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Reverend Insanity
Type
Genre
Tags[ ]
Rating(4.3 / 5.0, 1573 votes)
| 5 | 73% (1154 votes) |
| 4 | 7% (116 votes) |
| 3 | 6% (97 votes) |
| 2 | 3% (52 votes) |
| 1 | 10% (154 votes) |
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Language
Support Book (#ad)
Author(s)
One entry per lineArtist(s)
One entry per line
N/A
Year
Example: 2012
2012
Status in COO
Status in Country of Origin. One entry per line
2334 Chapters (Discontinued, continuation uncertain under legal restrictions, it's been unbanned but author is still restricted from writing it)
Licensed
Yes
Completely Translated
Original Publisher
One entry per lineEnglish Publisher
One entry per lineRelease Frequency
Every 621.4 Day(s)Activity Stats [Graph]
Weekly Rank: #5470Monthly Rank: #3168
All Time Rank: #234
Reading List [Graph]
On 13363 Reading Lists
Monthly Rank: #1311
All Time Rank: #134
Description
Links are NOT allowed. Format your description nicely so people can easily read them. Please use proper spacing and paragraphs.Human beings are the very spirit of all life, while Gu embody the essence of heaven and earth.
When one’s worldview, values, and philosophy become twisted, they are no longer human but demon reborn.
The past fades into a fleeting dream, yet a name may echo anew in time.
This is the tale of a time traveler, reborn endlessly, forging his path through a world shaped by the mystical power of Gu (creatures of legends and malice).
Spring Autumn Cicada, Moonlight Gu, Liquor Worm, Great Qi Golden Light Worm, Slender Black Hair Gu, Hope Gu…
A world where these magical beings are nurtured, refined, and wielded.
At the heart of it all stands a villain of unparalleled ambition, Fang Yuan. Reborn 500 years into the past with the Spring Autumn Cicada he meticulously refined, he uses his profound wisdom and battle-hardened experience to outmaneuver his enemies. In a world of unrelenting cruelty, where power is cultivated through the mastery of Gu, Fang Yuan rises as a figure who bends the world to his will.
Unbound by morality, he acts with cold precision and ruthless intent, pursuing his ultimate goal without hesitation or restraint. In this realm of peril and opportunity, Fang Yuan seeks to ascend above all others, driven solely by his own strength and ambition.
Note:
Gu, legendary venomous creatures often tied to black magic, can manifest as various insects or snakes, bearing both mystical allure and deadly power.
The “three views” refer to one’s core worldview, values, and philosophy of life.
Associated Names
One entry per lineCổ Chân Nhân
Gu Daoist Master
Gu Zhen Ren
Master of Gu
RI
القس المجنون
เทพปีศาจหวนคืน (ไม่มีตอนจบ)
蛊真人
蠱真人
Gu Daoist Master
Gu Zhen Ren
Master of Gu
RI
القس المجنون
เทพปีศาจหวนคืน (ไม่มีตอนจบ)
蛊真人
蠱真人
Related Series
N/ARecommendations
Warlock of the Magus World (30)The Human Emperor (13)
Dungeon Defense (12)
Zhanxian (12)
To Be a Power in the Shadows! (WN) (11)
Netheril’s Glory (11)
Recommendation Lists
| Date | Group | Release |
|---|---|---|
| 09/19/02 | Webnovel | c90 |
| 11/01/19 | Webnovel | c39 |
| 11/01/19 | Webnovel | c38 |
| 11/01/19 | Webnovel | c37 |
| 11/01/19 | Webnovel | c36 |
| 11/01/19 | Webnovel | c35 |
| 11/01/19 | Webnovel | c34 |
| 11/01/19 | Webnovel | c33 |
| 11/01/19 | Webnovel | c32 |
| 11/01/19 | Webnovel | c31 |
| 07/17/17 | Webnovel | c9 |
| 07/17/17 | Webnovel | c8 |
| 07/17/17 | Webnovel | c7 |
| 07/17/17 | Webnovel | c6 |
| 07/17/17 | Webnovel | c5 |
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Let me remind you first. If you are a person that love saviors, family bond, romantic relationships and loyal friendship, then you can stop reading while you are ahead. Same with people who like short plots and simple villains. If you read novels where MC always has to defend his pride, then this novel is where the MC sh*t on pride.
