only one person in all of recorded history successfully did it ten thousand years ago and they turned into a bloodthirsty demon who cared only about consuming other cultivators' souls to feed their power. In spite of all these risks, Wenren È performs this technique on himself to be able to save his own life and Yin Hanjiang's.
• Deck of Wild Cards: Every single member of Wenren È's sect (except for Yin Hanjiang) is constantly scheming to screw each other over and would turn on Wenren È the moment they thought they could depose him as the sect leader. Wenren È actually doesn't mind this overall because it proves that his subordinates all have ambition and the will to become stronger and he's confident in his ability to put them back in their place whenever their plotting starts getting too out of hand.
• Demonic Possession:
  • Wenren È gains this ability after becoming a blood cultivator, which he uses to possess a disciple of Shangqing Sect and stroll into the sect’s grounds completely unobstructed and undetected.
  • It's revealed later on that Hè Wenzhao agreed to be possessed by a powerful spirit, not knowing his true identity as the Blood Elder Demon who plans to forcibly take over Wenzhao's body when the timing is right.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • In the original Abusive Romance book, Yin Hanjiang crossed this line after Wenren È sacrificed himself to protect Baili Qingmiao which caused him to descend into madness and vow to kill Baili Qingmiao in revenge. In the main timeline, Wenren È tries to prevent this from happening but a version of it still ends up happening when he decides to willingly go to his death in the hopes that he can come back to life stronger and underestimates how devastated Yin Hanjiang would still be by his death, although he comes back in time to prevent Yin Hanjiang from going as mad over his death as he did in the original story.
  • Baili Qingmiao experiences this after a Blood Elder Demon-controlled Hè Wenzhao tries to kill her, sinking into a profound suicidal depression that lasts for over a year and forces Zhongli Qian to take drastic measures to prevent her from being Driven to Suicide.
• Destructive Romance: Baili Qingmiao's romance with Hè Wenzhao not only constantly leaves her miserable, heartbroken, and sacrificing virtually everything she has for him while getting little or nothing in return, but it also leads to the destruction of the entire world in the ending of God of Annihilation's original storyline when she sacrifices her life to save him and the ensuing lack of any primordial deities to hold the universe together causes everything and everyone in it aside from Hè Wenzhao to collapse into a void of chaos.
• Doorstopper: The Abusive Romance book is over 800,000 words long and it takes Wenren È a full week to finish reading it. The God of Annihilation book series is even longer; the first book alone is as thick as Abusive Romance and it has two additional books.
• Esoteric Happy Ending:
  • Many In-Universe readers of Abusive Romance regarded its ending of Baili Qingmiao giving up her divine nature to be together with Hè Wenzhao to be this, expressing disgust that the female lead giving up her goddess powers for a male lead who kept mistreating her and cheating on her throughout the entire story was treated as a happy romantic ending for her.
  • Several In-Universe readers of God of Annihilation felt that its ending qualified as this. On the surface, it's a triumphant ending where Hè Wenzhao recreates the universe and brings everyone back to life, but many readers were uneasy about the implications that Hè Wenzhao was merely just creating illusionary puppets of the people he remembered and he was really all alone in the void. The first extra confirms that this is indeed what happened and Hè Wenzhao didn't take it well when he realized that none of the people he had brought back were real.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: In-Universe, a lot of readers of Abusive Romance hated Hè Wenzhao and wished that Baili Qingmiao had chosen any one of her other love interests over him, with Wenren È being the most popular option. This is even the reason for Wenren È obtaining the book in the first place, as the book chose the most popular character from the cast to be the one to improve the story.
• Foil: Wenren È and Hè Wenzhao both have subordinates who are blindly, all-consumingly devoted to them even after being warned by other characters that their obsessive love might harm them if they can't let go of it. However, Wenren È genuinely cares for Yin Hanjiang, consistently goes out of his way to help and protect him just as much as Yin Hanjiang helps and protects him in turn, and corrects his behavior the moment he realizes that he's been unintentionally stifling Yin Hanjiang's growth and failing to see him for who he really is, whereas Hè Wenzhao doesn't put much effort into considering Baili Qingmiao's feelings or how his behavior might be hurting her and constantly prioritizes himself and other women over her, which is shown to be the vital difference between one of them developing a mutually supportive romance and the other one only having a toxic one-sided romance that ultimately falls apart.
