Literature / Reverend Insanity

“I failed in the end.” Fang Yuan sighed in his heart emotionally, yet there were no regrets.

This end result was something he had foreseen. When he made his decision in the beginning, he had prepared himself for this.

To be a demon is to be merciless and cruel, a murderer and destroyer. There is no place in heaven or earth for such a thing – turning into an enemy to the world, still having to face the consequences.

“If the Spring Autumn Cicada that I have just cultivated is effective, I shall still be a demon in my next life!” With this thought, Fang Yuan couldn’t help but let out a big laugh.

“Wicked demon, what are you laughing about?”

“Be careful everyone, the demon is going to attack before his final moments!”

“Hurry up and surrender the Spring Autumn Cicada!!”

The group of warlords surged forward; at this moment, with a loud bang, Fang Yuan was engulfed in a blinding surge of energy.

Chapter 1

Reverend Insanity, or Gu Daoist Master, is a xianxia serialized webnovel by Gu Zhen Ren, first published by Qidian before being banned by the Chinese government shortly before the author could could release the last few chapters.

The story began hundreds of years ago when Fang Yuan, a former Chinese official from Earth, is mysteriously reincarnated into a world that practices magic through the use of Gu, which are magical insects in Chinese folklore, which grant their owners, Gu Masters, magical powers. He lives for several centuries, during which he suffers through several traumas which disabuse of him of his previous ethical code, and climaxes with him successfully creating or "refining" a Gu which permits the user to return up the River of Time to their past, which leads to numerous factions of the world banding together to kill him, in which he activates the time-turning Gu, the Spring-Autumn Cicada, for the first time.

Having successfully returned to his past as a young teenager with all the knowledge and beliefs of adult he grew into, he remains committed to his amoral worldview and to reaching his ultimate goal of eternal life regardless of who, or what stands in his way.

The novel in Chinese stands at over 2,300 chapters long, and an ongoing English translation is available at Qidian's English language platform, Webnovel.

Reverend Insanity contains examples of the following tropes:

