The Eighteen Levels of Hell: Lying Is Forbidden

i don't read this as a cultivation novel. it's closer to a philosophy book that borrows from history and runs on logic, and the world is built out of those three things. the hook is watching someone get outsmarted. but once the lead and his opponent sit at the same level, or the opponent is stronger, the fights stop being about cleverness and turn into stranger things: time, emotion, memory.

i couldn't put it into a sentence on this read, so take this as a first guess. hell forbids lying, but the deceivers win by turning lies into common sense, so the thing that kills you is never the lie you can see. it's the belief you never checked. the power system is the same idea pointed inward: strip out what emotion, inherited common sense and feeling put in you, and see what's left. so if the book is about anything, it's about how little of what you think is yours actually is. i'll know more after the second read.

• power has a clear structure. fights enforce the levels strictly, nothing comes out of nowhere, everything stays within reason.
• everyone is smart. this is the whole novel. every character is a generational planner with battle iq. it's like RI if every character were a wisdom path cultivator and the only way out is to outthink them.
• the author's range. ancient chinese literature, history, logic problems like hilbert's hotel, time travel mechanics, causality, memory. the amount he knows, and the way he turns all of it into fights, is the part that keeps me reading.
• the cast. the main group all have their own personalities, and so do the antagonists, because everyone in hell thinks they're the protagonist of their own story. the ruthlessness it takes to survive and rank up demands it. i like these people. when chen ran is on the page i'm having a good time.

• it is extremely hard to follow. an ai translation on top of an already difficult premise means following the logic of the characters and their skills takes real work. you read each arc in one go, or twice, and even then i wouldn't say i fully understand the reasoning every time.
• the complexity comes from moving parts and references. if you match the author's knowledge you'll have a great time. if you haven't read journey to the west or three-body, some of what he's doing will pass you by, and those two are the tip of the iceberg. he pulls from a lot more than that.
• character development is thin. the focus is the battles, and backstories arrive as flashbacks at key moments to explain why someone has a skill or acts a certain way, not to grow them. it didn't bother me, but if you read for arcs, know that going in.
• there's close to no world building. it's hell, everyone here has died, other places are hinted at but we haven't reached them. a novel like RI has a lot (not the pinnacle, but a lot). this has almost none, and it doesn't seem to want any.

if you liked usogui or reverend insanity for the mind games, this is the next step up. it surpasses both on that axis. the comparison only holds on that one axis though. RI does smart characters in a fighting context. this does it as problem solving, and in other respects they aren't that alike.

the idea they share is the old saying both books lean on: heaven derives fifty and uses forty-nine, and the one left over is where a person slips through (大道五十，天衍四九，人遁其一). a fight never has a zero percent chance. this book makes that the whole game. you can try to work out the escape before the character does, which is why it reads like a problem-solving exercise rather than a novel with grand scenery and emotive characters. if that sounds like work, it is, and it's the point.

the power system. it's just mental strength, and it's the best thing in the book.

hell forbids lying, and the tutorial wall sorts lies into three kinds: lies out of emotion, lies against common sense, and lies inside feeling (friendship, family, love). chen ran reads that wall and maps it straight onto freud. the id governs emotion, the ego governs common sense, the superego governs feeling. that one mapping becomes the whole cultivation system. you climb by cutting each layer of yourself in turn: cut the id and emotion-baiting stops working on you, cut the ego and you become sensitive to every piece of common sense someone planted in you, reach the superego and you stop being a piece on the board and become a player. each crossing goes through a loss of self, and the book is strict that skipping the loss leaves you a half-thing.

then it keeps going. that freudian track turns out to be one of three schools. a daoist one where your five feelings stand in your mind as figures and you tame one, your base colour. a confucian one built on order, with two cities in your head, one bound by rules and one free of them. three plus five plus two realms, and the strongest form is not all ten but your strongest from each, assembled. the method pages are where the references stack up: the daodejing, the chan line about the mountain not being a mountain, hegel's negation of the negation, materialism, the daoist idea of cutting the three corpses that gives the system its name. every page of the method is a borrowed idea turned into a mechanic.

that's what stuck. the novel is so engaging that i would read an entire other book just to understand the drops of reference it makes in passing. i've never had a novel do that to me before.

the ai translation online is good enough to get through. when a section doesn't land, stop and retranslate or read it two or three times, because it's hard to tell whether the problem is the translation or you not following the meaning. it took me five months for about a thousand chapters. i could have gone faster and understood less. there are no slow patches. the antagonists are actively hunting the leads so nobody gets to rest. if anything it's too fast: i'd have liked more time in the levels themselves, exploring places, meeting people. but if i wanted that i'd read slice of life. that's not what this is.

must. probably many times, to get as close as i can to the author's intended meaning. blast your brain with a thousand, then ten thousand, and when you go back and start from ten it reads easy. the brain has seen worse.