• Genre Deconstruction:
  • Baili Qingmiao's storyline, especially in the original Abusive Romance book, is one of romance novels. Abusive Romance's readers assumed based on romance genre conventions that the handsome men who protected or were otherwise kind to the heroine were all hopelessly in love with her, but when Wenren È learns more about these men's backstories that the novel didn't cover in full, he realizes that all of these men, himself included, had pragmatic or selfish non-romantic reasons for wanting to help out Baili Qingmiao and them being kind to her did not necessarily mean they were in love with her. Furthermore, her central romance with Hè Wenzhao is shown to be an unhealthy one that she needs to break free of to be able to fully mature and come into her own.
  • Hè Wenzhao's storyline is one of Harem Genre novels where the male protagonist accumulates powers and wives by the dozen. God of Annihilation painted him in a flattering light as an impressive, desirable protagonist, but in a narrative like Abusive Romance's or the main Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know story that are told from other characters' perspectives and show what they truly think of him and how they're affected by his actions, it becomes clear that Hè Wenzhao is a self-centered hypocrite who expects his girlfriends to be fine with him constantly sleeping around with other women but flies into a jealous rage whenever any of them show interest in another man. The ripple changes to the original story cause both Baili Qingmiao and the Violet Pavilion Master, his main wives in the novels, to realize that staying devoted to him will only bring them suffering in the future and they sever ties with him, with the revised story ending with him dying alone and a pariah to his sect.
• Happy Ending Override:
  • Abusive Romance ended with Baili Qingmiao and Hè Wenzhao ascending to the immortal realm together and while a lot of its readers disliked it for Why Would Anyone Take Him Back? reasons, it was still an ending where both main characters were happy and had achieved immortality. Then Wenren È learns that Hè Wenzhao was secretly possessed by a blood demon partway through Abusive Romance's events and realizes that it's very likely that this blood demon was planning to take over Hè Wenzhao's body after he became an immortal.
  • Double subverted in the first extra. It confirms that many readers' suspicions that God of Annihilation's seeming Happily Ever After ending where Hè Wenzhao resurrected everyone wasn't as happy as it seemed on the surface and that Hè Wenzhao was really all alone in the void and living out deluded fantasies surrounded by false copies of the people he knew, but it then goes on to show that Wenren È was finally able to come back from the Blood Hell during this time and ignite the birth of a new world where he and others would be given foreknowledge of future events via people being inspired to write about them in other worlds to prevent this kind of ending from happening again.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: A Buddhist monk who talks his enemies into laying down their weapons instead of fighting them sounds like a laughable opponent for Wenren È at first glance, but he actually comes the closest to defeating Wenren È out of all the righteous cultivators by using his pacifist sutras to drain away his will to fight and soothe him into setting down his weapon and surrendering. It's only Yin Hanjiang's intervention that stops Wenren È from completely succumbing to these sutras.
• Hero of Another Story: The Abusive Romance book framed Baili Qingmiao as the protagonist and even in the main narrative where Wenren È is the protagonist instead of her, it's shown that she still has her own important plot and character arc going on even when Wenren È isn't interacting with her.
• I Love You Because I Can't Control You:
  • It's implied that Shu Yanyan is attracted to Zhongli Qian mainly because his principles and gentlemanly attitude cause him to not be easily seduced or wrapped around her finger like her harem of fawning subordinates are. Well, that, and his scholarly brains.
  • It's also implied in the extras that this was the case with the past god incarnation of Hè Wenzhao and his feelings for Baili Qingmiao's primordial goddess incarnation. He realizes that he doesn't like the completely obedient and docile construct he made of Baili Qingmiao and that the thing that most attracted him to her goddess incarnation was the way she looked at him with complete indifference which made him determined to get her to look at him with affection, only to become disinterested when her human reincarnation did exactly that from the very start.
• Ignore the Fanservice: Shu Yanyan's seductions and scantily-clad body have absolutely no effect on Wenren È or Yin Hanjiang, a lesson she learned the hard way when she tried to distract Yin Hanjiang during their first fight by seducing him and he responded by punching her teeth out.