Daoist Gu plot is real deep. Story is on a whole different level. Here you have real cruelty unlike other novels where everything goes smoothly for the MC and the hot chicks always survived. Also for once there is also a great meaning and explanation for him to be transported from another world. After you manage to read past 1000+chapters, you would throw 99% of the other Chinese novels you had read and admired in the garbage bin. It's like comparing a kid story book to a adult novel. Story is told from past, present and future. Here you don't get ret*rd geniuses, rich arrogant young masters or worthless enemies that appear out of nowhere to annoy MC. Every single enemy is a real master that has experience real life difficulties and are veteran in plots. They are harder to kill than c*ckroaches. MC has real shitty luck and is a loner. The whole world is his enemies and has no real allies. Any good luck he had was false, scheme by the heaven in the dark to control him. Anything he encounter has a meaning later on in the future (like 500+chapters).
MC has 2 personality: In the past his personality is more to the kinder side and is more reluctant to do evil. Spend 500years on pain, despair, difficulties and being suppress by heaven. He experience every kind of mood from love, friendship to hate. He is but a chess piece slowly being molded by heaven to become useful later on.
Present personality:because of his 500years of life, he already experience everything life can throw at him. He already love once, so he no longer need to love anyone else. He already shed tears before, so he has no tears more to give. Compassion, friendship, family, pain, torture, schemes can no longer faze him. Here is where his personality shines. His determination and endurance is on a whole different level. Nothing can stop his path. MC has 1 goal ever since he ended in the Gu world. Eternal life. In order to accomplice that he would keep walking the road ahead no matter how many enemies or difficulties ahead. Both in past, present and future his goal has never change. That make him so different from other people. He not afraid of anything and has never regretted anything he has done.
The amount of enemies he has is ridiculous. Basically the whole world want to hunt him down later on. MC has to survive by only using his brain, mouth and tricks. Here you have no hero story with rainbow and color, but cruelty and only the strong survive. Forget about novels with beauties. Here author treat female equally as hard as males. MC literally has no compassion toward them.
Best things I like about Daoist Gu: MC is always true to himself. Never a hypocrite. Also he is shameless, greedy and cruel on a whole different level. He would swallow you whole without even spitting out the bones if he get the chance. But what great about Fang Yuan is that evil and good has no meaning to him. For him there is no such different between black and white. Only eternal life matter to him. For MC things like pride, morals, justice, team work, loyalty etc are just bunch of nonsense. He always see what benefits him first and see if something/someone is useful for his purposes. Another thing I love about the story is that it has a lot of philosophies and life lessons. Author put real background into the story like the Gu insects, world settings and dao school (like human, blood, stealing, wisdom, information, time, space dao etc). I especially like the Human Ancestor Biography. You can see author really spent effort on it.
My personally opinion is that you really need to finish the first book to actually fell in love with the rest of the books (6 in total).
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- The claim that the story tries to justify the main character as not evil is wrong. He is unrepentantly selfish and will literally go to any length to achieve his goal, with absolutely no distractions. He cares for no one at all, and ruthless to both himself and everything else in the world. In fact, the author's opening notes for the story discusses how this is the story he truly wanted to write from the beginning of his career -- one of a truly immoral character, a profound and extreme resolve to pursue selfish aims, with NO compromise for toning things down for readers' sensibilities. I honestly don't understand where other reviewers are seeing the "justification". I mean, did they just ignore the fact that he is universally hated by the pretty much entire world as the worst and most fearful "devil" sage, and even most of his own "allies" who were forced or manipulated to work for him? I'm especially talking about those reviewers who inexplicably think the author is trying to justify him as an antihero despite having read to the later volumes when he is ACTUALLY at war with almost every faction in the world. This is a true villain protagonist -- but of course nobody is a villain in their own mind. That's actually this novel's greatest, most groundbreaking strength. If you've ever enjoyed stories where the villains were serious and posed real threats to the hero because their strength of will was just as high as the hero's own, and wondered about seeing the story from the villain's perspective, well this is the story you need to read.
