Pokémon for Unrepentant Sociopaths: A Review of Reverend Insanity

Alright, let's talk about a piece of fiction that most well-adjusted people would, and probably should, find utterly reprehensible. I'm talking about Reverend Insanity.

Frankly, in a world saturated with milquetoast heroes, saccharine power-of-friendship narratives, and protagonists who trip over their own feet into godhood, this novel is the literary equivalent of a shot of pure, uncut adrenaline straight to the heart. It's not for everyone. It is designed to make you uncomfortable, to make all the assumptions of a life unexamined seem hollow. If you can read the whole thing, and come away without feeling like you've been punched in the gut a dozen times, I'll doff my hat at you.

So, what the hell is it?

The World of Gu: A Brutally Meritocratic System

First, you need to understand the world-building, which is where the genius lies. Forget your bog-standard elves and dwarves. Or even the wishy-washy nature of standard Xianxia settings. The magic system here is based on "Gu," which are essentially magical insects that are the crystallization of the laws of nature.

My go-to analogy, and I stand by it, is that Gu are basically bug-type Pokémon, and much like the real deal, controlling them is like enslaving a minor god and using Him for cockfights.*

(If anyone reading this has ever caught Arceus with a masterball, they're well along on this path of cultivation)

A Gu Master cultivates these insects inside their own body, in a personal dimension called an "aperture." You feed them, nurture them, and in return, they grant you powers. A Moonlight Gu lets you shoot crescent blades of light. A Boar Strength Gu permanently increases your physical strength by implanting the phantom of a boar in your body. A more exotic one, like the Bone Flesh Unity Gu, literally melts your flesh and bones together into a grotesque but powerful amalgam.

The system is brutally, beautifully meritocratic. Gu Masters are ranked from 1 to 9. A Rank 5 is a king in a mortal kingdom. A Rank 6 is an Immortal, a genuine disaster-class entity. And a Rank 9, a "Venerable," is a being who has stood at the absolute apex of the world, their power so vast it warps reality itself. There have only ever been ten in all of history. This isn't a world of gentle progression. Each rank is an order of magnitude more difficult to reach than the last. Refining a higher-rank Gu is an all-or-nothing gamble that can bankrupt you, cripple you, or outright kill you on failure. Everything is a resource. Everything has a price. There are no free lunches, and if there are, they're probably bait.

The majority of people run as fast as they can just to stay in place. Even with the advantage of foresight, centuries of advancement, and a razor-sharp mind, Fang Yuan can only swim up stream with difficulty.

Our Protagonist: The Ultimate Rational Agent

This brings us to our protagonist, Fang Yuan. Let's be clear: he is not an anti-hero. He is not "morally grey." He is a villain. Full stop. He is a pragmatic, self-interested, utterly ruthless monster whose sole, unwavering goal is to achieve eternal life. Everything and everyone else is either a tool or an obstacle on that path.

(Does the normal usage of "evil" even capture such perfect amorality? Fang Yuan doesn't hate you, he doesn't love you either. Occasionally, you might be made out of atoms that are better used elsewhere.)

Regardless of good or evil, Fang Yuan is a perfect example of a high-functioning sociopath. Let's see how he got that way:

Originally a scholar from modern day China, Fang Yuan died and reincarnated in the world of Reverend Insanity. If he'd known better, he'd probably have choked himself on his own umbilical cord (that's good advice if you ever find yourself there, it's not a pleasant place to live.)

Despite using his Earthling-advantages, being lauded as a genius since childhood as he shamelessly laundered classical Chinese poems off as his own, he ended up drawing the short end of the stick, only having mediocre innate aptitude when it came to cultivation. At this point, he was psychologically normal, albeit increasingly beaten down by circumstances, and handicapped by his own lack of talent. He still had friends, lovers. He still cared.

Eventually, after centuries of struggle and hard, honest living, he made it to the level of Gu Immortal, standing tall over the mortal realm. He put his newfound wealth and ability to good use, refining Time-travel-mon, a godlike entity better known in-universe as the Spring Autumn Cicada.

This drew the ire of competing Immortals, and eventually the blameless Fang Yuan was ganged up on, cornered and left with no route for escape except self-immolation via use of his new toy.

(Blameless? Well, if you excuse the genocide, slavery and torture of millions it took to get there. No one's perfect.)

Fortunately, he manages to pull it off, he ends up reborn 500 years in the past, in his teenage body, with all his memories and cynical, bitter experience intact.

This isn't some fresh-faced intern learning the ropes. He is a survivor, an ancient, soul-weary monster given a second chance not to redeem himself, but to do it all again, only better. More efficiently. More ruthlessly. He sees the traditions, honor, and "righteousness" of the clan he's reborn into as the hypocritical cage it is: a system designed to funnel resources to the powerful while keeping the weak content with scraps.

Does he have friends? No. He has temporary allies whose utility has not yet been expended.