• Infinity +1 Element: There are multiple cultivation methods available, each based on a different element or concept like slaughter, ghosts, or writing, and none of them are treated as inherently better or worse than others. However, there is one form of cultivation energy that turns up late in the novel that is described as being capable of emulating all other forms of cultivation energy: the primordial chaos energy that Wenren È takes in during his stay in the Blood Hell, which is where all other forms of energy are created from.
• Intimate Healing: After Hè Wenzhao's Nascent Soul gets stolen by Shu Yanyan, Liu Xinyu has sex with him while he's unconscious to heal him but the process ends up damaging her own cultivation.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Wenren È muses a couple of times that there might exist a book somewhere that has him as the protagonist instead of Baili Qingmiao.
• Love Confessor: After Wenren È's first attempt to confess his feelings directly to Yin Hanjiang goes badly due to a mentally unstable Yin Hanjiang still believing that he's dead and that the real Wenren È would never love him back, he takes a different approach and talks to Baili Qingmiao about his feelings for Yin Hanjiang at length so that Yin Hanjiang will be able to read his words in the updating Abusive Romance book from Baili Qingmiao's perspective and realize that he truly is alive and reciprocates his feelings.
• Love Epiphany: Yin Hanjiang has one when he reads Abusive Romance's description about love "taking you unawares" and realizes it matches his feelings for Wenren È.
• Love Makes You Dumb: Wenren È concludes this after watching Baili Qingmiao go right back to fawning over Hè Wenzhao even after being presented with damning evidence of him having cheated on her with another woman and wonders out loud to Yin Hanjiang how love could make anyone act this way.
• Matchmaker Failure: Wenren È tries to matchmake Baili Qingmiao with Zhongli Qian, one of her love interests in the book, to get Baili Qingmiao to let go of her obsession with Hè Wenzhao but no romantic feelings arise between them and they become Like Brother and Sister instead.
• Mistaken for Romance:
  • After Wenren È discovers that Baili Qingmiao's past primordial goddess incarnation was the deity who enabled him to become a cultivator, he concludes that the love his Abusive Romance book self had for Baili Qingmiao was really just him feeling indebted to her and wanting to repay her for what her goddess self did for him and the book's readers mistook that for romantic affection.
  • The Abusive Romance readers also assumed that Yin Hanjiang was in love with Baili Qingmiao due to him always protecting her, until it was revealed that he was doing so only on Wenren È's orders and Wenren È dying to save her caused him to viciously hate her and secretly plot to murder her.
  • Zhongli Qian theorizes this is what happened in the original Abusive Romance in regards to his relationship with Baili Qingmiao: the readers assumed he was in love with her due to him offering to leave his clan for her, but he was really just in love with the idea of being able to break free of the fetters of his clan and hoped that he could draw courage to do so if he could convince Baili Qingmiao to do the same with her fetters to Hè Wenzhao.
• Off the Rails: Wenren È and other characters' actions cause the plot to change so much that the Abusive Romance book gets revised from a story about a masochistic heterosexual romance to a mainly non-romantic story where the female lead moves on from her unhealthy romantic obsession to become a stronger and more mature heroine and the only real romance is a gay one between two supporting male characters, turning Abusive Romance into a complete Artifact Title.
• Pair the Suitors: This happens from the perspective of Abusive Romance's readers when Wenren È and Yin Hanjiang, who were portrayed as two of Baili Qingmiao's potential love interests in the book’s original story, end up together in the revised story.
• Reading Ahead in the Script: Reading the Abusive Romance book gives Wenren È an invaluable amount of knowledge of what to expect from future events or characters he hasn't met yet. The book also starts undergoing revisions in real time when events start unfolding differently in his timeline than in the book's original plot, enabling him to regularly reread the book to catch up on recent events or see what kind of events its point-of-view character Baili Qingmiao is currently experiencing.
• Reincarnation Romance: Baili Qingmiao and Hè Wenzhao first met as gods and were reincarnated as humans who fell in love with each other. It's a far less idealistic example than the norm, however, as Baili Qingmiao's love for Hè Wenzhao is the exact thing that's preventing her from completing her cultivation and being able to ascend back to godhood.