- Comments about the MC's choices in cultivation being bland are just nonsensical. He is making efficient choices. This is a rational MC who operates on pure logic -- he's an emotionless machine that doesn't hesitate, rage, despair, or love, no matter how many readers ship the various potential pairings that have cropped up. He may falter at times of extreme distress and from enemy techniques attacking his mind, but that's all. It would be OOC for him to choose some sort of flashy, complicated cultivation method or battle style. He simply find the best possible short-term and long-term cultivation method to achieve... short and long term goals. The post-Xian cultivation is far more complex and flavorful because he started to need those, and the ones before were not because he needed rapid paths to power matched to accessible resources. He even completely abandoned his former life's cultivation path because it was not expedient in his new situation, and so there was no cheap path to power.
- Other characters have real personalities. In fact, this story goes far beyond most others in fleshing out characters. Some die quickly, but that's not a failing of literary presentation. Those who have strong or threatening characters or backgrounds are killed because the MC eliminates all threats, and so does everyone else. Nobody has plot armor (except, perhaps, arguably the MC himself due to his revival mechanism, but there is actually an in-story explanation for many "lucky" or "unlucky" occurrences eventually which becomes a major plot point). "Allies" eventually get less screen time and relevance because the MC doesn't care for them and they've been completely subjugated. Before anyone gets ens*aved or forced to work for the MC, or killed, they always have colorful and unique personalities, though many characters are devious and immoral by virtue of the world they're in. Again, I would consider this a strength of the novel as every character, every little faction, from families to individual cultivators to sects to confederated groups of major powers, and all the "dead" 9th circle supreme sages ("
") of history have/had their own motivations and ability to influence the story. This isn't a story that happens in a sandbox with crappy caricatures -- everything everywhere matters, and somebody will react.
- The author does not suffer from math problems. One reviewer mentioned that you'll see what the issues are when the number of Immortals is discussed. I'm afraid the reader failed to read between the lines. This is unfortunately also a spoiler if I gave a full explanation, but basically, the numbers provided before on the number of people who cultivate to 5th circle and then to Xian (the "Immortals" the reviewer mentioned) appear to be strange when you see how many Xian there are. The ratios are not off. The problem is that what you see in the normal world is not what the ratio is for Xian groomed cultivators, and the pool of people that exist is a hell of a lot bigger than the people in the normal world.
Spoiler
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I will admit one failing of the novel, which some would argue is not a failing because of the format of web novel. It suffers from repeated information that the author really doesn't need to say so many times. Unfortunately, reading some of the comments from readers on the raw site and elsewhere, it seems like they actually are necessary because people keep forgetting details of the story. That's partially a problem of the web novel format, but probably also because readers in general don't expect so much depth to the story. They skim the novel and end up confused because the answers aren't spoon fed to the reader and repeated at every turn. So unfortunately the later volumes the author had to put more exposition reminding readers of information presented multiple times before. That's not enough to deter from the novel's tremendous good points. As one final note, I point to the way this story's rating on Qidian has developed. Several hundred chapters ago, the rating was 8.8. Now it has risen to 9.3. That's a stunning feat for any novel -- most stories are rated highly and eventually fall off as it gains popularity and the burden of too many readers drives the average down. Something similar happened here on NU, the rating rose from something like 3.7 to 4.3.The Xian all have internal worlds formed by the ascended Aperture. People can live in those worlds, and those people can't interact with the outside unless the Xian allows them to. Obviously (but I guess it wasn't obvious enough for some reviewers), the Xian are going to focus g*ooming the people living inside their own worlds, and only keep a nominal force or family outside to maintain control of certain resources. Getting somebody groomed from 1st to 5th circle for an actual Xian with huge resources is extremely easy. Not so for people who think Xian are semi-mythical beings, who don't even realize their families have Xian.