Does he have a lover? Please. He sees romance as a weakness, a distraction that drains resources and creates vulnerabilities. A woman he "pursues" is just a pawn in a larger scheme, to be discarded the moment her value is exceeded by her cost.

Does he feel pity or remorse? About as much as I feel for the bacteria I kill with hand sanitizer. They're just background noise in the cosmic microwave of his ambition.

He is, in essence, the purest expression of an agent pursuing a singular utility function: immortality. He's what you get if you take my desire to "live forever or die trying" and strip away every last vestige of human sentiment, empathy, and conventional morality. Anti-heroes have a code, a flicker of goodness. Fang Yuan has a calculator. It's horrifying, and it is absolutely captivating to watch him work. He doesn't win because of plot armor; he wins because he is smarter, more ruthless, and more prepared than his enemies. He out-thinks, out-schemes, and out-suffers everyone.

"There is only immortality, only eternal life should be the goal one should pursue! If one cannot live forever, is there any difference between a rank nine Gu Immortal and a pile of shit in the gutter?! I am a huge fool, but I do not wish to be a fool that is made of shit... But if I cannot obtain immortality, I am also a pile of shit in the gutter… hehehe."

(It's worth noting that despite the name, Gu Immortals are anything but. Even the greatest of them, the ten Venerables otherwise invulnerable under Heaven and Earth, still died while cursing their fates. What Fang Yuan wants is, at least according to in-universe consensus, an impossibility. He doesn't let that stop him.)

A Masterpiece of Philosophical Brutality

Reverend Insanity is a philosophical treatise disguised as a power-fantasy web novel. It's an unflinching exploration of what it means to be human by showing us a character who methodically sheds his own humanity like a useless appendage. It's a brutal rebuttal to the Just World fallacy. In this world, good people die horribly, hard work often leads to nothing, and kindness is a fatal vulnerability. The only thing that matters is strength, wisdom, and the relentless will to persevere.

Talent is real, and if you don't have it, you are fodder. The novel critiques every system, exposing all of them as (at least partially) self-serving constructs. This includes family, clan, sect, empire, and the very concepts of "good" and "evil".

It might be easy to take the above to imply that the author is an edgy nihilist. That's not true. There are plenty of characters who flourish despite their attachments, or even because of them. Some are lucky enough to have their kindness paid back ten times over. They're just not the focus of the story, and barely worth noting for Fang Yuan, except as potential targets for manipulation.

And even Fang Yuan himself isn't a nihilist. Quite the opposite, he's driven by a single over-arching desire: eternal life. He values that so strongly that, while it's still bounded, nothing else really matters. Were that to change, then he'd likely open up to exploring life's other pleasures. I can commiserate, it's hard to do much of anything once you're dead.

Fang Yuan succeeds because the Gu world has several features that make sociopathy adaptive:

Extreme power scaling: Individual capability differences can be enormous (orders of magnitude between ranks)

Zero-sum resources: More often than not, one person's gain literally requires another's loss

Weak institutions: No effective governance, rule of law, or punishment mechanisms

High information asymmetry: Knowledge and techniques can provide overwhelming advantages

No reputation effects: Death is common and identity can be hidden or changed

These conditions are the opposite of what evolutionary psychologists identify as the environment where human moral intuitions evolved. Our moral psychology developed in small groups where reputation mattered, cooperation was mutually beneficial, power differences were limited, and defection could be punished by coalitions.

The novel implicitly acknowledges this. Characters who maintain moral commitments often succeed, but only when they have sufficient power to bear the costs of moral behavior, or when they operate in sub-environments where cooperation is adaptive. The "righteousness" sects that maintain ethical codes are portrayed as both hypocritical (they only extend moral consideration to in-group members) and effective (their internal cooperation gives them advantages over purely selfish actors).

(How this might change in an age of Superintelligence and Von-Neumann Replicators is an exercise left to the user)

The Author's Masterful Execution

I can't praise the author, Gu Zhen Ren, enough. I've got some pretensions of grandeur, writing the odd novel or two myself. Yet I must bow at his feet. The author is a mad-man, an absolute master of juggling a million plot-threads without getting them tangled up. No Chekov's gun remains unfired as a mantle piece, he'll foreshadow something subtly a thousand chapters in advance, and when Fang Yuan figures it out, you'll smack your forehead and wonder how you didn't see that coming.

Xianxia as a genre makes it very easy to perform ass-pulls and write yourself out of a corner. Yet he never abuses the reader's time or intellect, payoffs are earned in blood and sweat. I'd call it Anti-Fridge-logic, the novel.

Even the central get-out-of-jail-free card, the Spring Autumn Cicada, isn't used for that purpose. It has significant weaknesses, and every use of it is a gamble with the risk of annihilation.