• Actual Pacifist: Paradise Earth Immortal Venerable had absolutely no offensive moves, preferring to instead reform his enemies, and yet still managed to become one the strongest Gu Immortal of his era. In fact, he purposefully took up this mentality because his predecessor, Spectral Soul Demon Venerable, had the highest murder count among the Venerables and his time as Venerable caused the world to descend into chaos. Even Paradise Earth’s inheritances are known to be completely safe by all those wishing to try and attain them.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Unfortunately for Gu Masters and Gu Immortals, the higher Rank they attain, the harder and more costly refining Gu becomes. A plot point even shows how a Rank 8 Gu Immortal with many years of accumulated resources had to use up most of it (and steal even more) just to attempt to refine a single Rank 8 Gu.
• Baddie Flattery: Fang Yuan tends to express respect for his more dangerous antagonists; for instance, he notes that Tie Ruo Nan is incredibly dangerous because she is someone who has found her purpose in life and wholeheartedly committed to it.
• Becoming the Mask: Fang Yuan lies to Tai Bai Yun Sheng that he’s an senior disciple of Purple Mountain True Monarch, Tai Bai’s master whom he has only met once, in order to gain the old man’s trust. When Purple Mountain True Monarch, who liked the name Fang Yuan gave him and appropriated it, passes, he fully transfers over all his inheritance and his position as Shadow Sect leader over to Fang Yuan. Essentially officially making Fang Yuan his disciple as well as successor.
• Big Brother Bully: Fang Yuan is this to his younger brother, Fang Zheng. It starts off with him extorting money from Fang Zheng and escalates over the course of the story to attempted Sibling Murder.
• Birds of a Feather: The basis of Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing’s mutual respect for each other. They both acknowledge the other is just as insane as them and are both likely to toss the other aside the moment it’s beneficial to them. And yet it’s because of this relationship they end up trusting each other more often than not.
• Blessed with Suck: The Ten Extreme Physiques grant you incredible power - having one is the only way to have 100% mortal aperture capacity, and they each grant unbelievable capabilities in one specific field, strong enough to fight people a rank above you. Unfortunately, they overburden the mortal body, meaning that they can explode and kill you at any time; this chance increases as you grow more powerful, and having one forces you to steadily become more powerful even if you actively try to improve your cultivation until it near-inevitably kills you, usually within a few years of starting cultivating. You can avoid this if you manage to reach rank 6 and become an immortal... but in addition to the already sky-high one-in-ten-thousand difficulty everyone else faces when trying to become an immortal, anyone with one of the Ten Extreme Physiques also requires an Immortal Gu to accomplish it, which are so rare that even most immortals don't have one. And even if they succeed in becoming a Gu Immortal, their tribulations will be significantly harder than a normal Immortal and come at them in shorter spans of times.
• Bloody Murder: Blood Path is a path that gives its users mastery over blood and high combat prowess. However, it is considered a demonic path and any public cultivators following it is targeted by the righteous factions.
• Born Winner: Red Lotus Demon Venerable was born a genius and received blessing after blessing thanks to being fated to succeed. Which makes the first time he truly experiences the downsides to fate, his wife being fated to die, hit much harder.
• Can't Catch Up: Given Fang Yuan’s rate of growth, most characters introduced early on are no match for him later on. Fang Yuan’s brother, Fang Zheng, is the one hardest hit as he lived his life in his brother’s shadow and even when it seemed like life blessed him with more talent as a Gu Master than Fang Yuan, his confidence is shattered when his brother keeps beating him and overshadowing his achievements.
• Cast from Lifespan: Many techniques use up lifespan in exchange for power or information. Usually such techniques are last resorts given the difficulty in finding lifespan gu, the only reliable way to extend one’s lifespan with no side effects.
• The Chosen One:
  • The prophesied Great Dream Immortal Venerable, Feng Jin Huang.
  • Every Venerable has at some point in their lives been targeted by others because they were fated to become Venerables in the future.
• The Clan: The most common administrative structure in the world is clans, which rule over territories and may ally or war with their neighbors.
• Death-Activated Superpower: Fang Yuan's Spring-Autumn Cicada requires him to blow himself up for a chance to ferry his soul back up the River of Time to a point in his past, which makes it a fraught last resort rather than something he can use all the time.
• Desperate Plea for Home: Thieving Heaven Demon Venerable spent his whole life trying to find ways to go back to his world and to see his loved ones again. Whether or not he succeeded is unknown.
• Determinator: Fang Yuan has extremely strong willpower which allows him to do anything necessary for his goal and avoid distractions;be they negative traits like greed and addiction, or positive traits like sympathy and kindness. He has the ability to withstand any sort of pain without external aid and does not back down when insulted. He is so determined in fact, that he succeeds in refining the Perseverance Gu while trudging through the Reverse Flow River (a river that grows in length so one can never reach the end unless they have the Perseverance Gu)