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- IT IS LIKE AUTHOR READ TONS OF CRICITCS ABOUT OP MCs WITH PLOT ARMOR ON EVERY CORNER AND NOW HE NEEDS TO POINT OUT HIS LACK OF PLOT ARMOR ON EVERY CORNER.
Author invented this new type of forced situation (at least he made it painfully obvious) and henceforth it should be called: "REVERSED PLOT ARMOR"
He tries to shove a piece of cake down on every readers throats, but it feels more like he shoves tons of whole durians in my stomach and I mean the really big ones without even peeling the fruit. It hurts and it feels forced. Besides, forced feeding is never enjoyable.
If there is nothing else to read, I come back to this novel, but it isn't something I'm really looking forward to. It is just something to bypass time. 2/5 stars seems too little and 3/5 stars seems too much. Sometimes the novel is really enjoyable, so it is hard to get a final rating...- Cultivation. I love the style of cultivation. To put it simply, it's unique. Gu are fragments of the great dao (essence of the heavens and the earth). There are a plethora of Unique Gu for different situations. Battle, storage, movement, etc. I'd say the most positive aspect of the cultivation of Gu is that it's always moving forward. In every other cultivation novel I've read, the primordial/ancient time cultivators are stronger than the current ones. Here, it's different and more realistic. Gu Immortals are constantly refining, comprehending, and finding new ways to use Gu. The world is always moving forward in advancement, and there is new paths created in every Era. The part of cultivation I enjoyed the most would be the development of the aperture. It's a very fun and creative process watching the MC display his resourcefulness and logical planning when developing his aperture. The concept of tribulations keeps it balanced, and the strength of a Gu Immortal relies solely on themselves.
- Plot. The plot is very complex, yet simple, just like the dao. Even though I've read over 2.3k chapters and we're still on the same world, I never got bored of it. The Gu master world is very large. Usually I begin to lose interest in most novels after 1k chapters, they all lose some sort of flair. But this isn't the case for Reverend Insanity. It simply got more and more interesting to me. I enjoyed how his enemies are established. His enemies are his enemies simply because a conflict of interest. Fang Yuan does not care about pride, morality, revenge, etc. He simply prioritizes benefits that can help him reach his goal, Eternal Life. If someone or something stands in his way, he will destroy it. But if not, then he won't even bother to glance at them. There is sometimes a surprising twist, a slightly simple turn, but it all makes sense and engages the reader. I also like how things are always explained. Some people who have read this novel think that something wasn't explained properly or at all, and will leave a bad review or comment before moving on, but the author does this on purpose. If there is something the author doesn't explain in the present, he'll do it in the future. The narrator is third person and slightly unreliable. I'd say that if you don't understand something, wait until the next few chapters, it will most likely be explained.
- Characters. The best part of this novel, for me, is by far the characters. All of them are fleshed out properly, and the MC is very realistic. All of the characters are smart. Some people think that the MC's brother, Fang Zheng is dumb, and I disagree. He is simply naive. But you need to remember that the other fifteen year olds aren't like Fang Yuan. Fang Yuan was also naive when he was young. He was also and emotional and made slightly irrational decisions at times. Even though Fang Yuan never receives character development, that's positively one of the best parts about him. He isn't supposed to receive character development, as he's already five hundred years old. I was also tired of seeing supposedly hundreds or thousands of year old cultivators in other novels being reincarnated/rebirthed and suddenly becoming childlike again, but FY is the opposite. He stays cool, calm, and collected all of the time. So do the other characters. They're all smart in their own right. They each have their own experience and are all adept at scheming.