The author flexes further by churning out an enormous number of memorable and likeable characters, the majority of them worthy of their own novels. Yet the world is cruel, and he's crueler, and few who go up against Fang Yuan come out of it the victor. I've wept at some of their fates, the sheer valiance, their raging against the dying of the light or their efforts to uphold their values till the end. They inhabit the world they're in, they think, reason and plot. Fang Yuan isn't the one character in the universe with the ability to plan ahead.

It is also, however, extremely funny. Some of the jokes left me with a belly-ache. Fang Yuan can be shameless, to a degree that catches even you, the jaded reader, entirely off guard. He would have no compunctions about ritually sacrificing his parents and then throwing himself at the magistrate's feet, kowtowing for mercy while pleading that he's an orphan.

The Final Verdict

Why read it?

The Schemes: The true joy of reading Reverend Insanity is not in the fights, but in the plans. Fang Yuan is a master strategist. His plots are intricate, multi-layered Rube Goldberg machines of manipulation and foresight. He thinks in terms of decades and centuries. An offhand action in Chapter 200 might turn out to be the linchpin of a grand gambit in Chapter 1200. Watching his plans unfold, seeing how he turns every disadvantage into an advantage, how he plays his enemies against each other like chess pieces, is like watching a masterclass in game theory. It’s the same satisfaction one gets from a great detective story, except the mystery is "how will he get away with it?" and the answer is always "more brilliantly and ruthlessly than you could have imagined."

The World-building: The Gu system is one of the most imaginative and well-thought-out magic systems I have ever encountered. It’s a "hard" magic system with the grisly texture of a Cronenberg film. The sheer variety of Gu is staggering, from the mundane to the philosophically abstract. There are Gu for strength, for healing, for enslavement. There is also the "Attitude Gu," which allows you to perfectly feign any emotion. The "Perseverance Gu," which allows you to… persevere. The "Fixed Immortal Travel Gu," which allows for teleportation. And then there are the conceptual weapons at the heart of the story: Fate Gu, Destiny Gu, and perhaps the most terrifying of all, Love Gu, which is presented not as a gentle emotion but as a cosmic force of irrational, self-destructive obsession. The system is a bottomless well of narrative possibilities, and the author exploits it to its fullest.

The Spectacle: For all its intellectual depth, this is also a story that understands spectacle. The sense of scale is immense. Battles don't just level cities; they alter climates, shatter dimensions, and scar history. Immortals are not just powerful wizards; they are walking natural disasters who can refine entire mountain ranges into personal treasures and whose schemes can topple dynasties a million years old.

Reading Reverend Insanity is like watching a nature documentary about a particularly clever viper. You don't root for it in the traditional sense, but you can't help but respect its efficiency, its perfect adaptation to its environment, its singular, deadly purpose. It's not a feel-good story. It's a feel-nothing story, and in its emptiness, it achieves a kind of perfection.

Of course, it's not without its flaws. The translation can be janky. The prose can be repetitive. It's long, absurdly so. (I personally consider this a perk. The worst part about good novels is that they, inevitably, come to an end). And the sheer, unrelenting grimness can be exhausting. But now, we must come to the elephant in the room, the one thing that’s likely to put readers off:

In May 2019, at the height of a climactic battle and with the story seemingly heading into its final act, the novel was banned by the Chinese government. The official reasons are, as always, opaque. The common consensus is that the novel’s themes were deemed too "nihilistic," too "anti-social," and its protagonist too irredeemably "evil."

There is a profound and delicious irony here. A story about a singular will defying an all-powerful, oppressive system was itself struck down by a singular, all-powerful, oppressive system. Heavenly Court, in the end, won. The author posted a brief, heartbreaking final note promising to try to finish it one day, but years have passed with no resolution. The story ends mid-sentence.

It is, in a way, the most perfect, most frustrating ending imaginable. It transforms the novel from a work of fiction into a cultural artifact, a testament to the very ideas it explored. The CCP’s ban is the final, unwritten chapter, a real-world demonstration of the power of systems to crush inconvenient narratives.

Is it worth reading a 6-million-word story that doesn’t have an ending?

Yes. A thousand times, yes. savagery. The journey to its current, abrupt cliffhanger is more complete and satisfying than the entire finished catalogues of lesser authors. The apotheosis is unwritten, but the scripture we have is holy.

To read Reverend Insanity is to embark on one of the most audacious and unforgettable experiences in modern fantasy. It will challenge your morals. It will make you question the nature of good and evil, of free will and determinism. It will make you root for a monster and feel a strange, thrilling guilt for doing so.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to back to reading it, while overdosing on Copium-Gu that one day the CCP will relent, and this masterpiece will receive its capstone. Go ahead and start, fellow Daoist. The path to immortality is paved with good intentions... that you'll be stripping for parts.

*I’m particularly proud of coming up with the Pokémon analogy, so imagine my surprise when, during the process of researching for this review, I found out there’s an indie game in production. It’s Reverend Insanity, in the style of the old top-down Pokémon games. Here you go.