• Discard and Draw: At or near the start of each new book, circumstances generally force Fang Yuan to give up most of the gu worms he relied on in the previous book and find new ones, shuffling his capabilities in the process. The most extreme example of this probably at the start of Book 5 when he acquires a new body, gaining incredible physical powers and potential, but losing virtually all his old powers in the process.
• Doom Magnet: The side effect of using Spring Autumn Cicada is turning the user into one. Every time Spring Autumn Cicada is used, the user’s luck goes to rock bottom levels, making it likely for the user to be killed by their bad luck or fail to activate Spring Autumn Cicada the next time it’s used.
• Doomed Hometown: When Fang Yuan first rebirths, he is in his small hometown, which he knows from his time traveling is doomed to be destroyed, limiting the time he has in which to train before he needs to escape. Subverted as Fang Yuan's plans change and he ends up destroying it himself for power.
• The Dreaded: Every Venerable was this to some degree but Thieving Heaven Demon Venerable was especially feared for his ability to steal the Immortal Gu of others. He was so feared in fact, many just gave him whatever he wanted or let him borrow their Immortal Gu if he appeared before them, knowing Thieving Heaven Demon Venerable was an honorable man who only stole what he needed for his goal to return back to his world.
• Dying Race: The Beastman variant human race was once common throughout the world but over time, their numbers dwindled further and further, thanks to their violent nature preventing them from lying low like the rest of the variant humans, until they’ve become outright extinct in the modern day.
• Evil Virtues: Fang Yuan has several; ambition, decisiveness, flexibility, and determination are the most obvious, but he also has a less prejudiced mindset than most of the other people in his setting, partially out of objective recognition of threats and potential and partially because of his experiences as a transmigrator from Earth. He notes that women are as dangerous as men, and he specifically rejects the ideology of racial superiority most humans have towards variant humans (even having fallen in love with a mermaid at some time in his previous life), thinking to himself that he would happily give up his humanity to achieve his goals - as far as he's concerned, the only thing that matters is whether someone is a threat to his quest for immortality or not.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Red Lotus Demon Venerable ensures most of his inheritance will only go to an immortal who refined his Spring Autumn Cicada. And with his mastery over time, he knows the individual who will inherit it and his desire to completely destroy Fate Gu is Fang Yuan, an otherworldly demon who appears a million years later.
• Foil: Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing are both amoral demonic path Gu masters with strong willpower and disregard for life. However, there are differences in their personalities: Fang Yuan is cold, calculating, emotionless, pragmatic and never does anything without profit. Bai Ning Bing is hot-blooded, aggressive, belligerent and is willing to harm others or himself just for fun or anger. Interestingly enough, despite being more belligerent and emotion-driven than Fang Yuan, Bai Ning Bing has one moral line- which is being kind to those who help her with genuine intentions.
• Friendly Zombie: Zombies are almost entirely Gu Masters who, upon reaching the end of their lifespan, wanted to continue living and turned themselves into zombies while keeping their rationality. Despite their decay issues and some stigma, they are no more or less friendly than anyone else.
• Gender Bender: Bai Ning Bing, following the First Law of Gender Bending. Bai Ning Bing is very angry about the outcome and reversing it becomes a driving obsession for them. Becoming a Gu Immortal usually undoes any mortal gu effect on the individual but because of the special way Bai Ning Bing uses to become a Gu Immortal, it instead turns them female and now that they’re an Immortal, only an Immortal Gu level version of the Yang Gu can turn Bai Ning Bing male again.
• Good Is Dumb:
  • This trope is subverted repeatedly, including by the Paradise Earth Immortal Venerable (who was the Big Good for much of the setting), by Shang Xin Ci (who is kind and caring to a fault, but still intelligent) and by much of the Tie Clan (who, as an entire Inspector Javert clan, largely embody Good is Not Nice, but are mostly genuinely committed to justice while being intelligent investigators when pursuing it.) In particular, in volume 1, Tie Xue Leng identifies Fang Yuan as a demonic cultivator shortly after meeting him, and it only takes his daughter, Tie Ruo Nan, a few days to prove almost every one of his crimes and nearly every suspicious inconsistency in his actions to date.
• Human Subspecies: There are many species of "variant humans" who exist alongside pure humans, and all of them can interbreed. Their existence is involved in millions of years of Fantastic Racism.
• Hypocrite: Fang Yuan’s hatred of those following the so called Righteous Path stems from them proclaiming their ways to be right and moral but are just as bad as the demonic cultivators behind the scenes. For example, any cultivator following Blood Path is immediately targeted and killed by the righteous factions but Fang Yuan knows they secretly research Blood Path and have many Blood Path methods and Gu because Blood Path is too useful an ability to not have.
• I Just Want to Be Free: Most of what motivates Fang Yuan is his desire to live life according to his feelings, regardless of society’s rules or any outside influence. Only this way does he feel like he’s alive.
• Immortality Seeker: Fang Yuan will do anything to obtain immortality. Emphasis on Anything.