• Rescue Romance:
  • Shu Yanyan tries to invoke this with Hè Wenzhao by staging a scene where she gets bullied by Wenren È and Yin Hanjiang to get Hè Wenzhao to swoop in to rescue her, but it goes a bit awry when Yin Hanjiang throws her out of a second-story window and Baili Qingmiao is the one who rescues her instead of Hè Wenzhao.
  • In the original Abusive Romance story, Wenren È's first encounter with Baili Qingmiao was her saving him during the Great Sect War and nursing him back to health and Zhongli Qian's first encounter with her was him saving her after she got locked up on orders of the Violet Pavilion Master. In the revised story, however, Wenren È's manipulations cause his and Zhongli Qian's first encounters with Baili Qingmiao to go very differently which results in this trope no longer taking effect at all.
• Ruling Couple: After Wenren È and Yin Hanjiang become an official couple, Wenren È promotes Yin Hanjiang from his subordinate to co-ruler of the Xuanyuan Sect.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: This is humorously shown to happen In-Universe when the readers following the revision of the Abusive Romance book become split between Baili Qingmiao/Zhongli Qian shippers complaining about Qiu Congxue third-wheeling them and Baili Qingmiao/Qiu Congxue shippers complaining about Zhongli Qian third-wheeling them.
• Single-Target Sexuality:
  • Wenren È and Yin Hanjiang both had no idea what love even was before they realized their feelings for each other.
  • Baili Qingmiao has eyes only for Hè Wenzhao, although she eventually grows out of it.
• Surrounded by Idiots:
  • Wenren È's occasional attempts to consult his subordinates for advice on how to deal with a problem consistently result in them giving him extremely unhelpful advice, usually along the lines of "kill everyone," and him having a "why did I even bother?" reaction.
  • Zhongli Qian constantly finds himself in this situation, whether it's having to singlehandedly prevent Qiu Congxue and Su Huai from killing each other or Baili Qingmiao or causing angry righteous cultivators to kill them during their thirty years of travels or being forcibly hired as Xuanyuan Sect's new Altar Master and having to deal with all the demonic cultivators' eccentricities.
• Tap on the Head: Baili Qingmiao gets knocked unconscious multiple times by Wenren È, due to him either wanting some kind of treasure that appears only if she's passed out or not wanting her to learn that he has a book following her perspective of events because that information would subsequently appear in the text of that book.
• Thunderbolt Iron: Wenren È seeks out the Shattered Mountain Meteorite artifact specifically to use it to create a new bonded weapon for Yin Hanjiang. It's revealed through later flashbacks that he also used a meteorite to forge his own bonded weapon many years ago.
• Unreliable Narrator: Wenren È comes to realize that all of the seeming plot holes in Abusive Romance actually have logical explanations for them that weren't mentioned in the book because its protagonist Baili Qingmiao wasn't aware of them.
• Weapon-Based Characterization: A cultivator's bonded weapon is designed to reflect their character. Wenren È uses a halberd that's based on the halberd his family used to have and Yin Hanjiang uses a sword because Wenren È suggested that he become a sword cultivator but his true bonded weapon turns out to be a triangular spike that's much more reflective of the more violent and ruthless aspects of his personality that he was trying to keep hidden from Wenren È.
• What Does She See in Him?: Everyone, book readers and demonic cultivators alike, are left wondering why Baili Qingmiao is so single-mindedly devoted to a man who has repeatedly proven himself utterly incapable of being faithful to her or prioritizing her feelings over his own or other people's.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: The demonic cultivators of Xuanyuan Sect have next to no idea of what romantic love is, to the point where Wenren È thinks that infecting people with parasites that force them to feel each other's emotions is a great way to get them to fall in love and Altar Master Shi mistakes a kissing scene he sees as one person trying to suck out the other's spiritual essence.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: If a cultivator doesn't develop their mental state to match with their cultivation power, it can lead to them being overcome by their inner demons and losing control of their cultivation. This is why cultivation paths like the Path of Slaughter that are easier to level up in compared to most other paths are also more difficult to complete than most other paths because it's easy for the cultivator's power to outstrip and overwhelm their mental focus or sanity.