Episode 1 — Of All of Them, I Am the Craziest

Most people in the jianghu are mad.

They train day and night bent on killing others; they skip meals and ignore nature’s calls to sit in meditation and raise their inner power. That’s what makes them mad.

To picture how insane it is: imagine a monkey swinging twin blades all day, vowing to slaughter the others; or imagine a monkey sitting motionless in lotus posture, doing nothing but telling itself it will be stronger tomorrow.

A mad monkey brandishing twin blades.
A mad monkey facing a wall in silent practice.

That is the nature of those who walk the martial world.

Knights-errant who claim they help others, sect leaders who keep shouting their own sense of justice — none are truly different. Whether a wandering hero or a sect master, in the realm of martial skill they’re all possessed by the same craving: the insane desire to be superior to others.

In that sense, martial arts only make madmen madder.

Just as there is no end to learning, there is no end to mastering martial technique. Anyone who chooses a road with no visible end will sprint toward its terminus faster than ordinary people — and sometimes the body and mind crack under that pressure. That’s called zou huo ru mo (走火入魔): running into fire and falling into madness.

Of course I’ve seen it myself.

An old sage once said, “Do not teach what must not be taught” — meaning, do not pass knowledge to those unworthy. In truth, the study of martial arts is the sort of thing that should never be taught to people who are not fully human in spirit.

What would a madman do if given supreme martial power?

They unleash every instinct without shame. Lust-addled lechers, bloodthirsty fiends — they swarm like a plague. And when some take up the blade and train just to kill those monsters, the jianghu becomes a gruesome loop.

When people say “the code of the jianghu has fallen,” they mean exactly this: there are more madmen with martial skill than sane people with martial skill.

When lunatics become too many, even the heroes who’d hunt them go mad in turn — and the jianghu has been that way from the beginning.

I lived by slaughtering such madmen.

They hid in the righteous path and thrived in the underworld. The demonic way — that is a contest of madness, an arena where they measure who is crazier and rank one another.

I made enemies everywhere because I attacked whoever deserved to die, regardless of their banner. Still, of all the factions, it’s the demonic path I hated the most.

On the righteous side there are often men who mean to keep their duty. Even among the outlaws there are brash men who refuse to cross certain lines.

But the demonic path — those are half-crazed monkeys. They breathe poison from their mouths and thunder from their blades; they spring grotesque tricks from the dark and use inner power to freeze the very air. They delight in torturing people with uncanny, monstrous arts.

When these mad monkeys dominate most of the martial world, people call it the Reign of Demons — and that is the era we live in now.

I killed madmen by any means necessary.

And yet the monkeys never seemed to thin out.

…

I am the Mad Demon.