• I Regret Nothing: Fang Yuan’s overall goal is to attain eternal life but if he perishes along the way, he is ultimately fine with that and will die with no regrets as he lived his life the way he wanted. The proof he has no regrets comes when he is warned against touching Regret Gu before refining it, as it will cause him thousands of years of pain if he has regrets when touching it. Fang Yuan grabs the Gu and refines it immediately, proving he doesn’t regret a single action he ever took.
• Kill the Ones You Love: Duke Long exterminates his entire Dragonman bloodline and all of his descendants in order to prevent them from surpassing humans.
• Loophole Abuse: Fang Yuan is shocked when Wisdom Gu refuses to follow through on their deal simply because it doesn’t recognize Fang Yuan in his new body, requiring Fang Yuan to get back his original zombie body from Shadow Sect and remove the soul path traps on it before he can use the light of wisdom again.
• Loved by All: Thanks to Paradise Earth Immortal Venerable healing the world after Spectral Soul Demon Venerable threw it into chaos, Paradise Earth is the most beloved of all the Venerables.
• More than Mind Control: Fang Yuan finds himself a victim of Mo Yao’s will subtly influencing him to make decisions that harm him, such as making him choose to try and kill Ma Hong Yun when helping him would have been more beneficial in his situation. Mo Yao does this because she’s hoping Fang Yuan will ruin himself so much, he’s forced to activate Spring Autumn Cicada to go back into the past. At which point, Mo Yao will take over and use the Gu to go back to her body when she was alive and stop her husband, Bo Qing, from dying during his tribulation.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Spectral Soul Demon Venerable is an Omnicidal Maniac who solves every problem he encounters, no matter what, by killing people. He only created the Soul path as a secondary choice when he found that creating the Killing path was too difficult.
• Pocket Dimension: At a certain level of power, Gu Masters will develop a Small, Secluded World in which developing the ecosystem plays a key role in further advancement.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Although they are more antagonists than villains since Fang Yuan is a Villain Protagonist, the Heavenly Court is devoted solely to the advancement of "true" humans and considers the lives of variant human races to have no value whatsoever (even though they are largely just the fantasy equivalent of Rubber-Forehead Aliens.) Several characters, such as Fang Zheng, express disgust at this and overtly describe them as racist.
• The Power of Love: Love exists literally as an aware force embodied in Love Gu, which gives the owner of it enormous powers, but can also exact a huge cost while also being random in what it gives its user. Perhaps the greatest use of Love Gu is when Red Lotus Demon Venerable used it to gravely injure Fate Gu, only failing to destroy it because he wasn’t a complete otherworldly demon.
• Power-Up Food: Some Gu, especially those of Food Path, give the user the ability to gradually grow stronger over time by eating certain foods.
• Pragmatic Villainy: While the vast majority of the time it is simply more efficient to betray and murder, there are times when it is more expedient for Fang Yuan's plans to be a nice guy.
• Redemption Rejection: Lu Wei Yin attempts to redeem Fang Yuan by trapping him in a Dream Episode which attempts to convince him to be good in three different lives. It doesn't work.
• Stable Time Loop: Red Lotus Demon Venerable, the original creator of the Spring-Autumn Cicada wanted to save his dead wife from her fated death and failed repeatedly, leading him to be trapped in one of these, forced to watch his wife be killed many thousands of times eventually throwing him over a Despair Event Horizon.
• Straight Edge Evil: The ephemeral pleasures of the flesh count for nothing next to Fang Yuan's goal of eternal life.
• Thanatos Gambit: All of the Venerables do this to some extent, influencing events long after their death; but Star Constellation Immortal Venerable takes the cake, since she used her death to merge herself with heaven's will, allowing her to influence the course of fate even millions of years later.
• There Can Only Be One: Every Immortal Gu in the world is unique and only one can exist at a time. If an Immortal Gu already exists, then any attempts to refine it will always fail even if the recipe is executed perfectly. The function of an Immortal Gu can be replicated through killer moves but usually that way of reproducing the Immortal Gu’s ability has its own downsides like being too costly to use.
• Time Travel: With Fang Yuan owning the Spring-Autumn Cicada, he time travels to the past at multiple points during the story in an attempt to change history, which leads to him and other characters wrestling with subsequent tropes.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Ren Zu’s tale details the life of Ren Zu but is obviously dramatized to tell a story while also hiding the fact it’s Ren Zu’s human path true inheritance. Fang Yuan is even disappointed when he meets Wisdom Gu and it’s unable to talk back despite being shown to converse and even trick Ren Zu in the story.
• Villain Protagonist: While Gu Zhen Ren purposefully leaves much of Fang Yuan's life before the novel begins vague, he seems to have completed a Protagonist Journey to Villain, and late in the series grows to become the Big Bad for most of the known world.
• We Used to Be Friends: Duke Long and Red Lotus Demon Venerable, formerly master and apprentice.
• World's Strongest Man: In all of history, only ten individuals have reached Rank 9 and with it, a level of power no Gu Immortal of a lower rank can ever hope to compete against. They were all given the title Venerable and they each ruled uncontested over the world during their eras until they inevitably ran out of lifespan.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Fate is revealed to be an active force opposing Fang Yuan, and he isn't the first one to attempt to escape its control.

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