- Philosophy. I enjoyed the philosophical talks and Fang Yuans view of life in general, since I am also a believer of the extreme Buddhist philosophy. Fang Yuan views all life as equal. He sees a human the same as he would see an ant or a tree. Most people think this is psychopathic, but the Buddha was the same, except he embraced benevolence instead of ruthlessness. The novel mentions that the end of Buddhism and self-realization has two roads. One benevolence, and one ruthlessness. Fang Yuan chose ruthlessness, transcending the concept of "evil" and "good." He has no bottom line or morals holding him back. Most of the readers hated his talks on philosophy, and simply called them edgy or dismissed them as psychopathic rantings. But in essence his philosophy and view on life is simply extreme Buddhism. All existence is equal. An ant, a tree, a human, a beast, a rock, a river, they are all equal. I find it funny how people think everyone who agrees with the MC's views is going to become some sort of killer or something when that's the exact opposite. Killing, to the MC, is simply a means to an end. If he needs to kill, he will. If he can get it done through scheming, he will. Maximize benefits and minimize loss, this is the ruthlessness of the main character. Always plan for failure, think ahead, and use the situation to your advantage. However, this doesn't make the MC all-winning. He loses a lot, actually. In fact, the MC admits that in the heroes of the past, present, and future, all of those dazzling stars, he is simply extremely ordinary. Yet that doesn't discourage him, instead it makes his life and goal even more interesting. We can see this in the Reverse Flow River. He has emotions, he lived a tough life, and he steeled his will. The Main Character, his thoughts, actions, and philosophy, are very, very interesting.
- Proactive MC. The MC is proactive, meaning he actively creates his own events instead of simply reacting to events that happen around him. He journeys in the wilderness, schemes to become part of other clans, steals inheritances trough his memories, and uses his experience as an advantage. He needs to get his own resources, and simple inheritances don't cover it, so he schemes and uses his cunning to get them. He is the one who creates events or decides to participate in him, not the other way around where the MC simply reacts to a situation.
Summary: This novel has a pragmatic and ruthless main character. He feels emotions but finds them boring compared to his goal of eternal life. He doesn't care for the seven vices or virtues, nor does he care about good or evil. They are all simply a means to an end. If you dislike the MC, you won't get into the story. The MC is an extreme Buddhist that... more>>The single best Chinese fantasy novel I have ever read hands down. And I have read a lot of them but never have I been interested in reviewing them, simply because they could never compare to any of the great western fantasy writers like Martin or Abercrombie etc. This so far is they only Chinese novel that had managed to kindle that sense of awe and immersion that comes when you get lost in the author's world.
The best part is the world building and the plot development. At the time of writing this review a total of 1911 chapters are available (raws) and the entire novel is still set in the same "world". There is no "but wait.... There's a more powerful world with stronger cultivators, better treasures" and so on and so forth. The magic here is harnessed by using "Gu" insects which have a single purpose like increase strength, shoot blades etc. They are then combined in interesting ways and one cannot simply pile on a bunch of them together because they need to be fed and can have opposing properties.
The plot is absolutely amazing with no lucky "I just found the greatest treasure in the universe, in the tr*sh bin." Everything the MC gets is truly earned.
It's not all perfect though. The unavoidable issue with the stereotypical "dog eat dog" cultivation world is that it does not allow for deeply flawed characters, all of them inevitably are a bit too realistic and many a time can seem a bit mechanical. Most of them are still well written. The biggest concern though is the main character who has a psychopathic attachment to increasing his strength, where it is the entire point of the novel. While there is a reason why he gets this way it's a problem with all xanxia.
EDIT: And when they punch during fights the fists do not connect with each other. Just trying to imagine that sequence of events makes my tooth itch.